This post will be short and sweet, since I just pounded out 4,000 words, but I just want to bring to the masses the news that I, Garret S. Preston, Esquire, has officially completed NaNoWriMo for the first time! And one day early to boot!

It has been a grueling month of typing and falling behind and then typing some more, but we have done it. He have claimed the golden chalice of success and are currently holding it tenaciously to our bosoms, the excitement and elation are vibrant for all to see. I have posted on the sidebar the image you receive for winning. That’s about it, really, save for a PDF certificate of badassery that I will print and hang on my wall next to my college diploma. Which is more important? It’s honestly hard to tell.

But alas I leave this post tonight on the highest of horses. It is well passed my bedtime, but I believe I will be up late into the night, partying and drinking mead until the great sun doth awaken the land. Also just so I can stop typing in novel-speak.

Happy Holidays, everyone.  To keep with the pattern I set for myself, I should be telling you about a movie today, but this month we have a special occasion.  When  you go to college and study literature, you do a lot of reading.  Most of it is pretty rough.  You end up speed reading a lot of books that should be savored, and you read a lot of books that just aren’t that great.  People who study literature will read these bad books because they are culturally important.  However, once in a while you get a book that is both culturally important and a really good read.  These are golden moments that remind you why literature is a worthwhile experience.

Earlier this month, Chinua Achebe turned 79.  His novel Things Fall Apart is one of those stories that is at once obviously relevant and a joy to read.  It’s a little over two hundred pages long and deeply worth your time.  The narrative is told from a third-person perspective, but it uses limpid, effortless prose to follow Okonkwo, a hero who could have been pulled from any Greek tragedy. Read more…

To everyone who had wanted to view a show this week (that includes me!), I am sorry to inform you that I totally screwed up and had the camera set in a mode that Final Cut rather hates, so the show that we shot for this week is completely worthless and cannot be used. It’s rather sad, but we can recoup for lost time in the coming weeks. Due to the holiday of massive turkey slaughterings, we will not have a show this week.

In other news, it is the last week for NaNoWriMo, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a fun and sometimes stressful ride, but the end is looming over the horizon, and even if I make it or not, next Tuesday will be a fun day to be had by all. Right now I’m sitting at 39,003 words and 111 pages. There are officially five days left in the event, and 10,997 words to write over five days equals 2,199.4 words per day. It’s totally doable. The last few days I’ve had to write upwards of 3,000 just to partially keep pace, so two grand is a piece of cake. I also need to take some time to make a sweet cover for the book. I will do that over the weekend.

It’s been a full week since last week, so it’s that time again. Turn off the TV and bring in the kids, because it’s Haiku Thursday!

Garret’s Haikus

Hi there, Miss Palin,
How is the rogue’n goin’?
Hope all’s well with that.

Assassin’s Creed 2,
I just stabbed someone in the face,
thanks for letting me.

People like to bitch.
About what, exactly? Whatevs.
It is all fair game.

Hey, Psalm 109,
Sorry you are being used by
radical Christians.

CatsforGold.com,
Can finally sell this gold,
For asstons of cats.

Andrew’s Haikus

Yay for cold weather!

I always look great
in cold weather, thanks to Mom
and Eddie Bauer.

Hot soup: the greatest
food ever invented or
best food of all time?

Politics!

Both parties have a
preconceived narrative to
sell to the masses.

Democrat pundits
say, “Look how crazy all those
Republicans are!”

But Republican
pundits say, “We’re going rogue!
Cthulhu fhtagn!”

Both are partly right
and partly wrong, but Palin
is just looney tunes.

No, I’m not going to be talking about a famous WWII battle in the Pacific, I’m going to be talking about this monkey on my back; I have named him Jingles, but he sometimes goes by NaNoWriMo.

Today I will officially have passed the halfway point (three days late). They say slow and steady wins the race, but what about simply slow and slow? Because that’s what I’ve been doing. I have, however, found some useful tips that have greatly helped me not strangle small children as I struggle to write.

The first tip is to basically not go for 1,667 words at a time, or whatever the day’s goal is. I have started going for something more manageable: 100 words at a time. This post, for example, is already over 100 words. When you break it down into smaller chunks, it’s much more digestible, like a steak.

Today, I’m going to be trying out a new tactic. Since I’m behind by – a lot – I am attempting to write 250 words per hour throughout the day. I’ll need eight hours to do the 2,000 words I’ve been trying to knock out per day due to me being behind on it all. We’ll see how that goes.

I don’t know if these tips will help any one else, but look into it if you’re getting stuck. Or, if you’re not writing anything for NaNoWriMo, go ahead and laugh at my laziness, because it’s going to be a total bitch to catch up at this point.

Episode 84 of Pressed & Bound is online! NaNoWriMo is now in full swing, but will it kill Garret? In this week’s episode we discuss:

Books:

• Boneshaker (Sci Fi Essential Books)

Movies:

• Spy Who Came in from the Cold – Criterion Collection

Also, as mentioned in the show, we will be doing a charity gaming marathon on December 18 for the charity Child’s Play. More information, and the website where the event will be held, can be found at Hardmode.org.

Right click and download the eighty-fourth episode here:

• MP4 331mb

Comments or questions? Email us at: pnbfans(at)gmail(dot)com

Or watch online by clicking here!

Yet again, we’re back with another installment of Haiku Thursday; THE ZANIEST HAIKU DAY OF THE WEEK.

Garret’s Haiku’s

Modern Warfare 2
You keep me entertained, though
teens call me a Jew.

Hey, NaNoWriMo
Thanks for making me feel like
a chump. Thanks a lot.

Turns out writing is
hard. Now to stop making fun
of that guy Dean Koontz.

November is here,
you wouldn’t really know cuz
Christmas is a jerk.

So the house passed a
health care bill? Woop, now to hear
Repubs bitch a lot.

 

We also forgot about all this last week. It’s a shame, because last Thursday was Guy Fawkes Night. In honor of the only domestic terrorist to get his own international holiday, here are some belated November 5th haiku.

Andrew’s Haiku’s

November 5 is
a day marked by explosions
and bonfire ‘taters.

V for Vendetta
makes Guy Fawkes Night sound like it
celebrates the man.

The celebration
actually recalls his
failure to make fire.

Down with the gub’ment!
Americans forget Guy
was just a papist.

And now one for Sesame Street.

Happy 40th,
you big, beautiful puppets
and number monsters!
 

So it’s been exactly one week and a few days, and I sit humbled by the task at hand. The task of writing my face off.

So the daily word count was to be roughly 1,667 words per day. Each day that I tried to accomplish this I would spend an hour or two blasting through those words. I have been increasingly aware of the time limitations of our standard day, and hope soon that the powers that be add a few hours to the mix. Or simply that we make November a forty-five day month.

Over the weekend I missed about two days worth of writing, on Tuesday I only wrote 1,000 words, and yesterday I wrote nothing at all. All told, that’s about 4900 words that I’m behind on. I’m in a sad state of affairs. I should be around 18,000 words, but I sit forlornly at 13,000. To make up the words missed I have a couple of options:

1. Write like crazy.
2. Divide the remaining words up among the rest of the days.

I’m going to attempt to do #2 (teehee attempt to do #2…), but we shall see how that goes. Using only my brain meats, I figure that I’ll need to do about 2,000 words per day to get back up to pace by the end of the month. So if 1,667 took up to two hours for me to write, then another 350 words or so should tack on another 20 minutes, roughly. In the end it’ll simply a ton of words per day. This weekend I need to vow to sit and write, and not play video games or read or edit or anything else. (Actually, I’ll probably still edit video.)

So wish me luck, dear readers, because I might be on a path of failing this event, and if I fail then I will have to commit seppuku.

This week, Joe was out of town because that’s what he does, so we didn’t have a show this week. INSTEAD, yours truly spent a good deal of time writing for the big, crazy authorathon called NaNoWriMo, although admittedly not as much as I should have.

So for the one week of November, I’ve settled down with 10k words written, which is about 3k behind schedule. This weekend was not too kind for the writing.

Anyhow, since there was no show, we at least taped some super exciting footage of how the writing process works. Trust me, it’s two minutes of awesome.

Right click and download this video:

• MP4 18mb

Comments or questions? Email us at: pnbfans(at)gmail(dot)com

Or watch online by clicking here!

This message was posted very recently to Twitter by our very own Andrew:

RT from @neilhimself: For all of you doing NaNoWriMo, or just writing a book: http://bit.ly/jvSNO was the letter of encouragement I wrote.

It turns out that Neil Gaiman at points has doubts on his own work. We’ve finally solved the mystery, he IS human. You’re not the only one who gets stuck writing, don’t worry. A couple of years ago, Gaiman sent this letter to NaNoWriMo as encouragement for would be writers. Here’s an excerpt:

You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

Check out the whole thing, it’s worth a read, and definitely helps. I was honestly not feeling too hot about churning out 1,600 words today, but after reading his letter it’s helped to ease the pain a little.

p.s. I’m up to 5,000 words! Have to hit 6,667 tonight.