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[cristel-is-noveling]

[Sep 13] Life got hard. I'm back.

Life got hard for a bit there, but I’m back. I spent a little over a week reading good books (and comics! finally got started with Scott Pilgrim and not regretting it!), watching good movies, doing crafts, and spending some quality time with friends. 

It all helped, and if I’m not feeling creative, necessarily, I at least got to a point where I feel I can work on this again.

And work is what I did. I made time for a short stream today (an hour and a half). I read for the first two sprints, and then spent the last one going on a link hunt for some historical events I wanted to look at in more depth.

Wikipedia articles on several massacres, infamous governments, and the full texts of the Vienna Convention and the Rome Statute are now on the TBR list. This should be fun ♥

[cristel-is-noveling]

Taking a break this week. Crafts, mates, and excellent movies. Here's to replenishing the well! ♥️

[cristel-is-noveling]

[SEPTEMBER 1] The Stages of Decomposition

Ah, death! You just have to be accurate, right? Right?

It was a long time coming, but today I finally had to look at pictures of the decomposing corpse of a pig. So how did your morning go?

If any writers out there need a resource on the stages of decomposition, I found this pretty informative article by the Australian Museum. Very complete.

(Warning: Very graphic pictures of a dead pig, duh. On the bright side, all of this is equally applicable to human corpses. Or so they tell me.)

So on to today's progress...

REFERENCE 📚

Still on Spiral Dynamics. Despite all my misgivings, this is a great model if you want to portray the dynamics of personal and societal change in your art. Big scope stories (with stakes on the "village" "kingdom" and "cosmic" scales) might specially benefit from it in order to avoid simplistic portrayals.

So far, the patterns ring true enough. It's the proposed theory I'm still on the fence about. I don't want a review of this book to become its own project (and I might do well to search for critical takes before I set out to reinvent the wheel), but I'm collecting notes on stuff that I think might raise doubts.

WRITING 📝

Total Words: 334

I'm not disappointed in the word count, but I made a few bad decisions, which I regret.

I was inspired enough by the reading material to want to dedicate a sprint to checking the theory against my own world-building. Not only did it line up well, I was also able to make some new connections. So there was some benefit to it.

But the truth is that I could have done this any other time. And in light of what would come next, it wasn't worth it.

Enter the dead pig.

The second writing sprint was spent on the manuscript.

I needed to describe a corpse, and spent the better part of the sprint on a little research detour.

This is one I don't regret! The imagery gave me some cool ideas that I incorporated into the chapter to great effect. I truly am glad I didn't slap an [insert description here] tag and moved on, because I like this new direction better, and everything not on this foundation would have ended up scrapped!

Still, it was entirely too little time, and I had to stop writing just as I was getting warmed up.

If only I hadn't wasted the previous sprint. Oh, well.

BIOLOGY 🌱

Done with xylem, currently on phloem and the Pressure-Flow Model of Transport. After yesterday's fiasco, I felt I was breezing through the material.

Particularly fascinated by plasmodesmata and the whole idea of companion cells!

[cristel-is-noveling]

[August 31] The Most Un-Proud Of Studying Sessions

I was out there living la vida loca yesterday, getting some much-needed sun at the park while my sister read to me, followed by lunch and shopping with a friend who owed me a plushie in exchange for one of my scrap fabric pillows. The plushie was a no-show and I ended up getting a cool Tokyo Revengers t-shirt instead.

Afterwards I was exhausted (I walked almost 30k steps according to my fitness band) and went to sleep circa 8PM. #NoRegrets

(A fair trade.)

One benefit was that I slept more soundly and woke up more energized than I have in ages, although recent efforts to improve my sleep hygiene might have contributed.

Which brings us to today...

REFERENCE 📚

Still reading Spiral Dynamics, and accumulating notes on the matter. I'm starting to close in on what's rubbing me wrong about the book. I think I'll write a proper review once I'm done. On the plus side, I can totally see how the whole theory makes for a great writing tool.

WRITING 📝

Total Words: 1041

I wrote mostly off of my history notes, but I tweaked the opening paragraphs of my manuscript today. Inspiration is running high 😊

BIOLOGY 🌱

I spent almost the whole two sprints wrapping my head around a single concept (tracheids and vessel elements in xylem). It's one of those things that you wouldn't think are complicated, but I just couldn't find accessible material.

Not just how but why are they different? Why do they coexist if they do basically the same thing, only one of them does it better?

I could have gone all Feynman on it and not stopped until I thoroughly grasped it, but looking at the bigger picture, I decided it wasn't worth it. I wouldn't need it to understand any concepts ahead of me, and I can always go back if needed.

Still, this is my most un-proud studying session so far.

[cristel-is-noveling]

[August 29] Dead Air

Maaaaan, I hate YouTube. Hate it. Hate it. It minorly inconvenienced me today! Scheduling a stream is immensely helpful, because if you suffer an interruption, it'll keep your stream up until you manage to reconnect. Your viewers don't have to hunt for the new stream. You don't end up with multiple videos for the same stream after you're done. As someone who frequently falls victim to micro cuts, this is wesome!

Except we had an extended power outage today. It marked me as online until I managed to get my PC back on, reopen OBS, reconnect to the stream, and "officially" end it. Meanwhile I got left with three hours of dead air. I have the YT Studio app in my phone, so I tried to end it from there, but the option doesn't exist, or it isn't stupid-proof enough for me to figure it out before the power came back.

Still, progress was made:

REFERENCE 📚

Conflicting feelings. I've been taking notes in this regard—will elaborate some other time.

WRITING 📝

Total: 1124 words

It went super well! I kept writing from my history notes. While yesterday I went through the whole first volume, today I got around a third of the way through the second volume's notes. Part of it was that there were so many more notes! But also, they were much more relevant, so I ended up working off each one for longer.

BIOLOGY 🌱

There was no biology. The power outage cut my session short, since I borrow my textbook from the Internet Archive 😭 I did some extra reading though.

[cristel-is-noveling]

New Schedule! (august 28 report)

It's 6AM on the 29th, and I've slept through the night for the first time in weeks, so I'm going to take a moment to pat myself on the back here.

Yesterday I implemented the new schedule as planned. It went well, if unremarkably.

REFERENCE 📚

I started reading Spiral Dynamics, bascially because KM Weiland kept bringing it up in relation to archetypes, a topic I'm deeply interested in. I'm not sure I like it yet, and I would like to reserve judgment.

But if I'm honest? It's giving me cultish, pseudo-sciency vibes.

The concepts introduced so far are that:

a) Human nature evolves in a cyclical, yet increasingly complex, well... spiral, as we solve old problems and create new ones in turn. The apparent cyclical nature of history isn't a back and forth between known worldviews, but actually treads new ground with each go 'round. This happens in all leves of existence, from the individual, to the group, to humanity as a whole.

b) Understanding how this happens is Very Important if we are to affect change in the world.

I can't disagree with any of this. I also wish the book would get to the point already, but so far it's spent its first 35 pages out of 300~ (that's 10%!) trying to convince me of its own importance and breakthrough-revolutionary-ness. With no signs of stopping.

WRITING 📝

I decided to start easy and build stuff from my history notes. Did some character study and filled-in some backstory.

Total Words Written: 1999

I'm pretty happy with this for two sprints, but I'm under no illusions. It's going to go down once I'm alone without notes to serve as prompts. But hey, that's what all this research was for in the first place :D

BIOLOGY 🌱

I read the chapter on plant physiology, and it took me all the way to Part 5, Animal Structure and Function.

Learned a ton about how fluids actually move through a plant, why and how it responds to different stimuli, a bit about hormones. I'm surely going to understand all of it better once I start taking notes. I wager I'll be doing that all through this week.

I. COULDN'T. BE. MORE. EXCITED! These are the levels of organization I came here for!

Part 5 is going to take me all the way to page 320/400, and I wonder if, in light of the content I'm getting, I'm going to bother with Part 6. The completionist in me really wants to, but it takes me so long to complete a single chapter of this thing, it would be out of place once it stops being relevant to the novel. Then again, you never know what might end up being relevant. Then again, defining my scope is a problem I've had before. Sigh.

[cristel-is-noveling]

I forgot today was Sunday, and I swore I would take Sundays off, LOL. So here's a little video of me sewing that pillow I keep shredding fabric for on stream <3 Messy, but it's getting the job done, and I get to practice that blanket stitch 😅

[cristel-is-noveling]

The September Plan (coming to you this August!)

After the Great July Burnout, I had to decide between taking time off, or focusing on other aspects of the novel. I ended up doing both. I took eight days off between August 1 and August 10, and I spent the time since then focusing on research.

No regrets, research needed to be done. Not only that, it needed to be sped up. There were whole plot points hanging entirely on research that I wasn't (and still am not) even close to finishing.

The break was also beneficial in that it let the boys in the basement do their job, and I came out of it not only full of new ideas, but also a whole new concept of what this novel is, not in terms of story, but as a speech event. Why is this story being told, and to whom? All very interesting stuff I may write about at some point.

But back to the point of this post: The idea was that, come September, I was going to Officially Come Back To Writing (I say "officially" because all this inspiration did turn into a few frenetic writing sessions). It just looked like a nice goalpost, you know? New month, new schedule.

Well, screw that.

I just finished one of my reference books today, and wouldn't you know it, this also looks like a nice goalpost. The new schedule is going into effect starting tomorrow, August 27.

🌹🌷🌻 The September Plan 🌻🌷🌹

Research, regrettably, will still take up the majority of my noveling time. Otherwise I'll never be done with it, and I'll keep writing myself into walls of underdeveloped worldbuilding. I already marked everything I could as to be decided, but there's no ignoring those holes anymore.

Thankfully though, this latest surge of inspiration means I have new stuff to work on, so writing can again be a part of the picture. I will, however, not impose a word-count goal on myself. I'll make up a dummy NaNo goal to log everything that does get written, but I won't be shooting for any particular number. The catch, however, is that I have to write every day, for a set amount of time.

So my daily six poms are going to look like this from now on:

🍅 Sprints 1 & 2: Reference Material

Craft books, history, psychology. The next book on my TBR is Spiral Dynamics, so I'll be going with that until something better comes across or I decide it's not relevant enough and DNF it.

🍅 Sprints 3 & 4: Writing

A whole hour. Seems sensible enough. I tend to be at my most awake during this time, and will probably be inspired after the first two sprints.

🍅 Sprints 5 & 6: Biology

This should theoretically be the priority, but there's only so much of this I can take in a single day. A little less attention-intensive than writing, though, so a nice way to come down from the session.

[cristel-is-noveling]

Thank God almighty, I'm free at last! (report and... book review? ish? - august 26)

I can't do the Night Owl Thing anymore. I could in my teens and early twenties. Now, whenever I start Sleeping Weird, it's not as easy as shifting my schedule around, even for a freelancer like me, who technically has the freedom for it.

After two or three days, there always comes a point when I'm exhausted regardless of hours slept. Sleep cycles get increasingly chaotic, too. Getting my eight hours from 8am to 4pm quickly turns into sleeping two four-hour shifts, and then taking two-to-three hour naps every three or four hours.

All of this to say: I was useless all day yesterday, even while I was awake. Alas. I'm making a concerted effort to get more sunlight, and exercising, and taking my meds on time.

It must have done something, because here I am today, still living at night, but sleeping better! And GUESS WHAT? I'm finally DONE with my history book!

HISTORY 👑

I really can't impress upon you the sheer relief that comes with being finally done with this fucking thing. At best, it was a painfully dry read that needed so many more edits, if you ask me. I think part of it was the author's incompetence, and also the fact that this was the second book on this series. So, if we want to be charitable, we can attribute the book's lack of polish to a time-crunch. But I don't know how charitable I want to be here, because Yofre isn't a good writer, but he's not This Bad. The man is an accomplished journalist. He knows how to turn events into passably enganging narrative. So I get the feeling that no small part of this... general messiness was a conscious decision to obsfucate the telling as much as possible. This is a book trying to paint a literal dictatorship as a "failed project", and the human-rights-violating perpetrators as incompetent and dishonest. It's not that they violated human rights. It's that they should have come clean about it, you know? It's not that they took down a constitutional government (after all, it was just SO unpopular), it's that they weren't any better at the job. And I think think this even comes through in the formatting. Gone are the character portraits of the first book. He'll drown you with dates and names and events, but will refuse to tell you who's who except for scant career details, and their current position in government. Gone are the footnotes at the... well, foot of the page, where they'd be most convenient. Are they at the end of the book, the second most convenient place? Nope. They're at the end of each chapter. So, if you want to be diligent about checking them, every time you start a chapter you have to flip ahead to where it ends, and stick a second bookmark there, so you can jump back and forth. Every time. I did it. I can easily picture most people not bothering. Unfortunate decisions? Maybe. But awfully convenient, if you ask me, when you compare the purpose of the two books: One was a chronology of the previous government's downfall. It was an objectively bad government, and clarity played in the author's favor. At least where the government was concerned. Whenever he touched on members of the armed forces were concerned, you got the same kind of minimalistic profiling you got in this book, while terrorists and government officials got extensive character portraits. But hey, it was slightly competent journalism, if obviously biased. Here, though? There's no part of this book where clarity would help the point. Any point. This book is so biased it can barely say anything without shooting itself in the foot, so constantly throwing raw, barely relevant data at the reader is its best bet. Do I regret choosing it as reference? No. It was on hand (inherited) and I got what I wanted out of it. In fact, this last day was especially fruitful. I took more notes today than during the whole previous week. But I won't be going out of my way to find more books by this guy. Forget the dubious ethics. I just don't want to be bored to death.

[cristel-is-noveling]

It's Topsy-Turvy Day! (august 24)

Sooo... today I feel Much Better, and the research went Extremely Well. The price for it was sleeping all day after going to sleep circa 8am this morning. Oh, well.

BIOLOGY 🌱

Success all around! I finished taking my notes on secondary growth, and managed to start and finish leaf anatomy. With this, I'm officially leaving the shoot system behind, and ready to start a new chapter 🥳

HISTORY 👑

I made a single note, but it was on an interesting political situation: When two of your allies are fighting each other, and you might need both of them in the future, you don't want one to completely obliterate the other. Even if you take sides.

Another good thing: I found the last bunch of pages, almost a whole day's worth, are filler (the index is huge). Which means I'm actually closer to one day away from finishing this book, too. Yay!

[cristel-is-noveling]

Another last-hour success (august 23)

Today was a terrible, no good, very bad day, but better than yesterday in some respects. At least the noveling time remained sacred—I went for the full three hours. Today's research went well, but I have this one worry that if I'm not able to consistently sit down to write soon after waking up (and that only seems to be possible when I get up early, otherwise I have to immediately deal with the day's demands), it's going to negatively affect progress come September. Nights are good for research, but I need to be at my most alert if I'm to actually produce anything. In any case: BIOLOGY 🌱

Went well, but I struggled. I'm still on stem anatomy, but while primary growth and herbaceous stems were simple enough, secondary growth confused the hell out of me. Once I figured it out I didn't understand why, but it stumped me for a long time 😅

HISTORY 👑

I feel (somewhat) vindicated in my decision to stick with the text. I took a total of two (2) notes for 40 pages read, but they were good ones, and I even had to stop and write for a second because I got inspired by what I read. In any case, assuming I keep up this pace, this book is going to last me another 3 days. No big loss, I hope.

[cristel-is-noveling]

Late Night Success! (august 22)

I couldn't wake up for the life of me this morning. I was about to give up on noveling for the day, when I decided to hell with it and made it a night session (even though that's not ideal for me).

I got on stream and it went really well! All the sprints today were research sprints.

BIOLOGY 🌱

After a read-through of the chapter, now I'm taking notes. Specifically, I finished taking my notes on root anatomy, and I'm now working through the stem part of the shoot system. This research is as relevant as ever, and I'm excited for the worldbuilding applications!

HISTORY 👑

I feel I'm getting dimishing returns on my current text. I don't want to fall prey to sunk cost fallacy, but seeing as a) I'm REALLY close to the end and, b) I'm still making the occassional note, I think I'll just stick with this one until the end.

TO-DO 📝

• The last two history books have left me with a craaaaapton of notes that need to be put into some sort of order if they're to be usable. I'll have to set some time aside for this.

• Speaking of setting some time aside, I'm in the last week of August and keenly aware of it. After devoting the entirety of this month basically just consuming information, I need to make a game plan for September that allows me to get back to the story without neglecting all the research that still NEEDS to be done (specially re: biology). Trying to push through a worldbuilding gulf (that needed research to be sorted) in July was what led to me burning myself out, and we don't want that again.

[cristel-is-noveling]

Hi! My name is Cristel and I'm working on a novel!

This is a personal blog for accountability, goal tracking, project updates, etc.

I'm OneCristel on the NaNo site! 📖

If you want to keep me company while I write, I also have an accountability stream! Here you'll get to see me making weird faces at the camera, and chatting and doing crafts during breaks 🤗 Now Writing 📝 Filling gaps on the zero draft. Current Research 📚 Sylvia S. Mader's Introduction to Biology (currently on page 230/400) Spiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan (currently on page 97/352) Current Craft 🧶 Pillow with scrap fabric filling :3

(header pic by Omelapics, avatar by rawpixel.com)