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Showing posts with label Challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Challenge. Show all posts

Thursday, December 1, 2016

NaNoWriMo 29th and 30th day log: THE END (and what's next) with video

This is the last update on NaNoWriMo. I might have more writing updates later depending how things goes.
Today is December 1st so NaNoWriMo finished at midnight last night. It was a lot of fun as usual, I didn't participate in as much word count sharing and discussion as I usually do because my schedule was a bit tight and I sort of missed that but it didn't stop me from finishing it and reaching my first goal even if I didn't make it to the second.
In this video, I talk a lot about what is coming next, that is, what I'm going to be doing writing-wise in December. I'm introducing NaNoFiMo, you can join the forum here even though it's a bit dead today, I don't know if it's going to be updated or when you can have a look here.
And also I talk about my word count spread sheet. Basically, that's what I use when there is no other place online to count my words. It's also pretty nice in the sense that I can keep the data and analyse them later and compare them to other months. If you want the spread sheet, just let me know and I'll figure out a way to give it to you.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2016

NaNoWriMo 25th to 28th Day log: Not writing and environment (with video)

Welcome to a new NaNoWriMo update. This one is a bit of a sad update as I have almost now written at all since the previous update and it has been 4 days. Bad bad little me, I really trying super hard not to hate myself about it right now.


So here are some reasons why I haven't written anything. First I was out of town, so before going out of town I needed to "fix" my place. I have this tendency of using trip as deadline for doing big things I was putting of and of course I had to do it all at once and at the last minute so I started moving the furniture around the day before leaving. Of course, my house looks way better, I have better access to my dolls. My boyfriend even think I can really get an extra doll shelf but I hurt my back in the process and I was in so much pain by the end of the day that I couldn't do anything.
I was still feeling bad the next day but I needed to go to the azone store to get the Minami mermaids new versions. If you haven't seen that and are interested, check the last trip to the azone store video here and the vlog for that day here.
I think it will be self explanatory. I spent the all day out before taking the bus for out of town.

Then the rest of the weekend when all my American friends were having a Turkey day, I was at my boyfriend's parent having Japanese food and playing with dogs.  So I didn't do much writing.
The thing is, I had planned on doing a lot of things over there and on getting a lot of videos recorded but it didn't work that way. I gave up on making the doll videos when it took the all night to upload the vlogs and I think the environment wasn't really my writing cup of tea.

For my writing I need a sort of familiar environment so that I can get the creative just flow and it just didn't happen over the weekend. I was just interrupted every time I started writing. My concentration is really getting low with unusual noise happening as I am a super jumpy person. Anyway, the big idea here is, if you don't have a particular writing environment that works for you and you have trouble getting the words out, maybe it would be a good idea to create a writing space and habit that always make the words flow. I know I'm back in mine, considering how much I just wrote in this blog post. 


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Friday, November 25, 2016

NaNoWriMo 22, 23 and 24th day log: Post NaNoWriMo Syndrome and Witches Tarot

So this is another over due update for NaNoWriMo and there is two main reasons for that (not including a suspicions of a small food poisoning with orange juice).

First, I think I fell into the post NaNoWriMo Syndrome and rested on my laurels for a bit. I guess this happen to a lot of people after reaching a goal. We just don't want to keep going because in a way, we already made it. I think it happens to me quite often and I finally figured it out so I'm going to be taking care of not falling for it again. When I reached my 50000 words, I actually reached my primary goal for the month, the goal all NaNoWriMo writers are running after and therefore it was a bit hard to get into the big picture (finishing the draft, rewriting, editing and publishing the novel) Because, I don't really have a deadline anymore or the NaNoWriMo induced motivation. Still after talking with a friend on twitter, I figured out that 50000 words wasn't my real goal, but more of a stepping stone. So yes, I'm back at trying to get 2500 words a day. I seriously want to do it until all the books I planed to write so far are done so fingers crossed on that.

Then the second point was that I didn't know what I was writing. My main character started to learn the tarot and I don't know much about tarot so I needed to do some research about it to be able to keep going, still reading on the internet didn't seem to cut it so I got myself the "Witches Tarot". I maybe should have started with a normal tarot deck but I thought that because my character is a witch it would be a lot better to use something sort of specifically designed for her, or at least for witches. Learning the tarot with my character is going to be a lot of fun. If you want some updates on the witch tarot please let me know too. 


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Tuesday, November 22, 2016

NaNoWriMo 21th day log: (Spoiler alert) Congratulations Winner! NaNo site's winner page (with video)

So this time, I wrote a little bit more to make sure that the NaNoWriMo word eating monster machine was going to accept my win and here we go!
I'm taking you to the NaNoWriMo web page as I validate my win for this year. If you haven't win and want the surprise for when you do, keep this video in your watch later list. I wouldn't like to spoil it for you.
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Monday, November 21, 2016

NaNoWriMo 20th daily log: Head to Head with the word eating monster


So on the 20th, I won NaNoWriMo... Almost....
I had it all, my Open office word count was sure, I had my 50057 words. That's even 57 words too many, brilliant.
But that was without counting on the NaNoWriMo word eating monster machine!
See the word count for NaNoWriMo always understimate how much you wrote while Open office sort of over estimate it I guess. To be sure I'll have  to count all my words by hand (or a sample) but I'm not going to really do it. NaNoWriMo believe that I have only 49760 words so I'm going to write a bit more and in the next video, I'll show you what happens when you win NaNoWriMo.


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Sunday, November 13, 2016

NaNoWriMo 11th and 12th Day Log, Tip 9 and backache

So here is another 2 day log update with 0 words improvement. I'm going to try to do better today but I'm not sure how that will go. I'm so glad I followed my previous advice and got as many words as possible at the beginning so that I'm not really "late" on my writing. I still have a few words in advance so I don't need to worry too much.

And then here is your advice for today too. This is tips number 9 so only one left after that.



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Thursday, November 10, 2016

NaNoWriMo 9th day log, tip 7 and following my own advices

So I started following my own advice and had a massive catch up and a pretty good writing day. Write or Die is really too efficient for me. At this point I even felt like I could write the whole novel in one sitting, haha not happening but still it was a pretty good feeling.
I hope you'll enjoy today's new tips. I already decided to put in in practice when I finished today's writing session. Hopefully it will make tomorrow's writing even better.


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Saturday, October 4, 2014

24 hours comics, let's get started!

24HCD12_300x250_color_1

So here we go, I'm going to be crazy and create a 24 pages comic in the next 24 hours. I'm not sure about the story yet and I'm not sure about the topic. Ok maybe demon, mermaid and Egypte! And I never created a story before even though I have illustrated a few stories. 

So why the hell do I think I can do it?
Well, my motto is if a human being can do it, I can do it too. As long as you don't ask me to run or shot a basketball in the basket that is.

But people don't write comics in 24 hours!
Well, actually, they kinda do, especially crazy people here.

So anyway, I'll be uploading some sort of progress as regularly as possible through the day. 

My first problem is that I was thinking too much about bad stuffs to sleep before starting and I'm a bit tired and freaking out.

My second problem is my fridge is empty.

My third problem is I know what to write somehow, but it's super complicated and unrealistic.

So yeah, that's going to be a total blast and I have no idea what I'm doing as usual but I'm doing it!

The plan is, start as Monica, finish as Rachel! You just click when they click!



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Thursday, May 1, 2014

Mai's planning and Camp NaNoWriMo's Impressive Win.

Here is my plan for the month of Mai or more my absence of plan. 

I wanted to do the 6 week challenge again and Read More Or Die.  
But this time, the 6 week challenge is a special Esperanto challenge to prepare a 5 minutes presentation in Esperanto in 6 weeks. And I don't want to do that so I'll be studying Japanese on my own or maybe I want to do that, I mean the new things people are throwing at me always look like candy. So I might think about it a bit further (and discuss it with my "coach" lol)
And the Read More Or Die contest happened to be in April and not in May so I just missed it, which hopefully doesn't mean I won't read next month, I'm just not going to go totally crazy about having my daily 40 pages. 

Camp NaNoWriMo's Impressive Win.

In April, I wrote 100,715 words and finished on the 25th before leaving for Hong Kong. That's impressive not only because of the huge word count but also because I managed to finish Blue Angel and write the complete draft of Dark Druid in less than a month.



The main reason why I wanted to go up to 100k words was because I'm not feeling the thrill anymore.

There are a lot of people participating to NaNoWriMo who can't make it to the basic 50k, people who chose ridiculously small goal during camp because camp allows word goals as small as I think 10k and they still can't make it. Here are the stats for November.

I used to be a nice person, I used to think it was just hard and that people were busy and that people were having writer block and a life and well, I'm not a nice person anymore. 
I too have a life, a full time job, a boyfriend in a different city, a trip to plan and to go to at the end of April, a daily photography challenge, blog hops and daily blog posts, and writing and editing and learning Japanese and other stuff when I feel like it and an Etsy store, and so much more. I too have feelings about not being good enough, thinking that my novel is a crappy idea, that my draft is awful and not worth finishing. I used to sabotage myself with feelings. This time winning was overwhelming and when I hit 80k and started to think that I wouldn't feel the thrill this time around again I thought: "What the point, if the thrill isn't there?" I wrote 6000 words to be able to get something on paper because looking at the screen and the word count was scaring me.
But when you win nobody is being nice to you and telling you that you'll do better next time. You've got a "congrats" and others bitching that you did it again and they didn't. You go through the same problem and all you have is the win, you made it, for yourself and screw the rest of the world. And you didn't take the win from anybody either, they took it away from themselves. Accepting other people excuses while I'm not accepting mine is like saying yeah I did it because my life is easier than yours but that's not even true, so screw it, I won't be nice to people making excuses anymore.


If you didn't make it, you can tell yourself everything you want, give yourself as many excuses as possible. If you didn't win, it's your own fault and seriously you won't even win the next time around without a serious change of attitude.
Let's call a cat a cat and a loser a loser.  
  
Here is a quote from Rounders (1998):
Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table...
at the World Series of Poker every single year?
What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?
- It's a skill game, Jo. -
And this is so true, it's a game, writing is a game and it's a skill game.
I wrote 77k in November, it was hard but it was nothing unachievable. I wrote 100k+ this time around and in not even a month. 
Winning NaNoWriMo has nothing to do with being lucky or having time. You only have the time that you want to have. Winning NaNoWriMo is about telling to yourself: "I'm going to do this." 

Here is another quote from Rounders (1998):
Listen, here's the thing.
If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table,
then you are the sucker.
Guys around here'll tell ya... you play for a living.
It's like any other job. You don't gamble. You grind it out.
Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it.
So what about not feeling the thrill? Well, I thought there was something about me that was broken but in fact it's quite the opposite. I thought that because a lot of people can't make it, I should be over joyed about verifying my wining word count. But the fact is, I'm not telling myself every time I solve the Schrödinger equation that I'm such an awesome person because very few people in the word can do it. I'm not telling myself every time I write a post in English that it's freaking amazing because it's not my native language. In the same way, winning NaNoWriMo style contests has become an habit, it's something I do and I'm freaking good at it. I won't be pushing anymore to feel the thrill, I'll get the thrill with something else. I'll just continue writing novels for people to enjoy, because that's just what I do. That's it.

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Saturday, January 18, 2014

365 photography challenge

A while back I wanted a new camera. I wanted a camera that could take beautiful pictures. I had explored everything I could with my current camera and I was becoming frustrated with it. It's not a bad camera, it's small, I can take it everywhere easily, it took thousands of pictures that I will keep forever and hundreds of memories. At this point in my life, however, I just want something more. It took me about a year to take the decision of buying a new camera. Did I really need it? Did I really want it? I know for sure that I don't want to spend too much time on learning to take pictures, I don't want to become a professional, I just want a better quality than I have now and to gain a little bit of knowledge and techniques. So finally, I've got a new camera.

This is where the 365 photography challenge comes forward. 
Instead of pulling my hairs of because, there was this amazing thing to photograph but I didn't know how to use my camera at the right lens aperture and my ISO was off and don't even get be starting on the shoot angle, oh my goddess so terrible, I decided to take a step by step approach. For the next 365 days, I will take one picture a day and post it on this blog, flickr... actually in several places automatically using (ifttt). 
I decided not to have a theme so that I can practice as many skills as possible. I also want to have many topics to help me decide on what I like to shoot and what I don't like as much.

They will also keep my creativity juice flowing as I will need to come up with something to photograph every day. Using my camera every day should make me a better photograph no matter what anyway, using the power of practice, practice, practice!
















The 365 challenge going on on this blog every day doesn't mean that I will stop the rest of this blog activities (amigurumi, writing, editing prompt, travel, blog hops...), they will follow their normal course, the 365 challenge just comes as a supplement.  
 
 
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Saturday, January 11, 2014

January Challenges!

"But Linda, Linda, Linda! You haven't told us what are your new year resolutions and you haven't told us what you are going to do this month?" 

Yes, that's true that not long ago I started to every month with telling the challenges I wanted to accomplish but it hasn't been always like that and I didn't notice that I had to do it but I guess people got somehow used to it. 

So here we go again!

I don't believe in New Years Resolutions! 

The main reason is that probably everyone who took a New Year Resolution already gave it up by about NOW. I mean it's 10th of January and there is the "it's cold outside, I'll do it tomorrow factor." I know that because it's snowing in Sendai and I'm still walking home but that's only because I'm pretty good at self herding even if that's not so good for me. 

The second reason is that people are taking the same resolution every year expecting to obtain a different result without thinking that if it didn't work last year there is no way that it's going to work this year either, I don't know why they start believing that this year is so different just because it's first of January. If they actually really wanted to do something they wouldn't need to wait for the first of January to be convenient to start it, they would just need to start it whenever they think of it. 

The third reason is that New Year Resolutions are generally extremely poorly expressed and lead to being overwhelmed without even starting to work on anything. Like "This year, I'll get fit" but you have no idea about which new diet to start on or what type of exercise you like, or "I'm going to write a book or learn a language" without first planning the time for it during your busy day.
But I guess that's just me being annoyed with people wanting things and never putting the efforts into it and that's worse in January  because of the New Year Resolutions. 

So the challenge for January!

1)I'm up again for the Read More Or Die challenge but this time in 3 languages as I want to maintain my knowledge in German and Swedish a little bit better. 
I'm also reading books in French to help be get better at translating my blog post (and maybe later books) into French.

2)I'm still editing Harajuku Kiss which is getting closer to something good everyday.

3)I'm still writing Blue Angel even though I haven't joined Janowrimo because I was away at the beginning of January then didn't bother. (New part of Blue Angel coming soon.) 
 
4) I joined #fitbit2014 challenge and have a lot more than the 12k steps needed to success for this week. (Monday: 13752, Tuesday: 13678, Wednesday: 14075, Thursday: 14780)

Conclusion is: I rather "do" that awesome thing than tell people that "I'm gonna do it."

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Friday, December 20, 2013

End of the 6 Week Challenge

The 6 week Challenge finished earlier than I expected. When I uploaded my hours for Saturday and Sunday on Sunday night, it was already over, so the last hours I needed to reach 150 hours were done but not added to the following graph.


You need to add 12 hours drama and 25 minutes anime and 5 hours reading to get to my total count which means I reached my goal probably one day too late but I still reached it! Yeah me!

Next time I'll be careful which day of the month the Challenge starts. I'm reading to start again on February 1st!



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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Update on the 6 Week Challenge

November is the month of NaNoWriMo but it's also the month of the 6 Week Challenge. So far it has been 19 days, so I am almost at the middle of the challenge.

For my 6 Week Challenge, my goal is to study Japanese for at least 150 hours in 6 weeks. 
At the moment, I can't use earphone at work because I'm doing a lot of reading and working out math equation but it will soon change when I start programming, so my hour count didn't rise as quickly as usual. My hour count is mainly do to reading in the bus as I go and come back to work and watching anime. 

I will try to do a little bit more of Anki during the next 3 weeks. I think the problem was that I got bored with my deck but I have a new one (RTK2) which seems interesting. My total anki time for the 3 last weeks is the half of my boyfriends daily use, that's kind of ridiculous but he does anki while walking around to places while I only do it on computer. I can feel the technology power here.  On the other hand, I can read more books.

As I am not at 75 hours yet, I have about 35 hours to catch up. That should be doable.
  
 I'm happy because I managed to finish R.O.D. 1 and I'm now half way through R.O.D. 2.

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Friday, November 1, 2013

Result of October Challenges

I read more than expected. 
I'm so proud of myself actually. I had scaled the Read More Or Die Challenge on the previous 15 days RMOD challenge for which I just managed 100 pages. This time in October, I wanted to read 200 pages but I managed to read more than 300.
I finished ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 and I started on Read Or Die. I don't know if I'm getting better or of ROD is easier to read but it seems I'm a bit faster. Of course I still don't understand everything but I'm getting there. If you want to ask why do you read things you don't understand without a dictionary, well 1) I can't bother checking stuff every minute especially that I do most of my reading in the bus. 2) You might want to have a look at this it might revolution what you always thought about reading. 

I also started a new anki deck which gives the readings in the RTK2 order. My boyfriend says that a lot of things are obsolete but it's always good for the yomi anyway so you might definitely want to try it. I personally think it's awesome!

This counter is showing the total page read since I started on novels seriously. 
 

On the other hand, I don't have any progress for Vampire Heart. but I might get to it sometimes next year eventually.
 
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Friday, October 18, 2013

The Japanese Project:One more step toward literacy


One of the thing when you arrive in a country where you don't understand (speak) the language is that you become illiterate. Of course you can still read your own language but you are illiterate in the language of the country. This is what happened to me when I first arrive in Japan. Despite training myself, even now when I arrive in the book shelves in a store I just look at the book blankly while in my country I could grasp interesting titles in one look. As I tend to read a lot, I have to say that this became really frustrating so I'm going to try a little bit more, a little bit harder (easier ;) ).


I'm currently undertaking the Read More Or Die challenge with a goal of 200 pages read in the month of October and few days ago I finished to read my first novel in Japanese!! Yeah, Me.
I will start the 6 week challenge again on November 1st.
I don't understand everything, far from it. To be honest, I don't even know what I understand because I read without translating. When my boyfriend makes me translate it goes ok but I feel like it's breaking my learning. So I'm just reading and going trough enormous amount of stuff that I only partially get but I can feel the progress. 


Anyway, all that to introduce my new reading material. I was offered the all series of Read Or Die for white day last year. And what better than Read Or Die to learn to read. I wonder how great I will be at Japanese when I'm done reading all this. The more I read the more I feel really weird inside of my head a bit like nothing (everything) is making sense anymore. I know this mean progress as it's the same feeling I have when watching 20+ hours of drama in a row. It's the getting-fluent feeling, it's fun and I love it.

Read Or Die is the story of girls who use their sticky paper abilities to protect the world from geniuses back for the dead. No need to say, most of these girls read a lot. :)

 
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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

October Challenges

Hello everybody, sorry for the late post today, I forgot my wifi I home and then I did the laundry and well I was having a life like normal people for the day. 

Before telling you what challenges are coming up in October, let's see what will happen in September. 

The 6 week challenge didn't go so well but I'm back 40% through RTK 1 and music in Japanese almost all the time (I'm going through Stargate SG1). 
On the writing side, I have two main projects. 
I almost didn't edit anything and Vampire Heart's first draft didn't progress much, about 5k only. I finished Mich's Summer Mystery and nobody actually solved it. I also planned my novel for NaNoWriMo.
 
I added more amigurumis (cheaper ones) to my esty store but didn't get the novels there yet. I think I'm having a perfectionnist problem there. Nothing changes about the ebook version of Demon and Fairy and Attic Mirror either.

I'm taking more classes on coursera but I have been slacking on the homework only watching the videos.

October challenges

So now what is going to happen in October, first of all, the Read More or Die challenge is here. I'm intending to try 200 pages. I managed to read 100 pages on the half month challenge in August. 

The French blog will be revied, starting today. The last post had been in Mars and I stopped in the middle of the Toyama exploration. Now, I discover that I can spot a lot more typos when translating.

I will also try to have more of Vampire Heart's first draft done and some editing. I also have a new top secret project that you need to wait for few months.

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