March 2nd
184,402
Oof. I am so sore. Mondays are most always busy working in a library, but when you carry a load of groceries home with heavy bags on your shoulders (Panic attacks + anxiety because there's too many stupid drivers around here + growing up traumatized from car accidents galore = Not willing to get a driver's license), and your family wants to get fast food drinks, and you are the only one who can carry the drinks because one person has a back problem and the other person is pushing an upright, folding shopping cart home (My mom can't drive due to health problems worse than but similar to mine), it can take a toll on your body. In this case, mine. It was mainly my left arm and shoulder, but my right arm was sore, too. Being sore and weak especially in my left arm reminded me of just how much I need both arms to function (Pushing book carts, carrying boxes, carrying piles of books in your arms, etc.).
But I like physical challenges. It keeps me strong. I used to be skinny and weak when I was a kid, and I didn't like it, so that's where my love for having muscles originally comes from. I don't want to be weak and feel wimpy again.
Anyway, at least I can still write. But I should stop here because I'm both falling asleep and because I need extra sleep to recover.
Hey, before I hit the hay, here's a picture I took over ten hours ago of the windstorm we had today (er, that is, 3/1/16):
As you can see, the wind was blowing hard against the tree towards the right. Wind gusts reached 50 mph. The wind is nearly gone right now. It was an unusually short storm, but approximately 40,000 people are without power. Crews are working hard at clearing fallen debris and restoring power as fast as they can. This wasn't near as bad as the windstorm that hit us in November 2015, but a woman is in the hospital right now with serious injuries after a tree fell on her home. Praying the best for her.
Good night!
***March 18th***
No, I didn't die. But my laptop battery did! I had to order a new one and wait for it to arrive in the mail.
But don't worry, I was still writing during the wait. How, you ask? Well, against all odds, I was able to write quite a bit long-hand. For those who know me well, you might be squawking right about about now, "What?? But what about your old, healed-wrong injuries on your right pinky finger knuckles?" Well, I don't really know. I was being careful not to apply much pressure there, that's for sure. I think it had to do with the level of the table, how I didn't write for more than 15 minutes most of the time (Most of it was written while I was writing on break at work), and how I wasn't blasting through it (If I am writing very fast and with much enthusiasm, then I tend to pressing hard on the paper with my writing hand.
Stay tuned! I'll be updating the writing log very soon, if nothing else happens.
Welcome to my crazy life!
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***March 27th***
Happy Easter! I'm eating dinner at the moment (Ham, Brussels sprouts, yellow potatoes, sweet potato fries, too many potatoes for some reason, [At this, I freeze for a moment as I remember something, tell my mom that we forgot the sweet potatoes were still in the oven, and we laugh. The oven was already turned off, so it's okay. They're still warm.] and sweet potatoes.), but I'm just here to say: I've just finished updating my book file. *takes bite, chews while typing, takes bite, repeats* I'll be adding each day's log very soon, but here's the total for now: 155,808 words. Yowza! *takes a look at the last log* ...Wait. Somewhere I messed up. March 2nd says 840,402 words. Must be an extra number somewhere. I'll go check February.... *comes back* AHA! The last log in February was a 151,000 number, therefore, that so-called "840,402" is actually 158,402. ...I fixed it now. Heh, you folks probably thought it weird that I'd jump from the 100,000's to the 800,000's in a matter of days, then disappear for several days afterwards. Oh well, it happens.
***
Alright! I've got the numbers. Here they are:
March 7th - 8th (I wrote at night and didn't keep track of the time, but I recall that I wrote quite a bit into March 8th, so this number will count as a whole writing session, where I sat down to write and did not stop until well into the early morning hours of the next day.) -- 969 words written.
March 8th (During the day, during the hours that the light shone upon this side of the Earth) -- 610 words written.
March 10th - 11th (Little was written on the 11th, so the majority that was written was mostly the 10th) -- 484 words written.
March 12th -- 96 words written. (31 words of actual writing, 65 of editing. The story was getting a bit slow and hard to crank out, so I decided to read several pages back and ended up finding some mistakes or things that needed to be less vague. Some words were taken out and replaced by fewer words, others were added in, but most of the 65 words I added in were sentences that needed to be added to make situations in the story more descriptive and understandable. I felt better about the story afterwards.)
March 13th -- 1,080 words written. (The most done during the time I had to continue the story longhand.)
March 15th -- 219 words written.
March 16th -- 75 words written (mostly editing).
March 17th -- 24 words written (definitely editing).
March 20th -- 7 puny words written (editing).
March 25th -- 127 words written (editing).
March 27th -- 31 words written (editing).
As you can see, I had difficulty cranking out much towards the end. Much of the editing was done while I was on break at work, most of the writing bit was done at night after my family went to bed, though, in the beginning, I did write a fair amount at work. How much I write just depends on several factors. Including, but not limited to: Noise tolerance, anxiety, stress, distraction tolerance, and the ability to zone into the story, itself.
What I mean by "zoning into the story" is: Imagine seeing a hole in the floor and seeing another world, another dimension, another life, below you. You crouch and watch a person living their life, and other people living their lives. You can hear their thoughts, you can understand their troubles, you are with them through thick and thin. You are with them every step of the way and following their lives without actually being there physically. You are merely a watcher. You can't talk to them, you can't touch them or be touched by them. You can peer through their heads and see and hear their thoughts, you can feel their emotions, you are almost those people. You are hardly aware of your own self anymore. You can't feel cold, you can't feel hot, you can't feel pain. Your own hardships are not existent anymore. The characters that you follow... their lives... are yours. You feel instead their emotions, you think their thoughts, you go through their hardships instead of your own. That's what a book is like. And that's what I'm writing.
When you read a book, you feel all that. But when you write a book, you feel more. It's much more pronounced, because you understand every single part of that character. You know who they are, inside and out, and deeper inside than any reader can ever feel. You know who they are, because they are a part of you.
It's like carving out your rib and making a whole new skeleton out of it. You decide what that piece of you will look like with flesh and skin on it, you get to choose how many arms it will have or whether to give it back hair.
...Perhaps that's too distracting. Too gruesome. If you're more of a literal thinker, you'll hate a certain character of mine. Yep. That's a piece of me that I turned into a character. It's a silly part of me, but it's also an often misunderstood part of me, as well. (At least, to certain important people in my life, anyway. But I doubt those people will ever understand my character, either, so that's what makes the character even more special. He/she has undergone troubles and goes about pleasing people regardless of being understood or not. Just happy-go-lucky and always quirky.) So, I decided to create a character to help make it make more sense. In the form of a character.
Of course, in real life, I'm not as quirky. I'm not especially talkative or outgoing. I'm more like a grandma in a young woman's body, liking peace and quiet, preferring to listen and find opportunities to give good advice or tell funny or interesting life stories. However, I'm different around different people. When I'm with those who are silly, I feel more comfortable in my own skin, as I tend to stretch in all sorts of directions, and I can joke more and talk more, laugh louder, etc. I'm often either too loud or too quiet, which annoys me enough to eat an empty book that spits grapes into a pig's mouth.
...Yeah, I typed that on purpose. No hidden meanings. I'm just annoyed at something else: I just realized I made this post way longer than I anticipated. I think I need to go write, now. ...Of course, I may or may not write tonight. It was a long, busy day on 5 hours of sleep.
I assure you, I am doing a little better with my sleep amounts. It's just that last night I was playing an old video game and wasn't paying attention to the time. (I say "old" because it's on the Playstation 2, and I haven't updated to newer systems. I would like to get Xbox 360 eventually, but I'm currently not playing a whole lot of games lately and love the classics too much. Plus, this is a game I had about 5 years ago and never got to finish playing before I lost nearly everything I owned. I recently bought this again to finish it. ...Okay, gamers. You are probably dying to know what game this is, now. It's Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon. ...Hey! I'm not boring! I like first-person shooters, too! Who doesn't love the Halo series? I also love Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter, etc. And if you throw Pokemon games at me, I'll probably just catch em all. ...Lol That played well. ...And that, too.)
Ack! I'm rambling on again! I need to stop typing here and start typing in my story! But it's so fun to ramble, especially since I feel like I'm actually talking to somebody who's doing a superb job at listening to me and not interrupting. ...Okay, that's sad. Maybe I should start asking you people some questions so I can see who's actually reading this regularly.
Alright, here's a question: What do you plan on having for your next birthday cake? Let me know in the comment section below.
I'm thinking I'll just have a vanilla cupcake with homemade carob icing (Carob tastes similar to chocolate. I'm allergic to chocolate.), since I always gain unwanted weight around my birthday (in June). My sister's birthday is the day before mine (4 years and 364 days apart!), and our Auntie Ann's birthday is the day before my sister's, so you can imagine why.
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