Almost over

Wow, it looks November is almost finished. Just one more day, and it will officially be the beginning of the end. One more month, and the year of 2011 will be at a close...

Time is rushing by too fast! Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
NaNoWriMo is almost over now. I unfortunately didn't get to finish the novel I'd set myself. In fact, there have been days at a time when I didn't work on it at all. I've stopped bothering to update my word count on the official NaNo website. But I dont mind. I've actually been keeping a running total of not just words that I've written towards my novel, but EVERYTHING I've written this month. Anything I've typed out or hand-written on paper, I've kept a tally on. That includes journal entries, lists, blog posts, emails, chat conversations, yes, even my Facebook statuses and comments! I know it's not the normal way of doing things, but I really just wanted to see if, even if I didn't write a real novel, with a plot and characters and everything, whether I could write a "novel" with things I write every day.

I'll give the final "official" count tomorrow, because there are a few blog post besides this one that I want to fit in, but if my calculations are correct I have gone well past 45k words. It may not be 50k, but it sure is close to it! So I'm proud. And I'm also proud of the fact that I didn't publically give up this year. ^_^

Hmm... I'm thinking about whether I should mention something now or just wait to talk about it in better detail later... Ah, what the heck. I'll just say it now:

I'm going to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter next week!!! :D

Meet the Little Fellow

My younger brother, Adam, wanted my sister and I to help him make a movie yesterday. So we agreed. He loves Charlie Chaplin, so he came up with a little skit in which he's trying to get a drink from a water fountain. He got all dressed up like Chaplin, we drove him to the park, and together we brought his vision to life.

I did all the filming, while Annette and Adam co-directed and co-starred in the short. Then Annette handled the editing (using Adobe Premiere Pro), we threw in some old-fasioned ragtime music, and voila! We uploaded it to YouTube. ^_^

The first time we set music to the video, we didn't know how perfectly the ragtime would sync to every cut and scene! We didn't have to do any editing at all where the music was concerned. It was such an OMG moment... you just had to be there, I guess...

Because of this video, Adam now has his own YouTube channel! He'll probably make more awesome videos like this, so please subscribe to him! And leave a comment on the video, maybe...

Thanks!

Happy 11-11-11

Haha, let's just pretend I wrote this at 11:11.

This is a very interesting date for many reasons. For example:

It is the last binary date we will ever see again! At lease until January 1, 2100. We would all be senior citezens if we lived up to then! In binary, 111111 equals 63.

This is also the last date in which the month, day, and year all have the same numbers, until December 12, 2012.

I found out that there is a horror/ thriller movie actually titled "11-11-11" that, believe it or not, is being released in theaters today! How many calendar dates can say that had a film made about them? ("2012" doesn't count, because that's a whole year.)


Another film coming out today is Adam Sandler's "Jack and Jill," which my family got to be extras in an entire year ago! I didn't blog about it, because I wasn't supposed to mention it, but I swear I'm telling the truth! I have a friend who can vouch for me. ^,~ No, I didn't get to meet Adam Sandler, but I did spend a whole day on a huge luxury cruise ship. I have no idea whether any of us made it into the movie. We could just have ended up on the cutting room floor. But maybe there is a glimpse of one of us lounging by the pool, or of my dad being a bartender or something. Keep your eyes peeled, whenever you see it. (If you happen to know what I look like, of course. =P)

Today is the birthday of Leonardo DiCaprio (37), Demi Moore (49) and Stanley Tucci (51). Happy birthday, everyone!. ^_^

Another cool thing about numbers composed of ones: if you multiply them by themselves, you get a palindromic number, or a number that reads the same forwards and backwards! Allow me to demonstrate:

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12,321
1,111 x 1,111 = 1,234,321
11,111 x 11,111 = 123,454,321
Etcetera and so on and so forth. Awesome, huh? It works all the way up to
1,111,111,111 x 1,111,111,111 = 12,345,678,900,987,654,321

This doesn't have anything to do with 11, really, but here is another incredible math curiosity that I don't have to type out!

Thank you for letting me indulge in a little nerdiness. Hahaha. Hope you make today special in your own way!

Lots and lots of writing this month!

Yes, yes, I caved. I'm Definitely gonna do NaNoWriMo this month. I'm quite excited about it, actually! ^_^

The first day I experimented by using Write or Die to see how quickly I could turn out my necessary 1666 words (the per day quota needed to build a 50k word novel in 30 days) and it only took me 45 minutes. So I know that if I just put in a little bit of writing time every day, I can really do this thing. Whoo! Just have to keep plugging away.

This morning I experimented with a desktop application called OmmWriter, which is supposed to be a word processor that plays soothing background music and turns the keyboard taps into other musical sounds. Basically it keeps you from being distracted and makes you focus on what you're writing. It was nice, but I don't think it really improved my writing ability any. I just wrote about 600 words, actually... But I'm not worried. I can catch up on myself later.

I'm not thinking too much about winning that big word goal. I figure that with all the other writing I'm doing this month besides my "novel", such as blogging, participating in the forums, personal journaling, and poems and stuff, I can make it up to 50,000 words in a jiffy. Yeah, im couting the words I type, AND the words I physically write on paper. It may not be official, but still. ^_^

I believe on Friday I might meet a few fellow NaNoWriMo people for a "write-in", whatever that is. I'm looking forward to spending time with some fellow writers, maybe seeing some of the faces I saw on Monday, perhaps making new friends.

Well, as you can see, I'm going to be busy busy busy!

Pretty in... Magenta! ^_~

I didn't expect much this year, but Halloween was pretty fun. In the costume contest at our local town center (still attending that party after so many years) Adam won in the 10 to 13 year-old category as Captain Jack Sparrow, and I placed 2nd in the 14 and up (or adult) category as Pretty in Pink, once again. Yay! (Annette didn't win anything, but she makes a cute pirate girl, no? ^_~)

I had fun strutting myself around the room, smiling to everyone like I was a model. The umbrella just completes the look, I think.

After the contest was over, and I was enjoying the various game booths (whether you win them or not, you always get some candy), a little girl dressed as a cute witch tapped my leg and asked me, "are you Lady Gaga?" I just found that so adorable! :D

I must say, I probably wouldn't have placed if it hadn't been for my mom. She put so much effort into helping me look pretty in my pink getup. In fact, she's the one who found that wig in the first place and suggested that I dress all in pink! So thank you, mom. ^_~

Besides dressing up and indulging in some candy, I got into the holiday spirit by watching 3 classic scary movies with my brother and sister this week: The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dracula.
In my opinion, each film was better than last. (Actually, that's not saying much. =P) None of the movies were as scary as I thought they would be. The stories were kind of bland and slow-paced, most of the characters were dull and forgettable, but there is something about them that makes them so intriguing to watch. Maybe it was the camera work, or the locations/ sets, or the timelessness of the pictures. Looking at these movies from a historical standpoint, you wonder, did these films actually scare and thrill people when they were released? I felt like I was looking through a time capsule, almost.

Dracula was my favorite of the monster movies we saw. The special effects may have been kind of lame (fake bats on strings, come on!), and they never showed the Count in the act of actually drinking blood, but Bela Lugosi gave a grand, commanding performance, as did the guy who played Van Helsing. Also, one of the characters who stood out most in my mind was Dracula's servant, Renfield. That guy was waaaay cuckoo in the head! I think he was scarier, in a way, than Dracula, because he had such a mad manner and look in his eyes.

Well, now that Halloween is over, and November has begun, I think it is time to whip out my pencil! (Hehe, or perhaps my typing fingers. =P)