Tim's Bits and Pieces

Whoo! I've written 50,000 words, as of a few minutes ago. That means I'm a Winner. My novel isn't actually finished, which is as I expected, but it shouldn't take more than a couple of thousand more words to finish it off, so hopefully I'll get that done next week. I'll probably do a more detailed NaNoWriMo report on Monday, but for now I'm going to go watch a movie.

So, I got just over 3,000 words done yesterday, which brings me to over 42,000 words done for the novel. So if I type about 2,600 words per a day for the next three days I'll have my 50,000 words done by the end of the month. Looking at it I'd say there's only about 5,000 more words in the main plot, but there's some flashbacks which I want to write which will add another three or four thousand words, and some of the old parts will probably get a bit longer when I work on my second draft of them. Overall I suspect it will end up being about 55,000 words once it's done, which means that it was probably a good choice for a NaNoWriMo novel.

I recently purchased a couple of Sawyer water filters from an online webstore, and when I was looking into it I couldn't find much talking about the company itself, but it's prices where a lot cheaper than the competition so I decided to give them a go anyhow, and I thought I'd do a quick write-up on how it went.

Continue reading...

Just a quick update on my NaNoWriMo progress, since I had a pretty productive day yesterday, and managed to finish 3,200 words. That makes yesterday my biggest day so far, and I'll have a bit more free time in the evenings over the next few days, so hopefully I'll manage a few more big days, and get caught up before the end of the month, which now requires only 2,500 words a day rather than 2,700.

Well, I'm further behind than I was last time. I'm up to 26,500 words, but I wanted to be up to 32,000 by the end of the day yesterday. It is vaguely possible that I'll finish on time still; skipping Saturdays, which I do, I'd need to write 2,700 words a day to finish on schedule, which I have achieved once or twice so far, but I'm averaging more like 1,600, which would put me up at about the 41,000 words at the end of the month, and is actually pretty close to the per-day word count required if I had written on Saturdays as well, which isn't too bad for my first try at serious writing.

Well, I'm not doing too bad overall with NaNoWriMo for the first full week, I've got up over 10,000 words as of Wednesday, which is where I was aiming for. Unfortunately I got only about 150 words done yesterday, which puts me about 2,000 words short of my goal.

Continue reading...

I've decided to throw my hat in the ring for National Novel Writer's Month, which if you don't know is a challenge where you try to finish a whole 50,000 word short novel in the month of November. I've always though I would like to write some fiction, but I've never got beyond some basic short stories, so I figure this will make a good test. If I can't even get a decent start on it in the next month writing's probably not for me. Of course plenty of good writers couldn't finish a whole novel in a month, but they'd at least be able to stick to writing every day, or nearly every day for the month, which is what I'll be trying for. I'll actually be trying to complete a rough draft rather than a complete novel, with the intention to spend some time cleaning it up after the month is over and then publish it in a serial form (once a week probably) here.

Continue reading...

Some people seem to think that good, home-cooked food is more expensive that it actually is, and more expensive that takeaway like McDonald's or Hungry Jack's and the like. It's not though; for one simple example Cole's has a "feed your family for $10" promotion, which is basically just them listing a bunch of recipes that will feed four people and cost less than $10 (at Cole's), which is about one-half to one-third of the cost of four burgers from a takeaway store, and the food is much, much nicer, but some people have criticised it because the recipes assume that you have a fully stocked pantry, mostly for herbs and spices. (They do include the cost of herbs and spices, but only for the portion of the packet you'll use, so you can end up buying $20-$30 worth of herbs and spices just to get 50c worth that you'll use in this meal)

Continue reading...

I've finally got around to posting some pictures of the eM-4 plastic Troopers and Gangers.

Continue reading...

Last month I finished my first painted miniature (one of the eM-4 plastic Orcs), but forgot to post pictures of it:

Continue reading...