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11/27/2006
Bagpipes, here I come!
It's amazing what you find out about people when you get talking to them. For example, yesterday I was playing with my orchestra at a church service, and afterwards, as we were packing up, I started talking to one of the violinists, whom I'd never talked to before. As it turns out, he used to play the bagpipes. I said, "wow, that's awesome - I'd love to learn to play the bagpipes!" So he said, "Really?", just to check if I was serious, and I said, "Yeah, that really would be awesome!"
He offered to teach me some stuff about piping during the breaks of our regular orchestra rehearsals. So now all I need to do is find myself a practice chanter and a tutor book, and I'll be set to go! Woohoo!
Of course, I told this to my parents when I got back home, and I'm telling you, the look on my mother's face... Priceless!
This will be so neat. I love Scottish music (and celtic music in general), and the bonus is, if I get any good at it, I can join a pipes and drums band, and attend things like highland games, and we all know what that means. Men in kilts!! What could be better?
11:00 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11/23/2006
NaNoWriMo - I hit 50k!
I did it - I have written over 50,000 words of my novel. Actually, I'm at around 51,600 words, and I hit that point about 3 days ago, but still it's amazing. I can't believe I've written over 100 pages of straight text, not even padded with pictures or anything. (Padded with adjectives and adverbs, yes. Pictures, no. :-)) It's officially by far the longest thing I've ever written in my entire life. And the beauty of it is, I still haven't run out of plot. And not only have I not run out of plot, I am only just getting to where the action really starts! I have so much to write about still!
Which means... I probably have 100 pages of the most boring text known to man. Yes, I know, chances are I have an enormous pacing problem. I'll fix that when I go to edit though. Right now I'm just so psyched that I was able to get this much written. Not only that, but that I still love the story I'm writing about! This is wonderful!
I took a couple of days off though, because I was becoming quite sleep-deprived from all that writing. At least I got enough of a lead at the beginning to be able to afford some time off writing. It feels good though, to be on a schedule and see the progress real-time, and to know that I'm not the only one trying to nail my butt to a chair for long enough to pound out a novel.
Hopefully someday I'll be able to polish this story enough to send it off and get it published. That would be really awesome!
14:25 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Job Search: Don't bother making sense of it
Sometimes, in the job hunting process, I just have to shake my head at the irony of it all. You'd think that the closer your resume matches the job description and requirements, the more likely you are to get an interview.
Apparently not.
Recently I applied for a job that was so closely matched to my qualifications, skills, and experience, it almost looked like the job description text was plagiarized from my cover letter. It really was that close.
Then there was a completely different job, and all I seemed to have in common with the sort of person they were ideally looking for is that we were both engineers. Not even the same field of engineering! This particular job opening was for someone on the chemical/mechanical/manufacturing side. I'm electrical/software.
So which one did I get an interview for? Right, you guessed it. The chemical/mechanical/manufacturing one that's almost wholly unrelated to my previous work and academic experience. Go figure! The place with the opening that was basically a carbon copy of my talents turned me down without even an interview.
This is not to say I'm not happy about the interview I did do for that other position. I love learning new things and this should definitely be an eye-opening departure from the status quo, even if I do need to sip gently from the fire hose at the beginning. (Question at the interview: "What do you know about injection molding?" Ummm.... I've heard of it - that's about it!) It would be great if I got the job, though the commute would be a killer. I live in the extreme east end of Ottawa, and this place is in the extreme west end of Ottawa, and in between is about an hour and a half bus ride in each direction. Yikes! That's three hours a day just sitting on the bus. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Step one: get job!
13:10 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11/09/2006
NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul
Actually, that's the name of one of the Forums on the NaNoWriMo website. We're on Day 9 of novel-writing, and wow, I haven't felt this overworked, sleep-deprived feeling since undergrad. However, I'm quite proud of myself: I'm already at 29,000 words (or so), making this officially the longest thing I have ever written in my entire life. Even longer than my master's thesis, which also clocks in at around 29k words, but that included the massive list of references, table captions, and all that stuff. This novel is 29,000 words of pure single-spaced writing goodness.
Well, maybe 'goodness' is taking it too far. It's going to need a serious edit (read: complete rewrite) once this is all over, and when I take out all the boring descriptions and redundant adverbs, I'll probably be left with about 10,000 words of useful text. Oh well, it's the fun of it!
Plus, the Ottawa region is trying to beat Sacramento region's wordcount this year. The only problem is, Sacramento has about 30% more writers than Ottawa! We're actually gaining on them percentage-wise though, so possibly by the end of the month, who knows, we might be able to beat them yet!
In the meantime, I'm going to aim for 100k words for my novel, rather than just 50k, mainly because I expected to be further along in my plotline than I actually am, given the number of words I've written. My planned plotline covers about a year's worth of events, and I'm officially on day, oh, five of the timeline, and I'm more than halfway to 50k already. I haven't even brought in the bad guy, the terrible ghosts, or the invading armies of the two giant neighbouring empires!
So, as far as NaNoWriMo goes, I'm in far, FAR better shape than I thought I'd be. Maybe I should have listened to my grade 11 English teacher after all, and become an English major. I haven't felt this happy about an accomplishment in a long time, and it's not even over yet!
16:43 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this