NaNo and a couple of awesome things
8261 / 15000 (55.07%)
The fact that making a habit of writing would make it easier to write is one of those things I've known intellectually for a long time without really having internalized it (much like "doing exercise will make exercising easier"). I have this slightly patronizing writing-your-dissertation book that has a slightly over-worked running metaphor, but however overworked the metaphor (and however little I can evaluate its accuracy re: running) it's surprisingly correct (for my experience) that writing every day can make it so that you can fall into your stride more easily, so that writing 500 on-topic (if disorganized) words is suddenly entirely possible.
I mean, I'm not looking forward to December (which is when I'm allowed to try to organize my rambling prose by topic), but at least I'll have a stack of dissertation then.
And if I weren't finding time to write 500 words of my dissertation each day, there is no way I'd be finding time to do any work on my dissertation. I have job applications and two entirely unrelated presentations coming up in the next month and a half, and both presentations involve topics where I have a cool idea, but not exactly a worked-out solution.
Anyhow.
I also made the mistake of beginning to read a novel yesterday, before I did any work in the evening. As I have said before, I am almost completely unable to stop reading a(n engaging) book once I've started it (if only this were true of literature, or academic papers.) So three-and-a-half hours later, I finally got up off the couch, but by then it was too late to do anything but sleep. This is why I am on a no-fiction diet, people (I am also avoiding fic like the plague).
I think I'll wrap up with a couple of things that are awesome:
1. When I was in my early teens, I had a tape of a radio play the BBC made for Murder on the Orient Express. I listened to this tape while falling asleep for years, until finally both cassettes were lost and/or eaten by broken tape players. For me this is the definitive edition of this story.
I've tried and failed to find it on the internet before, but I decided to try again this weekend and it was available on iTunes! (And also as a torrent, which I confess is how I actually acquired it.) I am so happy to be reunited with this radio play, you have no idea. I also have several other plays in which John Moffat plays Hercule Poirot!
I would heartily recommend these dramatizations, but I have no idea if they're objectively any good or if I'm blinded by a fog of sentimentality. I leave it to you.
2. I have new shoes! Mine are off eBay in a discontinued colour (cognac?), so they didn't actually cost $110, but they are wonderful. My feet have been getting increasingly cranky about any heel in a shoe, and insufficient width, and these are absolutely flat and very wide. They are also "minimalist" shoes, which feel slightly more like walking barefoot than a normal shoe, and I really really like that about them. I want all the colours, and it is only their exorbitant price tag that is preventing me.
If they had a winter boot that wasn't absolutely hideous, I would totally drop $250 on a pair.
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