Busy weekend. On Saturday I went to the museum to see the Egypt exhibit, and I guess I should have known, but the hordes were there as well. People just love Egyptian exhibits. There were so many parents with children there, which was very cool, but the little ones were screaming and crying and throwing tantrums and fits, which is kind of hard to take at 9:30 in the morning.

Perhaps if I hadn't already been to the British Museum and seen their Egyptain room I wouldn't have been disappointed, but this exhibit was small as is the case with most travelling exhibits. But for people who have never been to the British Museum, the exhibit must have seemed fantastic. The exhibit had all the "greatest hits" of the British Museum's egyptian collection including the famous Ani Book of the Dead scroll and a giant egyptian statue head that had never left the British Museum before. Still, I did enjoyed the exhibit immensely only because you have to marvel that these artifacts are so incredibly ancient.

Then I went to see Merci Pour le Chocolat and Rivers and Tides, the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy. More on those movies later. Then I went to see the San Francisco Symphony. A friend who works for them called me on Friday and said she had tickets and would I like to go. Of course I said yes, and we heard Mozart's Piano Concerto # 23. Ivan Moravec played the piano and Jiri Belohlavek of the Prague orchestra was conducting. She had great tickets too and we were in the orchestra, where the seats normal cost $70.

I was non stop from 9 am and I didn't get home till 11 pm. By Sunday I was exhausted. I went to church, came home and watched the 49ers/Raiders game and would have gone to library to get on a computer and blog, but the game went into overtime and by the time it was over, the library was closed.

I'm a little behind in my novel at 4,245 words, instead of the 5,001 word target I needed to be by end of Sunday. Pocket Word doesn't have a word count feature, so my word count is just an estimate based on the number of words per average line and the actual number of lines. Such a pain. I'm calling the computer place today to find out what what the status is my computer. I really miss it, and although I'm grateful to have the baby laptop to write, it's a not ully functioning word processing program. This whole computer failure problem has been such an eye opener on how dependent I am on my computer, and how I have to make sure I'm never in this situation ever, ever again.

After a stressed out no writing break, I'm going back to the too busy to do anything else but writing schedule tonight. I need to write 1,666 words a day for 30 days to reach the 50,000 word mark for the National Novel Writing Month.

Since my computer is dead, if I want to blog I'll have to do go to the library and get online. I'm lucky because the local public library is just three blocks from my place, but Saturday will be a full day.

Besides needing to write my daily 1,666 words, there's an exhibit of egyptian artifacts from the British Museum at the California Legion of Honor that I'm dying to check out. The Egyptian section was my favorite part of the British Museum. Then it's off to the movies to see "Merci Pour le Chocolat", a froggie-french movie which is supposed to be very, very good, and "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time", a documentary about a Scottish artist and his ephemeral works of art.

But there's always Sunday if I can drag myself away from watching the 49er/Raiders football game on TV.

Things are getting better in my world. My company finally handed out our merit raises, which we were supposed to get in April. No retro pay though because of the bad economy. Oh well, at least I got a decent raise. It's nice to have the extra money every month.

I watched the news reports of the Halloween in the Castro on TV last night. Some of it got violent and that's sad. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived a couple blocks from the Castro and on my first Halloween in San Francisco my boyfriend and I dressed up and walked around the Castro. Back then it was a neighborhood event and every one dressed up, no gawkers at all, and it was low key and fun. The streets weren't blocked off, and it was more like a parade of dressed up people but not alot of drinking and no violence whatsoever.

Now it's totally crowded and hardly anyone dresses up, and most people go to gawk at the few people who are dressed up, and they drink and party and things get out of hand, and people get violent. Where's the fun in that?

Nanowrimo starts today and I'm excited. I'll be able to participate because I can write in pocket Word on my LG Phenom. Thank god for my baby laptop.

I think this year I will outline the story first before I start writing. From screenwriting, I learned how important it is to have a well thought out plot and an outline, just so you don't get lost while writing. I'm not sure if I'll stick to a straight three act structure however, because in a novel I think there is a little more freedom to be looser with your plot. You don't have to be so linear, and you can have flashbacks, have way more background and backstory, etc.

I'll review Aristotle's Poetics to refresh my memory about plot structure. In a movie, they say you should "start late and leave early", meaning I think, begin on the cusp of conflict and end your movie leaving your audience with a sense that there's future, just in case you want to do sequels. Or something like that.

This will be my first stab at fantasy type literature. I think it makes sense that I would eventually gravitate towards this kind of writing. I love science fiction (love Red Dwarf), and I love stories and movies about magic, witches, and other world type phenomena. I'm an avid listener to the Art Bell program, and I totally love conspiracy, one world government theories. My favorite show on TV was Witchblade, and the other two shows that I really liked, Alias and La Femme Nikita, had fantastic elements in them. I even got hooked on The Charmed Ones for awhile, although I stopped watching when Shannon Doherty left the show.

It will be interesting to see how easy or difficult it will be to write a fantasy story. I'm going to have to create a whole new different world, with its own rules, its own creatures, etc. I want to start to play with my brand of elf lore and mythology, and have my main protagonist be a half elf and half human. If elves have 12-strand dna and human have 2-strand dna, then would a half elf and half human would have 4-strand dna?. It's issues like this I'm going to have to start thinking seriously about to make my story credible.

But I think it will be so interesting and fun to try and do this. It will be a challenge to my imagination and my logical mind, and I'm so looking forward to mental stimulation and exercise.