my heart is a glorious machine;

Oh, life.

Eventually I will make a Thanksgiving Post, because Thanksgiving is a very important holiday to me -- which is a very silly thing to say, really, because every holiday is deeply significant to me in one way or another, with exceptions for things like Flag Day and Columbus Day (o hai, European Xenophobic Oppressors Day! and I'm not even into political correctness). Thanksgiving is one of those lovely warm intimate quiet holidays: it hasn't got the comfort and joy wonderlust of Christmas, or the looking-forward raucous solemnity of the New Year, or the (now commercialised, bleah) eerieness of Halloween, or the wondrous holiness of Easter, but it means something, and is, in fact, the only major holiday that has resisted almost every attempt to commercialise it. (One holiday I don't really care about? Valentine's Day. I think it has my least favourite commercialisation, and if any future Signficant Other buys me a stupid singing teddy bear I will just ... our relationship would not survive this. And when you don't have a Significant Other you are stuck with tacky aluminium valentines with television characters on them. I think it could be quite a lovely holiday, if I had a Significant Other and we did something really de-commercialised, because it's a really lovely idea, just ... wow. I can't think about it much or I start seeing pink spots and feeling quite ready to swoon uncomfortably.) 

But anyway. I have been spending the last several days walking around fairly blindly because I can't seem to get enough sleep. Friday I slept for twelve hours -- I went to sleep at eleven (bed at ten) and woke up at eleven -- and still spent the entire day stumbling around trying to wake up. Today was only marginally better; I allowed myself some brief naps, and now feel reasonably awake, which is nice. My head was starting to feel far more uncomfortably jumbled than usual, and I wrote a bit of NaNo that barely even approached logic.

Actually, not much to tell. Life = NANO OMG NANO. One more day, oh help oh help, and I know I'm nearly there, but that makes it worse, because if I somehow do not finish tomorrow I will be in the deepest well of despair, wailing and gnashing my teeth, and taking out my frustration and emo on inanimate objects that may or may not have had anything to do with it. (Carpet: no. Toaster: no. iPod: yes. Internet: totally.)

I have learnt that Mr Caruthers' Sordid Past (which sounds like a band I would totally dig), involves opium, among other things, and so I have got out a book on it from the library. I hope it will be useful. If not, Dad has some books on the history of drugs. Um. They were for a class on American culture. I keep meaning to read them -- for some reason this kind of thing mesmerises me, maybe because of my interests in psychology and mental illness? I don't even know. Anyway I think once I have Mr Caruthers' past down a bit more the current story will sort itself out rather better. His past is rather more sordid than my characters have usually gone -- drugs, vampires, violence, unpleasant magic, and, erm, apparently Leading Young Women Astray? I really don't know what the key is, what gets him into all of these things to begin with (just boredom? resentment? depression? a need to belong? but I think a lot of it he was really actually into, not just Following The Guys Around, and he got involved with vampires in a very significan way somehow, and the Ministry dragged him in and may have rehabilitated him somewhat, but I think there was a catalyst to him letting them, and that was probably because someone got seriously injured or killed by the unsavoury activities he'd got mixed up in BUT ANYWAY.

I am going to be writing this novel until I am in my eighties. *headdesk*

Tomorrow: church, work, and FINISH NANO OH HELP.