We Were Too Full for Second Breakfast...

Denny's is currently running a Hobbit themed menu in conjunction with the upcoming Hobbit movie and my friend Gabi and I decided that we really wanted to sample the Middle Earth fare.  Our only problem was that we apparently live in the only town in the country that doesn't have a Denny's within five minutes.  We had to make a special trip up to Lakeside Mall just to get some Hobbit food.  It was worth it, though.

We started off with red velvet pancake bites.  I have no idea how these relate to the Hobbit (or to pancakes, for that matter), but they were far too tasty for me to care.  Then I ordered a Hobbit Slam, which was by far the best thing I've ever gotten to say while ordering in a restaurant.  My Hobbit Slam (!) came with pumpkin pancakes and lemon seed cake french toast.  The pancakes were amazing.  I'm pretty obsessed with pumpkin, so I might be a little biased, but they were heavenly.  The seed cake, on the other hand, wasn't so good.  It was ok, though, because that left my stomach free to hold even more of the pumpkin pancakes.

All in all, it was a good day.  Especially since I discovered that I had my copy of The Hobbit in my purse.  Naturally, I had to pose for a picture with it and my pancakes.  Now they can live on in my memory forever and ever.  One of my other friends asked if we had eaten Second Breakfast, but I was so full from our Hobbit feast that I barely ate for the rest of the day.  Yum.

Weeping Angels are Scary...

I'm sure you're well aware that I'm kind of a nerd.  If not, I suggest that you take a peek at the title of this blog.  It's easy to read since I still haven't gotten around to 'Shopping a nifty header for it, so the name looks all boring.

Anyway, I'm pretty obsessed with Doctor Who, so I decided that I wanted to make a Who-themed pumpkin for Halloween.  But what to make?  I saw some TARDIS templates online, but I like making faces on pumpkins.  That's when I realized that there's nothing scarier than a Weeping Angel.  I don't know why, but they creep me out more than any other Who monster.  They're terrifying.  I found a couple of templates, but I didn't think I had quite enough pumpkin carving talent to pull them off.  Plus, my printer was out of ink.  I decided to free-hand a template of my own.  This was a major accomplishment for someone like me who never quite progressed beyond the ability to draw stick figures.  This is what it looked like:

Then I taped it to my hollowed out pumpkin and traced it with a poking stick (I'm assuming this has a technical name, but I have no idea what it is.) so that I could carve along the dotted lines.

This was the final result.  It's pretty scary if I do say so myself.  DON'T BLINK!

Oh, and since I'm such a huge nerd, I decided that it would be fun to dress up as the Tenth Doctor.  A perfectly timed gust of wind helped my hair live up to Ten's awesomeness in this picture.

Don't even blink.  No seriously, don't do it.

NaNoWriMo Away!

I've been aware of National Novel Writing Month for a couple of years now.  I'll admit that the first time I saw a Twitter friend mention it, I thought the idea was a little bit crazy.  This year, however, I decided to dive in.  I tossed the idea around for a few days as I saw other people on Twitter talking about making their preparations and last night, two hours before it kicked off, I decided to register and make a go of it.  I figured that if I was ever going to do something like this, now would be the time.  I'm absurdly underemployed and almost completely lack what most twenty-somethings would describe as a social life.  Now, I know that you're thinking, "But Kris, shouldn't you be writing your novel instead of writing about writing your novel?"  And the answer to that question would be a resounding yes.  However, anyone who would ask me that clearly lacks appreciation for my extraordinary powers of procrastination.  It's all a part of the creative process.

I started writing at midnight and made it through 858 words before I decided to call it quits for the night at 1:30 am.  I can always tell when I'm too tired to continue writing because my phonics start to get wonky as I type.  It's not pretty; as a grammar elitist, it's a point of pride that I get some sleep and come back to the computer when I'm rested enough to continue properly.

I'll be honest: I kind of hate what I have written so far.  I've always been a good writer, but I've almost exclusively written academic papers.  Creative storytelling is something that's more or less new to me.  I think it'll get better after I power through this opening chapter and move on to the characters that I really like.  I have a feeling that it's just a matter of finding my own writing voice and figuring how to put the images in my head down onto paper.  It's definitely a different process than pounding out a thesis statement and some analytic paragraphs.  I need to convince myself to write the novel my own way, not try to make it perfect or fit into some preconceived notion of what it should look like.