Well, last night didn’t go horribly. It didn’t go great in terms of writing, but I had fun with my friends and the whole thing was pretty relaxing. Except, of course, for my neighbor and his music. I can’t hear anything but bass through the walls, so it’s not like it’s very loud, he’s just cranked the bass up to the maximum and decided to completely disregard the fact that he share’s a building with people who aren’t his family. I don’t even know how THEY put up with his music. Fun fact, that was the first thing we learned about the people we moved in next to. Their youngest kid came over while I was unloading the moving van and told me his dad likes to play loud music on Fridays. After that, he wandered away like five or six year-olds will. It wasn’t until relatively recently that it started staying on until early morning. Before that, it wasn’t even this loud. The noise of my fan and a couple of white-noise creators in my room would mask it. Now, it’s so pervasive I can feel the bass when I’m in bed. in the past three weeks, it hasn’t stopped before two am.
I wonder what changed. Maybe he got a new stereo with more bass to it. Maybe he’s stressed about his job and is trying to work through it on Fridays with his music. Maybe he just wants to have a good time and this is his idea of one. Normally, I’ve got nothing against people who just want to have a good time. More power to them for knowing what they enjoy. I’m not one to try to stop someone from having a good time, whatever that may be. However, my idea of a good time after midnight on any night of the week is going to sleep. You can see how these two things might be in conflict.
My roommate has agreed to handle the talking part so long as I bake him something to offer as a sign of peace and good intention. I’m glad he’s willing to do that because I would rather struggle through baking something, which I’m not particularly good at (or bad, for that matter), than have a potentially tense conversation. Plus, it doesn’t help that every single one of my mental simulations of the conversation include a lot of swearing and at least one ultimatum per simulation. That’s a good way to get people to dig in their heels or decide to do something idiotic just to spite you. No one wins when those kinds of games start.
Another part of the problem is that I’m now so frustrated by heavy base that it pulls me out of whatever I’m doing when it starts. I got almost nothing done yesterday, from nine until midnight when I finally gave up, because his music was going. Any period of silence was enough to make me pause my music to listen for the potential end of this headache-inducing vibration. Every time it started back up, a small part of me died and my focus was further broken until I couldn’t stay focused on what I was writing long enough to finish a single sentence. It was incredibly frustrating to try to get anything done last night and even putting it aside to do something else wasn’t much help since the constant rise and fall of my neighbor’s bass prevented me from enjoying that as well. Heck, even the event I went to with my friends was kind of grating because the DJ used an adequate amount of bass but even that makes me uncomfortable and angry.
I mean, I was so tired last night that I was dozing off as I wrote and still, climbing into bed to sleep made it so difficult for me to ignore the bass that even my complete exhaustion couldn’t crash me from awake to asleep. I dislike feeling that tired, but I was hopeful that it’d help me get past the frustration of the bass so I could just go to sleep right away. Alas, it was not meant to be. Not even my old standby of “play Pokemon until I hit myself in the face with my 3DS” worked. Only NyQuil. Which sucks because that meant I was unable to actually rest during sleep until it wore off around six this morning. Which meant I immediately work up, of course, because I can’t just go to sleep or even stay asleep.
The upshot is that I won’t have to deal with this until the end of the month. I’ll be away, visiting family, next Friday, so I won’t have to deal with this jerk and his music. By then, my roommate will have talked to our neighbors and gifted them with banana bread, so hopefully it won’t be a problem anymore. For now, I’m going to focus on writing and trying to get caught up with my National Novel Writing Month project. Having written forty-nine thousand words doesn’t help much if only twenty thousand of them are in the actual project I’m supposed to be doing this month. Twenty-nine thousand bonus words is nice, but I really need to start making some big progress on the novel project.
I’ve got nothing planned this weekend except coffee shop trips, Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday, and kitchen cleaning. Two days is plenty of time to get all that done plus a bunch of writing, even if I’m still pretty sleep-deprived. At least I’ve managed to go three days in a row where I’ve made my daily minimum for word counts. That’s a good feeling, avoiding falling further behind. I’m catching up a bit, too, but so far only about six hundred words over the past three days. It’s totally doable to still finish in time. Even if all I do is write two thousand words a day instead of one thousand six hundred sixty-six.
Anyway, I hope your weekend is off to a great start and that you’re making progress that feels good on your National Novel Writing Month projects. I wish you the best of luck in getting some writing done today and I hope no one rises to frustrate you at every turn like my neighbor and his music have done to me. No matter what, I believe in you!
Daily Prompt
Why is your protagonist’s best friend actually their best friend? There must have been some moment, some shared thing that solidified the friendship, even if it was only the weight of the history they have shared. What created that bond and how have they maintained it? Is it something they both work at, or is the bond held together by only one person? Why is their relationship currently the way it is? For today, write about the relationship between your protagonist and their best friend. Show us how they each value the relationship and how their participation in it affect the other. Is it something that’s going to grow stronger as a part of the character growth in your story, or are they going to grow apart? Maybe nothing will change. Give us a bit of foreshadowing!
Sharing Inspiration
Some days, it is difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. Depression sucks. You know what doesn’t suck? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning and Gnight tweets. Been doing it for so long and they’re so popular that he’s got a whole book of them now. Honestly, there are days where his tweets are the only thing that makes me feel like someone cares about me. He’s a stranger on the internet and they’re so heartfelt and he’s so lovely and positive that there’s no doubt in my mind that he really does care and that he really does mean those words for every one of us. They remind me I’m not alone on what is a typically isolating platform. How many people would call Twitter anything other than a distraction or a reminder of how disconnected we all are despite how much access we have to each other? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tweets make me feel like we might actually be able to really connect and that the internet might one day actually become a place for community and togetherness like I’d always hoped it would.
Helpful Tips
Whether this is your first story or your thousandth, it is always good to remember that you don’t need to get everything perfect the first time. If you’ve got a good idea that you can’t quite capture, just get something down that’ll jog your memory when the time comes to work on it again. There is always time for edits and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it. There are tons of great authors out there who spend their time making each thought perfect, getting each line into the best possible shape, but that generally means each book takes them almost a full decade to finish. It’s basically ready to go at that point, just like most books, but it took them years to get there. Years that other authors used to create half a dozen or more books. Don’t be like them, at least not yet. Focus on getting into the habit of writing every day and gradually start incorporating common mistakes you notice yourself making or that your readers point out you’re making. It’s good practice.