This is awesome.

Well, my website’s URL is, at least. This is just too cool. Check it:

Not entirely within the purview of this site, but I thought I’d post on it none the less. This guy‘s pretty cranky, and that’s about all I got from his tirade. I’ll let him get back to sitting on his lawn and yelling at the hoodlums who pass by.

I got a chance to play the Wii, first two weeks ago and then again last weekend. Below are some of my thoughts, in no particular order.

• This console is just plain fun. We must have played Wii Sports for four or five hours, and Super Monkey Ball for the rest of that time.
• My favorite parts of Wii Sports are, in this order: bowling, tennis, golf, baseball. I haven’t yet played boxing, so i can’t intelligently comment on it. Bowling is awesome, simply put. It’s easier than actual bowling, but a lot of your technique will carry over. Tennis is probably–and I’m not really speaking from personal experience here–nothing like actual tennis. You can do a forehand swing, a backhand swing, and you can serve; your characters move toward the ball automatically. That said, it’s lots of fun, in a sort of twitchy, reflex-game kind of way, especially when you’re playing doubles.
• Monkey Ball is sort of hit-or-miss when it comes to the multiplayer minigames. Some of them (Hovercraft Battle, Monkey Race, Spaceship Landing, Monkey Battle) are a lot of fun. Others (Monkey Darts, Ring Toss, the one where you put together a jigsaw puzzle for God’s sake) are not, for the most part. There are about fifty of them, though, so there’s a good chance you’ll find a few you like to play with your friends.
• The Wiimote rocks. I love the motion sensitivity, the pointing capability, and all that, but there are all these great little touches, too. There’s a row of four LEDs on the Wiimote that tells you whether you’re player 1, 2, 3, or 4 in a simple, visual way. The pointer in the main screen rotates when you rotate the Wiimote. When it’s your turn to play in a game like bowling, it’ll vibrate and make a little noise to let you know. It’s just awesome.
• The Wii is not necessarily friendly to those who have bone and joint problems. My wife has a lot of wrist problems, and two or three minutes of playing tennis was enough to make that flare up.
• The graphics, while not spectacular, are still pretty good. I was pretty impressed by the few minutes of Zelda that I saw, and even Monkey Ball and Wii Sports are visually appealing.

After having participated in NaNoWriMo (and after having thought about it for a couple of days), I have a few thoughts. First: it really wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. I made it my goal to try to write about 2000 words per day (a goal that I sometimes kept and sometimes didn’t), which, if you don’t dilly-dally too much, is only about an hour to an hour and a half of actual writing time. Not too bad. I do think I had a pretty big advantage in that I already had most of the broad strokes for my novel in my head, so I knew generally where I wanted things to go. I think, once that’s done, a novel actually can pretty much write itself; that’s what it felt like a lot of the time.

I think the hardest part of NaNoWriMo, for me, was the last 2500 words. One reason for this was that I had already pretty much finished the entire story arc by the time I got to that point, so I was using those last 2500 words to just expand on previously written scenes and otherwise pad my word count a little bit. The other reason is a little more personal (and I won’t be sharing it in this forum), suffice it to say that NaNoWriMo was way down on my list of priorities during those last couple of days; it just didn’t seem as important.

Anyway, now that it’s done, I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out. That said, my book still needs a fair amount of work. I wrote the book as two separate narratives from the perspectives of two different people, and I have yet to integrate them into a single work. So there’s still that to do. Also, I’m sure there are certain parts of what I’ve written that I won’t be using, and other parts that I will be expanding upon. The thing is, despite the name of the contest, I don’t think I wrote a novel. It’s a complete story, to be sure, and it’s longer than a short story, but I think that 50,000 words is really more of a novella than a novel; I think you’d need at least 75,000 to 100,000 words to really be able to call it a “novel”. The thing is, though, I’m fine with that. I’d like to eventually get this thing published, and I’m just as happy getting a 100-page novella published as I would be getting a 300+ page tome published.

So who else out there finished NaNoWriMo? Who tried but didn’t quite make it? I’d like to hear some of your stories, too!