WHERE IS THE TIME?

Fourth dimension needs to introduce me to its friend, fifth dimension.

me: Oh my god with the new dramas.

girlfriday: Seriously, May?

me: Do you suppose we could learn to write faster? Or be more efficient?

girlfriday: That’s an idea. Well, I don’t know if we could write faster, but we could try sleeping less.

The Brat is on most days a persnickety, aloof ball of floof — adorable and yet completely immune to cuddles. Which can be sadly frustrating when I want to shower her in kisses and she’s all, Aw, Mom, geroffme! This is so not cool! Ooh, birds! Really, I think she just barely permits me to hug her; it certainly ain’t for her benefit. So the one nice thing about when she feels a little under the weather (and I mean a case of the sniffles, nothing more) is that she gets more affectionate.

Like the other night when I was getting ready to sleep. Normally she pretends to be wholly unconcerned with the whole bedding-down process, although I can totally see her eyeing me, belying her feigned indifference — and then she sneaks into bed after I’ve settled down. Because she’s up and about before I am in the mornings, sometimes I wonder if she thinks she’s fooling me. WHATEVER, CAT. I wake up in the middle of the night when you’re draped all over my legs, YOU BIG FAKER.

But with her being all snuffly, she promptly laid down on my chest for once, curling up as close as she could to my neck, tucking herself right under my chin. I pet her as she purred, and I thought to myself, yay, she’s being sweet! How cute! We are bonding!

And then she sneezed on my face.

Was looking at a blog the other day (a half-personal, half-professional sort of dealio), and it was so witty, disarming, and enjoyable to read that I thought to myself, with equal measures envy and resolve, “I should really write a blog.”

Pause.

“Like that one, I mean.”

Funny to think that DB started out on this humble little space here and has since moved on to more expansive, more expensive pastures. Not that it’s run any differently than it was back then, despite the occasional and inevitable “It USED to be so much BETTER!” pointed sigh. (Can sighs be pointed? In my mind they are, with the offended party doing their best to breathe their disapproval in my general direction. I just pretend not to notice, leaving that affront hanging in the air with nowhere to go but back to its sender, who may dispose of it as they will.)

This is a compensated review by BlogHer and Intel.

One of the questions I get asked the most on Dramabeans is how I manage to watch and recap so many dramas all the time, in addition to keeping the blog running on a daily basis. My response is in the FAQ page, but I suspect people want a more serious answer. So I’ll just say: It’s not easy. Girlfriday and I both probably spend a lot more time on the site than could be considered healthy (it’s all for you!), and on a few occasions I’ve made the conscious effort to scale back in order to balance out my life — but ultimately, I always come crawling back like a junkie in need of her next kdrama fix. Which isn’t even so much a metaphor as it is an accurate description of life. What can ya do? We’re both workaholics, perfectionists, and completists. That means I spend a LOT of quality time with my computer.

So if we can’t cut down on the volume of work that we take on, the only other option is to do what we do faster and more efficiently. Time management is the key. That key may occasionally get lost in the cosmos somewhere, perhaps in the fourth dimension along with Jang Geun-seok’s fashion sense, but I think I’m starting to figure out some of its secrets.

Since I spend so much time blogging and most of my work is heavily computer- and internet-dependent, I’ve gone through a few computers since beginning Dramabeans, usually when the old one has finally worn itself through and drops dead. Granted, I use the heck out of my machines: watching dramas, downloading files, recapping episodes, formatting posts, editing photos, uploading files, editing reviews and recaps, scouring sites for news. Usually all at once. Often while listening to music and surfing the internet. Which means that at any given moment I’ve got more than a dozen windows open and that many programs running at once.

All this is to say: You can understand how I saw the appeal in being approached to review a computer that was being promoted under the theme of “Get More Done in Less Time.” Oh, yeah? I’ll take that challenge. Bring it on, computer.

To that end, I’ve been provided with a laptop powered by The Intel® Core™ i5 processor and an Intel® Wireless Display (aka WiDi) adaptor allowing me to use my HDTV as a monitor. If you stick around, I’ll let you know how that went.

In the meantime, I have a cool giveaway to offer you:

To win a $250 Best Buy gift card: Leave a comment below telling me the first thing you’d do with a nifty new laptop. Easy as that!

To enter to win a laptop: Check out instructions here; entry is as simple as leaving a comment on that BlogHer page.

Rules:

No duplicate comments.

You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

1. Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
2. Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
3. Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
4. Read the official rules for alternate form of entry.

Sweepstakes ends 5 PM PST on December 22, 2010.
This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older.
Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail.
You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.
The Official Rules are available here.

It sort of feels like Day 1 is a bit of a cheat, because I don’t have a clear-cut narrative structure in place, but since it’s the first day I have the luxury of just spitting out scenes that I know will come later. No need to organize the thoughts or write scenes sequentially since I’m just getting words on the blank page, the faster the better, because the sooner there’s black on that white, the less daunting it is to keep adding more black to that white. The scenes written today (really, more like barfed up) don’t as yet have a defined place in the overall plot, but I know the emotional context. So it’s a bit like splattering gobs of color at the wall in an effort to create a Jackson Pollock-like work of art and ending up with a Jackson Pollock-like mess of paint.

But hey, I’ll take word count wherever I can.

So last year I made it about a week before I flamed out. I was disappointed to leave the game so early, but in retrospect that was actually not so bad. I’d have loved to have finished, of course, but at least I got a good taste of Nano and a nice (if small) chunk of writing to show for it.

This year I’m a lot less prepared — I only remembered Nanowrimo was encroaching a few days ago — and therefore my mind is all a-jumble with the various ideas I’ve got spinning in this headspace. I’ve got an idea in the works, which I’ve been tossing around in my brain for the better part of the last five years. (I know! Five years! That’s a lot of procrastination, but in case you didn’t know, I am the master of that.) It’s one of those ideas that made me and my love of flippancy a little uncomfortable with its earnest spirit. Plus, I was maybe-sorta “saving” the idea for later, for when I became a better writer and could do it better justice. (It occurs to me that this may be yet another excuse to procrastinate so I wouldn’t have to write it, while feeling okay about writing it because hey, at least my reasons were good!) I suppose this is the point where I bitchslap that flinching ego of mine and tell it to grow a pair and just do it.

Last year I was super-prepared with outlines and color-coded folders with notes and character bios and relationship charts, and I faded in the first week. So maybe this year the lack of preparation might work to my benefit. Well, I can hope.