November: Soroptimists, Young Scientist and NaNoWriMo

Hey!

There are approximately twenty-one minutes left in the month of November as I write this, so I think it's time to write a summary. Busy month, as usual. I can't actually remember most of it oops.

On the first I competed in the National Finals of the European Union Science Olympiad. I didn't win, but I had a good day, saw a couple of friends up there and am proud of how I did in the exams.  (Also, situations like that are great for fueling writing. Life experience.) There wasn't any visible cheating this year, which was nice.

I finally completed a Codecademy course! I quit Javascript and did HTML & CSS instead, and it only took a few days as I did it intensively. Just really got into it this time around for some reason. I started November 10th and finished November 14th. Admittedly, HTML is a lot easier and it's only an intro course, but I'm still proud. I don't really know what to do with the skills now though.

Am still keeping up Duolingo like a pro! Currently on something like a 35 day streak.


On either Saturday or Sunday the 22nd/23rd, I won the local heats of the Soroptimists Public Speaking competition. I competed last year and was a runner-up, but I won this one. Narrative justice in action at last? I should have pictures at some point. A teacher in my school insisted on taking photos of me a couple of days afterwards purportedly to send to the newspaper, and of course at this point I looked awful. So that was unpleasant. But yes, I advance to the Regional Semifinals in Athlone on the 8th of February.

I'm feeling under a lot of pressure with Young Scientist at the moment. Honestly, I just need more time - if the exhibition was in February I think it'd be fine. I've been going up every Friday, mostly for the afternoon but most recently all day. I don't mind missing school if it means the project's successful; I'm just afraid it won't be finished on time.

On a lighter note, today I won NaNoWriMo (the Young Writers' Program). My goal was only 20,000 words, but as I was so busy I'm pretty proud of that. The novel as a whole is currently around 99,000 words and has about five scenes left, so I'm drawing near the end. It'll be a relief, because then I can take a few weeks off to focus on my other projects.

Also, my book blog passed 10,000 views about a month ago, woop woop. That creeped up on me pretty unexpectedly. I have been neglecting it, but I'm currently writing a review of Only Ever Yours (which is SO HARD to write because the book is too good).

I've been writing scripts for various Youtube videos I want to make, but it's quite hard to film them as (a) I can't do it at all on schooldays because it's too dark both before and after school in winter (b) I'm not very photogenic (c) I need to get props and things and lack the organisation (d) I'm afraid of them looking stupid. Videos are a lot harder for me than writing: you can write in bed (like I'm doing right now), you can backspace anything you don't like and rewrite it at no cost, you can leave something you're writing and come back to it whenever you feel like it. With videos you can't do that (unless you're very good at editing, and I'm clearly not), because it's obvious in videos. You have to both write and be an engaging presenter, and I'm working on the latter. And then there's the fact that most of the popular Youtubers joined in approx 2007. Oh well.

Now there are two minutes left in the month. See you later.