After having to take some time off for bad behavior (playing on an injured ankle), I came back to it slowly. Frustrating in that I seem to have lost some of my endurance and arrow reading fluency, but encouraging in that I clearly have been making progress.

In DDR Supernova, I can now consistently beat "Doll" by Terra in yellow mode with an A (this one troubled me for months. It was one of my first major walls), and can also easily pass "Jerk It Out" by the Caesars with an above C grade (this was a song my sister, Moss and I were all failing around the new year). I can also manage to not fail many songs in pink mode, though not all by a long shot. Oh, also, I seem to be able to scrape a passing grade consistently on "Dance Dance" by Fallout Boy in yellow mode, but it's still a hard song.

In DDR Extreme 2, I am mostly working in pink mode, now, but still failing an awful lot. "When the Rush Comes" is giving me trouble in pink mode right now. I am stating that here as a marker so I'll know when I have made more progress.

I went back today to DDR Max, which I hadn't played in quite a long time. It's still much harder in yellow mode than the others, but I only failed one song of the ones I tried today ("Groove 2001"). I specifically chose songs that had been hard, or impossible before, too. Passed "My Generation" and "Ecstasy" without much trouble, but more impressively managed to pass two previously impossible NAOKI songs "You've Broken My Heart" and something else, the name of which escapes me. I just know that I played "You've Broken My Heart" for hours and days in my last stint of DDR Max and couldn't ever pass it. Today it took one try.

Generally, I am getting better at arrow fluency and anticipating where my center of gravity needs to be. I'm starting to deal a bit better with side-up and side-down jumps, and I am also slowly getting the hang of eighth notes(?) (I keep wanting to call them half beats), the slightly different colored arrows that require fast movement between two regular beat arrows.

I am sure this is nonsensical to most of you and fairly boring to those of you who understand what I am talking about, but it helps to have a record. If you have DDR war stories of your own, feel free to share in comments!

823 words today in a new short story, which is flying fast and will be done tomorrow. Yay!

8118 / 67500 words. 12% done!

Also finished bethr's manuscript and sent feedback on it, and played 30 minutes of DDR so I wouldn't be a complete sloth. I kept choosing random so it would pick songs for me, and I am not kidding you, it chose "My Only Shining Star" 4 times. Maybe the PlayStation read my migraine entry and felt like playing a prank? Spooooooky.

Will post the booklog tomorrow as well as work on revising Short Story of DOOM.

I have still written every day this year! (this sort of squeeing may get old to you, but I'm sorry, you'll just have to deal, because I don't think it will ever get old to me.)

I have had a dastardly migraine all day. I remember once reading that migraines and schizophrenia were linked, and that schizophrenics tended to get a lot of them and that migraine sufferers heard a lot of things in their heads that might be similar to schizophrenic episodes. I remember this because it rang true and creeped me out when I first read about it. Ever since I can remember, my migraines have come with horrid soundtracks. One particularly bad one in high school featured the voice of one of my high school friends saying my name over and over and telling me that I couldn't go to sleep and that he wouldn't shut up. Horrible. But many times it's just random noises or phrases I may or may not have actually heard in the real world. The important thing to realize is that these noises or phrases or whatever are extremely vivid and overwhelming, and they often make me feel a weird compulsion to voice them myself. I generally don't actually give in to that compulsion because I realize that while it wouldn't actually make me happy, it would make me sound utterly insane, but it's there all the same.

Keeping all that I've just said in mind, the soundtrack for today's headache is a few snatches of My Only Shining Star from Dance Dance Revolution. I have had to stop myself from making pathetic imitation techno noises and saying "You're my guiding star!" all day long. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is it makes me want to play DDR even while I know I cannot under any circumstances actually handle the noise, the flashing lights, or the jumping around. Brilliant.

But I somehow managed to get my writing done for today. I actually got a scene to flow for the first time this year. For a few minutes my fingers flew over the keys as if of their own accord, which is what one always hopes for when writing. When I finally looked up, I had written double the minimum at 1,553. Not bad.

Counting bar thingy:

4303 / 67500 words. 6% done!