I did it. Somehow. After Day 28, I was right around 36,000 words. I had all but given up, but once Saturday came around, I decided to put ‘er in overdrive. I wrote about 5,000 on Saturday, then the remaining 9,000 while I watched football on Sunday.

Speaking of that, how ’bout them Steelers — they wiped the floor with those retard Patriots. I loathe the Patriots, and love to see them lose.

Anyhow, my novel sucks. I had an outline that I carefully crafted in October, but the story veered way off course about half way through. Then, as I got closer and closer to the 50,000 word goal, I realized I’d have to wrap things up pretty quickly. And it was bad.

But I did it. And maybe I’ll pull it back out at some point in 2009 for some HEAVY editing and re-writing.

Oh, God. I find myself in a gigantic hole with 2 days left to go. What a hellish month. There have been so many days that I haven’t been able to write at all. This has, by far, been the most difficult year for me yet in trying to write a novel in November.

Today I start my last-ditch effort at winning for the third year in a row. I have to write 13,190 words between today and tomorrow.

Oh, God.

Things are going differently this year than they have the past two. The biggest difference: I’m behind. The last couple years I would get ahead as much as possible the first week or so, because I know that the going gets much slower as the month wears on.

But not this year. I have an outline to follow, and maybe I’m thinking about things way too much.

The web site — nanowrimo.org — has been painfully slow. I think yesterday was the first time all month I could actually view a page from the site. So my word count on the site is inaccurate — I’m lucky to be able to bring the site up.

I still hate my story. It’s going so slowly that I want to hit my head off the counter.

Yeah, my story sucks. I just realized this today as I attempted to craft an important part of the story’s introduction, and everything went wrong. It just wasn’t happening according to the outline.

That’s right — I had an outline this year. I spent the last couple weeks of October putting an outline together. It’s a story based on a dream I had. For the first time in three years, I’ve come into November with some sort of idea where I’d like my novel to go.

So I’ve already changed things dramatically from what my outline holds, and I’m hoping to fit it in with what else I’ve planned out. We’ll see.

My wife came home with a giant bag of candy “for the trick-or-treaters.” Every year she and I are surprised when that candy never makes it to Halloween.

This year it was a huge bag of Nerds, Sweet Tarts, Runts, and Laffy Taffy. So, this morning, I decided that I’d give myself a little extra boost by eating Sweet Tarts along with my strong dark coffee.

This was bad.

Individually, Sweet Tarts and coffee are luxurious. Together, it’s like ingesting vomit.

One of the podcasts I listen to – Horror Etc. – is holding a logo design contest, and the winner is based solely on listener votes. Go on over to their forum, then register and vote for my logo – Corey’s. I will love you forever.

Is it wrong to foster pure, unadulterated hatred toward a corporation? I don’t think it is. Because Time Warner Cable once again can’t pull its head out of its ass, I am stranded without Internet access at my home. It’s another in the long line of outages occurring in the past couple weeks. But this has been the longest — it’s been over a day now, and they have no idea when service may be restored. Of course.

An outage occurred last week, and the customer service representative insisted that it was my cable modem, telling me that the modems that Time Warner issues are often uninspected, refurbished modems. Wonderful. Well, I drove out to the local office to get a new modem, seeing a Time Warner subcontractor working on poles outside. When the new modem I was given provided no change in my interrupted service, I called back and told the next Time Warner person that I had seen someone working outside. After being put on hold for several minutes, they came back on and said, “Oh, yeah, we are doing work in your area . . .” They have no idea what the rest of the company is doing.

They told me to call back in 2 hours if my service wasn’t back on. 3 hours later, I called back. I was told that the first crew screwed up, and they had to send a second crew to fix it. Awesome. Several hours later, I had my service back.

Since then, it’s been intermittent. It worsened over the past weekend, so I called yesterday afternoon. “You need a new modem,” they told me. I expressed how ridiculous this was, since I just got a new modem, but accepted it at first. But the more I thought about it, I realized that I should make absolutely sure that they weren’t just doing work again, and didn’t bother to tell the customer service people again. I called back, and immediately got a special message saying that there was an outage in my area. And I haven’t had service since.

What a company of retards! One part of the company doesn’t have a clue what the other is doing. The service is terrible. I’ve had a rash of rude customer service people, and when I’m promised calls back from higher-level technicians or supervisors, it only really happens about a quarter of the time. I’m sick of it.

So I’m working from Panera Bread this morning. I really feel like a hip, cool, tech-savvy guy now, blogging from Panera wi-fi, sipping coffee. Wishing Time Warner Cable would experience pain and suffering so intense that the Cenobytes from Hellraiser would shit their pants.

I was excited this morning as I looked at the schedule of films for the day and saw that a zombie short was supposed to go on in the morning. So I showed up early, watched the first film (Harvest Moon, a very good vampire short), but was then confused as they skipped the zombie short and went right on to Casting Call of Cthulhu, a fun comedy short with wonderfully-crafted CG work. Alas, no zombie film.

But then I was treated to Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, a fantastic documentary about HP Lovecraft featuring interviews with Guillermo Del Toro, John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, and a ton of other well-know horror people. I haven’t read Lovecraft for a long, long time, and now I want to go out and read a whole bunch of it.

The other highlight of the day was meeting and talking with Kane Hodder, the actor to best portray Jason Vorhees. He is one huge fella, and very personable. He even was so kind as to do an interview for the Midnight Podcast, in which he expressed what I have been hoping to verify all along: that Jason is in fact a zombie. The interview, along with all the others, will be featured on episode 106 of the Midnight Podcast next week.

Of course, I had to meet and hang out with Chainsaw Sally. Her husband, who is also the director of Chainsaw Sally, was there with her, and snapped the picture you see here. Very nice people.

I may stop by the festival once more tomorrow to stop and say hello to the Rue Morgue magazine people. Their table was very crowded today as I passed by it, and I was getting hungry, so I didn’t have the patience to wait around.

I’ve just come off two days at the Eerie Horror Film Festival at the Warner Theater. I haven’t actually watched any films — yet. That’s for the weekend. As for yesterday and today, I’ve spent my time there talking to people. Namely the famous ones (but also some of the not-so-famous ones).

First off, I’m really happy that I finally scored a copy of The Video Dead, a movie that I’ve been attempting to track down for a long time now. One of the DVD vendors had it, and explained that it’s out of print and only exists on VHS and VHS-to-DVD transfers. He also had Porn of the Dead, and while I usually jump at the chance of watching any zombie movie I find, I passed on this one. The vendor was a really cool guy, and we talked zombies for quite a while before I moved along to the celebrity section.

Sid Haig was the first celebrity I talked to. He was very nice, but seemed tired. I did an interview with him for the Midnight Podcast in which he was a little less than enthusiastic, but cool nonetheless. I found out he’s seriously running for president. If I were a voter, I’d vote for him, no doubt. After that, I strolled around a while longer then left.

This afternoon, I went back and talked to Gunnar Hansen. He’s an intimidating man — large in stature and doesn’t smile much. But he’s very cool too. His interview for the podcast was definitely fun.

But the man I enjoyed talking with was Ed Neal. This guy is a character. He’s a lot of fun, constantly cracking jokes and very animated. I had a blast doing the interview — we could have gone on and on, but a crowd was gathering to talk to him, so I cut the interview short and let him carry on with his thing.

Hopefully some of the other guys I want to talk to show up this weekend — namely Kane Hodder and Tony Moran, who were nowhere to be seen so far. I also wouldn’t mind talking to Chainsaw Sally and Rodrigo from Rue Morge magazine. We’ll see.

I’m pretty tired this morning because of the Steelers game last night. It went well past midnight, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew the outcome of the game. I knew the Steelers would have their hands full with the Ravens, but was confident they could pull it off on a Monday night at home.

At halftime I was ready to turn the game off and go to bed. Roethlisberger was playing like a retard. Our entire offense sucked. Only our defense kept the score reasonable, but at 13-3, things weren’t looking promising. Players were being carted out left and right — the Steelers lost nearly all their running backs, and lots of starters were injured.

You know who really needs to lay off the roids? Ray Lewis.

But the Steelers came out the second half, during which I was actually trying to fall asleep. But I resumed paying attention to the game when things had completely turned around for the Steelers. They took over, took the lead, and even made the game really exciting by taking it to overtime. And in the end they pulled it off.

I’m happy to see us beat the Ravens, mostly because the Ravens suck.