10-26-06
Originally uploaded by chrismaverick.
haven’t tossed off a full blog entry in over a week, but here are some smaller thoughts that have been on my mind over the past several days for one reason or another.
- Thank you to everyone who attended Halloween Jam. I hope you all had fun, and pictures will be up soon. In theory.
- Congratulations to my little brother, Sean and his wife, Jessica on the birth of their new daughter, Nevaeh.
- Thank you to beststephi for eight years of love and happiness. Here’s to hoping for 80 more. But after that I’m trading you in for some hottie twenty-two year old bimbo. No offense.
- There should be a penalty of some sort for people who try to take more than eight items into the express line. Counting to eight really isn’t that hard. And really, if you happen to have nine, I’m not going to bitch. But how do you end up with twelve. I think for every item over eight you are, you should have to give $10 to each person in line behind you.
- Is John Kerry secretly working for the Republicans? I mean, he’s a relatively quiet guy most of the time. He just shows up every November to make the Democrats lose.
- Who is doing NaNoWriMo? I’ve thought about it in the past. And I even considered it briefly this time, but I feel like whenever I do finish writing my novel, I want it to be… you know… good. I just don’t feel like I can create quality if I force myself to write every day. Of course, I’m forcing myself to take a self-portrait every day for my 365 project. So that may not really be much different. So if you’re attempting it, I’d really like to know what you think of the project. Does it feel worth it? Are you proud of what you are writing? What are you going to do with it when you’re finished?
- Steph is getting me new portrait lights for my anniversary present. I need someone to model for me this weekend so I can play with them Preferrably someone hot. I mean, I know I’m all sexy and stuff, but after 82 days of this 365 project, I’m kind of tired of photographing myself and need to mix it up a bit. Any volunteers?
- Why do funeral processions get special traffic exemptions? The people are already dead. They are not in a hurry. When I die, please, any of you who feel the need to have a service for me, please honor me by NOT FUCKING UP TRAFFIC FOR EVERYONE ELSE. Especially during rush hour.
I think $10 is a little steep, I mean c’mon!
hehehe… well, my thought is that if someone has like 2 extra items, they essentially will end up paying for my purchases.
Who is doing NaNoWriMo? I’ve thought about it in the past. And I even considered it briefly this time, but I feel like whenever I do finish writing my novel, I want it to be… you know… good. I just don’t feel like I can create quality if I force myself to write every day. Of course, I’m forcing myself to take a self-portrait every day for my 365 project. So that may not really be much different. So if you’re attempting it, I’d really like to know what you think of the project. Does it feel worth it? Are you proud of what you are writing? What are you going to do with it when you’re finished?
I seem to be doing it. It’s kind of on a whim, and I may drop it like last week’s sushi if I start to make progress on more serious writing endeavors that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
I think the reason I want to do it is to shut down certain critical faculties that are standing in the way of getting anything done. One thing I’ve noticed about my favorite authors: they write a lot. I’m reminded of an episode of Futurama, where there’s a library containing every book ever written, and they walk past a room labelled “Stephen King Aa-Az.” And here I am, stuck on a single book.
Now, between the ages of 11 and 13, I wrote seven or eight novels. Short novels, around 60 pages double-spaced, and they were, naturally, crap. What do you want? I was eleven. But I wrote them. Had I continued writing that much up till now, well, I would have had to have gotten better. Just through practice. Now, I’m not expecting to create a great masterwork of literature in the next month. It’s just not possible. As a result, I’m taking myself way less seriously, and hopefully this will help me breeze past a lot of the usual stumbling blocks and just get practice writing, get my brain into the habit of using words and forming stories. Because I know I can do it, it’s just a matter of doing it, and doing it enough that I learn to do it well.
Sometimes I think school was actually pretty harmful to my growth as a writer. I read so much bad fiction, I only learned what not to do (a very extensive list). It’s paralyzing. I instinctively know something is bad before I even start to write it. So I don’t. My brain is cancelling all my shows before I even get to see them. I’m hoping to break that habit so I can learn by doing.
I just don’t feel like I can create quality if I force myself to write every day.
I was trying to think up a joke involving Shaq and free throws, but it isn’t working right. The most common piece of advice I’ve heard from successful writers is “Write every day.” Every time I think, “Easy for him to say.” Sure, you can write every day if you enjoy doing it. I don’t, because most of the time it’s really frustrating, trying to come up with something even remotely interesting to say. Every once in a while I push through and get on a tear, and then it’s a piece of cake to write every day for a month, or two, or three, until something difficult comes up (Ghostories Chapter 4) and I struggle with it for a while, don’t get anything I like, and then I just stop. And who knows when I’ll start again? I blame the critical faculty. It must be tamed.
As for your other questions, ask again in a week or two.
i think that’s where I am. Sure, I know I should be writing every day, and for a while, I was, but the last time I sat down to write fiction I was pretty disappointed in my results and I sort of clammed up.
In that respect, NaNoWriMo is probably a good thing, since it would force the process. But I also worry that it would ultimately end up depressing me a lot.
Only depressing if you take it too seriously, I’m guessing. I just think of it as practice for real writing, and thus far I’m pleasantly surprised by what I’ve come up with.
I´ve decided to do NANOWRIMO several years in a row, each time not intending to actually finish in a month but instead hoping that being in constant communication with other people writing would spur me on.
This year I´m not bothering because, well, I´m out of the country without consistent writing time, and when I do have time I´m usually writing, so I don´t really need the encouragement.
So I guess I don´t really DO NANOWRIMO, I just use them.
so how “successful” were you in any of those cases?
I´m yet to make it the whole month writing each day, and I´m yet to continue writing on a consistent basis past the first month, but I have used the thought of NANOWRIMO several times a year to kickstart my work. So in that aspect, it has been successful.
I also believe strongly in ¨all good writing is in the rewriting¨ so from that I get the idea that you need to write whatever shit comes out until you have a full plot, then let it sit until you can look at it without taking it personally, and then start reworking sentences so that they sound pretty.
Back in the day when I was a writer [and I havent been in many many years] I always made the effort to write every day. Or at least to be at the writing area for an hour or two to make myself think about writing.
I use to have some lively discussion about this [especially with Professor Schonberger in Society & the Arts] and I always was firm that while writing was creative and an art, you still needed to have disciplin and a commitment to the mechanics of actually doing the writing.
BTW I wrote 2 novels and they were both shit…
yep, as I was telling above, I certainly know that I should be writing. I just haven’t been happy with what I’ve had to say so I kind of subconsciously forced myself to take a break.
Of course, now I just got an abstract for a paper accepted to a pop culture conference in April, so that’s going to give me something I have to work on.
My thoughts on John Kerry…
Yeah, here’s the thing about John Kerry. His “joke” was scripted by the DNC. He is shilling for them becuase he is a politican and that is his job. However, he bumbled the line and it completely backfired. It was on par with a GWB type of flub. It’s politics as usual in both camps, so the GOP is making a huge deal out of it when they know that it was a simple mistake that their guy has made a thousand times before, and the DNC is bitching at the GOP for making a mountain out of a mole hill, despite the fact that they do they same to GWB every chance they get (which is often).
Yeah, the DNC has no idea what to do. Dean is using Kerry because he figures that Kerry beat him in the primaries, so he MUST be popular. But really, they should be using Obama (but they are scarred becasue they are grooming him for the run and want to keep him as spotless as possible) or Hillary (the DNC’s Dick Cheney). Kerry LOST, and should not be brought out like a show horse to rally the DNC troops.
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Re: My thoughts on John Kerry…
it actually perplexes me a great deal that Dean even bothered to cart Kerry out there. Dean has simply got to feel that he could have won the election (true or false, you have to theink Dean believes that) where Kerry lost simply by being John Kerry. Why bother doing that again?
I definitely agree about the DNC and RNC being playing the same game. That’s true pretty much in any political case.
NaNoWriMo
Yah, I’m doing NaNoWriMo. I tried last year, only made it to 33k, but then I didn’t hear about it until the 3rd of Nov last year, so this year I have more of a thinking-about-the-book head start. The best thing I learned in HS about writing was 4 drafts: Madman->Architect->Carpenter->Poet or something like that. NaNoWriMo is a great time to practice letting your Madman throw words on to the page. Good first draft.
Re: NaNoWriMo
so (and don’t take this as an insult) you would say that quality of your novel is not an issue in this case at all.
Re: NaNoWriMo
I think the point is more that the quality of the first draft isn’t all that important. Write like a madman for a month, then clean it up later. If you manage to get something down that’s worth cleaning up.
Re: NaNoWriMo
There are different kinds of quality. There is the quality of the idea, and the quality of the architecture, and the quality of the sentences… Obviously, I would like to not be writing total crap. I mean, I’m pretty sure if the point was just to write 50k words, I can probably toss out about 1500 an hour just rambling about the world. I don’t know, I guess I’m aiming for, creative story that doesn’t have plot or character holes larger than the size of a semi truck. I would like to get something that has a somewhat coherent story arc, while moving away from agonizing over every sentence and character interaction. Probably I should be aiming for complete crap, but I haven’t reached that state of enlightenment yet. 😀
I started NaNoWriMo on the first, and don’t seem to have made much progress because of overwhelming job issues. I hope I can get myself writing this weekend, because I like this story and I want to do something with it.