Ad of the Week

Amazing.



Let me rephrase: Amazing in the sense that I only sorta caught on to two of the 21.

A Holiday Treat

As we move into the long holiday weekend -- the long holiday week for me and my cat-tastic travels -- I have been gifted with the following: the long awaited audio files from the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop participant readings!!!!

The readings are grouped by day instead of being separated out by individual speaker, which means that I won't be able to put my clip up on my website unless I get fancy with my audio file editing skills. And by 'get fancy' I mean develop any at all because I've never done that before.

Yours truly was only number three to read on day one, but if I remember correctly (and I might not as the adrenaline was fairly high) the girl reading before me was rightly hilarious. The woman after me ... I remember nothing of, at that point the adrenaline of reading in front of roughly 80 - 100 writing savvy peers had wiped my brain clean of any cognitive process.

Those of us up on the first day only had a couple of days to write and polish what we read because "the spirit of the thing" was to read new work, work that had been started there at the Kenyon workshop -- for my group that meant there were only three writing projects to pick from, one that had been written in the 24 hours prior to the reading. I ended up reading the very first piece that I wrote there. Not only did the extended 72 hours help, but it fit the best into the three minute time frame.

And hearing it now ... there's words, repetition I would cut. Argh. Are we ever really ready to let go of our writing?

More Grammar Flummoxed

Grammar and Style Point

So back in the day I gave my students this sentence

It felt chilly after the jacuzzi.

and said what's wrong with it? We teased out the issues of not knowing what "it" was, of the fact that you can't "after the Jacuzzi" and the fact that "it felt" was wimpier than simply going for the jugular and saying "it was."

I explained that while they may have been taught to avoid to be verbs in high school (one kid stated that it was a point off for every to be verb in each paper), that there were no hard and fast rules like that in the real world, and that sometimes things just are and need to be expressed that way in order to create credible narrators.

To which a student raised his hand, "What if we want to create an unreliable narrator?"

At the time I didn't have a response and I just canned the question by telling him to save it for his creative writing classes not his comp credit.

But I've never forgotten that question.

I tell myself that if I had been more on the ball I would have pointed out the differences between an non-credible narrator and an unreliable one. That an non-credible narrator tells you things you don't believe because the reader believes the narrator is an idiot, whereas the reader doesn't believe the unreliable narrator because the reader has been tipped off that something is astray.

Notable unreliable narrators in 20th century literature: Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Solider, Anita Shrive's All He Ever Wanted, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. (List woefully short.)

In the first two examples there is something amiss with the narrator. The narrator starts off asserting things that we believe, but as the dissertations go on we realize that he is (in both cases) completely deluding himself as to the reality of the situation. In The Handmaid's Tale, like in many distopias, the narrator is forced into a position on unreliability not because of a mental delusion but because what limited information reaches her is heavily filtered by those in power. She only knows -- and therefore we only know -- what they want her to know.

Yet, with all of these examples, the narrator asserts what little facts he or she knows. Despite the delusions of grandeur and self-importance, all notions are presented as fact. And if we were to go by tone alone we would say they are credible narrators. They report well what they perceive without sounding wishy-washy, but as a source of information they are unreliable. Thus making an important difference between the It felt and the It was camps.

Cat'tastic Travels

Two things have recently come to my attention: 1) I do not have enough cute kitten pictures of Ash posted on this blog and 2) Ash and I will be driving 90 miles together on Tuesday. This will be her longest car trip ever.



We've been taking short practice runs. Obviously she's had a couple of cat-carrier trips to the vet, but I've made sure that she's also had trips to the pet store as well to balance out the poking, needles and temperature taking. So we go to PetCo and she gets to watch the caged birds and have old ladies coo over her.



I've also been doing straight car ride trips. These are about 30-40 minute long trips where I just drive. The 40 minute trip with her in the cat carrier the whole time got a little punch at the 30 minute mark. At which point the kitty duffel proved its toughness by not shredding under her claws despite her attempts to get out.

At this point I figured she might not make it for 90-120 minutes home to my father's house.

But there's no way I'm driving with a "loose" cat in the car.




So I got a harness and leash. She's fine with both (just don't expect to lead her anywhere with that leash). I attach the leash to the back passenger side door and that way she has the run of the backseat, she can even hunker down in her carrier, but she cant' get under my feet or, worse, under the break peddle.

My vet told me about an accident that happened right in front of the vet's office because the lady's cat jumped underneath her break as she was trying to turn onto the busy road from the vet's parking lot.

The harness test run seemed to go okay. She cried for a while, but didn't freak out like she did in the carrier. After being pouty, then exploring, then crying, she settled down on the exact middle of the backseat where she could see everything, hung her front paws over the edge and decided to wait things out.



We travel tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Ad of the Week

Which is almost as creepy as this:



Which brings up the question: why is Bailey's creepy?

Oh Too Amusing

Paperback Writer has a post up about the top myths perpetuated in romance novels. Far, far too amusing. But then again, romance is a 'fantasy' genre and it even says as much in Harlequin's guidelines.

Actually in response to PBW's myth #4 Harlequin states that protection is not necessary if it interferes with the narrative or bogs down the prose -- because it's a fantasy, not because they're trying to undermine all that safe sex stuff we were (hopefully) taught in school.

Writing: Art, Craft and Beauty

From the comments to yesterday's post:

Blogger Guerilla Grodd said...
A few weeks ago I was talking to my buddy Gordon, who is a very gifted composer. We were discussing the ongoing debate about the "art" of composing. What is the purpose of music? Is it a pure art form, or does it require a degree of accessibility for the listener? Can a piece of music be commercially viable AND artistically relevant? For whom is music written, the composer or the listener? I think this conundrum is also applicable to writing.

I sat down to address this comment with a firm notion of where I was going with my response. I was going to define "art" as per the academy and then I was going to talk about "craft" and then "beauty" because that "beauty" is where the soul lives. But then I choked. I couldn't get the first part down. I just sat here and turned one question over in my mind: What the fuck is art?

There's art for the sake of art -- although given that I can't find a definition of art that I believe both logically and intuitively in relation to any form of composition, we're going to have to gloss that phrase as meaning there is a reason for doing technically difficult stuff and that reason is that it's technically difficult.

I suppose that's akin to why Olympic athletes choose to do vaults or high dives that are worth a possible 10 points or a possible 9.9 instead of ones they know they can accomplish that are only worth a possible 9.6. But when they're spinning and flipping that fast all I know is that they are air born and that gravity will shortly end their flight. I only know if something went wrong when they don't stick the landing -- or because the commentators told me so. Dangerous, that last one is.

Anyway, I started this because I truly believe the purpose of writing is to produce joy, awe, wonder, to share a moment with the reader and give them something beautiful. That beauty could be sad beauty. It could be comic beauty. It could be poetic, assonance filled literary beauty. It could be scary beauty, or troubling beauty, or whimsical beauty.

I stopped myself short of sleeping beauty so we can all rest easy now that I've admitted my near miss of a bad pun.

Should writing entertain? Entertainment in that sense is a form of beauty, so why not? Should it accomplish other goals? Why not?

For whom should it be accessible? Well it damn well needs to be accessible for the author. I just finished that Nancy Kress interview in The Writer's Chronicle, and that interviewer harps on the woman constantly about "conscious decisions" in regard to genre, content and market needs/demands, and Kress seemed to get really testy because there are only so many ways she can say I wrote whatever came to my mind, I wrote in genres I had read, although I read almost every genre but romance; I didn't pick science fiction writing to make a career of, it happened simply because I was passionate.

Writing that is passionate is ten times closer to beauty, ten times closer to art than writing that is rote and dry because it is what someone else wants.

There's many an agent out there on the internet writing blogs saying yes, this is hot on the market right now, but don't write another novel just like [Twilight] just because it's hot; your novel will be stilted, boring, and the world will move on without your unimpassioned novel.

I'm here to go against the writing of the academy (a notion of contemporary fiction fashioned forty years ago as "artistic" and unanalyzed ever since) and say that writing to the academy simply for the sake of garnering their approval is exactly like writing another Twilight knock-off.

Specifically to Tanya and others in her crises: I think there is a great deal to be gained from learning how to do "academy approved" writing in an MFA program, but that doesn't mean that this is the type of writing you should be doing, nor the type of writing you need to do for the rest of your life.

Blogger Guerilla Grodd said...
... As artists, we can all study the "how" of our respective disciplines, but often we are not quite sure of the "why."

The "why" needs to be because we love it. Otherwise we're doing a whole lot of work for a very tiny profit that we do not give a damn about.

Sucks All the Energy Outta Ya

A post by Tanya recently got me thinking, and the fact that I read it Monday night after my workshop for the week got me writing this post.

The MFA workshop sucks the energy right out of you.

Most weeks I leave and all I want to do is put on my sweats and pour myself a drink.

The one time I walked away feeling truly energized was the week my story was critiqued by the group. I had all these new ideas for where to take the story and how to build my modest story (which I thought was finished) into something really cool. And then I read the written comments and that bubble burst but that's another story for another day.

I don't really have the problem where increased knowledge of writing and how it works correlating with decreased reading pleasure. Yes, I notice theme more readily now and I'm much more aware of the mechanics behind the work that the author has employed -- reading The List after taking Tara Ison's workshop I could totally see all the elements of structure she taught us about employed in her novel -- but that is fascinating in the same way that learning how movie special effects is fascinating; it still looks lifelike on the screen even when I know how it's done.

Any thing much deeper than that doesn't occur to me when I'm in the middle of reading.

In the midst of reading I love being caught up in the moment, in the emotion, in the beauty of imagery or the tension of the conflict and I stay right there with the story unless the author breaks it for some reason. This is what I refer to as the joy and wonder of reading. What is referred to in a recent edition of the Writer's Chronicle as "good storytelling" (and how it is frequently missing even unadulterated literary writing). I rarely develop any sort of notion for analysis (psycho, literary or otherwise) during these read through and keep myself wholly focused on the wonder of an unknown story. Then if I sit down and care to still think about it after I'm done reading I'll find myself able to draw those analytical conclusions.

For workshop: I read; I experience the joy of the unknown story (usually); and then, I sit and analyze. I analyze whether the mechanics worked and I analyze some deeper level of the story to see if it's there and see if I don't have any comments that could help the author in later drafts develop one. Although, I firmly believe that a moving, emotionally engaging, well told story doesn't need overt levels of meaning and that the author shouldn't try for them consciously. The four levels of allegory are what high school English teachers apply to fiction; they are not present when the writer writes.

Then, in workshop, the class destroys my joy. My awe. And any sense of wonder I may have had in reading.

They are overly critical and cynical (and rightly so, they know what a shortcut looks like because they've tried them). They've read a lot. Most of them, myself included, either read slush for a literary magazine or they work as an editor on the program's literary mag. They've seen a lot of "good" stuff and they've seen a lot of crap. This leads them to viciously attack anything they perceive as a weakness in the story.

No, workshop is not for the tenderhearted.

They do it in the name of what doesn't kill a story in workshop makes it stronger in the next draft, but, all the same, I'm glad I'm not asked to reread these same drafts after we've workshopped them because there is no joy left in reading it once it's been beaten and snapped at from all angles.

One form of badgering that has become particularly prevelant (and disturbing to me) is the use of the word "device." Every element of a story is now referred to as a "device." If it is what happens between the beginning and informs how we get to the important part or why the important part even happens, it's a "device." Occasionally it's a "good" term: the author used a really subtle device here. But it never feels like a good term, it feels like the naming of a cheap trick. Someone used it last night, and suddenly the story we workshopped (not mine) felt less like this heart wrenching slice of life in the world of a widower and deer hunter and more like a clock, or robot, or remote control. Device.

Maybe "device" is an appropriate word though. Given how we discuss stories and the kind of suggestions these writers make it seems more like they view themselves as builders, tinkers and puppet masters. They want to see how they can engineer a character's past and his emotions to make a better mouse trap.

What should a writer be?

I don't know. And I don't want to be prescriptive about it.

At times I find Natalie Goldberg's zen based writing philosophy too zen for me and yet I do not enjoy the writer-as-engineer philosophy either. There has to be some happy medium, don't you think?

Perhaps this is why I find myself ever more interested in writing good genre fiction opposed to bad literary fiction (see Writer's Chronicle interview with Nancy Kress and Poets & Writer's article by Mike Chasar, available in print only): because the genre writers are storytellers, they harken back to that ethnological desire of ours to spin tales, that biological need to relate to others even if only through the page.

The Beard Off

Just so you don't think grad school and novel writing is all work and pain, I give you the men of Western Michigan University's on campus Writing Center in The WMU Beard Off.

Ad of the Week

Awwww. Issasocuute.

MFA Workshop

I'm feeling kind of gypped. In the workshop I'm taking we only work on two stories a piece. As I understand it from the blogs I'm reading, other people are going up for workshop three or four times in a semester. We're also only reading one book of short stories at this point. While I appreciate the free time and the fact that it allows me to read what I want instead of reading what someone else wants, I'm feeling kind of deprived.

Around here the poets go up for workshop every other week, but not so for the fiction writers. It could be the faculty member I'm taking class with, or this could be how things are done around here. I'll have to ask about the specifics on that.

But mostly my feeling of being gypped comes from the fact that I thought I was going to put a certain story up for my final workshop in December -- I thought it was going to be "Cake" -- but on Monday our instructor said he wanted to see more stories that took place not just in one or two days but were spread out over months or years -- which is frankly tougher to write and annoying to read in my opinion, but whatev, if that's what he wants to read then that's what he wants to read. I think his desire comes from being an editor for years, whenever he gets too much of one thing he desires to see something else -- but that's completely speculation.

He also requested "clockless" stories a la Charles D'Ambrosia, meaning that there is no "ticking clock" or other time device placed on the situation. These "clockless" stories frequently manifest as stories where stuff happens but you have no idea what's changed, a manifestation that drove me nuts as an undergrad when I was trying hard to craft stories where something changed because I was being taught that a change makes a story. Well apparently in literary fiction you can subvert that rule and if the New Yorker publishes you then you're a genius and if no one publishes you then you're an idiot who didn't follow the rule about stuff changing in a story.

This brings me to my point where I want three workshops instead of two. I've already used one, and now I had thought I wanted to put a new draft of an older story up for workshop. Now, with this directive being issued about time and clocks I'm drafting something new. Something that is new but at the same time very old. It appears that whenever I try something new I jump back into my interior voice. That inner monologue that runs through my brain: sarcastic, snippy, young female. This was the only voice I wrote in college because it was the only one I could write with any authority or authenticity. Then this past summer at Kenyon, Brad Kessler wouldn't let me write in the first person (not for aesthetic reasons but because he was pushing me) and I developed this very removed, short, choppy voice that lent itself to eerie writing. I was intrigued with the voice and thought to keep it up. The new voice has allowed me to tackle characters that aren't 20-something and uppity women, which caused me to jump for joy -- I could broaden my range and not write cliche stories! Yea!

But I'm annoyed at all these guys pushing me around on the voice issue. Trying to compare the new voice to minimalism and giving me statements like "I'd be interested to see that" about the old voice.

Whatever.

[woah, that was grumpy, sarcastic teenage-me making a comeback just now]

It's probably for the best. It'll probably lead me to find my true, natural, authentic voice, or some such zen shit. In the mean time, it feels like I'm being pushed around.

And I'll probably write the new thing that fits to the instructor's desires rather than workshopping the thing I want feedback on. I made a pro con list so that I wouldn't feel like I was selling out or brown nosing.

Cons of writing and workshopping new material:

• Feeling like a sell out
• Feeling like a brownnoser
• Start doubting whether I can find any value in my work if someone else doesn't value it (that's heavy shit)
• Need to write and entire new piece
  
• Don't really know what exactly I write about
• I won't get feedback on the old story
  

Pros

• Writing new material means not sitting on my thumbs
• A forced deadline for new work
• Trying something new
• I tend to perform surprisingly well under constraints (e.g. write something "clockless")
• I think I already know all the things this group would say about the old story (and it wouldn't be a confetti fest)
• I'm not invested in this new piece the way I'm invested in the old one
• I like shocking people, and a sudden change of voice would be shocking to them
• I need new material; the old stories are feeling stale

Guess that's it. Guess I've talked myself into writing new material without feeling like a sell out that writes only to please others. I need something fresh and I need some reason to write new material and not just edit "Cake" four million times. Although I will be editing "Cake" and asking some people to read/workshop it outside of workshop.

Second Thoughts

Two part post

Second Thoughts Part One:
NaNoWriMo update: I changed novels. Yeah. Whoops. That's why more word count has suddenly dipped from over 7,000 to just under 4,000. However those 4,000 words came much easier than the previous 7,000. And I'm hoping to break through 6,000 words tonight. This notion, while it does not yet have a plot, has several very likable characters and a cute back cover blurb / story pitch. (See the blog run by Bookends Literary Agents for more on pitch.)

Ginny Marie Holtzinger thought the job description sounded normal enough. WANTED: honest, hard worker able to deal with the day to day of hospitality industry and many curve balls. After the past year, Ginny thought she could deal with anything so long as it meant a job. Little did she know that ‘curve balls’ was meant in a more metaphysical than metaphorical sense.

A girl desperate for employment and needing to make a clean start of it for reasons she won’t share wouldn’t endear most people to an employer, but Daphne Ambrosia knows an honest soul when he sees one and hires Ginny on the spot to help run the ------ Inn.

Employment and housing secure Ginny just starts to relax when everything begins going wrong. Daphne promptly leaves for an indefinite amount of time leaving Ginny in charge of a hotel she’s barely even taken a tour of, with no help except for the gardener/handyman/resident pain in the ass and a cat who dispenses nothing but sarcasm and cryptic advice – a week prior and Ginny would have thought a talking cat was the weird part, but that was before she met the guests and life started getting stranger than fiction.

Suggestions for the name of an Inn (metaphysical, mythological or every day) are greatly appreciated.

Second Thoughts Part Two:
jolie's comment to Tuesday's post got me thinking.

I think I suffer from a Joyce Carol Oates + J.D. Salinger complex. Their short stories tend toward the depressing. I don't covet depressing story matter, but the notion that it's "serious" and not trite.

Then again I have many issues that revolve around me wanting "to be taken seriously" which I thought I had escaped by leaving law school.

I used to write funny stories. Or at least very sarcastic stories which people found funny depending on their sense of humor. At one point I was even able to write very humorous stories where very bad things had happened to the narrator and perhaps that meant that her sarcasm was part of her coping mechanism. ... But I think I thought those stories were too ... me?

Stupid, right?

If the voice sounds authentic in my own head, or at least authentic in that it sounds like the voice in my head then it should be ... well ... authentic, right?

But for some reason I discredit things that sound too much like how I think. I can get fairly articulate at dumping my stream of consciousness and crafting it into a story ... but since it doesn't feel like the sophisticated stories that I read i wonder if it's just child's play.

And since I doubt, I write comic (sarcastic) fantasy set in a hotel with a snippy young female narrator and a talking cat because, well, that's easy. It's fluff. It's the fun stuff I do to get away from the "work" I should be doing. Doh. Damn interfering dichotomy. I keep repeating my father's idiom: find something you love to do and you'll never have to work a day in your life. And yet I don't believe it. I somehow believe that work should feel like work. It should weigh on you because most of my jobs have, because most people's jobs do. Teaching doesn't even feel like work!

Woah. That last statement should really be my wake up call. If teaching doesn't feel like work -- and it is at the moment my only gainful employment -- then I really need to snap the hell out of this if writing is fun then it's not serious and you should be doing serious work mindset. I just wish that realization as easy to accept and internalize as it is to verbalize.

Interrupting Your Regularly Scheduled Post ...

We'll get back to thoughts on writing and workshop tomorrow, but today I understand will be marked by tens of thousands of people marking both in Salt Lake City as well as California in outrage over being made second class citizens by Prop 8.

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC says it better than me in this video clip, but I'll say it anyway.

Forty years ago, states had laws on the books that prevented interracial marriage and today we find the thought abhorrent. A hundred and fifty years ago states had laws on the books that prevented black people from marrying at all, and today we find that abhorrent. Both times we, as a people, had to redefine marriage.

And lastly, if 50% of heterosexual marriages in this country end in divorce, what, precisely, is it about marriage that we find so sacred?

Workshop Rundown

I realize that I never really posted about my workshop experience.

So on Monday, before workshop I posted this clip, it's a comedy sketch and worth spending a couple minutes watching before I tell you this next bit.

I posted the clip to be funny.

But I think that's what just happened.

In the same hour, with the same people in the room, we discussed how they loved that I named all the characters by their function/role in relation to the main character, and then suggested that I give them names just for the sake of clarity. There were a couple other examples in the conversation but I'd like to skip ahead to when I looked at the comments written on the copies of my story. One guy underlines a bunch of lines and made comments about how much he loved those lines. The next copy I picked up another person had marked all the same lines as "cheesy" or "too cute."

Exactly the same lines!

Apparently my writing is as polarizing as the Republican party.

So here I am in the world of 'write this, but don't write that ... unless it's this.'

The actual conversation, having these twelve literate people shred my story was really a thrilling experience (not as thrilling as being at the Kenyon Review workshop, but thrilling enough). Reading their typed comments the day after workshop was enough to send me running for prozac.

What was the difference? Maybe they were being intentionally harsh in the writing, wanting to be sure to get across certain points to me that caused confusion for them. But there was none of the light hearted tone and banter that there was in the discussion.

Although, for anyone who read "Ten Days" when I still had a draft of it on my website, the instructor brought up a very interesting point. That the most interesting part is not when she's in New York and the scandal breaks, it's when she's in New Mexico with her host/old mentor and I skip over the first three days that she's there. Three days ripe with possibility of creepiness.

Workshop starts off with people praising certain parts. They appreciated the reserve and the minimalism of the prose. Which would later digress into a conversation about my story and minimalism and whether or not I had actually achieved minimalism. Funny, as until that night when the instructor defined minimalism I hadn't thought about how it applied to fiction only to art. So, no, as it wasn't intentionally minimalistic, I just wanted to have a very "pulled back" narration.

Then then went into the issues. They didn't like the ending. In this workshop, btw, no one likes any ending that anyone turns in. For me, they didn't believe I'd earned an ending where the main character kills herself. Although I argue that walking into the desert at night for a girl who's lived her whole life in urban environments isn't as much suicide as being reckless with her life. Then again, this crowd does not have much connection with the desert and the fact that getting lost out there is pretty damn easy.

There's more ... there's much more ... but I am sadly, falling asleep as I type. I'll date this to post in the morning ... yawn. Night.

Story Telling, Truth and Erasers

The above image is from FOUND magazine, and I used to believe whole heartedly in the sentiment it implied.

... and then I read my students papers.

Even though they're storytelling, I wholeheartedly advocate the judicious use of an eraser.

Ad of the Week

Somehow over the past twenty months I missed hearing that Al Franken was running against an incumbent for one of Minnesota's seats in the US Senate. The race is still not yet decided, they're having an automatic recount because the margin that the incumbent is leading is less than 600 votes. Sheesh.

What's the World Coming To?

Michael Chrichton's dead, Danielle Steel has a blog and J.K. Rowling is managing to make yet more money by not writing another book, just in time for Christmas.

Hope and Despair

So all this election talk with connotations of hope, change and progress has left me feeling ... well ... hopeful.

There was a great line from Obama's acceptance speech that I jotted down:

Our stories are singular but our destinies are shared.

And I thought, now wouldn't that just make the coolest epigraph on a collection of connected short stories?

But then I got thinking about it, more so, about the kind of stories I write, and I do not write hopeful stories.

The reason I do it is fairly obvious: I'm young and in order to appear like "part of the club" I feel that I have to take on serious subject matter. And serious means a lack of hope. It means cancer and marriages breaking up, it means running away and denial, it means a lack of money and a shady past, date rape and drug use, and who gets used by whom, right?

Wow. Incredibly depressing. No wonder so few people read literary fiction if this is what we think we need to do to write it.

I'm not sure if I even know where to start on writing a "hopeful" short story, or at least one that manages to be hopeful and yet not cheesy. There has to be some sort of line that can be walked between hope and despair in literary fiction, some sort of notion that out of the ashes of one rises the other, but it's a tough line to walk when you want to be both serious and happy, but not corny.

I have a feeling that if I brought in a "hopeful" story to my current workshop I would get reamed. And if I can't even write one hopeful short story, how on earth do I expect a collection to make use of that epigraph?

The Good and the Bad

Both the good news and the bad can be summed up with one statement: I'll miss seeing Tina Fey on SNL.

The Drive and the Acciendtal Byproduct

Oof. I'm writing this Monday night and it feels like it's been a long day. I don't really think it's been all that long but it seems long. Maybe my body just hates me.

Anyway.

After Monday's post, Tanya left a comment that she didn't think she had the drive for a NaNo marathon, that she barely had the drive to write for class.

And I wholeheartedly feel her on that.

However there is a very happy byproduct of writing a whole novel in a short amount of time: like begets like, and writing begets writing.

This weekend I wrote 4,500 words on a single novel, but I also wrote out four pages long hand of a different novel idea and today in workshop got a goofy look from the instructor because I started jotting down notes during discussion of someone else's work (oddly enough we don't do that in our current workshop and it's the first time I've seen this phenomena) because I had an idea for the opening of a short story.

When I did a novel marathon in January, I stumbled upon two short stories. Quite literally tripped over them. I was trying to go to bed and these stories kept me up for three hours each writing and rewriting themselves in my head. I knew that if I got up and wrote it down that my sleep deprived fingers would make a mess of it so I just kept running and refining lines in my head and then next morning got down as much as I could.

I think they're quite interesting stories, however I haven't shared them with anyone because both of them contain the most controversial content I've ever dealt with so I need a whole story before I start showing it around to people who might otherwise be offended, or think I'm an idiot.

But my point is that it is somehow tied into the notion that if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. ... Or maybe I really need to stick to the like begets like thought ...

Argh.

Brain = too scrambled to do more than this.

The Value Within

On November 1st I embarked on a 50,000 word journey. But unlike other novel writers in the academy I did not embark on a lengthy first draft process; I sprinted from the marathon start line knowing that was the only way to accomplish my goal: writing a 50,000 word first draft within the next calendar month.

As of Sunday night my novel stands at 4,768 words. The word counting widget on this page may, or may not agree -- the traffic on the NaNo page is overwhelming so I'm having trouble logging on to update it.

I have done this before -- I devoted my entire month of January to a novel in 2008 -- and everyone I told was extremely supportive if completely mystified by my sudden desire. I have wondered, however, if now that I am an MFA candidate and part of "the academy" if the reaction would be different.

I'd like to say that they'd just see it as another wild and crazy artsy thing to do ... but I don't know for certain that this will be the action. I've told one person in the entire English department about it ... and I'm pretty certain I'll never bring it up to my workshop. They're ... um ... how do you say? ... particular.

But for those people who need a more rationalized description of my endeavor I give you the following article from Associated Content.

NaNoWriMo: The Value of National Novel Writing Month
I provide a description of the value of NaNoWriMo, and an answer to obvious criticisms of the program.
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NaNoWriMo or Bust!

Ad of the Week

Mr. Obama Goes to Washington

Somehow I missed the memo that this was aired Wednesday night across America ... and then the magical TV switch from prerecorded to Live TV (which is damn hard to do ... I hope this is a sign that everyone Obama chooses to work with him are the best - the TV crew really is).

Series of 4 videos:

-- oddly enough, part 3 is the hardest to find but it's the segment that made me cry, perhaps because I remember watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention when Obama spoke and watching my father cry --









Vote this Tuesday, November 4