goddess of clarity: a blog about politics, culture, and serenity

Archive: November 1 - November 15, 2005

November 15, 2005 — 19:27 EST

President Bush Haiku

(An ocassional look at the actual musings of George W. Bush through the medium of 19th-century Japanese verse)

We do not torture.
There is an enemy that
lurks and plots and plans

Anything we do
to that effort, to that end
is within the law.

President Bush defends America's record on torture at a press conference in Panama last Monday, the same day that five Army Rangers were charged with "abusing" prisoners in Iraq

—lori.

November 14, 2005 — 13:31 EST

This has been making the Internet rounds for a couple months now, but I just saw it for the first time over a friend's house this past weekend and it cracked me the hell up.

Some post-production houses hold a contest each year where they re-edit film trailers. This year's winning spoof was The Shining (made to look like a romantic comedy). I found a couple others as well:

• Psycho (romantic comedy)
• Titanic (horror)
• West Side Story (horror)

—lori.

November 13, 2005 — 13:55 EST

My first attempt at NaNoWriMo has ended in failure.

In hindsight, I don't know what I was thinking. My plan was to jump off to a good start during the first four days of the month, and then just write something -- anything -- during the five days of the HighEdWebDev conference, even if it was just a couple hundred words a day. It was a brilliant plan in theory, but it lacked in execution.

I was at the conference venue from 7 a.m. until around 10 p.m. every day for five days, and when it came down to it I just couldn't get myself gee'ed up enough to write for a couple hours each night. Yes, I was pretty much pooped for the entire week (Note to self: a conference is probably more enjoyable when you're not one of the people organizing it). But the conference fatigue is just a cop out. The real reason this grand experiment ground to a halt: I didn't have a story to tell. It's that simple.

I had what I thought were some funny vignettes, a couple of neat characters, and an interesting setting. That was it, and it wasn't enough. I had no idea what was going to happen to these characters, or how these funny vignettes would fit together.

So under the heading of "nothing is a failure that teaches us something," here's what I learned from my first NaNoWriMo experience.

• Novel writing is not for dabblers. For some reason, I thought I could just play at this. That my ill-formed notions would somehow form themselves into *something* if I just goofed around with them long enough. Wrong. Ill-formed notions need discipline and love, not well-intended kidding around.
• The story starts NOW. Remember the first season of Survivor? Thirty seconds into the first episode, this large cast of characters gets unceremoniously dumped off a boat with only the shirts on their backs, and begins to stagger in the surf toward some unnamed island. Turns out this unscripted "reality" show has a lot to tell about good writing (or at least good TV). The producers didn't try to introduce all these 14 characters before beginning the action. They just jumped in at the deep end.
• Real people talk. My characters didn't. I spent all my time explaining what they were thinking or what they were like or why they felt the way they felt. I had to stop myself and consciously think, "OK, nobody has said anything for awhile. Maybe there should be a conversation right around now."
• Novels happen in present tense. My "novel" was one big temporal disturbance. During the course of one or two paragraphs, my writing would often take a train ride through past, present, and future tenses. Since I never got to the point where things were actually happening *now*, it was hard to keep track of where I was in the space-time continuum. Again, this is even more challenging when you don't actually have a story.
• Revisit, re-read = refrain, resist. I can not resist the tweak. I spent as much time re-writing as writing. I knew this about myself going in, but this experience only reinforced it: I am an editor, not a writer. Maybe someone should start NaNoEdMo in December, to edit everyone's NaNoWriMo novels.
• My favorite word is "just". I don't know why, but it is. I used it 10 times in 2,310 words (and seven times in this post).

So that's that. I may try again next year, but if I do I'll be wiser for it. I may even come armed with a story. In the meantime, here are the first couple paragraphs from Flour City, a novel whose time had not come.

For reasons Audrey would never come to understand, Sister Patrick Marie always seemed to have it in for her. To be fair, Sister Patrick Marie was never known to be nice to any of the students at Holy Family Academy. Nor to the other teachers. Nor even to the parents. Still, she seemed to reserve an extra level of hostility especially for Audrey MacFadyen.

Maybe it was because Audrey was a scholarship kid. Each of Rochester’s parish schools had a few "ships" on the rolls, and the rest of the girls always knew who they were. Nobody knew how they knew; they just knew. And if the girls knew, it was a safe bet the nuns did, too. Maybe Sister Patrick Marie simply thought Audrey MacFadyen was a waste of parish resources, and that the money spent attempting to educate her would have been better spent heating the vestry.

—lori.

November 10, 2005 — 20:50 EST

At 8:52 this morning, while I was on my way to work, the first flakes of snow fell in Rochester.

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter’s not forever, even snow
melts; and if spring should spoil the game, what then?

all history’s a winter sport or three:

-- e.e. cummings

—lori.

November 2, 2005 — 22:35 EST

To the people who live in the house down the street with the lighted Christmas tree in the window:

Hello.

We haven't met, and I'm sure you're very nice people. Actually, I'm not sure of that at all. You could be assholes, how would I know? One thing I do know for certain: You are insane. How long did you let the window remain empty after you took out the Jack O' Lantern? Two hours? Three? Are you incapable of allowing your front window to go unfestooned for even a weekend?

It's the 2nd of November, for Christ's sake! Assuming you leave your tree up until New Years' Day (and I'm guessing in your case there's a fair chance it will still be up well after the Feast of the Epiphany) we're talking a solid three months of tree. Who wants to spend a full quarter of each year with a giant tree in their front room? I knoooow they're pretty, but so are ponies. You wanna cover a pony in tasteful white lights and stick it in your bay window for three months? Stop. Just stop now.

Thanks.

—lori.

November 2, 2005 — 12:10 EST

Day one of NaNoWriMo is in the books. I think it went pretty well, except for the fact that I stayed up until 2 am and I only just brushed up against my 1700 word goal. I worked on my novel for seven hours last night and wrote 1697 words. That works out to 242 words an hour. At that rate, it will take me 207 hours to hit the 50K mark. Which means I'll have to write 6 hours and 50 minutes a day, every day, from now until November 30th. While I suppose that's not technically impossible, I know for a fact it ain't gonna happen. In other words, I need to pick up the pace.

Or course, I didn't spend every minute of those seven hours writing last night. There were long, healthy periods of procrastination sprinkled in. For instance, I told myself I wouldn't watch House at 9pm unless I had reached my goal. When 9pm rolled around and I was still somewhere around 800 words, I decided what I really needed was a break rather than a reward.

Besides, House proved to be very instructive on the art of good writing. The story lines are often completely ridiculous, with some random plot device thrown in at the last minute to solve the mystery. ("Why didn't you tell me the patient works in a garden supply store?! That would explain the kidney failure!") But the main character is so well-conceived and the dialogue is so sharp, that it doesn't matter. A case in point from last night's show: Dr. House is listening to some sanctimonious doctor lecturing them on how every 40 seconds someone is Africa dies from tuberculosis. At the end of the speech, House just rolls his eyes and sighs, "And every minute we don't love one another a puppy sheds another tear." Man. Now that's good. Thanks, House.

So I'll be back at it tonight. I realized this morning that in all my 1697 words last night I haven't actually described what anyone or anything looks like, I've written a grand total of two lines of dialogue, and nothing has actually happened to anybody yet. Is that a bad thing?

—lori.