Flo(NaNoWri)Mo

November 2009’s hits, slashes, and brawls. * Last years Nano blog 2008

11/17/09 3:51pm

” Shouldn’t you be writing?” Friends ask.  ” Shut up,” is my response. I’ve taken to calling what I’m doing this month ‘word building’ or ‘laying down words’.  Calling it ‘Writing’ seems to fill the process with undo intent, instead of random fits of chaos which it is more apt be.  I’m at 23,000 wrds

Found this gem while procrastinating – wonderful word jelly.

“The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.”
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

11/10/09 1:36am

I’m up to 11k.  The characters have finally let me know where this thing is off to.  One thing Nano is good at is showing the writer to move his opinions off the road so that the characters can walk it without hindrance.  I guess that would be my advice for anyone doing Nano, write without pause, without a rigid outline, let the characters decide where you’ll roam.  I didn’t really have much of a plan when I started, I  have to admit.  But even so, the characters have now presented an ending that I can get to, and one that makes sense.  Ever onward.

11/04/09 11:04pm

Going pretty good so far.  Changed my plan after about 1000 words in.  Novel was going to be a YA magic realism novel, changed to a fantasy fanfic deal.  It’s more fun and I realized that I hadn’t written fantasy in a long long time.  I’m about 4,500 words in, a touch behind, nothing to poop about, after all I’m still unemployed and have buckets of time to write.  If I only knew where my words were going, I’d be set.

10/28/09 3:56pm

No Outline.  No Plot. Have one character in mind for a YA novel, nothing else really.   Thought about some possible prequel or sequel novels to movies I like, but that idea really hasn’t led to anything substantial.  Last years YA novel went very well, and I enjoyed writing in that genre….

NaNoWriMo once again…the horror!

Another November is swiftly coming towards us out of the winter winds..with it come greedy x-mas shoppers, pumpkin pie, and novelists looking for a plot.

Yep, that be it..it’s NaNoWriMo time.  Gods I love it!  The muses are quaking in their mythic boots, for soon a league of writers will suspend all civility and begin juicing them of every tangy creative ounce of their whimsical blood.  

I look forward to NaNo every year..it purges all the half-ass garbage from your system – all the whining and thrashing your brain does when normally writing has to be completely ignored.  You come to terms with just how bad a first draft can be, you allow characters to think thoughts no human could ever possibly understand and accomplish things only the most lovecraftean of horrors could ever manage.

Early inspiration:

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  ~Anaïs Nin

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.  ~Sylvia Plath

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia,” Afterthoughts, 1931

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.  ~Norbet Platt

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

So an outline will be constructed in the next few days that will allow some kind of trail to follow throughout November.  Have no idea what I’m going to write, no thought of characters, genre, or…anything….it’s only 50,000 words after all.

Avatar

The movie Avatar seems to be all the rage on the net.

My question is why?

This movie looks like just another lame attempt from a movie studio to lull us to sleep with fancy Special FX.  Until the day comes when I watch a movie and not know that I’m watching a CG created thingy or beastie I won’t be impressed.

Other directors are touting Avatar as the future of movies.  Is it really, come on now.  Just looks like more of the same to me.   It’s always the gimmick with these hollywood storytellers.  Funny how it’s the story that still eludes them.

I think movies should be inciting the viewer to use a little more imagination…these Special FX insult the viewer.  I WANT  STORY!

When’s the last time you saw anything that really moved you in the theater?  If you did I bet it wasn’t the latest Special FX barrage, it was probably the drama or the scifi flick that really pushed the envelope because it wasn’t filled with CG crap.

You know what’s sad?…The fact that if Mr. Cameron were to be making a really crappy movie based solely around some new intense Special FX gimmick his crew probably wouldn’t even tell him for fear of losing their over priced job.

Pieces.

Begin

Now that I am an official casualty of recession economics, having been laid-off, I have decided to rewrite my 2008 Nano-Novel into a working and readable novel.

This book demands quite a bit of research.  And, though there is a working plot and theme, it will need to be entirely revamped.  It is geared to be a standalone novel, one very easily moved toward a series.

The only thing I’ll be reporting here is my progress…no plot details or story specifics.

Forgotten Sci/Fantasy I

Watched one of my favorite SciFI flicks this week, White Dwarf. 

White Dwarf was a made for TV movie, a 2 hour pilot for a series that never took off planned for the wonderful year of 1995.   This is true scifi for those who like such things, with a little fantasy thrown in.  This is a  shockingly good tale with fun little quirks and characters that remind you how far modern television has fallen…like the newly reborn PsyFy channel…what a wise marketing choice.

If you can I’d pick it up somewhere, don’t think it’s on DVD, only VHS.   It’s worth a look and when something like this comes along, Produced by Francis Ford Coppola you should take notice.   And if your starved like I am for good imaginative SciFi viewing, on the small or on the big screen, you’ll gobble this up.

I won’t give too much away, but the story follows a brash young doctor who takes a position on the world of Rusta, an out of the way place that is split in half by a wall.  One side of the wall is always dark, the other always light.  The side in the light seems to run similar to the Western frontier of the 1800’s while the dark side functions in a more fuedal 1500’s european way.

It is a bit campy, but then what good scifi isn’t.

Fascinating interview

Beyond Life Inc: Talking with Douglas Rushkoff

Q: An over-arching theme I found in the book is how the common-sense stuff of our reality, the economy and money and shopping and working, is really science fiction; we don’t live inside a “natural” economic structure — we made it up.

A: It gets very much like Baudrillard in a way. We lived in a real world where we created value, and understood the value that we created as individuals and groups for one another. Then we systematically disconnected from the real world: from ourselves, from one another, and from the value we create, and reconnected to an artificial landscape of derivative value of working for corporations and false gods and all that. It is in some sense Baudrillard’s three steps of life in the simulacra.

So by now, as Borges would say, we’ve mistaken the map for the territory. We’ve mistaken our jobs for work. We’ve mistaken our bank accounts for savings. We’ve mistaken our 401k investments for our future. We’ve mistaken our property for assets, and our assets for the world. We have these places where we live, then they become property that we own, then they become mortgages that we owe, then they become mortgage-backed loans that our pensions finance, then they become packages of debt, and so on and so on. We’ve been living in a world where the further up the chain of abstraction you operate, the wealthier you are.

Watch the vid that summarizes the books intent

KNOWledge

I think knowledge is becoming obsolete.

We now have the world chained to our desks, the internet makes everything available, every whim can be satisified.  Each lusty want for knowledge can be had in as long as it takes to flip a switch or type a few words into everyone’s slave librarian whose name is google. 

I am expecting this internet frenzy were experiencing to turn knowledge into sludge, to make it obsolete, to render it completely docile.  Already I feel this happening in my psyche, my personal dreaming is taking on the fact that people can know anything at any instant and therefore that that thing gained so easily,  means less.

Think about how long it took someone to gain wisdom 500 hundred years ago, 200, or 100.  It wasn’t too far back in our human past when books were rare commodities. Now we have books, movies, music..all of it when we want it, when we want to learn.  Learning has never been so simple.

When I hear a new tidbit of info these days, it really doesn’t strike me as interesting…or I should say the person telling me the information doesn’t impress me with his/her studies, or how they have dug through years of research to find whatever nugget of esoterica were discussing.  I know the knowledge has probably been pulled from wikipedia or some other factoid based website with a mere flutter of fingers or even worse – by chance.

Why should anyone be impressed with knowledge anymore?…it’s become the one commodity without cost and without any kind of sacrifice to obtain.

Jordan: A Memory of Light

I know there are some die hard Robert Jordan fans around…

I greatly loved the first three books in the Wheel of Time series, after about book 7 I stopped reading.  I figured Robert was just milking the market.  Now nearly two years after the authors death I find myself wanting to read the whole thing, all 11 books so far.

This is mainly because the series will be finished by Brandon Sanderson, chosen by Robert’s (James Oliver Rigney, Jr.) wife to conclude the monstrous fantasy epic.  Brandon has stated that the series finale, book 12 entitled A Memory of Light, will be a tome of about 750,000 pages and will see print in the form of three parts:

1. A Memory of Light, Part 1: The Gathering Storm
2. A Memory of Light, Part 2: Shifting Winds (Working title)
3. A Memory of Light, Part 3: Tarmon’Gaidon (Working title)

I realy want to see what Brandon does with the series and how his voice either makes it better or worse.

I haven’t decided yet if I’ll read all 11 books. I may have to get them on audio…I remember book 7 being brutal to read.

Comment

My story ‘Colater 696′ found in Ragun Revival # 44 received a blurb on Quasar Dragon, what they had to say:

“Colater 696″, “Abandoned citizenry discover what was forgotten…may not have been.” An intriguing, very short story

“An intriguing, very short story…”  I like the intriguing part of that.

Being that the Colater story was really a personal challenge to write scifi, and then another to get it published out of shear frustration at the lackof  getting anything to print…I think it accomplished what I wanted of it.

Found another review here:

http://lecturas.blogsome.com

English translation (according to google)

Published in Ray Gun Revival # 44

A relic is found, its original owners and return it.

Too unreal, even within the area of the space opera, but still fun.

My note: entertaining.

Watchlike

Watching the Watchmen in the theatres is kind of odd.

I wonder if the masses (myself excluded of course) are ready for such a story.  If you believe as I do that stories are powerful, and that they create with that power a kind of reality around them, I think the Watchmen may have an effect that many are not ready for.

Am I thinking to deeply, probably.

I remember reading Watchmen nearly twenty years ago when I was younger and deeply questioning the world around me, sometimes in beneficial ways, but more-so in ways that probably weren’t.   The Watchmen told the story of how I saw the world then, as corrupt, as hopeless, as degraded, people apathetic and tired of seeking change.

I no longer hold that view, the view that Rorschach holds so strongly – that humanity isn’t worth saving.   I believe just the opposite in fact.  But as I said, I think stories are powerful.

Rorschach’s final realization that humanity is worthy of something resounds with me.  Most movie goers I think will not see Rorschach’s change or his revolt at the actions of his colleagues to destroy that which he has mistakenly labeled as unworthy, most will only relate to Rorschach’s disgust and hatred of humanity.

The Watchmen had alot to say about society, about ethics, about morals and of course about the heroes who employ them.  The theater was full of gasps when the heroes committed acts of cowardice and brashly executed selfishness.  People are unaccustomed to having their heroes portayed as men and women with real flaws, which is the beauty of what Alan Moore did with Watchmen.

One of the things you never experience as a reader or writer are the effects words have on people.  The awesomeness of hearing people squeel, feeling the energy in the theater change from scene to scene was magical, I realized fully what Watchmen was intended to do.

Alan Moore, who has always been repulsed by the cinematic interpretations of his creations, finally in my opinion, has been translated correctly.

Some Alan Moore info for the neophyte

Magic is Afoot: A conversation with Alan Moore about the Arts and Occult

Alan’s Wiki entry

And if you haven’t seen it yet,

The Mindscape of Alan Moore