Category Archives: Arts & culture

NaNoWriMo update

Today I fianlly had time to get back to work on my National Novel Writing Month project. Prior to today, I had done nothing on it since November 8, and I had fallen far behind the 2,000-words-a-day pace I had promised myself.

Earlier today, I had almost decided to give up NaNoWriMo. It’s bad enough having a sermon churning around in my head all week; I don’t need a bad novel to be churning around in me as well.

But then I decided that I couldn’t just abandon the story; now I kind of want to know how it turns out in the end. In spite of my efforts to forget it, the story has been stewing in the back of my brain for the past week. I sat down and churned out about 3,500 words of the story this evening. Then I had to stop because bedtime rolled around; but I wasn’t ready to stop. I wonder if I’ll wind up dreaming about the story and the characters tonight, or if I’ll lie awake for an hour with the story turning around in my mind.

And now it’s far too late, and I have to go to an all-day meeting tomorrow, and a dinner meeting tomorrow night, and then church most of the day on Sunday, and when will I ever find the time to get back to the story?

Election Day snippets

Our polling place is in the old New Bedford Hotel. But Carol had not changed her place of residence properly (no, it wasn’t voting fraud or conspiracy, it was Carol’s mistake). So I’m the only one in our house who voted. And then I was the only voter in the polling place at 7:30 p.m. — me, seven poll workers, and one cop. I asked if it was a good turnout in our precinct. The poll workers just shrugged.

Since this blog is my private blog, with no connection to the congregation I serve as minister, I can safely express political opinions here that would give the IRS conniption fits if I said them at church….

I voted to re-elect Ted Kennedy even though his stand against the Cape Wind project is utterly selfish and immoral. Global warming is real, it’s happening, and wind power makes sense here in windy Massachusetts. I cannot imagine why Kennedy, usually so strong on environmental issues, is throwing all of his weight (and probably a fair amount of his money) into ending Cape Wind — unless it’s because he selfishly doesn’t want to see a wind farm from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis on Cape Cod. Ted, Ted, Ted:– wind farms are the new chic landscape feature; all the rich people like you want to be able to see a wind farm these days.

The thing is, Ted Kennedy is also one of the few senators who can be counted on to stand up to the current administration’s handling of the Iraq war. As a pacifist who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously, I believe all war is bad. But this current war is beyond bad:– in my opinion, it can no longer be justified by the standard Western criteria for just wars; therefore, we are currently engaged in an immoral war. The immorality of Kennedy’s stand on wind power is more than balanced by the morality of his stand against the Iraq war.

For the second time in my life, I got to vote for congressman Barney Frank (the first time was when I was in seminary at Andover Newton, which through the miracles of gerrymandering is in the same congressional district as New Bedford). So what if he’s running unopposed again — I enjoyed voting for Barney Frank.

State senator Mark Montigny and state representative Tony Cabral got my votes, in large part because of their strong stands in favor of same-sex marriage.

I did vote for a Green-Rainbow party candidate — Jill Stein for Scretary of State in Massachusetts. Interstingly, she was endorsed by the New Bedford Standard-Times, who wrote: “We recognize that Jill Stein, the Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Secretary of State, is a long shot to unseat Democratic incumbent William Galvin. But our endorsement of the physician and open government advocate from Lexington and your vote for her will send an important message. The voters need an activist secretary of state who will open up government on Beacon Hill….” I have to admit that my vote was as much a vote against Galvin as it was a vote in support of Stein.

Deval Patrick better win… that’s all I’m going to say about the governor’s race.

Election Day is not my biggest political concern right now. I’m more worried about the constitutional convention here in Massachusetts on Thursday, conveniently scheduled after Election Day so the pols can vote as they please and not suffer any consequences at the polls (grr…). If the opponents of same-sex marriage get fifty votes on Thursday, there will be another constitutional convention in 2008, and at that time the convention could vote to put an anti-same-sex-marriage question on the ballot. I’ll be attending the big rally in support of same sex marriage in front of the State House on Thursday [Link] — I’ll be there in the morning, and I hope to see you there, too.

Word counts and Sturgeon’s Law

First of all, remember Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of anything is crap. Originally developed for science fiction, the same law applies to all writing.

I write a 2,500 word sermon three out of four weeks, along with a 250 word prayer and perhaps other incidental material for the worship service. I write a 700 word column for the church newsletter every two weeks. I write another 1,500 words of reports each month. So as a minister, I write nearly 11,500 words a month, ten months a year — or 115,000 words a year.

Then for fun and relaxation I write this blog, for which I’ve been averaging about 500 words a day, or about 15,000 words a month. This month I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month, which should result in another 50,000 words (I’m already ahead of schedule — as of today, my official NaNoWriMo word count stands at 12,589). In the last week of June, I wrote stories for the denominational Web site as part of the coverage of the annual denominational meeting, for a total of about 8,500 words. My total recreational output this year will be about 238,000 words.

Add recreational output to professional output, and you get over 350,000 words. Now apply Sturgeon’s Law, which predicts that I will write no more than 17,500 words that aren’t crap.

The problem is, how do I sift through all the crap to find the 17,500 words that aren’t crap?

(244 words, not counting the title or this parenthetical note; of which 12.1 words are worth reading.)

No really, it’s fun

From the Web site of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), telling about the experience of writing the first draft of a novel in one month:

The first year’s trials and tribulations are laid out in the introduction to No Plot? No Problem!, but the short version is that our novels, despite our questionable motives and pitiful experience, came out okay. Not great. But not horrible, either. And, more surprising than that, the writing process had been really, really fun.

Fun was something we hadn’t expected. Pain? Sure. Embarrassment? Yes. Crippling self-doubt followed by a quiet distancing of ourselves from the entire project? You bet.

But fun? Fun was a revelation. Novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.

I think NaNoWriMo is part of a wider trend of people having fun by making stuff (can’t quite call it art) and distributing it via the Web. Examples: the people who use iMovie or some other free video editing software to produce videos which they then distribute free via YouTube; the people who use GarageBand or other cheap audio editing software to produce songs which they distribute via Web sites; the blogs, of course; the mash-ups; the immense wave of creativity that we’re seeing.

Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 95% of everything is crap, still applies to this wave of creativity. Given our current cultural standards, that means we can’t call most of these creative endeavors “art,” because art is defined the 5% (or less) of everything that isn’t crap. Not that that is really the point. Yes, more than 50,000 people are writing NaNoWriMo novels, and probably 20,000 will actually complete their novel, so there might be 1,000 NaNoWriMo novels out there that might be worth reading (at least, they might be worth reading after they are throughly revised) — but the real point of doing it is because it’s fun.

Case in point: I’m now 11,148 words into writing my own NaNoWriMo novel, and yeah, it is fun. It is a whole lot of fun. It is far more fun than watching TV or reading someone else’s novel.

NaNoWriMo, day one

…this is for all you who are doing the same thing…

I logged onto the National Novel Writing Month Web site to update my word count. I thought the connection was going to time out before my user page would load. Obviously, the NaNoWriMo site is seeing a lot of traffic presumably people are madly updating their user profiles or something.

As far as my own writing project (I can’t really call it a novel), it is continuing along nicely in its non-linear way. Current word count stands at 5,245 — which means that I’m a tenth of the way towards my goal, and it’s only the first day of the month. I’ll attribute some of that to my own (non-pathological) hypergraphia. But I attribute more of my progress to using WordPress blogging software as a kind of simple CMS. The chronological ordering of the blogging software allows me to arrange and rearrange chunks of writing, as I figure out the chronology of the writing project. I’m also assigning categories to different chunks of writing based on various topics, and assigning authors based on the principal personality in each chunk of writing.

I’m making this sound hopelessly complex, but it’s really not. It’s as if I’m writing on big index cards which I then file according to chronology; and it’s as if I’m using different color index cards for different topics; and somehow the index cards can also be sorted out according to principal personality (and a few other categories). Or to put it another way, instead of developing an elaborate filing system with character files, scene files, etc., I’m just using blogging software to automate all that. The end result is that it’s easy to make big changes really fast in response to the developing writing — how freeing!

NaNoWriMo starts in 1 hour and 25 minutes

Most of you probably think that what’s most important about October 31 is Hallowe’en. But around the world, thousands of people anxiously await the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, which begins at midnight tonight.

Yes, NaNoWriMo is the month when thousands of would-be authors sit down and churn out pages and pages of fiction. The idea is simple:– for people who have always wanted to write a novel, NaNoWriMo provides a structure for actually sitting down and writing that novel. The would-be novelist gets a deadline (November 30), a minimum number of words to write (50,000), and therefore a daily writing target (1,666 words a day). The point is not to produce a finished novel, but to get through the first draft of the novel.

Not everyone writes a novel, though. Last year, my older sister decided to produce a non-fiction book during NaNoWriMo. She figured non-fiction was harder to write than fiction, so she decided she only needed to write 45,000 words during NaNoWriMo — still enough prose to fill a book.

This year, I’ve decided to take on the NaNoWriMo challenge. I’m not exactly going to be writing a novel (no, I’m not going to tell you about my project here), but I do plan to write 50,000 words in all. I figure I have a one-in-two chance of actually reaching this goal. If things get crazy at work, I won’t be able to reach my goal. And writing 2,000 words a day is a stretch for me — my usual output is 500 words a day. On the other hand, I’ve already got 3,500 words written and November hasn’t even started yet.

Participating in NaNoWriMo is a stupid thing for me to do, really. My life is full enough as it is, I don’t need to write 1,666 words a day. But I’m thinking it’s maybe a kind of spiritual discipline, a kind of self-flagellation for a religious liberal. Or maybe it’s not a spiritual discipline at all, maybe it’s my descent from being blogging-maniakku into becoming a writing-otaku.

Forget broadcast TV…

…and check out Chasing Windmills, a Web-based video series. Pretty good concept, decent acting, interesting script (if a little too, shall we say, interior). Personally, I like the surrealism, and the contemporary black-and-white noir filming style. But the reason you should really watch Chasing Windmills is that it’s a whole new way of doing a video series, starting with the fact that it’s a daily video blog. But there’s more….

The second season of Chasing Windmills officially kicked off today. This is the biggest experiment we have taken on so far. We have 8 people who will play characters, and each character has a blog through which the audience can interact…. The audience interacts with the characters through their blogs, and the characters are influenced by the dialogue. Interactivity through influence. [Link]

A couple of warnings: First, remember that these are video files so if you have a dial-up connection, forget it. Second, this series is not for kids, with foul language, sex scenes, etc. (not as bad as The Sopranos though).