Gee, thanks to Cybele for giving me a stupid quiz to post in this formerly quiz-free space ;->
11.08.2002
11.07.2002
W00t! I hit 10,000 words - 20%! Okay, so actually I wrote during my lunch hour and hit 10,039 words. And now I've got a love story going and it's getting all passionate and tragical and soon there will be some heavy sex and poignant broken hearts. Oh, and alien life forms and war. What more do you want?
Ahh... better. Went to Jennifer's Coffee Connection in Studio City last night and wrote for a few hours - am finally getting caught up to where I need to be. And with the whole plot thing, well, lemme tell ya, it's getting complicated. But that's all to the good - I'm writing various scenes here and there and at some point I'll have to come up with something to string them along, like pearls on a silken cord. Yeah, just like that. Or not.
11.06.2002
Well, apparently my brain decided that since it had burned all those extra calories and found a plot, it was done for the day. I only wrote 600 words yesterday, so I'm now about 1200 behind ;-< Note to self - watching Buffy and Smallville doesn't work when writing a novel. I can write other crap and partake of the boob tube, but I can't write this crap while watching TV. So tonight I'm gonna head off to a coffee shop after work and get some serious numbers up.
11.05.2002
In deference to Devra whom I adore, I am posting the intial chunk (clot, clog, wad, clump) of my nano novel here, just as it appears on the nanowrimo website. I will probably have to work out a pdf format thingy or a seperate page or something if anybody really cares to work that hard at finding things to make fun of me for. Oh wait, here's one now - my working title (I suck at titles so bear with me) is "Again With The Knives And The Screaming... Oh, And I Found This Really Cool Leopard-Print Babydoll Thing In My Drawer or Speaking Truth to Power" - like it? I thought it up all by my self. Can you tell? I really, really suck at titles... heh.
Tap... tap. Is this thing on? She cleared her throat then started to speak, her voice cracking just a little as she read the prepared introduction from the card in her hand.
“Not a complex life, not a simple one either. Just me and what I wanted, and what I got. I'm here to tell you about that, and about all the places in between that I've finally, in my seventy-eighth year, started to explore. I've gone on walkabout through my head and around my life for the past five months, you see, and this is what I've learned.”
“I started doing this my first few weeks in the camps, back when I was a girl. I’d travel from barracks to barracks, interviewing people for their stories, their bits of wisdom, maybe score a few bites of some sweet that my mother wouldn’t let me eat because we all knew that the camp dentist was a butcher. We were lucky enough to get moved from Manzanar after the first six months, before the cholera epidemic there, so I had a fresh crop of new subjects to quiz and harass and spy on that kept my interest from flagging.
“Looking back, I see it as a way to try to figure out just what I was doing there, what my entire family was doing there… the same way that a group of women will worriedly quiz a rape victim in their midst as to just what she was doing when she was attacked and brutalized, secretly hoping to figure out the magic combination of events to avoid at all costs. I, too, wanted to know why my family was being singled out from all the other families in our neighborhood, why my family was being brutalized, abandoned, betrayed by our country. I wanted to know by what right, what mandate from heaven, our government could revoke all our rights as citizens and throw us into century-old camps to rot the next five years away.
“None of our fellow camp inmates – I see you wince at that work, Honored Speaker – well, inmate is the correct and accurate word. We were held prisoner against our will. We were inmates of a lunatic asylum outside our walls. Society’s fear had curdled to madness and we were the scapegoats driven out of town, curses laden on our heads in the twisted hope that our punishment for your crimes would free you all, cleanse your tribe of every thing that was bad and dark and bloody and painful and the consequence of the political actions of that time. Your father was a junior official at one of the camps, wasn’t he? Does he ever speak of his time there, of the papers he shuffled or the execution orders he signed? Ah, another wince, as if I said something in poor taste… I’m not up here at this podium to be polite or dance around your revisionist sensibilities. I am here to speak truth to power, my truth in the face of the power you represent.”
Tap... tap. Is this thing on? She cleared her throat then started to speak, her voice cracking just a little as she read the prepared introduction from the card in her hand.
“Not a complex life, not a simple one either. Just me and what I wanted, and what I got. I'm here to tell you about that, and about all the places in between that I've finally, in my seventy-eighth year, started to explore. I've gone on walkabout through my head and around my life for the past five months, you see, and this is what I've learned.”
“I started doing this my first few weeks in the camps, back when I was a girl. I’d travel from barracks to barracks, interviewing people for their stories, their bits of wisdom, maybe score a few bites of some sweet that my mother wouldn’t let me eat because we all knew that the camp dentist was a butcher. We were lucky enough to get moved from Manzanar after the first six months, before the cholera epidemic there, so I had a fresh crop of new subjects to quiz and harass and spy on that kept my interest from flagging.
“Looking back, I see it as a way to try to figure out just what I was doing there, what my entire family was doing there… the same way that a group of women will worriedly quiz a rape victim in their midst as to just what she was doing when she was attacked and brutalized, secretly hoping to figure out the magic combination of events to avoid at all costs. I, too, wanted to know why my family was being singled out from all the other families in our neighborhood, why my family was being brutalized, abandoned, betrayed by our country. I wanted to know by what right, what mandate from heaven, our government could revoke all our rights as citizens and throw us into century-old camps to rot the next five years away.
“None of our fellow camp inmates – I see you wince at that work, Honored Speaker – well, inmate is the correct and accurate word. We were held prisoner against our will. We were inmates of a lunatic asylum outside our walls. Society’s fear had curdled to madness and we were the scapegoats driven out of town, curses laden on our heads in the twisted hope that our punishment for your crimes would free you all, cleanse your tribe of every thing that was bad and dark and bloody and painful and the consequence of the political actions of that time. Your father was a junior official at one of the camps, wasn’t he? Does he ever speak of his time there, of the papers he shuffled or the execution orders he signed? Ah, another wince, as if I said something in poor taste… I’m not up here at this podium to be polite or dance around your revisionist sensibilities. I am here to speak truth to power, my truth in the face of the power you represent.”
Okay, so I'm futzing with my color scheme in lieu of chortling about the fact that I've finally got a plot! W00t! And I'm only 52 words behind where I should be as of this fine a.m. Even better. Instead of attempting to fully multitask at work like Cybele, I shall simply spend the day taking notes on the fine, fine plot I'm developing. Hey, if I don't act like it's amazing, I'll weep...
11.04.2002
The real secret to this novel-in-a-month thing? "You have to keep all your marbles in the same duck." (Dilbert's Real Life Quotes)
Spent a great afternoon at the Bourgeois Pig yesterday scribbling away with three other nanos and my buddy Doselle, and was actually able to get some really difficult scenes written that would have had me curled up in a corner sobbing had I tried them at home all by my lonesome. I was also amazed that I was able to actually write in a cafe - I haven't been able to do that before, but maybe I just need that grandiose looming deadline impetus. Yeah, I just need to be spanked...
Spent a great afternoon at the Bourgeois Pig yesterday scribbling away with three other nanos and my buddy Doselle, and was actually able to get some really difficult scenes written that would have had me curled up in a corner sobbing had I tried them at home all by my lonesome. I was also amazed that I was able to actually write in a cafe - I haven't been able to do that before, but maybe I just need that grandiose looming deadline impetus. Yeah, I just need to be spanked...