5 more things I learned from NaNoWriMo 2012 (2)

1. Once-in-a-lifetime Studio Ghibli film on the big screen marathons make daily quotas difficult.
2. But not impossible over the course of a month so long as you don't get too far behind or let yourself give up after getting somewhat far behind.
3. Thanksgiving break can be a good time to catch up.
4. I have a lot more work to do if this raw material is even going to possibly reassemble itself into something novel-like for next November's draft.
5. There are enough things to write about that I should never run out of ideas for things to draft.

5 things I learned from NaNoWriMo 2012 (1)

1. If I wanted to know whether I'm capable of more sheer output (quality not considered) than I currently produce, the answer is YES.
2. Pre-planning or at least pre-drafting and free-writing are helpful.
3. They make the vomiting of draft material onto the page that much easier.
4. Maybe I should do my reading research in October.
5. Because for some reason it was hard to read as much as I wanted and write as much as I'd committed to on the same days in November.

NaNoWriMo Update 1

I probably shouldn't say this so early, but hitting the quota for National Novel Writing Month today was easy.  It took less than an hour and a half.  That'll be tough to carve out on my busiest days, for sure, but the fact that this is about output and not quality is really very freeing.  (To see the current total, look to your right where the tracker is to keep me honest.)

To some extent, these blogs (one post a day spread among 4 different blogs) are also an experiment in output, but they were more about any daily output, not 1667 words of it.  And it's only really this year that I've started to be more consistent with the daily part.  (I admit I do cheat sometimes since Blogger fixed the scheduling feature, so I can designate a time I want it to say it was posted, so it doesn't look like I did three posts on the same day after getting behind, but I think I've kept it in the same month, and you will notice a regularity there.)  Maybe I needed 3 years of fiddling with that to get into enough of a habit to be able to make NaNoWriMo work for me.

Extensive planning is allowed, and maybe such activities would have helped me focus better and have some themes and chapter divisions already picked out that I could write towards, but my decision to participate was somewhat last minute, and I didn't want to try to cram all that thinking into a short time and set myself up for disappointment.  I sensibly decided to settle for some free-writing to get some topics and ideas down.  On October 31st, I did enough brainstorming to make this some sort of bloated epic.  (I'll settle for hitting the goal of 50,000 related words.)  Now I don't even have to strain to come up with the topic for the day's "chapter."

The result will be a lot of haphazard info dumped onto pages without any thought for novel structure and final form.  According to the rules, that's okay.  Yay rules! 

In conclusion, it looks like my results will be about what I predicted, the kind of kitchen sink draft my essay professor and my fiction professor suggested as an exercise in completing something all in a set time and worrying about editing it later once I saw what kind of story and themes naturally shaped themselves in the drafted material.  I may even hold off trying to dump it all into the computer until the end (or until my hand gives out) to prevent the urge to edit/tinker.  This might mean I won't be able to upload the scrambled novel and get the official completion badge, but I can live with that, if need be.  If I succeed, I'll know, and you'll know, and that's probably enough for a first try.

Just testing whether the looming specter of personal humiliation is a reliable muse

Some advice I liked from the NaNoWriMo website.

2) Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December and beyond. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it’s hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn’t. Every book you’ve ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you.

Except for Joseph Conrad's novels.  He only ever wrote one draft.  Maybe this is why so many of his works are so perfectly depressing.

3) Tell everyone you know that you’re writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who’ve had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

Hey, everyone, I'm writing a "novel" as defined by NaNoWriMo this November.  Don't write to ask how it's going because I probably won't answer your email, and then I will feel guilty about this.  : )  I'll post updates here.  See you then.

Why you should keep writing

"Keep writing and submitting and asking and trying, but don’t forget that the joy of it is in the simple movement of pen over paper. Of finding the exact right word. Of finding yourself carried into the next paragraph by some wild thought. Of getting a new, startling glimpse of the holy. Publication may come, or it may not, but it will never get better than this." - Addie Zierman

Amen.

Ditching the Slacker Voice, an odyssey

In the immortal words of Relient K, "I so hate consequences."

Once upon a time, I adopted a more, shall we say, relaxed speaking voice. You see, I was a graduate school student in a choir full of undergraduates, and I was working a retail job, and my height and confidence, coupled with a somewhat precise speaking voice, large vocabulary, and decent diction seemed, shall we say, threatening at most and not very friendly at least to people I had to interact with every day.

My sister puts it this way, "You make people feel stupid sometimes."

I decided that since a lifetime of slouching hadn't really helped my height be less intimidating, maybe I should try to change my speaking voice, so I did. I adopted a lazy sort of tone, reduced my vocabulary outside the graduate program, and tried to sound more relaxed. Now I'm paying for it.

My voice has been getting more gravelly, and it takes an inordinate amount of time to warm it up for speaking or singing, and I thought it was because of being allergic to the Midwest. I went to see an ENT, and he prescribed some additional thankfully cheap things for the allergies. During the exam, he asked me five times, "Do you strain when you talk?"

Five times I answered, "No?"

After the fifth time, he said, "You strain when you talk. Want to go see a voice therapist?"

"Sure, " I said. It took a while, but I finally saw one. It turns out that I strain when I talk (shocker). After some discussion, it turned out that the main culprit is my slacker voice.

Sigh. You try to be less threatening to others and only hurt yourself. What a strange life lesson.

Because I'm a singer, the therapist told me I might be able to straighten out some of the damage on my own, especially since I knew what was causing it and since I don't need it for those reasons anymore (working a professional job and thus not able to participate in that choir anymore).

I can go back to sounding like an intelligent, professional person again. Hooray! So now, my goal is to ditch the slacker voice before it does any irreparable damage to my vocal cords and my singing voice. Welcome back, diction.

The thing is, after 8 years of the slacker voice, my vocal cords don't really know what the correct way to work feels like, so my throat is tired and still hoarse most of the time.  I don't really know if I'm actually making progress.  Also, I don't always think before I talk (a problem since birth, I think), so I'm not sure how long it will take to reprogram my speech patterns. (I pray not as long as it took to make them a habit.) Wish me luck!

Maybe I'll get an essay out of this someday . . .

When the storyline diverges

Did you ever read Dune by Frank Herbert?  It's kind of a sci-fi classic, but I never finished it.  I got stuck in the part where the main character started to see all these diverging futures, and it made him a little insane.  I can kind of understand that because I'm dealing with no more than three, and it's wearing me out.

In one most likely future, I stay here with my current job but purchase a decent condo or townhome to move into when my lease expires this summer.  (Other variations involve extending my lease 3-6 months and going after the perfect short sale home and possibly getting a roommate or subletting from someone else/moving in as someone else's roommate while looking for that short sale home, thus necessitating two moves in the space of a year, which is . . . problematic.)

In the other future, I get a job elsewhere, and I have to purchase a condo or townhome in another state to move into this summer at the same time as I start the new job.  House hunting from afar is . . . difficult.

The timing is bad/good because I think I'll likely end up moving at the same time either way, so there will definitely be packing, and I can get a head start on that.  See?  I can be positive!

The closer I get to the divergence, the more I feel like I'm living two lives.  I have to put all my eggs in both baskets because there will be serious repercussions and difficulties if I neglect one or the other.  I thought I was having enough trouble trying to fully commit to one life.

Well, Paul (if that was your name) I think with your tons of future vision diverging paths, you were entitled to a little bit of insanity.

God and Grammar Snobs

I wonder if another reason people feel comfortable believing that the church is full of ignorant people is the grammatical errors in worship songs . . .  It's kind of hard to ignore when you're not only hearing it but seeing it in print and obviously incorrect.  Sometimes it's so distracting, I can't sing and have to close my eyes until the next slide shows up.

It's true that I can be a grammar snob, and the new book I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar cracked me up, but the reason why poor grammar writ large on a projection screen is particularly irksome in church is because it distracts me from praising God.  If I'm trying to figure out what the song means, so I can decide if I agree with it and want to sing it, and I just can't, I'm afraid you've lost me with your song.  You are not helping me engage in praise.

I'm aware that I'm too sensitive about this, but what are your thoughts?  Has poor grammar or lack of sense in lyrics tossed you out of a song that's supposed to be drawing you in?  What do you do about it?

A little quote about discipline

It seemed appropriate. 

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly." - Thomas H. Huxley

 Now, then, I'm off to meet a self-imposed deadline.


Do you agree with the sentiment expressed here?  Do you think this is still the case with education?  Have we lost sight of it?