Done any significant amount of knitting (we shall not speak of the spinning which has not happened, nor the designing)
In other words, the work, the school, and the life stuff have taken over – seemingly permanently, and while I still may rebel to stand and shout, “There are four lights!” I feel that the creative part of my little corner of the world is… crumbly. Perhaps crispy. It certainly isn’t lush and vibrant just now. I have only my internal assurance to know that it even exists.
And I have what may amount to a hubristic faith in that assurance. So thanks for sticking with me.
I have this funny, perverse mental habit. When someone tells me, “You HAVE to watch X. You will LOVE X,” I immediately find myself averse to ever looking at such a thing.
My mother is a very smart woman.
She now precedes all recommendations with, “So – you will HATE this. You don’t want to watch/read/listen to it.” For some reason, this actually works.
This week is one of those funny, stubby weeks – a few days of work, a few days off, John is picking up my mom from the airport and working an odd, late day tomorrow due to a faculty senate meeting.
As a result, we have that semi-giddy, let-off-the-leash feeling you get when life is off kilter. We watched Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch this evening – growing up in Red Sox Nation, we felt both the hero and the heroine’s pain. And also their triumph. It was a surprisingly nuanced movie. If you like sport, or love someone who likes sport, I can recommend it.
I’m not ready to go to bed yet, and I can hear John upstairs laughing at Milo. It’s a good sound. Hearty and loud. It makes me look forward to the holiday weekend.
Because, in addition to my commitments at school, work, and home, I seem to have helped craft a new writing project idea for November. You may have heard of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind this is kind of crazy, kind of compelling: write a novel-length piece of prose in the 30 days of November. Conceptually, I can see how this might get me past my, “I want to write a novel-length piece of prose, but what if it’s crap?” problem. Because the idea isn’t to write a good novel, just something that is that long. Once convinced of your idea that yes, you can string that many words together about one story, perhaps then you can get out of your own way and proceed crafting something of a decent quality.
It may work, it may not – but I do have one friend who turned the concept into a book contract. There are probably others.
But procrastinating about writing is more than a common occurrence – it’s a cliche. So many of us who like to write, like stories, like to read, and want to tell our own stories end up putting it off indefinitely. Thus it is so that I have about a zillion pieces of ideas around a novel-length piece of prose and have only committed a few of them to pixels. The rest of those ideas keep rolling around in my head like laundry on an endless tumble-dry, going nowhere. Perhaps shrinking. Perhaps I’m letting this metaphor get out of hand.
Enter an idea that sort of bounced around among Rana of Frogs and Ravens, Amanda of Household Opera, and me: NoNaShoStoWriMo, or Not-National Short Story Writing Month. Instead of committing to a 50,000 words in the next month, we’re shooting for the more modest, achievable goal of about 7,500 words. I’ve decided to use the ideas/concepts that have been doing the tumbling and spinning and see where I get with it – perhaps that will get me enough of a start so I can use it as a springboard to an actual long-format work.
Anyone with us?
ETA:
And yes, the name does sound like something in Judoon, for all you Doctor Who fans…
I was pretty jazzed about the Kindle when it first came out. Sitting here as a Metro commuter at the halfway point in my second graduate degree, just the idea of not having to lug a bunch of textbooks is enough to get me at least mildly excited about the prospects of e-readers. However, then there was a bit of disillusionment with how the device’s accounts were handled. And then more with how content was handled, add that to the fact that there’s no native PDF support (a lot of my reading these days is pdf downloads of journal articles), a few other irritations, and… no thanks.
Ability to peruse entire volumes (inside a B&N store, but still)? Interesting.
All in all, this has me thinking, “Well – sometimes people give me B&N gift certificates for Christmas…” Because it looks like B&N is actually looking at the behavior of real readers and designing a product that has a lot more potential to accommodate the way they think and behave.
I got a Wii console for my 40th birthday – because though I may be 40, inside I am 12. I generally use it to work out (EA Sports Fitness – though occasionally glitchy – is surprisingly intense), though I did get sucked into “World of Goo” on a friend’s recommendation. Other than that, we only have the sports game that came with the console. We had a party recently for my school colleagues, and the Wii was the hit of the party. There is something about the game that seems to bring out the positive, encouraging side of people. Miss a hit in baseball? Nobody jeers. Instead, cries of “You wuz ROBBED!” ring out, even from the opposing side.
As someone who really hates what my mother calls the “nyah nyahs,” I have been surprised to witness this sort of behavior. Life has taught me more often that games where there are winners and losers are just… well, nasty.
Even John, who doesn’t really like video games, likes to play Wii. Well, he likes to play Wii Bowling. Since we are both New England kids, I usually respond to his, “Wanna bowl?” with, “Yeah – ya gonna take me bowlin’ an’ buy me a beah?” We’re pretty well matched and the usual score is close. But I found out today that John, well… he’s a magical Wii bowler. He ran upstairs to do something when I was playing my turn, and his turn came before he had returned. Suddenly, his figure went live, and I watched his Mii bowl a perfect strike. Moments later, he ran downstairs and said, “How’d I do?” He had brought his controller upstairs with him and heard it “ding.” So he played his turn blind. From upstairs.
Just tired and uncreative at the moment. I’ve had no odd or awkward encounters on Metro, no epiphanies, no humorous anecdotes about life with the librarian and our zoo. Just a lot of head-down, straight ahead life stuff.
Sorry. More later. Promise. I haven’t given up on blogging, but right now the work/school/life thing is kind of kicking my ass.
Popular posts