The holiday movie season is here! The holiday movie season is here!
Okay, sarcasm doesn't read well. Yes, the holiday movie season is upon us. Everyone is talking about James Cameron's "Avatar" and Hollywood is gambling that millions and millions of people will get so tired of dealing with Aunt Sarah and her dog stories that they will flee family gatherings in droves and head to the theater. It's a good bet.
I probably won't be one of those people. I simply don't make it out much to the movies these days. In the past, I never was one to go to the movies often, and now a trip to the cineplex is an incredibly rare treat. I might make it out to see a first-run film once, maybe twice a year at most.
Of course, there are good reasons for this. For one, I'm pretty much a homebody. One of my favorite things to do is to lounge on the sofa at home with Jean on the nights we have together, watching a DVD on our tiny TV.
For another thing, I'm not an early adopter of gadgets, social trends, or any thing else, so it follows that I'm not one of those people who has to see a movie when it first comes out. I'm generally happy to wait to see a film until I can get it at the movie store, or even better, for free at the library.
A few more advantages of staying in over heading to the multiplex are that I can control the temperature of the room (I usually come out of the theater with my lips having turned blue), I can drink beer instead of six-dollar buckets of soda, and I can pause the action whenever my tiny bladder demands. And, of course, there's the cost. A trip to the Rave in Vestavia for the family will set me back a quick fifty bucks, easy.
So it's no mean feat to get me out the door to the movies. A film must significantly tickle my fancy for me to plant my butt in a theater seat. This year, there are a couple of likely candidates.
Sure, everybody is going to see "Avatar" (Roger Ebert likened it to an event movie, like "Star Wars" or "Harry Potter"), and it looks good to me, but I'll wait for the furor to die down a bit. What should be an easy ticket is the new Terry Gilliam film "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus".
Gilliam's movies work best when he's dealing with the fantastic (See "Brazil", "Twelve Monkeys"... hell, just watch anything he's done), and from the trailer it seems that he's headed in that direction once more. This film might just be another "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", but the cast -- including Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, and Colin Farrell -- should ensure that nothing like that happens.
Another flick that might find me out of the house on Christmas Day is "Tony Stark Goes to Victorian London", also known as "Sherlock Holmes". In "Iron Man", it seemed like Robert Downey Jr. found his acting niche as the charismatic, intelligent, tech-savvy playboy. The trailer for "Sherlock Holmes" appears to be more of the same:
Guy Ritchie is directing (I wondered about that when I saw the fight scene, and is that Bullet-Tooth Tony I saw in there?), and the cast includes Jude Law and Rachel McAdams. It should be fun to see the long-historic character of Holmes turned into an action/supernatural blockbuster.
So there you have it. I probably won't see you at the theater for these, but you can bet that by March, I'll have been to Blockbuster and you'll find me on the sofa enjoying these two films.
17 December 2009
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
During our weekly visit to the Homewood Public Library this past weekend, Jean and I picked up the DVD of "The Deep" episode of the BBC's fantastic documentary "The Blue Planet". After work last night (and following a bit of universal remote finagling on my part), we sat down on the sofa and watched as Sir David Attenborough described some of the strangest creatures found on planet earth (a sample is below):
It was interesting to learn that not only is the sea bed the least-explored part of our planet (more people have been to outer space than have been to the bottom of the ocean) but also that every expedition discovers new and ever-more-odd species of life.
Most of these species fall into two categories: Hunter and hunted, just links in the food chain. At that depth, it's a short chain and the different species have evolved in strange ways to ensure their survival. There are some ugly mothers at the bottom of the ocean, to be sure. As we watched some of the more violent-looking creatures, Jean turned to me with this thought:
"They look so murderous," she said. "I wonder if that's some sort of karmic hell."
It's an interesting, albeit sobering, thought. In my humble opinion, you would have to lead a seriously horrific life to be reincarnated as a creature found only on the cold, dark sea bed, never seeing the light of day, with your previous transgressions manifested in your appearance.
My bigger question is this: If that is a karmic hell, how would you get out of it?
15 December 2009
Writing and momentum (or lack thereof)
Fellow blogger (and really smart guy) Wade Kwon made the point in a recent blog post that "perfection kills". Essentially what he said was that if you try to make everything perfect (especially in the blogging biz) that you'll never get anywhere.
But what hit home with me was this quote: "Although I’m not a fan of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, the event has at least one great takeaway lesson: Your momentum matters... Those who finish their 50,000-word novels in 30 days are rewarded with two things: a mass of sloppy, unedited writing, and the use of momentum to accomplish a once seemingly impossible accomplishment."
In my writing, momentum is -- simply put -- huge. Way huge. Godzilla-like ginormous, even. Once I get going, I don't want to stop. It's a great feeling to get thousands and thousands of words out of my head and into the computer.
But once I stop, getting back on track is damned nigh to impossible.
I'm in the middle of such a period right now. On November 30, when I hit my 50,000-word goal for NaNoWriMo, I decided I needed to take a little sabbatical. A week, at most, I thought. It would give me time to get some ideas flowing for other projects, and besides, I deserved it. I knocked out those 50,000 words in twenty days -- I was due some rest and relaxation.
But before I knew it, one week had melted into two, and the situation threatened to keep stretching until the holidays were over -- and I am certain that by then I could find one or two more reasons to keep from getting to the keyboard. I hadn't written a thing since December 1, not a blog post, work on Committed, or anything else of substance other than the occasional Tweet or facebook status update.
But thanks to the nagging voices in my head, I'm back at it -- even if the first steps are nothing more than some hand-scribbled notes in a spiral notebook and a blog post about how important momentum is to me. It's a start. And like the wise man said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
I can guarantee two things: Those steps won't be perfect. But one will follow another until I get someplace. It might not be my initial destination, but I will journey far and wide before it's all said and done.
But what hit home with me was this quote: "Although I’m not a fan of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, the event has at least one great takeaway lesson: Your momentum matters... Those who finish their 50,000-word novels in 30 days are rewarded with two things: a mass of sloppy, unedited writing, and the use of momentum to accomplish a once seemingly impossible accomplishment."
In my writing, momentum is -- simply put -- huge. Way huge. Godzilla-like ginormous, even. Once I get going, I don't want to stop. It's a great feeling to get thousands and thousands of words out of my head and into the computer.
But once I stop, getting back on track is damned nigh to impossible.
I'm in the middle of such a period right now. On November 30, when I hit my 50,000-word goal for NaNoWriMo, I decided I needed to take a little sabbatical. A week, at most, I thought. It would give me time to get some ideas flowing for other projects, and besides, I deserved it. I knocked out those 50,000 words in twenty days -- I was due some rest and relaxation.
But before I knew it, one week had melted into two, and the situation threatened to keep stretching until the holidays were over -- and I am certain that by then I could find one or two more reasons to keep from getting to the keyboard. I hadn't written a thing since December 1, not a blog post, work on Committed, or anything else of substance other than the occasional Tweet or facebook status update.
But thanks to the nagging voices in my head, I'm back at it -- even if the first steps are nothing more than some hand-scribbled notes in a spiral notebook and a blog post about how important momentum is to me. It's a start. And like the wise man said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
I can guarantee two things: Those steps won't be perfect. But one will follow another until I get someplace. It might not be my initial destination, but I will journey far and wide before it's all said and done.
03 December 2009
Lessons from NaNoWriMo
For the past couple of days I've had time to think about this whole NaNoWriMo experience and what it has meant to me. I think it is a wonderful, crazy idea to get authors from around the world to write a new novel in 30 days. To be honest, NaNoWriMo 2009 turned out to be an enjoyable, challenging, and -- at times -- frustrating experience for me. I'm glad it did it. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
NaNoWriMo made for a most memorable November, and one I'll likely not forget for a number of reasons. But the main reason is simply this: I have a first draft of my first novel. That was my goal for the month, and reaching it has given me an incredible sense of fulfillment -- as well as expectation for what I will do next with this story of Snakebit. It made me feel like I can be a writer, if I just sit down and do the work. It's a fantastic feeling. I imagine many of the other participants feel similarly; at least I hope they do.
And there were a lot of participants. I remain amazed at the sheer scale of the entire enterprise. If NaNoWriMo signifies anything, it's that there are a whole lot of people out there who want to write. The final numbers weren't up on the NaNoWriMo site the last time I checked (and please don't hold me to my recollection), but I think something like 170,000 people took part in the madness with around 16,000 people "winning" by hitting the 50,000 word mark. In total, there were more than TWO BILLION words written for NaNoWriMo. In a single month.
Whew!
It felt good to be a part of that enterprise, sharing a common goal with so many people around the world. I enjoyed seeing what other writers had to say about the experience, how they were faring, what techniques they used during the month. It was enlightening and informative, and a learning experience in many ways.
The most important thing I think I learned is that I actually can can start and finish a first draft of a novel in a month. I can have completion, as long as I work for it. This has been a problem for me for years. My writing, before November, was generally a long, drawn-out process. For example, I've been working on my other major project, Committed, for nearly three years -- and I think I've only hit about 80,000 words in that epic. To start something like Snakebit -- almost on a whim, I might add -- and finish it in 30 days is incredibly encouraging for my writing career.
Also, NaNoWriMo hammered it into my thick skull that there is no substitute for sitting at the keyboard and writing. You write even when it's not fun, even when it's not easy; you just keep writing, one word after another. This sounds ridiculously simple (and it is), but I only really got the point this month. The ideas in my head are not going to magically transfer themselves into engaging prose in the computer. It's up to me to sit down and do the work. And it is work. Hard work. But I like this work, and NaNoWriMo reminded me why.
The pieces on this blog may not always be evidence of the following, but I am pretty picky about how I write what I write. It's not the just the story I want to tell, but I want to tell it in an engaging and entertaining way, using just the right words to get my ideas across. This pretty much hampers any pretense of productivity, and such behavior is completely useless during NaNoWriMo. Learning that I can tell my inner editor to take a hike for a month is probably the most liberating thing I discovered in November.
Ditching my inner editor allowed me to get my story down, and that was the important thing. Good prose can wait. The draft I have now is undoubtedly a mess; there are holes in the plot the size of Connecticut, my main characters sometimes seem to be no more than cardboard cutouts, much of my descriptive work has all the flair of and vigor of cold oatmeal, and much of what I wrote is quite likely gramatically offensive. I can accept that. This is a first draft. I will edit, rewrite, and edit some more until the story is told exactly how I want to tell it. A good story isn't at its best with the first telling. Only after the tale has been retold, perhaps many times with details and embellishments added with each telling, does it get better. I have a foundation to build upon, and that is exactly what I wanted out of this adventure called NaNoWriMo.
I could not have finished the draft had it not been for some serious planning and scheduling. This point was driven home right at the beginning when I took off five straight days from writing at the start of November. I planned for the days off and I eventually overcame the word deficit, but not without some serious ass-busting at the end.
So why was the plan so important if I still had to pull off the literary equivalent of a cramming for an exam during the last three days of the month? Because without that plan, I wouldn't have been in position to pull off those last three days. I didn't always stick to the plan, but I worked with it and tweaked it as circumstances dictated. I will continue to use this kind of planning both for major projects and daily work.
All in all, I have to say NaNoWriMo 2009 was an overwhelmingly positive experience, and one that I will remember. I accomplished much and I learned much. I liked it so much that I plan to do it again in 2010.
But that's a year away. What do I do now?
For the time being, I'm going to let Snakebit settle. I plan to leave it alone for the month of December, at least for the most part. I'll walk away from it and come back to it for editing and rewriting when January comes. I'll admit that I probably won't walk too far away from it; I had an idea while I was taking shower this morning that filled up a big plot hole and I ran to the computer, still dripping wet, to get it down before it flitted away. I have committed to not reading the draft until at least January 1. Then I'll get back to work, and I'm shooting to have a manuscript ready to submit to potential publishers by March 1.
I'll also be getting back to work on Committed, putting up episodes on a more regular basis than readers have been used to seeing in the past. I learned quickly during NaNoWriMo that I can crank out some verbage when I just sit down and type. This should help a lot with the episodic nature of Committed. And that story is about to start being all kinds of silly fun, not only to read, but also to write. I sense some serious craziness about to happen for Tal and Liv and the bunch.
I'm also considering making some changes to my website; it's been static for too long, and I want to try some new ideas to get things hopping over there. Content will be a priority, but I also want to look at some technical things. I'm also considering changing the site so that Committed is available only to registered users -- this might be a way to save my rights of first publication when I get the story ready to submit to publishers, but it may be too late for that now. I'll be doing some more study on that issue soon.
Another avenue I want to explore is getting some paid freelance work. Momma needs a new pair of shoes, you know? I'm looking to do some short story work (I've got one idea for a story about a new arrival to heaven that tickles my funnybone) and possibly some other articles for submission to a variety of publications.
So that's that. One project done, another begun. I'm looking forward to the rest of December and the upcoming New Year. Should be a good one.
NaNoWriMo made for a most memorable November, and one I'll likely not forget for a number of reasons. But the main reason is simply this: I have a first draft of my first novel. That was my goal for the month, and reaching it has given me an incredible sense of fulfillment -- as well as expectation for what I will do next with this story of Snakebit. It made me feel like I can be a writer, if I just sit down and do the work. It's a fantastic feeling. I imagine many of the other participants feel similarly; at least I hope they do.
And there were a lot of participants. I remain amazed at the sheer scale of the entire enterprise. If NaNoWriMo signifies anything, it's that there are a whole lot of people out there who want to write. The final numbers weren't up on the NaNoWriMo site the last time I checked (and please don't hold me to my recollection), but I think something like 170,000 people took part in the madness with around 16,000 people "winning" by hitting the 50,000 word mark. In total, there were more than TWO BILLION words written for NaNoWriMo. In a single month.
Whew!
It felt good to be a part of that enterprise, sharing a common goal with so many people around the world. I enjoyed seeing what other writers had to say about the experience, how they were faring, what techniques they used during the month. It was enlightening and informative, and a learning experience in many ways.
Lessons learned
The most important thing I think I learned is that I actually can can start and finish a first draft of a novel in a month. I can have completion, as long as I work for it. This has been a problem for me for years. My writing, before November, was generally a long, drawn-out process. For example, I've been working on my other major project, Committed, for nearly three years -- and I think I've only hit about 80,000 words in that epic. To start something like Snakebit -- almost on a whim, I might add -- and finish it in 30 days is incredibly encouraging for my writing career.
Also, NaNoWriMo hammered it into my thick skull that there is no substitute for sitting at the keyboard and writing. You write even when it's not fun, even when it's not easy; you just keep writing, one word after another. This sounds ridiculously simple (and it is), but I only really got the point this month. The ideas in my head are not going to magically transfer themselves into engaging prose in the computer. It's up to me to sit down and do the work. And it is work. Hard work. But I like this work, and NaNoWriMo reminded me why.
Imperfection is okay
The pieces on this blog may not always be evidence of the following, but I am pretty picky about how I write what I write. It's not the just the story I want to tell, but I want to tell it in an engaging and entertaining way, using just the right words to get my ideas across. This pretty much hampers any pretense of productivity, and such behavior is completely useless during NaNoWriMo. Learning that I can tell my inner editor to take a hike for a month is probably the most liberating thing I discovered in November.
Ditching my inner editor allowed me to get my story down, and that was the important thing. Good prose can wait. The draft I have now is undoubtedly a mess; there are holes in the plot the size of Connecticut, my main characters sometimes seem to be no more than cardboard cutouts, much of my descriptive work has all the flair of and vigor of cold oatmeal, and much of what I wrote is quite likely gramatically offensive. I can accept that. This is a first draft. I will edit, rewrite, and edit some more until the story is told exactly how I want to tell it. A good story isn't at its best with the first telling. Only after the tale has been retold, perhaps many times with details and embellishments added with each telling, does it get better. I have a foundation to build upon, and that is exactly what I wanted out of this adventure called NaNoWriMo.
I could not have finished the draft had it not been for some serious planning and scheduling. This point was driven home right at the beginning when I took off five straight days from writing at the start of November. I planned for the days off and I eventually overcame the word deficit, but not without some serious ass-busting at the end.
So why was the plan so important if I still had to pull off the literary equivalent of a cramming for an exam during the last three days of the month? Because without that plan, I wouldn't have been in position to pull off those last three days. I didn't always stick to the plan, but I worked with it and tweaked it as circumstances dictated. I will continue to use this kind of planning both for major projects and daily work.
All in all, I have to say NaNoWriMo 2009 was an overwhelmingly positive experience, and one that I will remember. I accomplished much and I learned much. I liked it so much that I plan to do it again in 2010.
But that's a year away. What do I do now?
What's Next?
For the time being, I'm going to let Snakebit settle. I plan to leave it alone for the month of December, at least for the most part. I'll walk away from it and come back to it for editing and rewriting when January comes. I'll admit that I probably won't walk too far away from it; I had an idea while I was taking shower this morning that filled up a big plot hole and I ran to the computer, still dripping wet, to get it down before it flitted away. I have committed to not reading the draft until at least January 1. Then I'll get back to work, and I'm shooting to have a manuscript ready to submit to potential publishers by March 1.
I'll also be getting back to work on Committed, putting up episodes on a more regular basis than readers have been used to seeing in the past. I learned quickly during NaNoWriMo that I can crank out some verbage when I just sit down and type. This should help a lot with the episodic nature of Committed. And that story is about to start being all kinds of silly fun, not only to read, but also to write. I sense some serious craziness about to happen for Tal and Liv and the bunch.
I'm also considering making some changes to my website; it's been static for too long, and I want to try some new ideas to get things hopping over there. Content will be a priority, but I also want to look at some technical things. I'm also considering changing the site so that Committed is available only to registered users -- this might be a way to save my rights of first publication when I get the story ready to submit to publishers, but it may be too late for that now. I'll be doing some more study on that issue soon.
Another avenue I want to explore is getting some paid freelance work. Momma needs a new pair of shoes, you know? I'm looking to do some short story work (I've got one idea for a story about a new arrival to heaven that tickles my funnybone) and possibly some other articles for submission to a variety of publications.
So that's that. One project done, another begun. I'm looking forward to the rest of December and the upcoming New Year. Should be a good one.
02 December 2009
NaNoWriMo Update: Days 25-30 -- An End
Daily Stats
Days 25-30 Word Quota: 15,100Days 25-30 Words Written: 15,167
Cumulative Word Count: 50,067
Reaching an end
At midnight on Monday night, NaNoWriMo 2009 came to an end. I have been woefully lax in blogging about my progress for the past week. I'll end the suspense early: I achieved the 50,000 word goal, and I am a winner (I have the PDF certificate to prove it).I hvae perfectly good reasons for not providing an account of my doings over the past seven days, and although Thanksgiving is over, I'd like to share with you my recipe for How to Make The Last Week of NaNoWriMo Really, Really Difficult.
1. Start from behind
If you want to make the last week of NaNoWriMo as difficult as possible, you want to be behind schedule. Take my experience. After renewing my excitement about the story on Day 24 and writing a quite impressive 3,300 words, I found I was still far behind where I needed to be. To that point I was somewhere just under 35K words total; which meant I would need to knock out some serious word count over the next six days. Difficult, yes, but hardly impossible. I needed to add some more challenge.2. Throw in a Holiday mix
I found that challenge in the approaching holiday weekend. I love Thanksgiving. It is one of my favorite holidays; there is something about family and food and the cool weather that touches me. It does not, however, make for good writing. Nor does an incredibly busy day at work the day before. Add in the Iron Bowl on the Friday following the annual gorge-fest, and you can make things really hard in that last week.I knew both Wednesday and Thursday would be busy days, so I scheduled accordingly. I set small goals of 500 words on each day -- not where I needed to be, but I would make some kind of progress on the story. It was part of the plan.
Of course, on Wednesday, I completely blew off writing, thanks to work. The day before Thanksgiving is a big day at the Pork Palace for carry-out business. We sell a lot of smoked turkey breasts and side items, as is to be expected, but also a surprising amount of ribs (I imagine I could eat ribs on Thanksgiving, but it just seems very, very wrong to me. I'm a turkey man). As such, I ended up working a double shift of Wednesday, both to help out with the increased business, but also to make up for the shift I would miss when the restaurant was closed on Thursday. By the time I got home on Wednesday night, I was exhausted and had to call it a night without even looking at the computer.
I made up for it on Thursday, mostly writing in the morning. We had great dinner that afternoon with Jean, Caroline, Katie and Juliana, and after one of the best Thanksgiving Days in recent memory, I had ended up writing almost 1,100 words. Good for a holiday, but not good for my cumulative total. I was still just under 36,000 words with only four days to go.
I expected to gain some ground on Friday, or at least that's what I told myself. I scheduled a 3,300-word day, and I was eager to get some good writing done.
Yeah, right. It was Iron Bowl day.
I did some writing that morning, but most of the time I spent on the computer was taken by checking on pre-game information and reading articles about both Auburn and Alabama. Once game time arrived, any more writing I had hoped to do simply wasn't going to happen. I went to work during the third quarter of the game, came home after the Pork Palace closed early, and went to bed. I had written 1,500 words for the day.
3. Mix in new projects
At this point, I had three days left to write and more than 13,000 words to go.The task before me was daunting. Scary, even. That's a lot of words-- a whole lot of words -- to knock out in three days. And not to just type them into a computer; I needed them to make sense and advance my story. Ah, yes; the story. I was rapidly running out of ideas for the story as well. By then I had only one phase outline completed for one of the chapters, and another phase outline sketched out in a raw form. The rest of the story was wandering around aimlessly in my head, making itself incredibly difficult to find.
But that just wasn't enough difficulty for me. Something else needed to be thrown in to make things really, really hard. Namely, a newsletter and a website.
Not only would I be typing like a madman over the weekend, but Jean would need a significant amount of computer time herself. Magic City Blues News, the newsletter Jean and I lay out each month, was behind schedule and needed a lot of work. Jean is also building a website for a client of hers, a gentleman who hand-builds guitars from cypress knots (more about that later).
Instead of panicking (to be honest, there was a little panic. What do you mean we have to do all this by Monday?), we planned. We plotted. We scheduled. And by early Saturday morning, we had a strategy that might -- just might -- let us get most everything done, if we stuck to it.
4. Hit your stride
Time was slipping away and there was too much to do. If I was going to hit that magical 50,000-word goal, something would have to happen -- and soon.I guess I was exactly where I needed to be.
Maybe it was the deadline pressure, or perhaps the structure; it might have been the synergy I felt from working with Jean, but I hung in there and Saturday was the day when I hit my stride. We swapped time at the computer, each of us working in shifts that lasted between 45 minutes and an hour, and we each made the most of our time. And during my shifts, the words just started flowing. I was hammering out a lot of material, completely focused on the task at hand. If I got stuck with something, I just moved on to the next idea. Quantity was the important thing here, not quality.
I made a decision to work with the story in sections; trying to tell the story from start to finish wouldn't work. There was just too much story left to write; I figure that telling all of Snakebit will take 80,000 words or more. I took a hint from the NaNoWriMo website and worked on pulling together a decent beginning, middle and end, with highlights in between and the details to be filled in during the editing process.
And it worked. By the end of the day on Saturday, I had written more than 5,000 words. My cumulative total was over 42,500 and I could not only see light at the end of the tunnel, I could also make out the exit and what lay beyond. After Saturday, hitting the 50,000 word mark was practically a foregone conclusion.
Sunday was another very busy and super productive day, following the same pattern as Saturday. I knocked out more than 4,000 words on Sunday, working mainly on the ending of the story.
5. Bask in the glow of success
Monday was more difficult than the other two days, mainly because I almost ran out of things to write. I was happy to type out the words "The End," but when I checked my word counter afterward, I was still 800 or so words short. I ended up adding two more sequences to the middle of the story, and sometime around 3 o'clock that afternoon, I became an official NaNoWriMo winner.That's 50,000 words in the month of November. For me, that ended up being twenty writing days. And there there is still much work to be done on Snakebit. There are plot holes to be filled, characters and descriptions to be fleshed out, and probably two months of editing work to do. It is a book that is far from complete, and I know it. Yet I also know this: I have a foundation. A good one. My first one.
I am eager to see what happens next.
Tomorrow: What NaNoWriMo taught me
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
