The bari-sax
is very sexy.
Those low
notes
go
down
to your soul
and grind around
in your groin.
I love
good
sax.
.
This is culled from a bio piece about the Grace Awakening Myth character Ryan, who plays sax. You may have noticed that Ryan is a little obsessed with sex, as well.
April is Camp NaNoWriMo time. You may know about NaNoWriMo–that frenzy of writing that is National Novel Writing Month. If you sign up, you commit to write 50,000 words of a novel in November. (Like you have nothing better to do, what with American Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and the like!) I find it to be a punishing pace to write 1666 words every day for 30 days. You can join with or make writing friends who you encourage. You write. Your receive encouragement or pressure from your writing friends. You write. You get inspiring emails from the Office of Letters and Light. You write. I did it (as you can see by the icon on my page), but I confess that while working full time and juggling all my other responsibilities, it was really painful.
Camp NaNo is much less intense. First of all, you can set your own goal. I set mine for 25,000 words in 30 days. That’s the pace I wrote Grace Awakening Dreams and Power: an average of 834 words a day. At that pace I finished a 157,000 word (400+ pages) novel draft in six months. It is a nice, relaxing pace, and joining Camp will provide the discipline of commitment and accountability to stick with it, since I’ve gotten a bit lax in my writing routine lately.
So here I am, plodding along at camp. I still have to introduce myself to my cabin mates (having some trouble figuring out how to email them). Another nice thing about Camp, is that it doesn’t have to be a novel, so long as you’re writing. So while I do have a novel that I expect to be working on, I can count blog posts, poetry, and articles I write for magazines. Gotta love that, right?
Look! This makes 290+ words towards today’s word count! 🙂
See you at Camp?
(Read this one aloud, in slam style)
.
I need a poem.
I need to feed on bones of poems.
To seed strong reeds that groan like bones and sound like poems,
I need to lead the words that alone clone more poems.
I need a poem to seed, to grow.
I need a poem to read, to know.
Beyond fat groaning tomes I need the brevity of poems.
To be complete, to seek, to speak,
I need a poem.
I thought I’d have a ring or bracelet made with a Latin inscription that reminds me of my goal to “write a thousand words a day.” I have played around with the Google translator and it offers me:
It looks rather impressive, doesn’t it? Unfortuately, the ring I have in mind has room for 30 characters, and this is 32. I could go with “write a thousand”
or even “a thousand words”
I could skip the amount, and just say “write daily” which is probably the most essential point
Finally, I decided that I could boil it down to a single injunction:
Yep. That’s the crucial component of the exercise. Quit goofing around. No more procrastinating. Turn off Facebook. Quick checking out eBay.
I love learning. I like researching and writing papers. I like developing programs and evaluating them. I like coming up with innovative ways of doing things. I love the satisfaction of successfully meeting a challenge. In short, I’m a nerd.
This also means, I probably should have applied for grad school years ago. It was first suggested to me by a teaching assistant in a Women’s History course I did back about 1989. At the time, in a one income household with a toddler and baby, it was just something to sigh about and say, “Some day…”
I did apply for an extremely competitive Creative Writing program at an eminent university two years running. They have very, very low acceptance rate, but I figured, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” As it happened, I received the second rejection the same day I got my first royalty cheque from Grace, and somehow that told me that it didn’t matter. Most people enter that program so they can get a royalty cheque. I was ahead without them. I will continue to develop those skills working with amazing authors, attending conferences, reading, and being challenged by my editor and friend, Vikki.
I still want to learn though, and I want the credential, because it will open other opportunities. Today I dropped two grad school applications in the mail. Ideally, I’m going explore the Finnish education system and how it can be adapted for use in B.C. I’ll focus on some sort of curriculum development, either in the traditional class room or via distance learning. Both options offer all sorts of exciting prospects, so I’m eager to see where I’ll end up.
Should I confess that my biggest fear is that if I end up in a program that requires weekend study, that it will impact the May 2014 weekend when Diana Gabaldon will come to be presenter at the Shuswap Association of Writers’ Word on the Lake Festival of Writers and Readers? The grad school will have to do without me that weekend, as I’ve already booked it off! My kids aren’t allowed to get married that weekend either. I have my priorities.
And how should I celebrate this new adventure? Some would raise a drink with friends, or take their honey out for dinner. I’m celebrating with new Vogs, culled from the collection of the ultimate Vogger, Rebecca in Winnipeg.
Welcome to the family Fluevog Second Miracle Cascades… (See if you can find them in the group photo of Rebecca’s shoes, in the link above!)
I spent an hour today participating in a Twitter chat with a ‘big name publisher’ and several authors involved in a recently released anthology.
There were a few of us tossing in questions and responding to the assorted tweets. Key word: few. 3 authors. A publicist. Members of the reading public? Maybe 4? (I was one of those) All those people had obviously been promoting the event on their own blogs and websites. It just doesn’t seem like a very useful exercise.
I was glad to rub shoulders with these talented folks and banter back and forth with them, but to be honest, it seemed like it was a waste of their time. The messages are now there for posterity for others to enjoy, which could provide some latent publicity, but I’m doubtful of its value.
In theory, a Twitter chat sounds like it’s a good idea. Each author brings his/her own following, exposing them to the other authors. Connect with the fans. Spread the love.
Sounds great. In practice, is it?
What do you think? Do you use Twitter for promotion? Do you use Twitter chats? Have you participated in them?
Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”
Stephen King On Writing p. 121
I kind of like grammar. I like the structure of it, and I like analyzing it. It’s even interesting when I discover I’ve been doing something incorrectly for years. True, I have an English degree, and I teach English (and frequently I’m the grammar expert on staff), but occasionally there is still a surprise.
Last week, Diana Gabaldon posted a selection of her latest work in progress (My Own Heart’s Blood, book 8 in the Outlander series) which included the sentence, “I saw the seriousness that underlay the laughter…” I had to study that for a while.
Underlay- a noun- is the padding that goes beneath carpet. The form of the word we most frequently use is the adjective ‘underlying.’ So, whence cometh ‘that underlay?’ At first glance, I thought it should be ‘that underlaid the laughter,’ but Diana has corrected my grammar before, so I pondered.
Following the lay, laid, laid vs lie, lay, lain model, I realised the verb is to underlie, and therefore the simple past tense must be “Yesterday he underlay the principle with a moral lesson,” and that “Previously he had underlain the principle with moral lesson, until he didn’t any more.” It still doesn’t sound right, but frequently correct grammar doesn’t.
Good thing someone is keeping an eye on us, and providing an excellent grammatical role model.
More importantly, thank heavens for brilliant editors!
How about you? Have you had any grammatical epiphanies lately?
Madame Arthurson brought word tattoos for the Creative Writing Club meeting today. Cool! 🙂
Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.
Stephen King in On Writing
There is an inter-connectiveness between art and the artist. Our lives are fuel for art, a touching point, a grounding place, a beginning, but not a support system. It’s not the scaffold of bones that holds the art in place, because art should not be tethered. Art flies.
Art becomes the air that intoxicates and enlivens the life.
Art supports life.
Shawn L. Bird 
Fictional truths March 3, 2013
Tags: business, fiction, Frank Bures, Keith Oatley, literacy, literature, reading, The Rotarian
March is Literacy Month in the world of Rotary, and there is an interesting article in this month’s The Rotarian magazine. It quotes cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley saying,
Well, duh. Any writer could tell you that. My husband, who has a psychology degree, vets my characters and makes sure I am keeping consistent psychological profiles and responses. I write teen fantasy, mind you. Even those of us crafting fictional worlds do so with care.
Our worlds are crafted to give our readers an opportunity to explore another life, other responses, other realities.
I find it vaguely amusing that the professional business world may not have realised that there is a reason literature is in the curriculum. It would behove more of our leaders to pay close attention to the lessons of Orwell’s 1984, for example. A more well-read population should also be quicker to recognise the danger signs they’ve seen in literature. That’s why I’m a high school English teacher. Along side the history teachers, I aim to provide warnings and inspiration. To raise the next generation to see with clear eyes and communicate their vision with well-chosen words.
Later in the article they quote Oatley quoting Aristotle, “History…tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people.” He adds that fiction “measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.”
Hear. Hear.
.
Work cited:
Bures, Frank. “The Truth about Fiction.” The Rotarian. Vol 191 No. 9 March 2013. pp.29-30.
PS. It behoves me to mention that ‘behove’ is the British spelling of ‘behoove.’
Share this: