Dystopian Present #001

Close the gun show loophole!  We require background checks for those who care for our children, why not for those who want to kill them?

Out of the Zeitgeist - Publishing Edition

For my entire life, I've had a problem with zeitgeist. It's not like I've made an effort to do this. Life, especially childhood and youth,  would have been a whole lot easier to be "one of us"—of any "us." It's not that I don't want to walk to the same drum, it's that I can't even hear the beat.

Case in point: today's NY Times Book Review best seller lists. I read a lot. So you'd figure if there was any place I had a chance to align with the zeitgeist, this might be it.

Well, I went through this week's Fiction best sellers. Of the individual titles represented (regardless of format; some are selling loads in several), here's how I map:

• read/purchased   6/58
• vaguely interested in 6/58
• would rather read a laxative label  46/58
  (since the majority of books on these lists are genre fiction, you may be getting ready to make a snarky comment about elitism. Oh? Of the last 20 books I read, 13 were scifi, fantasy and/or mystery. I just don't want to read any of these.) 

Seeing that this is where I stand as a reader explains a lot about me as a writer, doesn't it?

Annual Reflection

Yes, we measure time by artificial constructs. But we do measure; and we make our rituals to observe the passage. December has always been my month for reflection. So what did I come up with this year?

A year can hold a lot.

What it holds will be good, bad and/or indifferent, in different combination and to different degrees for each of us.

Mostly the indifferent fades over time and we hold onto the good. Or hope to. Sometimes, as for the families and friends of 26 people who were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, last week, the bad in the year is too overwhelming.

The image on this page is a patchwork of the good from my year 2012. It represents travel to places I enjoy, time spent with family and friends, a satisfying hobby, one happily-achieved "bucket list" goal and one promise kept. And unseen on the page are the shadows, sometimes directly behind these images, plus a whole lot of indifferent connective tissue. Only when I see these moments all together here does it occur to me that everything good had to be made to come about; nothing just happened.

What will next year hold? There's no way of knowing. There never is. You must live it to find out.

NaNo 2012: Winning - ish

'Tis the night after Thanksgiving, and I've "won" NaNo.  That means I've managed to cough up 50K words of a new piece of work. More specifically, with seven days still to go, I've managed 51,507 words.  In NaNo terms, that makes me a winner.

I feel a minor tingle of accomplishment and a big wash of relief. NaNo has been especially hard this year, flying without a net. I wasn't all that confident that I had enough in this new project to write about. I'm glad to have been proven wrong. I've made it and with time to spare.


But I seem to be accomplishing less each year, and that's disappointing. Yes, I've got seven days left, but only a few of them hold good blocks of writing time. I know I won't be finishing NaNo with anywhere near a personal best (that remains at the bar I set on Year One), but I'm not even sure I'll pass the 60K mark as I did in both previous years.

Relief is a nice feeling, but it's a passive kind of nice. It would have been nicer to earn some fireworks.

Status Update: NaNo Week 1

So endedth the seventh day of NaNoWriMo. And I am totally shocked to report that I'm ending the day with a word count of 20,121.

No two of my NaNoes have been alike.

Year One was the Adventure. I was a little terrified at the challenge. The story I chose was in a genre I'd never tackled before, and many times more plot-heavy than my usual tales (probably while I'm still mopping up after it!).  I did a lot of detailed preparation: timelines; family trees; and I hadn't done so much research and organization since my college days in the History department. Most important: I had a wonderful cheering section of friends and coworkers, many of whom I saw five days a week.  I made it through the month and made it beyond the 50K goal. It was exhilarating and exhausting.  And absolutely inspiring.

Year Two was the Purge.  I had a story I knew I reallyreally wanted to get started telling. My prep was a set of character sketches and a long list of bullet points for things I wanted to make sure to fit somewhere into the story somewhere. And I had a very loose timeline that I clarified for myself with a set of doodles that represented character relationships as of the milestone markers. I'd changed jobs, so my cheering section was remote. When my energies flagged, I'd think about the year before and tell myself I'd already proven I could do this.  December 1st found me quietly excited. I had fewer pages, but I'd still gone beyond 50K again and this time I had a number of pages that I felt truly proud of having written.

This year is the Improvisation.  As of October 15, all I knew was that I absolutely had to do NaNo again. The other two NaNo projects were dangling over me, yearning to get finished, but I'd been so distracted this year by publishing (a non-NaNo book) that I hadn't done much writing.  I knew that NaNo would be just the kick in the pants I needed. So I decided to start a sequel to unfinished book #1, on the theory that I'd have familiar characters to work with and that, along the way, I might come up with a few things to iron out some of the wrinkles in book #1.  I did some quick mind-mapping and thought I could see enough shape there to get me started on November 1st.  I'm mostly cheering myself on this year, though I do check in with a circle of NaNo participants who found me from a public G+ post.  It all seems so loose that I can't believe it's enough to get me through to the end. But I'm doing it. And this year, that was the entire point!