What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). Austen is the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. Although she never got married herself, but she is best known for books about women who do get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: she told her fiancé that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.

…There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place…

Austen’s first two books, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were great successes in her lifetime, but after that her readers grew less enthusiastic. Neither Mansfield Park (1814) nor Emma (1816) was as popular. It was only after her death that she became one of the most popular novelists from the 19th century. After the First World War, Jane Austen novels were prescribed to shell-shocked British soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war. Rudyard Kipling said, “There’s no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you’re in a tight place.”

The November issue of Wired has an interesting article about stories written in only six words. Count ‘em, six. November is also the month of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), better known as 1600 odd words a day in linguistic hell to complete a 50K plus word something or other.

…so what’s yours?…

This year I’m taking a break… I just can’t do the 50K thing. But I might be able to do six. So consider it a Meme…. come up with your best six word short story and we can make November a ShoStoSixWorMo instead.

Some examples;

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. – Ernest Hemingway

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. – Margaret Atwood

It’s behind you! Hurry before it – Rockne S. O’Bannon

And mine, you ask?

Birth, stuggle, death. Rinse and repeat. – Ric Knight

So what’s yours?

It’s the birthday of Aldous Huxley, born in Surrey, England (1894). Huxley’s own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was one of the great scientists of the previous century, a man who helped popularize Darwin’s theories of evolution. Huxley’s grandfather is believed to be the man who coined the word “agnostic,” and he argued that all areas of knowledge would one day come to be understood through science.

…An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex…

Huxley considered becoming a scientist himself, but when he was seventeen years old, he came down with a disease of the eyes, which rendered him almost blind. He learned to read Braille and said he loved it because he could read in bed without getting his hands cold. But since most of his schoolbooks had never been translated into Braille, he had to finish his education by reading everything with a giant magnifying glass. Despite that, his friends all agreed that he was the best-read guy they knew.

His first successful novel was Point Counter Point (1928), about a group of artists and intellectuals who don’t realize that one of the men in their company is a budding fascist revolutionary. Point Counter Point was Huxley’s first best-seller, and since it had been so ambitious a book, Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells, and thought it might be fun to try to write some science fiction.

The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered. It was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

Aldous Huxley said, “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

I came across this site today on Craiglist. It is a clearing house for freelance writing gigs. It is set up along the same lines as elance.com [which I used when I was a nerdy computer/network contractor]. Here writers can bid on jobs posted by clients. There are no membership fees for writers, however a percentage of the transaction has to be paid to the site when the deal is completed. Sounds interesting.

Take a look for yourselves: www.writerlance.com

Some of the current projects are;

It has been twenty days since I “Fell on my Pen” in the NaNoWriMo. Twenty days since the heady rush of putting a few thousand words a day into a computer file with no particular title. Twenty days and I’ve written virtually nothing.

…the Muse isn’t back from her winter vacation in the islands…

This lack of output on my part is particularly unnerving. The NaNoWriMonauts warn of this phase of the post November blues. Holidays coming on; everyone busy shopping; no time to write. A feeling of uselessness creeps up on you, a sort of post novel depression sets in and suddenly it’s very difficult to work up the get up and go necessary to, for lack of better words, get up and go.

I’ve pretty much scraped the idea from the NaNoWriMo attempt, mind you there is a chunk that would make a pretty good short story. I’ve been trying to come up with something new that I can work through, but it hasn’t shown me what it is yet. I suppose the Muse isn’t back from her winter vacation in the islands yet. I hope she chokes on her margarita.

…if you write three or four pages a day, in a month you have one hundred pages…

It’s the birthday of one of the most prolific writers ever, Robert Payne, born in Cornwall, England (1911). He wrote The Mountain and the Stars (1937), and hundreds of other books, many under other names. He taught poetry and shipbuilding in China, became an authority on Indian art, wrote biographies and novels, and made English translations of Boris Pasternak and Søren Kierkegaard. He worked on five or six books at a time, and got most of his work done in the wee hours of the morning, between two and eight. He was asked how he had come to write so much, and he looked surprised and said, “If you write three or four pages a day, in a month you have one hundred pages.”

When things go really bad for a professional soldier, there is an expectation that they will improvise, overcome, and adapt to get the job done. When this is, by all practical measure, an impossibility, there is another option open to them. They can fall on their swords. Romans did it in the bath tub, Samurai had a nice cup of tea first. My thoughts on Day 22 of the NaNoWriMo is what the heck are writers supposed to do?

…raising the white flag of literary surrender…

If I fall on my laptop, even with a cuppa fist, I’m really just going to break it, and the tea will make the keys stick even more than they do now. Not really an option. I suppose the best I could do would be to fall on my pen. It at least is sharp and pointy. This is at least in the spirit of the whole falling on something genre.

I am raising the white flag of literary surrender. The word count is too far behind, and life, family, the job, and even the alignment of the planets do conspire against me. OK I made that last bit about the planet alignment up, but the tires on my 12 year old Mercury Sable need an alignment, does that count?

Where did I go worng? Well interestingly, there is an interesting book put out by the founder of the NaNoWriMo called No Plot, No Problem. In the pages of that book are explained all the reasons for my capitulation. Not locking up my Internal Editor. Falling too far behind in the count. Allowing self doubt to creep in after 4 days of writing nothing… Boy If only I had read this before I started!

“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.”

-Paulo Coelho (Mystical author, one of Brazil’s most successful novelist)

Final Tally:

Slow and steady wins the race. We have to believe Aesop knew what he was writing about. We need to understand that if we just keep at it, victory will be ours.

It is day 15 of the NaNoWriMo and I’m about 10K words behind where I should be. Part of it is work eating up my time. Part of it is me fighting a cold that does not seem to want to let me escape it’s clutches. But mostly it’s as a result of early, lingering procrastination.

I’ve been increasing my daily word counts lately. Sometimes over 2K. If I’m going to finish I really need to reach 3K per day. I’ve received lots of encouragement to keep going and that’s what is propelling me onwards. That, and a very understanding wife who is giving me the time to do this craziness. Right now I’m just keeping pace with the progress… Tomorrow I need to pick it up and push that little bit farther.

Thirteenth night and the cracks have started to appear in the wall that was, until recently, a very solid case of writer’s block. Flow is moving again, however I find my story falling back and forth through time. At one moment I’m in the present where the story happens only to find myself in the next breath far in the character’s past discovering why he thinks, acts and feels the way he does. It’s a little like a temporal roller coaster.

I’ve given up on he idea of writing in a linear fashion. I can’t seem to get my mind around it. When I sit in front of the keyboard I just start writing what ever comes out. I used to try and force myself to carry on from the point I left off at, but that quickly lead to slowdown and a blockage forming. Now I’m just writing whatever section occurs to me. I will stitch the component parts together in the edit phase, after all isn’t that how Dr. Frankenstein got started with his monster?

There was a time when the characters were speaking to me. The words flowed across the keyboard if I just sat in front of the damn thing long enough. This is not happening, and I am suffering from the sound of a silent pen. Ink well all dried up. It is soddenly frustrating. I have not been able to put word to electronic file in two days. Everything I’ve typed has been crap. Have I whined sufficiently enough yet? Are there any offers of cheese coming?

…too many balls in the air to juggle…

Part and parcel of it is that I’m particularly tired. Work has been draining this week on both a physical and intellectual level. There are just too many balls in the air to juggle and I sense a shutdown coming. My wife senses something similar, mind you she senses that I’m getting sick. Coming down with a cold or flu (again) is the current theory. Manifesting an illness as a coping strategy to deal with all the stress. I of course scoff at the idea, as my head and joints ache, my sinuses start to fill, and I descend into a massive heap of grumpy helplessness as can only be achieved by a man under the weather. The kind of crappy ill feeling that turns early forties fiercely independent males into seven year old children looking for their mum and a bowel of chicken noodle soup.

So here I am, further behind. Feeling like crap. Feeling worse for being behind. The spiral downward is becoming more rapid, but there is hope. Hope for the weekend, hope for feeling better, hope for the muse’s return.

Nine days into NaNoWriMo and I’m falling behind. The last two days have been all work and no play, at least not of the writing kind. Work has reared it’s ugly head and expanded to fill all available time. My hope is that I can recover some lost ground this weekend. On a positive note I managed to find some time to work on my outline and get it firmed up a little more.

OK I’m grasping at straws here… outline schmoutline… I need words! Somebody give me some words. Just like the muse to bugger off in the middle of things.