The last three weeks of my life have been a mix of Google Reader, fret buzz, cellular respiration, late night coffee runs, and mysterious bus adventures. Incidentally, finals week was ridiculously fun, except for those ten or so hours where I was huddled over a piece of paper, trying to convince myself that the right answer for a question about amino acid sequences wouldn’t have a thymine base in it, wobble or not. Pardon my nerdiness.
I think the writing mania that overtook me in November has definitely subsided. My idea of writing for the past few weeks has been, “CHANGE THAT WORD. ADD A PAGE BREAK. CHANGE HER BACK TO A WOMAN,” and associated escapades. Consequently, I haven’t been writing much on here, but not much has been going on, unfortunately. I know you wanted to hear about finals-week debauchery or tales of evil twins or penguins with nine legs and catamarans taped to their faces engaging in bacchanalian spectacles of strength and blindness (because I reason that penguins that have lost the ability of sight and consequently movement only have two things in their favor, by which I mean one thing, by which I really mean nothing at all except for the sheer happenstance that someone might get hit by a penguin with a catamaran and other penguins reason it out from the sounds around them enough to laugh and continue drinking). None of these things happened … that I know of…
I have been reading a lot recently and trying to work back to that time when I could binge read a book in a day. Like Gone With The Wind. I admit that at the time that I had the plague so I was pretty delirious, and I probably skipped a few meals to read it so I was running on insanity and static electricity from the mountain of blankets around me. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I signed up for Readernaut, which is a very usable, very easy way of listing and reviewing your books. It’s still in beta, so there are a bunch of kinks. For example, sometimes you won’t be able to find your version of the book on the site (they vary by page numbers and covers, so when you’re keeping track of your progress in a book, it’s important to make sure you have the right one, unless that doesn’t matter to you) and making one can be a little tricky. Rating and reviewing the books is pretty painless, most of the books I’ve read so far — even the more esoteric ones like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which I hadn’t heard of until I won it at the Plan II Convocation (thank goodness for Winston Churchill) — popped right up when I searched for it. God knows why I’m amazed by this — it’s probably just an Amazon search engine. BUT IT IS STILL FASCINATING.
Feel free to try out Readernaut. I’m afraid that I’ll get neurotic and start racing people to finish books, which can only be bad for me, because I start living in books the more I read them. A Thousand Splendid Suns was especially hard in that respect because I kept waking up saying, “OH SHIT, WE’RE IN AFGHANISTAN” when this really wasn’t the case. I’m interested in diving back into Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham). HA, DIVING. READERNAUT. I GET IT. Ahem, Specimen Days is a weird book. It’s divided up into three time periods — essentially past, present, and future — but the only constant thing is Walt Whitman. Lucas, the character of the first third, quotes Whitman all the damn time, saying that he can’t control himself. YES YOU CAN, LUCAS. YES YOU CAN. Lucas is also described as being “wall-eyed” and “gnomish,” which sounds both hilarious and tremendously depressing. I wonder where that book will go from there… as long as it doesn’t take the Of Human Bondage path and through in an annoying female character who screws up everything around her. I HATE YOU MILDRED. I HATE YOU SO MUCH.
Even though I didn’t reach 50,000 words, I feel that my attempt at NaNoWriMo was a success. In two hours, word counts and struck-out lines (re: word counts. I can’t edit until … now) will be a thing of the past. I finally gave some of my character necessary goals and expectations and beliefs, so now a certain someone is no longer a whiny wimp who falls off of a tower. That was a bad Chapter 2. I don’t even know why I wrote that.
November has always been a very hectic month for me and I really think I would have been more motivated if it were held in July or June when people have time to do things and can sit home all day writing a novel. And then you don’t have to settle for a 50,000 word minimum either. Then I would get things done. Also, if I were doing better in Calculus from the start, I would probably also get things done. Yep. That would do it. I don’t like NaNoWriMo being about “defeating the odds” because, although you get a lot of good ideas when you’re stressed out and about to set fire to your textbooks, were it not for the fact that those cost you money and you would like that money back, who has the time to sit down and write a novel in one flat month? Things always get in the way. For me, it was two trips back home where I read a bunch and did little writing, and a period here or there when I was getting papers done. So I started opening up my file at 11 at night,and finishing at around 3 or 4 to get my writing done. And although I did a lot of good writing during that period, I could only do that four days out of the week because I had early classes on the other days. That was an inefficient system for me.
The numbers
In order to hit 50,000 words, I planned to write 2,000 words a day. which would give me a surplus of 10,000 (yay basic math!) in case I got behind. A few days, I hit just about 3,000 a day, and some other days, I only got 1,000 words written. When I hit 25,000, I had five days to write the remaining 25,000, and 5,000 words a day is a tall order for anyone, but most especially me because words make me neurotic and word counts even more so. I wrote a grand total of 1,000 something words over the break and called it a month.
Thoughts on the halfway point
26,000 words is still a pretty significant milestone. I have a prologue mostly done, I can now rewrite Chapter 1, use my current Chapter 2 (with TEH DEATH SCENE), throw in my completed Chapter 3, write a Chapter 4, use notes for Chapters 5 and 7, and make up Chapter 6 as I go along. And some more chapters just like that. See? Novel writing is easy! You just use place holders until you have to fill them with words. My favorite placeholder words are plot or characterization (and this is why I never finish a draft).
Some excerpts from THE DEATH MONTH
The great hall was lined with the portraits of forgotten men. Across one wall were the faces of pagan kings — eleven in number — painted wildly in reds, ochres: the colors of tumult. There were men with on horses, men surrounded by tropical birds, men in towns that no longer had names, buried beneath the desert sand. At the end of the wall, aligned neatly with the corner, the eleventh portrait was of a man with deep solemn eyes. Rodim had ignored this portrait before. In the war, it had been moved through the cellars of the palace. Its frame had been broken, the brightness of the object that he held had been reduced to gray, and Rodim was certain that the luster of his eyes was no longer there.
But the duke had little patience for the nature of things. He kept his windows curtained but not closed. Some part of him, he reasoned to himself, still wanted to believe in beauty. Years ago, he had tried to paint the towers of his citadel completely white. The duchess was dead, the people said amongst themselves, what else was there to do? But the rains began without warning, and a world away, as the year-long drought ended, Alexei Makarus fell into the street, watching white paint weep from his towers. Years ago. There was still white paint in the smallest fissures of the citadel’s walls and in the hollows of the city streets. When the duke stepped outside, he averted his eyes; later, he curtained his windows. Rhone had become a city tainted by his grief. He tried to contain himself in smaller and smaller spaces, filling tiny crevices of his chambers with messages to himself: The first tower is for Sagrim, my father; I have lost my wife - my hands are white and I do not know why. But his was ever the more a public despair.
I just had the weirdest instance of a dream within a dream (within a dream). I planned a nap into my evening today, just before my aunt was going to give me a Calculus lesson online (newfangled technologies!). I mistakenly gave myself only an hour to sleep before waking up, being woken up, or otherwise discovering that I had somehow fallen out of my bed and the sound of my shins breaking didn’t wake me up. My shins are lousy. Anyway, it takes me about half an hour to fall asleep. For the first ten minutes, I’m usually huddling under the blankets in some random position, trying to find out where I have both sources of oxygen and excessive warmth. This is a very scientific process. The second ten minutes, I have usually forsaken this glorious location in favor of something that is quieter because, as I have unfortunately discovered, I can hear people through my walls, doors, and window. I also think I hear the radio whenever it’s turned off. Maybe a hundred years ago, an alarm clock died in this very room, and its ghost is haunting me in the present. Or I’m just going a little batshit. Either way. The third stage is a very tricky stage. I have usually fallen asleep at this point, but I wake myself up, thinking I only have five minutes. This is a poor adaptation on my part, and this is the reason that I will never be a successful bear. Because if there are five minutes? I either oversleep or count down to when my alarm goes off. This is where our story begins:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— A Dream Within A Dream, by Edgar Allan Poe:
The first dream
What I noticed first is that I had an iPhone. And I thought this was especially remarkable iPhones are exceedingly wonderful. Not this one. As I was trying to find the website my aunt sent me (even in my dreams, I am exceedingly schedule-oriented. DAMN YOU BRAIN!), I noticed that there was some clapping in the other room. The setting, as I later discovered, was an elongated, elegant version of my house, and I was hanging out in the kitchen, where in the place of bananas and bowls of strange gloopy substances that will soon be assembled into any number of awesome dishes, were well-dressed people, all of whom were Asian. I don’t know quite how this happened
Anyway, I soon realized that whatever browser I was using had way too many tabs open. This is a constant problem with the way I go through my RSS feeds. I basically open freaking everything, and then over the next thirty minutes, read as many posts as I can wtihout Firefox going, “OK, forty tabs was crossing the line, but I’m not doing this three-hundred-and-one crap.” Apparently, this doesn’t work in my dreams either. While I’m trying to find this tab, a diplomat comes over with his assistant, who keeps trying to take some black package from me and got really pissed off when I wouldn’t hand it to her, and says, “The president wants to see you!” This would elate any one who wanted to shake hands with Hu Jintao. I, unfortunately, am quite content with shaking hands with Yao Ming.
Every time he came over, his offer kept getting better and better: “You’re invited to the banquet”, “You can sit at the president’s table!”, “WE SAVED YOU A SEAT BY THE PRESIDENT!”, “GOD DAMMIT, HURRY UP. YOU’RE THE PRESIDENT OF CHINA, AND OH GOD, THERE ARE NUKES, AND I THINK LASSIE’S WAITING OUTSIDE BECAUSE SOMEONE FELL IN A DITCH!” (this one didn’t happen, but I’m working off of a natural progression here). Then, just when I thought I found it, some app came up with a map of a country called “Surina” which had a capital of “Riman” or something like that. Not at all like “Suriname” and “Paramaibo,” oh heavens no.Then I got to change the color of the country — between white and red anyway — and I think at one point, it asked if I wanted to bookmark this page. Then, I transitioned into my second dream.
The second dream
I was running through god knows what (AKA Blanton) with my friend, trying to find my room so I could, again, get to the site my aunt set up. This Blanton of my dreams is a strange, strange world, not unlike a meatpacking plant. In fact, I think that’s what it was. And in the midst of all this running around, I noticed that the building had seven floors, and every time I tried to take the elevator up, I ntoiced that it was subdivided into two compartments, one for the elevator operator (1950, people, get your tickets!) and one for … the elevator toilet. I remember staring at it somewhat strangely before running up to the seventh floor (Blanton only has six floors) and realizing I DON’T ACTUALLY LIVE HERE, so I ran down to the sixth floor (which, in Blanton, is called the “Blattic” and has two big study rooms and rows and rows of study nooks) and had the same dilemma. I couldn’t actually remember what floor I lived on, and then I thought, “A-ha! I’m dreaming! So if I wake up, I’ll make it to my room in time for the lesson!” Enter, dream three.
The third dream
This was the shortest of all. And it was rather like the ending of A Christmas Carol because I think I actually said:
“I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!”
—A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Exactly like that.
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