Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
This morning you may have heard the starting gun for NaNoWriMo or the erroneously named National Novel Writing Month. It really should be GloNoWriMo, substituting Global for National. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world try to write at least 1,666 words each day for 30 consecutive days at the end of which (theoretically) they will have completed a 50,000 word short novel.
I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the conservative wave wash over me, so I went to law school instead.
Writing stories is not a recent obsession for me. It began in my early teens with a story about the end of the world. Planet Earth gets sucked into a black hole. Balls and holes. The scientist who announces Earth’s fate to his colleagues does so while standing beside a pool table holding a cue stick.
Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing. The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights. I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the water the Morlocks drink in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – an underground toxic sludge.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that, in writing my novel, The Land, I used my brother-in-law’s organic farm as a rough model for the setting. And while the characters — husband, wife and two boys — bear a superficial resemblance to my brother-in-law and his family, it doesn’t take too many pages before any resemblance evaporates.
The most unlikely movie scene ever in the history of Hollywood (at least in my humble opinion) has to be the closing scene of Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on a short story by Stephen King.
It isn’t exactly news to point out that publishing is in crisis. Now that digital text can be delivered in a format which offers a viable substitute for the physical book, there are fears that the publishing industry will experience an upheaval of biblical proportions.
I’ve committed an act of theft and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get away with it. I’ve stolen some lives and a piece of property and I’ve hawked them for a novel. My novel is called The Land and I plan to release it on May 7th or thereabouts. Here’s what I did: I took four people (my sister-in-law, her husband, and their two boys), I ran off with their organic farm, and tossed them all into a bag along with a few unruly ideas to spice things up.
Every now and then, you read a blog post that pisses you off. What makes the piss-off quotient worse is that everybody else thinks the post is wonderful. You start to doubt your opinion. More than that, you start to doubt your hold on reality.
Insight for needlesVoodoo dolls for charactersNovels for revenge I offer this haiku, remembering how, as a teenager, I fought with a friend who refused to see things my way. My view was obviously right, and his refusal was just him being mulish. Since I couldn’t budge him, I opted for the next best thing: I…
As of today, I’ve completed 48,000 of the 50,000 words required to “win” NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month. It looks like my novel will be more in the 75,000 word range. I feel like one of those marathon runners who doesn’t realize he’s crossed the finish line and keeps on going because his legs have gotten used to the idea of running.
After day 1 of the National Novel Writing Month contest, I’ve completed 4,488 words of the 50,000 word target. However, I’ve come up against an important issue: research. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
A friend once said a good reason for writing fiction is that, as you work on your characters, you work on yourself. (He may have implied that this was the only good reason for writing fiction, but I can’t remember.) It’s kind of like therapy.
This year, I took the plunge. On the spur of the moment (one of a thousand clichés I’m sure to spew this month), I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month contest.
This is the second post prompted by reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. As I wrote previously, this is not a book review so much as a handful of supplementary comments and speculations. Go here for the first part of this discussion.