NaShoStoMo

For the past couple of days, I've been itching for something to blog about but nothing has particularly come to mind. Nothing interesting, at least, which was why my last post was about the weather. Last night I was debating whining about the papers I have to write for classes, or the fact that I feel like my writing ability is getting worse (rather than better), or the new library employee policy which says that I'm not allowed to read books on the clock. Or write them, for that matter. But then I struck blogging gold. (Editorial Note: The fact that I'm listening to "Jerk it Out" by The Ceasars seems to make this blogging gold better. Its something about the beat of the song in conjunction with the sun outside which makes me really excited) I was stalking some professional writer's blogs and found Dan Wells (author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You) and discovered that while he's on book tour this month, he is venturing his own NaNoWriMo knock off. Since it's hard for him to novel-write on book tours and because he's terrible at writing short stories, he has decided to do a short story a day for the month of April. And because I'm a writing junkie and like competing in off-the-wall writing challenges, I think this is a marvelous idea. Here's the short list of goals (established by Dan): each story has to be AT LEAST 200 words; each story must have a beginning, middle, and end; by the end of the month, you should have 30 short stories, so it's not necessary to do one short story a day--just have thirty by the end. So my dear blog followers (of whom there are few), I extend the challenge to you. Thirty days, thirty short stories. For all of you who thought a novel was too much to handle, this is much more feasible (and if each story is only 200 words long, you're writing about 44,000 words less than you would during NaNoWriMo). As for me, I'm totally jazzed to find a productive way to continue procrastinating my research papers, school projects, and finals studying. Rock on, writers, rock on.

This is just ridiculous

I know its conference weekend this weekend, which means that the weather is obligated to uncooperative, but dropping more than twenty degrees between Saturday and Sunday is just plain ridiculous.

Saturday Night Work Shifts

I'm at the circ desk with Tawny on a Saturday night and there's nothing to do. I mainly attribute this to the following facts:
(One) It's a Saturday night. Most people like to go on dates on Saturday nights.
(Two) There was a basketball game and we totally trashed whatever school we were playing (by 22 points)
(Three) Because we trashed them, we are now in the Sweet Sixteen and people like to celebrate things.
(Four)Who on earth goes to the library on a Saturday night? Finals are still three weeks away.

So I just have to suffer here, not being witty or entertaining, just relatively bored.

Life is Good

My feet were cold, so I grabbed a pair of fluffy socks that had been sitting underneath my netbook. My netbook was on and the socks were being heated by it.

Now it feels like I've stuck my feet inside a toasty oven.

Life is grand.

Ideas Are Cheap

Next to the advice "write what you know," I think the most common writing advice ever given is the small tidbit that "ideas are cheap." If you listen to writers talk, they'll tell you. Ideas are cheap. It's the skill and talent required to write that's hard to come by. They hand out this fact like parents hand out candy on Halloween, and over the last few years, I've come to accept this morsel of truth as hard fact. I've been blessed with enough quirky ideas to know that they're easy enough to come by if you know what you're looking for.

This past weekends was one of those very moments, where suddenly an idea made sense. The very basics of the idea had occurred to me years ago after seeing a production of Robin Hood at a high school, but at the time, I didn't have enough of a sense of, I don't know, life in order to piece the idea together into a story, or even a premise. But when the idea came to me again late Saturday night and again Sunday morning (during sacrament meeting), it was like someone lit a fire underneath me (if I may be so cliche).

Ideas that didn't work three years ago suddenly did. Characters looked more fleshed out, more original. The basic premise became more plausible. The conflict became . . . more conflicting.

And I really don't think I can communicate to you the rush I feel with this new idea bouncing around in my head. It's still not very fleshed out. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out and a lot of things that need to be tweaked and twisted until they all fit together. But I'm excited and I want to get going.

Here's the hang up of cheap ideas, though. New ideas are inherently more intriguing than old ones. So while my mind wants to race off with this new material, this new toy, this new playground, my creative writing class is still waiting for me on the old playground. I have a partially finished manuscript (I estimate that, at 50,000 words, I'm about a third of the way through), and I want to finish it, I really do, but this new shiny idea is way too intriguing.

And add that to the fact that I have a monster assignment due tonight, a paper due on Thursday, a test on Friday, another test the following Wednesday, another test the following Tuesday and three major papers looming in the distance and you might be able to understand why the concept of cheap ideas is so troubling.

I hope you don't mind...

(Just warning you, this post is basically me just whining about people I have to deal with--it probably won't even be that witty, I just think my roommates probably get sick of listening to me whine, so I should do it somewhere else)

For my creative writing class, we're supposed to submit 1,000 words a week for our workshop groups to go over in the second half of class. Collectively, (as in "as a group") we decided that we wouldn't mind if anyone posted more than that, within reason, as long as everyone still understood that the mandatory 1k was all that had to be read.

Now considering that I write that much in a day (on average), it's usually not a problem for me to find a thousand words to throw up on livejournal, and because of my word surplus, I usually post an additional 300 words or so, not expecting anyone to read all of it if they are really that crunched for time.

Now, there has been a gal in our group who has been posting 2,000+ words a week for the last week or two and that is a little extreme, but we talked to her and smoothed everything out. She didn't realize she was pposting that much and will now be word-count-conscious in the future.

And, as recently as this past Thursday, our professor reminded us that we are under no obligation to read anything more than 1,000 words, regardless of how many words someone posts.

So, with this in mind, I submitted my bit for workshop today like I was supposed to. Because I don't like leaving scenes unfinished (and its hard to do a decent, relevant scene in just a thousand words--that's only three and a half pages double spaced), I posted 1,500 words. I warned my group that my word count was a little heavy and added "I hope no one minds." Now, for me, that little warning was just a heads up to whoever was reading to let them know they didn't have to finish. I just figure, if there are people who don't mind reading a little extra, I don't mind recieving that little extra feedback.

Which was why I was a little suprised to find that someone had commented and said that she did mind. And from the tone of said comment, she minded a lot. Because apparently posting 543 words (yes, she must have copied my post into word to get the accurate word count) was far too many and she never agreed to read that much. She was quite short about it.

And all I could think was "Really? You're okay with reading whatsherbucket's extra thousand words, but you're getting short with me about a few hundred?" Granted, this particular member of the group and I have butted heads in the past. She doesn't like my protagonist, she doesn't like my dialogue, she doesn't like my characterization, she doesn't like my conflict. Basically, I'm not writing a story that would interest her. If it were on the bookshelf at a store, she wouldn't pick it up. And I'm perfectly okay with that. It's not for her. Somebody else is going to like it just fine. I can't please everyone.

And to be perfectly frank (and yes, you can be larry), what she writes doesn't exactly suit my fancy either.

(Of course, she has only read one-seventh of my total word count right now, so the fact that she complains about things that are explained in the other sixth-sevenths of the book doesn't exactly endear her to me)

What really gets me, I think, is the fact that she took the time to write that comment, when it'd probably take just as much time to read those extra 500 words. Maybe I just read fast, but I can usually read the five thousand (plus change) words I get from the group as a whole in under an hour--and I think someone else in the group has said something along the same lines.

I wrote her a polite (and an honestly polite--not the fake polite like in those notes I may or may not have left on my grammar homework) reply saying that I was just informing people of the word count and I never expected people to read more than they were required.

But I'm not going to change my submission.

And I'll probably keep track of how many words she posts in the future. Not that anything will come of it, but just because I like having the satisfaction of knowing she's just as much at fault as I am.

And all of this is probably why I should go to bed at midnight instead of staying up to finish reading books and checking my email and now writing relatively whiny and passive-aggressive blog posts.

I hope you all have a wonderful life and that you didn't mind my self indulgent whining.