KJToo

We had a little snow in Willoughby on Thursday. Just enough that I had to shovel a drift on the front steps and sprinkle some salt on the sidewalk Friday morning. The sun has been out all morning and now most of the snow has melted.

When I got home from the NaNoWriMo meeting Thursday evening, I found an e-mail from my dad waiting. Seems they’d gotten some snow in the U.P., too.

 
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Posted November 19, 2005 Comments(3)

Progress has been made. I wasn’t particularly productive at Panera tonight (I’m estimating somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 words), but I haven’t updated with last night’s Arabica total (around 700 words), either. If you add the roughly 1,300 words of background material I just wrote, that makes for about 2,300 words that aren’t included in my current total (21,760), which should put me right around 23,000. Still a fair bit behind, but nothing that can’t be made up in a day or two.

Since I’ve been stumbling over scenes that just weren’t working over the past couple of days, I decided to go back and do something I might have done early in week one, had I known what I was going to write about at the time: I’m setting the stage.

There’s a lot of stage to set, and most of what I’m writing now will likely be integrated into the story in some other form. I think it’s important that I set the stage now (better late than never) because it’s really going to help establish some boundaries and — more importantly, direction — for the story in the coming days. What I wrote tonight is interesting, and has me looking at my story from a new angle, which is definitely a good thing. It may take a couple more days of writing this type of background before I get back to the story, but right now it feels like I’ll have a good idea where the story needs to go once I start moving it forward again.

I’d add more to the 1,300 words I just wrote, but I have a job that I’d like to keep, regardless of how much it’s cutting into my writing time.

Posted November 18, 2005 Comments(6)

Does anyone else find it interesting that ABC waited until the latter half of the month to report on NaNoWriMo? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to publish such a report sometime in October to give readers an opportunity to participate in NaNoWriMo themselves? Of course it would, which is exactly why ABC waited until 17 November. They’re hoping you’ll forget all about NaNoWriMo between now and 01 November 2006.

That’s right, ABC doesn’t want you to participate in NaNoWriMo. Why? Well, let’s think about that for a minute. NaNoWriMo is just the sort of story with which news organizations prefer to end their broadcasts. After twenty or fifty minutes of stories about natural disaster, war, corrupt governments and the atrocity of the week, it’s nice to be able to close with a piece on pets helping the elderly or a woman who knits mittens for the homeless. So you’d think NaNoWriMo — with its thousands of aspiring novelists and fund-raising campaign to build libraries in third-world countries — would be a golden nugget of human-interest For most media outlets, that’s exactly what it is.

But not for ABC. See, ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, and Disney has a vested interest in burying NaNoWriMo. Just so there’s no confusion, let me make it perfectly clear: the House of Mouse wants every single one of NaNoWriMo’s 62,000 participants this year to fall flat on their faces. The nearly 400 million words already written by WriMos across the globe represent a significant danger to Disney’s bottom line, especially in foreign markets, where Disney has had less than phenomenal success.

How? To understand that, you need to know something about the recent history of the Walt Disney Corporation. In the spring of 1994, Michael Eisner (CEO of Disney at the time) covertly met with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno on four separate occasions. Recently, a CIA investigation recovered documents connected to Eisner’s meetings with Reno, and the specifics of the meetings are just now being made public. One of the documents, signed by both Eisner and Reno, is an agreement to… hell, I don’t know. I’m just making shit up to avoid writing my novel.

Posted November 17, 2005 Comments(7)

I didn’t write anything Monday or Tuesday, because I am a big, fat slacker.

Tonight: more coffee shop writing. That word count will go up, it’s just a matter of how much.

Posted November 16, 2005 Comments(6)

The latest episode of Unquiet Desperation has been published. It is the second of Chris Miller’s podcasts dedicated to NaNoWriMo and people in the Cleveland area crazy enough to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

This particular episode is near and dear to me because I got to play field correspondent and conduct interviews with several aspiring authors (including Laura and blob). After I turned the interviews over to Chris, he layed down some phat beats in the background and removed almost all references to Star Trek slash fic.

Posted November 15, 2005 Comments(0)