So following in the steps of James and probably at least one or two other PMSitanians, I'm taking up the challenge of National Write a Novel in a Month Month! The deal is you write a novel in a month. It's supposed to kind of suck. I dunno I'm gonna see how it goes.
Here is a website with information:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
And here is my profile which will tell everyone nothing they don't already know anyway:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/680803
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Holy mackerel, I had enough difficulty writing a novel in three-and-half years. Break a leg, dude.
Niffy username, by the way.
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Many real-world problems are contingency problems, because exact prediction is impossible. For this reason, many people keep their eyes open while driving.
I'm about half way through a novella that I started earlier this month.
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
C'mon, Kodi, give it a go. It's not so much "write a structurally sound novel," it's "write 50,000 relatively cohesive and sequential words that you maybe want to shape into something workable later." Way less daunting than writing something that's thematically meaningful.
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No way! I never want to write fiction again, or at most, nothing longer than a short story. The experience of writing The Lone Argonaut was agonizing, the final product was of questionable quality, and my doubts about the value of art in general have only increased as I've aged. Anyway, I have four nontrivial school projects this semester, including a thesis, and I'd rather spend what free time I have polishing my grad-school applications and fixing bugs in Rakudo than writing stories.
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Many real-world problems are contingency problems, because exact prediction is impossible. For this reason, many people keep their eyes open while driving.
Ha! I don't need NaNoWriMo to meet my writing targets. /pointless snobbery
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
I "hah"ed at both "nontrivial" and "snobbery." At nontrivial 'cause it was funny and at snobbery 'cause c'mon man, the whole point is to write for the joy of putting words on a page and not about any snoot at all!
C'mon, dooooooooo eeeeeeeeeeet.
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If you're asking me to do this either because (a) you want to see my writing or (b) you want to see my writing process, I think we can cover that ground sufficiently with what we have, don't you think? ;D
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
Heh, my professor for my Classical Mythology class talked a little about this today. Kinda thinking about doing it...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
I've never actually gone ahead and done NaNoWriMo. November has always been a poor choice of month for it to be.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Nah, it just seems like a fun project. I'm pro-fun.
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Structured writing is even more fun.
I managed to get almost six pages done today. That's probably the most I've done in one day for months.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
Damn. I rarely get close to that without running a serious fever and a couple of fake amphetamines.
Also: classical mythology course? Y'all reading anything cool, or just Hamilton's/Bullfinch's Mythology? Not that those aren't cool.
Also: for the curious and so I'll feel obligated to fulfill the boast to come at the end of this paragraph for having posted it on the internet (because you're not allowed to lie on the internet), my NaNoWriMo novel will be Buddha on the Road the story of a man who, in the middle of a combined Zombie/Vampire/Werewolf/Actual Biblical Apocalypse Apocalypse awakens to the Buddha nature within himself, learns a spontaneous love for all the things in the world and tries his best to counsel the human survivors of the cataclysm through a new religion based on his own cosmic insights and what he vaguely remembers from a comparative religion course he took back in sophomore year of college. This is at odds with the position he's in in the world and so hilarity ensues. In preparation ('cause I can't start writing for like nine more days or something) I have assembled the following to do list which now that it's codified I can't back out of:
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The title is actually a quote from Bodhidharma, a mystic central to Zen, who maintained that while doctrine and so forth are good, they're useless without what Friedrich Schleiermacher called a "moment of religion;" an ecstatic moment of something like cosmic awareness which is variously defined. Anyway Bodhidharma recommended that "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him." This has been interpreted variously, which makes sense because he's the guy who came up with koans. Anyway, I'm ~50 pages into Kerouac and I feel about Kerouac about how I feel about every indie movie protagonist, old metalhead and J. D. Salinger character. Except he has a delightful Transcendentalist flavor to him.
-D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism: Most of my reading of Buddhist theology (or I guess I should say cosmology or some other term) comes from its intersection with Ignatian theology, so it's somewhat limited. But this guy translated the go-to English version of what Wikipedia tells me is the central document of Zen, the Lankavatara Sutra. I started reading the online version, except the introduction referred me to this book, so what the hey. Also, it has a forward by Carl Jung, so hell yes. Also, it's only 130 pages, so I'm hoping I can polish it off quickly.
-Kerouac, Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha: This one was kind of a target of opportunity. Just kind of showed up on a library search and I was like "eh." ~150 pages and heavily sourced, so it should be cool. I'm marginally worried it's like Robert Graves's King Jesus but what I read of that was a hoot anyway, so it shouldn't be time wasted.
-Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon, Preacher: As far as I know this is a "travel through America's Heartland doin' stuff" epic. I have no illusions about its literary merit (I can stomach *most* of their Hellblazer, but only most of it) but it's the sort of thing that I'd like to crib a scene or two from. And by "crib" I mean swipe most of the action from, but recast it so that it's thematically resonant with the new context I'm situating it in, though it still manages to comment on the old context by resonating with the new context.
-Catcher in the Rye: Like I said, I suspect at this early stage this came out of Kerouac. I know I want to do a sendup of the sort of post-WWI Bildungsroman and so I'm really just looking through this for scenes to crib. I'm thinking the bit with the teacher.
That and I need to write copy for the <WROLTBA!
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I would like to say that I have references as extensive as that, but I don't. The project I have going on now is a loose parody of the Stieg Larsson books but with much less of an emphasis on crime/mystery and more of an emphasis on political intrigue. I'm probably going to end up stealing a lot subconsciously from Terry Pratchett's The Truth. I'm also going to take a shot at introducing hipsters into a fantasy world, which should be fun. Man, I've only just realised that I've got a bunch of things going on in this book. I hope it all ends up making sense.
I got in another five pages today - feels good man. I'll be lucky to get half a page a day for the rest of the week until next weekend. >=|
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
Hah. Magical hipsters. "It's a pretty obscure grimoire. You know, before Mordenkainen got all big and commercial."
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This topic will not die. I'm way too nosy about your progress, Sir Wil of 5225.
I managed to put in another good eight pages this weekend, so I'm pleased.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
Whoops, my bad Wil. It's mostly just Greek mythology, but we did cover a tiny bit of Mesopotamian (most to compare and contrast the parallels I think). Got a test on the Iliad tomorrow.
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Hah, okay. I figured continuing to update would just be a weird show of narcissism.
I got some 1800 staying late at work (in fairness, maybe 400 were an intro I'd written maybe 2 weeks ago as a style sample). Then I got to 3000 and figured I'd call it a night (I want to get a generous lead going in case I run out of steam/can't get a chance to write some days). Then this girl I kind of dated in Canada who stopped taking my calls without explanation posted on facebook about hitting 4200 and I was like "Pfft **** her" and so I hit like 5k. So yeah. Apparently spite is my muse.
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Oh PS important question: creepy twincest in a book: always creepy, or sometimes important to the narrative?
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It didn't stop Fire Emblem...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Can't it be both?
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
So, I need a little help getting motivated to do this...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Tertiary protagonist discovers plague of vampire bats; turn out to be fruit bats. go.
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Heh, I've already got a very, very, basic plot down (that gives me plenty of room to ramble for 50k words), just hard to get started you know? Well, now that I'm done with tests for a tiny bit, hopefully I can get started this weekend.
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
I haven't done anything the last two days; I started working on actual projects (some of mine, a few pages of Rebirth etc.).
I dunno, I'm kind of losing interest in my story. Also, like Chris I'm sort beginning to wonder what the sense of doing this is, since it's not like I need the extra motivation to write anyway. I dunno, I was pretty far ahead for a while, so I can take a few days to work on things I care more about, it just makes me sort of wonder what the of my post-apocalyptic Buddhist thing is sense is.
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Progress report: I'm up to 19,000 words, so I'm pretty happy. I'm expecting a 90,000 or so word count by the end of it. School was out on Thursday and Friday, so I took the opportunity to be productive.
The scope of the story is getting more streamlined as I go along, which is a good thing. The main character of this story is a supporting character in the "Necromancy university" pieces that I've finished, so this story picks up at the end of that. This girl graduates with a degree in journalism, and she's having a tough time finding a job in her university's city, so she works for a political watchdog magazine that her horrible uncle runs.
The magazine, however, has just been sued for libel by a politician that they tried to discredit, so the whole organisation is kind of in the dumps. In order to try and regain some credibility, they pick up this obscure case in which girls have gone disappearing in a nearby forest, and they suspect that a biotech lab whose premises are in said forest has some connection to it, and they suspect in turn that there have been political elements involved in a cover up. This is the part where I want to connect it up to a Bride of the Monster-type story that's sort of been floating around in my head.
Eventually there will be political intrigue. There will also be some ass-kicking involved. This girl's magical power is that she can create illusionary clones of herself, although she doesn't have Jamie Madrox's problem of the clones being autonomous, because I've always thought that that is a little weird. Interesting, but weird.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
I demand a progress update, William.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].