| December 21, 2009 | Rise: | Solar Noon: | Set: |
| Actual Time | 7:23 AM EST | 12:06 PM EST | 4:49 PM EST |
| Civil Twilight | 6:53 AM EST | 5:19 PM EST | |
| Nautical Twilight | 6:19 AM EST | 5:52 PM EST | |
| Astronomical Twilight | 5:47 AM EST | 6:25 PM EST | |
| Moon | 10:28 AM EST | 9:48 PM EST | |
| Length Of Visible Light: | 10h 26m | ||
| Length of Day |
9h 26m
Tomorrow will be 0m 2s longer.
|
||
…and that is enough.
Oh the irony. In the same month that DC loses its last lgbt bookstore the City Council finally passes and the Mayor signs a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.
Congress now has 30 legislative days (not the same as calendar days) to either quash it or let it solidify into law.
Yes, there will be challenges in that time but hey, the longer they drag out the healthcare bill fight the sooner it could be legal to wed in DC.
Yeah us! The most backasswards, screwed up city in the country finally gets something right.
It weighs 4 lbs and with the covers is 2.5 inches thick. Yes, it would break your nose if it fell on your face in bed.
I’m finding that I don’t much enjoy reading like a writer. Yes, I know I need to do it.
After all, it can only help my own craft to be able to look critically at something someone else had constructed and figure out how it works. This deconstruction is something I do all the time in my day job, and I have no problem doing it with movies – part of my mind unconsciously analyzing where the lights were when the scene was shot and where the edits are both visually and aurally in a film doesn’t seem to detract one bit from my enjoyment of the motion picture which is why a long time ago I started asking people if they wanted the film school review or the normal person review – but doing the same thing with fiction seems to sap all the enjoyment out of the story for me. Perhaps it’s just a matter of training. I can still vaguely recall when doing the same with movies wasn’t routine.
So, I’ve been trying to read more consciously, more critically if you will. I set myself an easy starting target: Stephen King. He’s easy not because his writing is less than but because it is so good and so accessible at the same time. I’m just afraid it’s going to take me a while given the size of his latest.
Oh, yes, and there are couple of dribbles of small fiction in the fictionblog with more to come.
photo by allaboutgeorge
licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Well, it’s official: DC’s lgbt community is pretty much dead. Only a day behind The Citypaper, The Washington Post reported this morning that Lambda Rising will close its doors before the end of December 2009.
The Post article writes:
Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s founder, said that he has accomplished all he had intended when he opened the gay-oriented bookstore in 1974 and that “it’s time to move on.”
And while it feels like a strawman argument to say this it, I can’t help but feel it: Are you happy now HRC? We’ve finally been assimilated.
I know, I know. More openness, being able to find a gay or lesbian section at Books-A-Million is a good thing so why do I say the lgbt community is pretty much dead?
Simple: there is no real community focus any more. Yes, we have an “official” community center but their outreach is so poor, and so overshadowed by other organizations that have dominated the community for decades that even though I’ve been looking I had to find out about them by reading an article about another community institution closing.
I will miss Lambda Rising. Just walking into the place all those years ago was a personal triumph and a key part of my history. And maybe I’m just whining but it’s hard to see yet another independent bookstore shut down, and doubly hard to see this one, so long a bright, safe place, go.
It’s not often that The Washington Post Magazine has a cover story worth sharing, nor is it often that their recent strategy of “read more on our web site” has motivated me to do just that because, really, the Post has a kind of crappy site. Today was a bit different.
The Magazine’s cover story this week is all about the Hubble telescope. Not a lot of text but some amazing pictures. Enjoy!
I need a shower. My house is about to get vacuumed, and yes, my first draft of the book is finished weighing in at not quite 70,500 words and 199 single spaced pages.
In a few days we will rejoin our regularly scheduled blogging already in progress. Until then, have some left over pie and go for a walk.
My house hasn’t been cleaned in three weeks and it’s been just as long since I’ve gotten any real exercise.
Oh, yes, and I am one of those people whom in previous years I have hated: I have 54,505 words today and the book still isn’t done. I’m just going to keep writing until it is.
Then comes the hard part: the editing.
Total Words Written So Far 33,755
Total Hours Spent Writing 33.25
Avg Words Written Per Day 2,596
Avg Hours Writing Per Day 2.56
Avg Words Per Hour 1,015
Avg Morale Per Day 5
Number of Words Remaining 16,245
Number of Days Remaining 17
Number of Hours Remaining 16.00
So why do I still feel like I don’t know where I’m going? Ah, the joys of NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo follows a pretty set pattern for me: the first few days I feel like a complete and utter hack.
What hubris to think I can write a novel (even though I’ve done it before…three times)! And how dare I think I have anything interesting to say or that my prose might be even vaguely entertaining (when I know for certain that NaNo is supposed to 1) produce a first draft, and 2) everyone’s first draft is kinda shitty).
The kind folks at the Office of Letters and Light, NaNoWriMo’s parent organization, realize that most authors go through a similar cycle so they line up a pep talk a week for us. It makes me feel a bit better that this year’s week one pep talk is from an author whose work I admire, Jasper Fforde.
Because here’s the thing: Writing is not something you can do or you can’t. It’s not something that ‘other people do’ or ‘for smart people only’ or even ‘for people who finished school and went to University’. Nonsense. Anyone can do it. But no-one can do it straight off the bat. Like plastering, brain surgery or assembling truck engines, you have to do a bit of training—get your hands dirty—and make some mistakes. Those 22 days of mine were the start, and only the start, of my training. The next four weeks and 50,000 words will be the start of your training, too.
There’s a lot to learn, and you won’t have figured it all in 50,000 words, but it’ll be enough for you to know that you don’t know it all, and that it will come, given time. You’ll have written enough to see an improvement, and to start to have an idea over what works and what doesn’t. Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation. A manual on knitting can tell you what to do, but you won’t be able to make anything until you get your hands on some wool and some needles and put in some finger time. Writing needs to be practiced; there is a limit to how much can be gleaned from a teacher or a manual. The true essence of writing is out there, in the world, and inside, within yourself. To write, you have to give.
What do you give? Everything. Your reader is human, like you, and human experience in all its richness is something that we all share. Readers are interested in the way a writer sees things; the unique world-view that makes you the person you are, and makes your novel interesting. Ever met an odd person? Sure. Ever had a weird job? Of course. Ever been to a strange place? Definitely. Ever been frightened, sad, happy, or frustrated? You betcha. These are your nuts and bolts, the constructor set of your novel. All you need to learn is how to put it all together. How to wield the spanners.
And this is why 30 days and 50,000 words is so important. Don’t look at this early stage for every sentence to be perfect—that will come. Don’t expect every description to be spot-on. That will come too. This is an opportunity to experiment. It’s your giant blotter. An empty slate, ready to be filled. It’s an opportunity to try out dialogue, to create situations, to describe a summer’s evening. You’ll read it back to yourself and you’ll see what works, you’ll see what doesn’t. But this is a building site, and it’s not meant to be pretty, tidy, or even safe. Building sites rarely are. But every great building began as one.
So, even though I’m ahead on word count, there’s still 2,000 more words out there for me today.
