Paradise By Laptop Lights
Ah that went much better. After going to see "The Illusionist" tonight at the little bargain theater by my apartment, I came home and sat down to writing. Well after checking my sports bets on bodog.com (since last year, I've developed a slight gambling problem - that being that I can't seem to pick the right teams and that's a problem) and playing around a bit on the NANOWRIMO message boards.
It seems as though each year I'm getting a bit more scarce on them. Which is, of course, the opposite of what I should be doing as I should be relating the experiences of the past three years to the new people.
Not that I avoided contact with other NANOers completely as I have posted a couple of times to the NANOWRIMO group on flickr.
But I've just gotten really turned off by hearing the new people go through what I've already gone through (both the joy and the pain) as if it's something new (which to be fair to them it is). Yeah, I'm a selfish that way. But not for long as I really am going to try to get out there like I did in 2004.
The big problem is that I don't have a genre this year. I can't even hide behind literary fiction as it's a disaster novel and there's not much action yet in this action/adventure. In fact I've gone 2000 words without even much interaction. There has not been a single piece of dialog yet.
And the crazy thing is, I don't even really care that there should be in the opening scenes at least. But I do think there's some good observational stuff. The escaping walls of water can come later. Or whatever I do with these characters I vignetted in the first chapter. Two of them are about to meet up so that's a start toward something relatively chatty I think.
Oh, but I do like some of the inner monologue so far.
And as I promised, here's the morbid opening:
"The moment that life changed for Anthony from the carefree days of youth to the cold reality of life was the moment that one realizes that one day all he knows will cease to be. Beyond just the idea of death, the human condition that everyone shares planted itself firmly onto his shoulders like a burden to carry when he realized that the idea of himself will one day cease to be. The last vestige of comfort the could have been that his works and his deeds would live on no longer even gave him respite when he realized nothing he had done would have seared itself into anyone’s long term thoughts for more than a few years.
And even then, he had thought, those people who his life had intersected wouldn’t live on much longer or for even less time than he would.
The idea that 'no one dies while their memory lives on' stopped being reassuring when Anthony delved below its surface. If that’s the case, he had realized, than really one only lives on for a generation or two. He couldn’t nave anyone further back in his own family history than his grandfather. That would mean thousands of generations of thousands of families lost to the ages if his experience was the universal one. Thousands of generations washed away on a sea of time."
I guess if I accomplish nothing else, I did put down those thoughts on a piece of paper - er on Microsoft Word. So NANOWRIMO's not a total waste this year.
It seems as though each year I'm getting a bit more scarce on them. Which is, of course, the opposite of what I should be doing as I should be relating the experiences of the past three years to the new people.
Not that I avoided contact with other NANOers completely as I have posted a couple of times to the NANOWRIMO group on flickr.
But I've just gotten really turned off by hearing the new people go through what I've already gone through (both the joy and the pain) as if it's something new (which to be fair to them it is). Yeah, I'm a selfish that way. But not for long as I really am going to try to get out there like I did in 2004.
The big problem is that I don't have a genre this year. I can't even hide behind literary fiction as it's a disaster novel and there's not much action yet in this action/adventure. In fact I've gone 2000 words without even much interaction. There has not been a single piece of dialog yet.
And the crazy thing is, I don't even really care that there should be in the opening scenes at least. But I do think there's some good observational stuff. The escaping walls of water can come later. Or whatever I do with these characters I vignetted in the first chapter. Two of them are about to meet up so that's a start toward something relatively chatty I think.
Oh, but I do like some of the inner monologue so far.
And as I promised, here's the morbid opening:
"The moment that life changed for Anthony from the carefree days of youth to the cold reality of life was the moment that one realizes that one day all he knows will cease to be. Beyond just the idea of death, the human condition that everyone shares planted itself firmly onto his shoulders like a burden to carry when he realized that the idea of himself will one day cease to be. The last vestige of comfort the could have been that his works and his deeds would live on no longer even gave him respite when he realized nothing he had done would have seared itself into anyone’s long term thoughts for more than a few years.
And even then, he had thought, those people who his life had intersected wouldn’t live on much longer or for even less time than he would.
The idea that 'no one dies while their memory lives on' stopped being reassuring when Anthony delved below its surface. If that’s the case, he had realized, than really one only lives on for a generation or two. He couldn’t nave anyone further back in his own family history than his grandfather. That would mean thousands of generations of thousands of families lost to the ages if his experience was the universal one. Thousands of generations washed away on a sea of time."
I guess if I accomplish nothing else, I did put down those thoughts on a piece of paper - er on Microsoft Word. So NANOWRIMO's not a total waste this year.
posted by incendiarymind at 10:20 PM
1 Comments:
Sounds like you had a good time at your kick-off.
I'm not so sure that the older participants have decided to just quit. Maybe they moved so you can't find them on the Chicago list any more. Heck, I've moved like three times (all to different states) during the years I've done Nano. Of course, it's really easy to check up if I'm still doing this by looking up the first page of the author's list...
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