Given NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, it seemed appropriate that a quote about novels showed up in my iGoogle quote-of-the-day widgit:

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.”
–Albert Camus

Which inspires me to give you a number of other quotes related to books and writing as well. Thanks to WikiQuote for helping me find some of these.

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”
–Gilbert Highet

“I am a part of everything that I have read.”
–John Kieran

“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”
–James Russell Lowell

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
–Neil Gaiman

“Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”
–Robert Benchley

“The natural state of all writing is mediocrity.”
–Ira Glass

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
–Stephen King

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As of October 28th, one week before Election Day, Electoral-vote.com is reporting that Indiana is leaning “barely Democrat”. Obama leads by… are you ready for this? One percent. One single measley percentage point. Your. Vote. Counts. No matter who you’re voting for, it’s important to get out there and do it, because folks? This one is gonna be close.

Not sure where to vote? Hey, we can help with that.
Vote 411′s Polling Place Lookup (for any state, not just Indiana)

Want to vote early? In Bloomington, you can do that at the Curry Building, 8:30am-6pm today through Saturday, 1-5pm on Sunday, or 8:30am-noon on Monday. (For other counties, look up your local Board of Elections for location and exact hours; you should have the same timeframe, as it’s statewide.)

If you’re like me, you have no idea where or what the Curry Building is, which may have made you reluctant to try this “early voting” thing. It’s at the corner of 7th and Morton, next to the Justice building, across 7th Street from Bloomington Bagel Company, and across Morton from City Hall and Showers Plaza. (And the Winter Market — convenient for those who will be in the area for that on Saturday!) Click here for a photo taken looking across 7th Street at the building, for those of you who do better with visuals than with addresses.

Vote, people!

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The goal with NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words. That works out to roughly 1,667 words each day during the month, for those of you playing along at home. I’ve typically rounded up to 1,700 just to have a nice even number.

My problem is that there are already about six days in November that I know are not going to be terribly conducive to writing. I might get something done, but I probably won’t. That leaves me with 24 days at 2,084 words each. I’ll probably round up to 2,100.

I decided to do a test run, to see how feasible this was. I can’t start on my actual NaNo project yet, so I pulled a scene from Alex’s story that I hadn’t done much with yet. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to be working on it right now. I needed a scene in which I basically knew what was going on but didn’t have specifics nailed down; this one fit the bill. I cut off arbitrarily at 2,108 words. It took me 96 minutes of just working on writing. (I stopped the stopwatch if I had to go off and do something else.)

That’s about 23 words per minute, which is not a stellar typing speed but I think is halfway decent for composition under these circumstances. I’m feeling like I’m going to have to really focus on this to get it done. An hour and a half a day is a lot of time for me. Probably I won’t get it all in at once — I’ll do some on lunch and then finish up the day’s wordcount after Natalie goes to bed or something. I still think this is cautiously doable.

I’m not sure this thing is going to confine itself to 50K words (2100 covered a lot less scene than I’d remembered it did), but that’s OK. I think technically the requirement for “winning” NaNo is just to hit the wordcount, not necessarily to have a completed novel. And, hell, I’ll be happy if I just hit the same wordcount I did last year (around 25K, the halfway point). I’ll be ecstatic if I actually make it to 50K.

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(I’m hearing that title to the tune of “Dance, Dance” by Fallout Boy in my head, which may not be immediately obvious to anyone but me. Or make any sense.)

I again let myself get off-schedule this weekend. I’m really bad about that. But I got my writing in last night, in between blanching and freezing a dozen ears of corn. I now have a complete outline. I think I’m ready for NaNo to begin on Saturday. I’m a little nervous, but in an anticipatory way rather than in an anxious way. I still think I might be insane for trying this again.

I’m going to try out Google Docs for the actual writing. I plan on doing some lunch-hour writing at work as well as writing at home after Natalie goes to sleep when I can, and I think that will be the easiest way to always have the most current version available wherever I’m at.

I also think I’m actually going to skip photography this weekend (putting it off until next), because Saturday will be the first day of NaNo and I’d like to be able to focus on that this weekend. Once it’s underway I’ll feel better about taking the time out to go snap pictures. Maybe I’ll borrow Tim’s parking pass and go to campus this time? Or just go downtown. I don’t know. I want something a little different from the last session I did.

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Oh, gods. I fell asleep at my desk again. And this time someone saw me.

I’m not in trouble, that I’m aware of. This guy isn’t remotely in my chain of command, and from the way he apologized for waking me (eeep) I got the feeling he didn’t find it terribly unusual or shameful that someone would catch a couple of quick winks at their desk on their lunch hour (which time it fortunately was). Still, how embarrassing.

I can blame it on any number of things, most immediately the heat (you’d be surprised how warm it can get in here even when it’s 40 F outside) and the white noise from the fan I’ve got in my cube to help deal with said heat. What it comes down to, though, is that I was asleep when I shouldn’t have been. At least it was only five minutes or so, I guess…

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The regular summer CSA is over, but now we’re into the winter shares. For 10 weeks, at about $30/week (and well worth it), we’ll continue to get fresh local produce. Today one of the things in our basket was bok choi. It was so beautiful I just had to share.

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Saw V: Wait, what? This franchise is still going? Lord. How many gruesome ways can you make people kill themselves? Oh, hey, Julie Benz is in this one. Darla!

High School Musical 3: Still laughing over a friend’s suggestion that Hollywood should remake Battle Royale using the cast of High School Musical. I wonder if anyone but me remembers that Zac Efron, before he was Mr. High School Musical, played a younger Simon Tam (in flashbacks) in Firefly.

It appears that my memory for who’s in what is stuck in the late 90′s/early 00′s. In which case we can add the “does anyone remember that anymore” role for Heath Ledger (you know, Brokeback Mountain, The Dark Knight, tragic and untimely death), too: the TV series Roar. Speaking of which, whatever happened to Vera Farmiga? She had that other TV series, and then she popped up randomly in The Departed… Wow. Looking at her pictures on IMDb, maybe I’ve seen her in other things and just not recognized her. I never realized different hair could change a person’s look that much. (Also, I love this picture, though know nothing about the movie — just for the light and the movement in the curtains.)

There is a remake of Clash of the Titans in the works, slated for 2010. I can’t decide whether to hope it’s awesomely bad or just plain awesome. Speaking of, check out Atomic Gadfly‘s post on Greek history in Hollywood. “Depending on your point of view, ancient Greece was either the cradle of Western civilization or the setting for the wackiest, longest-running soap opera in human history – the sagas of the gods, demi-gods, and human bystanders who make up the Greek myths.” (Actually, I think it was probably both.) “When it came to Hercules, the Disney people just threw up their hands, and didn’t even try to adapt the actual story. Instead, they came up with a generic adventure story about a generic hero and called him ‘Hercules’ for the name recognition. With a few alterations, they could’ve just as easily called him ‘King Arthur’ or ‘Barack Obama.’” “The last thing we need to see is Shia LaBeouf starring in the title role in Socrates’ Revenge. (Tagline: ‘We’ll see who drinks the hemlock this time!’)”

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I love me some dumb reality TV for relaxing in the evenings, and CW really does the “dumb” part well, making it easy on the brain while also making it easy to laugh at the shows rather than simply being bored by them. (See: America’s Next Top Model, Crowned — and when is the latter coming back, anyway?) So when I saw the commercials for their latest, Stylista, I actually did think about setting up a season pass on our DVR. Young fashion talent competing for an assistant’s job at Elle. Sounds great!

Then I realized it was just Anne Slowey trying to be Anna Wintour, got bored, and wandered off. Then I did a little reading post-premiere and realized that I had been wrong. It was Anne Slowey trying to be Miranda Priestly, which character was based on Anna Wintour. Which is even more of a hot mess. But in an embarrassing way, not in a fun way.

New York Magazine sums it up for me: “[Imitating The Devil Wears Prada] makes sense for producers who may want to cash in on the excitement people had for the movie. But the problem is, Meryl [Streep]‘s character was based on Anna Wintour, the most powerful woman at the most powerful magazine in fashion. And Anne Slowey, for all her talents, is not the most powerful woman at a magazine that is not the most powerful one in fashion.”

Yup. Walking away.

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Sigh.

A co-worker of mine (OK, actually now he’s my boss…’s boss) describes blah days as follows: “My motivation can be measured in micro give-a-shits today.” That’s kind of how I feel today, and how I felt yesterday. I had lost track of time over the weekend and not wound up getting my writing time in (again; I have got to work on sticking to my own schedule), but figured I’d do it Wednesday after putting Natalie to bed. Except I wasn’t exactly motivated.

I bored myself to tears. Not because what I was working on was boring, but because I just wasn’t feeling it right then. It was one of those times when writing is really work, and not just something you do to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that this week’s session was at all productive.

I had decided it might be fun to take a break from plot (I still have one more weekend before NaNo, so I can finish outlining the final act then) and work on some character sketches. Except I wound up bored and most of the sketches I did really didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. It was helpful for one character, maybe two, out of the seven I worked on. Blargh. And then I should, in restrospect, have gone on to work on setting, or figure out what the heck makes this fantasy again anyway, or work out how to work in knowledge of the niece and nephew without giving away the twist too early. Any number of details I’ve been neglecting. See: micro give-a-shits.

Well, some weeks are better than others, I guess.

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…Like when they lead me to amusing tongue-in-cheek sites like this:
Teach the Controversy

I normally ignore web ads entirely, but I saw this one on Sinfest and it was a case of, “…Okay, now I have to know.”

If they were serious, I’d have a totally different reaction. However, while it can occasionally be difficult to tell satire from serious, I think the design with the flat world supported by elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle pretty much says it all. (This is, incidentally, the design in the ad that made me click through.) Because even if you believe things like that Satan planted dinosaur bones to give us a false sense of the Earth’s age, that the solar system revolves around the Earth, that Atlantis really existed, that the sun is literally being pushed across the sky by a scarab beetle, etc., I really don’t think anyone takes Discworld’s cosmology remotely seriously.

Is it wrong of me to actually kind of want a couple of these? I… actually think the one with the ESP cards is really fun, and also the table of elements.

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