Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Happy Birthday, Rose





                                                                  Rose Wilder Lane
                      
                   (December 5, 1886, De Smet, Dakota Territory – October 30, 1968, Danbury, Connecticut) 

                               American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist.


Rose Wilder was first child of Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder. Rose was their only child to survive into adulthood.  Her mother, as author Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote a series of children’s books about her life in the 1930s and 40s, that are now generally known as “The Little House” books.  They continue to be in print, and the tv series of the 1970s and 80s produced by Michael Landon entitled “Little House On The Prairie” (the series title was taken from the second book in the series) was adapted from the book series.

Lane’s early years were difficult ones for her parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, Lane moved with her family several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida, briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota, before the family finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where her parents eventually established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana, (where her father’s sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, had settled), graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley in 1904. Lane’s ability to compress three years of Latin into one more than earned her the top spot in her graduating class.

Despite this academic success, her parents’ financial situation placed college out of reach and her formal schooling was over. After high school graduation she returned to her parents’ farm and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station where the station master was the father of a school friend.  Wilder worked for Western Union in Kansas City as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years.

In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Clare Gillette Lane. Around 1910, Lane bore a son who was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more children. The details of the child’s death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.

For the next few years Lane and her husband traveled around the US working various marketing and promotional schemes. Letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence with both Lane and her husband traversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately. However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this time, Lane described herself as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband.

One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.

During this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash. Between 1912 and 1914, Lane – one of the earliest female real estate agents in California – and her husband sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. It made sense for the two to work separately to earn separate commissions, and Lane turned out to be the better salesperson of the two. The marriage foundered, there were several periods of separation, and eventually an amicable divorce in 1918. Lane’s diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her divorce, but she never remarried.

The threat of America’s entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend’s offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane’s photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Her first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.

In 1915, Lane’s mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, visited for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; many details of this visit and Lane’s daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder’s letters to her husband and are available in West from Home, published by Lane’s heir in 1974. Although Lane’s diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, Wilder’s letters do not indicate this. Gillette Lane was recorded as living with his wife, although unemployed and looking for work during his mother-in-law’s two month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up for her mother’s visit, or had not yet involved separate households.

By 1918, Lane had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin to launch a career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane’s work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.

Lane was also the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of Hoover for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers reside in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Lane’s papers contain little actual correspondence between Hoover and herself, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.

In the late 1920s, she was one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, Lane’s compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or “silent” editor for other well-known writers.

Lane’s occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman’s Day magazine, providing “a woman’s point of view.” She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, author Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named “Zenobia”. An account of the journey, Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983 by her heir. Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England.

In 1928, Lane returned to the U.S. to live on her parents’ farm and there she took in and educated two local orphaned brothers. In 1938, Lane purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the remainder of her life.

The stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane’s and her parents’ investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with Lane’s encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.

In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, titled Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura as she matured from ages five to eighteen. Despite Lane’s efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was resoundingly rejected, although one editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on this project, thus producing “Little House in the Big Woods”, which was accepted by Harper & Row in late 1931. The success of the book resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura Ingalls into young adulthood.

It remains unclear whether Laura Ingalls Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who never discovered her talents until her sixties, with Lane’s only contribution to her mother’s success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took her mother’s unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote the series of books we know today. The truth appears to lie somewhere between these two positions — Wilder’s writing career as a rural journalist and a credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane’s formidable editing and ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing written evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane’s extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder’s own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder’s confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary.

Many of Lane’s most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from her mother’s recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore—Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century, and how the “free land” in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings.  Let The Hurricane Roar was based on the early life of Lane’s grandparents-who would be know to future generations as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls and Charles “Pa” Ingalls.  Free Land was based on the early years of her Lane’s own parents’ marriage and included members of both sides of the family.  The Saturday Evening Post paid Lane large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio performances.  The Young Pioneers would later be adapted into a TV movie in the 1970s.

During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American Black newspaper.

Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, she seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history.

“Here, at last, is a place where I belong,” she wrote of her new job. “Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom.”

Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann’s rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a “capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion” while Ford’s showed how a poor mechanic can create “hundreds of jobs … putting even beggars into cars.”

She combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were strikingly similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was Black.

Lane’s columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the “ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of ‘race,’ [by] which a minority of the earth’s population has deluded itself during the past century”, it was time for all Americans (black and white) to “renounce their race”. Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the “old English-feudal ‘class’ distinction.” The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling “young minds with fantasies of ‘races’ and ‘classes’ and ‘the masses,’ all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government.”

In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial writing and became known as one of the most influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, perceived “creeping socialism,” Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. She cut her income and expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors’ pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury, Connecticut. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged the move to Connecticut, where she would be only “up country a few miles” from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.

A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her Red Cross travels, Lane wrote the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, and the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.

Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane’s and Paterson’s nonfiction works were “the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century.”

The two women had “shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally … They don’t fumble and fiddle around—every shot goes straight to the centre.” Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final “conversion” from socialism to what he called “an older American philosophy” of libertarian and conservative ideas.

In 1943, Lane was thrust into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would ultimately destroy the US. The subsequent events remain unclear, but wartime monitoring of the mails eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her farmhouse (supposedly at the request of the FBI) to question her motives. Lane’s vehement response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, “What is this, the Gestapo?,” that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights, despite the wartime exigencies.

There was an FBI file compiled on Lane during this time, which is now available under the Freedom of Information Act.

As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. She broke with her old friend and political ally, Isabel Paterson in 1946, and, in the 1950s, had an acrimonious correspondence with writer Max Eastman.

During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the “libertarian movement”, a term she apparently coined, and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writers Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand. Lane wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.

With her mother’s death in 1957, use of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the surrounding land. The local townfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to her mother, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family’s belongings to help establish what became a popular museum which still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield. Her lifetime inheritance of Wilder’s growing Little House royalties put an end to Lane’s self-enforced modest lifestyle; she began to travel extensively again, and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home.

During the 1960s, Lane revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the Vietnam war zone in late 1965.

Lane wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a strong libertarian undercurrent) for Woman’s Day and edited and published On The Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother’s original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. This book was intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, for those many fans who since Wilder’s death were now writing to Lane asking, “what happened next?”. She contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.

Lane was the adoptive “grandmother” and mentor to Roger MacBride, best known as the Libertarian Party’s 1976 candidate for President of the United States. MacBride was the son of one of Lane’s editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a young boy; she later admitted that she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, he also became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multi-million dollar franchise that he built around it after Lane’s death.

The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane’s wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl’s intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.

Rose Wilder Lane died in her sleep at the age of 81, on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. She was the last surviving member of Charles Ingalls’ family line as his daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder (Lane’s mother) was the only one of his four daughters to have children.

Monday, November 5, 2012

NaNoWriMo/NaBloPoMo – Day 4 and other things


So I am informed by Ye Trusty ole NaNoWriMo Word Count stats cruncher that:

Your Average Per Day
778
 
Words Written Today
1,020
 
Target Word Count
50,000
 
Target Average Words Per Day
1,667
 
Total Words Written
3,114
 
Words Remaining
46,886
 
Current Day
4
 
Days Remaining
27
 
At This Rate You Will Finish On
January 3, 2013
 
So I have upped my word count slightly but I need to pick up the pace to at least hit 50,000 words within this year.



An interesting development is that while watching this:
  , (which is about these guys  ),
I found a key to unlocking the soul of the story I want to tell.  The music from Unknown Pleasures and Closer albums really inspired me.



I came across more writing tips online:
infographic -- click the text links in the post for text versions of the visual material
About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Copyblogger Media.


AND

Go Into the Story’s contribution of …
“Get the damn thing done!”:
http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/10/get-the-damn-thing-done.html


Lastly, I was tooling around on GetGlue.com (I should say old GetGlue (o.getglue.com), because no one likes the new GetGlue.com website and found this:
I am thinking about Jack Klugman

And so I shared the excerpts from his book, “Tony and Me” on GetGlue that spoke to me:
“I tell young actors all the time: learn your craft and the rest will take care of itself.”

and

“I don’t like to preach, but I’m going to now because I feel this is too important not to say.  If you’re like I was, or you’re someone who likes to hold a grudge, or you’ve never really let someone know what they mean to your because you’re afraid, ask yourself this question: what are you really protecting?

If you look, you’ll see it: nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Just phantoms from old wounds that never healed. Give them up and join the people in your life who love you.  Risk it all. For me, it was the best gamble I ever made.”

Saturday, November 3, 2012

National Novel Writing Month: A Meme

"The scariest moment is always just before you start". —- Stephen King



The questions/meme are a reblog from clarisaxx.tumblr.com, but the answers are all my own...


Working Title [of NaNoWrimo work for the current season]:
Novel 1: The Tale of Snow White and Rose Red
Novel 2: The Angry Gondals stuff
Novel 3: And the Rest (including Sibs of Doom and Gollumidas stuff)

Genre:
All over the map, but I'm guessing fantastical epic stuff

Projected Word Count:
It would be great if I could get one of them to 50k.  My modest expectation is that all combined will be at least hit 50k.



AT THE START DO YOU:

Start typing?
Sure. The deadline is 11:59pm each night to review, word count and repeat.

Have an outline?
Yes for the first two, not so much for the third.

Scene-by-scene?
Kinda.

Know how it starts?
Yep.

Know how it ends? (Does it have an ending?)
Novel 1: Yes
Novel 2: Sorta
Novel 3: No, bloody clue-I'll go where the story takes me.

Have your climax in order?
Possibly.

Have your main characters yet?
Yes.

Plan to draw on your experiences?
Maybe. There are very few life experiences that are unique so I'm sure if it didn't happen to me, it happened to someone.



IS YOUR WORK GOING TO BE:

Funny?
I usually infuse some kind of funny in anything fictional that I write. Your Mileage May Vary as to how funny it is.

Serious?
Oh yeah.  I do 'Serious' pretty well.

Sad?
Oh yeah.  There will be tragedy.  It wouldn't be me if there wasn't some kind of tragedy.

Semi-Autobiographical?
Not really, although Your Mileage May Vary there too in reading some incidents.

Based on another story?
Novel 2: Yes. It's my reimagining of the Angria and Gondal tales.



HOW MUCH HAVE YOU PLANNED?
HAVE YOU USED:


A paper journal?
Yep.  A lot of material was/is documented in those pretty journals that Barnes and Noble and the now defunct Borders used to sell. My herculean task has been to digitized all of it.

A computer? 
Some.

Index cards? 
Yep, in ways that would make the teachers that I frustrated because I wouldn't use them and complete term papers go "What The?".

Bulleted lists? 
Sometimes on the index cards.

Plot Charts?
On the larger index cards-leftover practice from storyboarding for film.

Character Charts?
Yes and no.  I like to keep names + traits + appearances listed, which makes things easier to keep track of, but I know them in my head and so I'll rarely update them.



ODDS AND ENDS:

Favorite writing resource?
Book:
On Writing by Stephen King
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
The prefaces of the short stories written by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Sword and Sorceress anthologies
How to Become a Famous Writer Before your Dead by Ariel Gore

Online:
The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust (http://www.mzbworks.com/)
Forward Motion for Writers (http://www.fmwriters.com/zoomfm/index.php/home)
Vision (http://visionforwriters.com/visionjoom/)
The tweets from @lawnrocket (twitter.com/lawnrocket)
NaNo for the New and the Insane A guide to surviving NaNoWriMo(SM) By Lazette Gifford (http://lazette.net/freestuf/NaNoBook.pdf)


A line you would like to use:
"Cleaving through the night sky" - I came up with it but I don't know where I'll use it yet.

A scene you would like to include:
Possibly the one where one character sleeps with the other but was leading him on to find out what side of the fight he was on and he doesn't see it coming because she pretty much doesn't seem to be cutthroat.

A concept you would like to explore:
Novel 1: The compromises we make
Novel 2: Personal Evolution
Novel 3: Oh the places that we go

A cliché you would like to avoid:
While I'd like to avoid as many as possible (tvtropes.org holla!), I don't think it's possible to avoid even one.  You basically find a way to make them less hackneyed.

A character you would like to use:
I can't really think of one that's not my own.



FORWARD THINKING:

Do you expect to be able to complete it?
I'd like to, but realistically I may not.  It doesn't mean I can't try.

Do you intend to complete it? 
I'll do my level best.

Would you ever try to publish it?
I'd like to try publishing one of the three.  That would be kinda cool.

What do you expect to get out this month of frantic writing? 
Some really ripping yarns that I would like to read on my own and to share with others.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

More Random or NaBloPoMo Day Two

Here we are at Day Two.



Just finished watching the Shaun Cassidy segment on the 'Best of Oprah' on the OWN network. It was one of those channelsurfing moment. It wasn't a bad segment, though I wished that Oprah had spent some time on how he managed to not go down in flames as had several of his contemporaries and carve out another career as a producer and writer. They mentioned it in passing, but Biography did a better job of covering this.


Speaking of writing, what I love about Shaun's work is that he does shows that not only tell a great story, that explores things like family, community and the absurd.


I first became aware of his career "behind the camera" with the series 'American Gothic'. I also watched 'Roar,' which is now more remembered as being the place where most Americans first saw the late Heath Ledger. I also remember it because Bill Maher tried to take Shaun to task about the show on 'Politically Incorrect' because a character on 'Roar' was of African descent and Maher felt that they were pandering to audience pressure to be inclusive on a show that takes place in Iron Age. Shaun, who was minding his own business, calmly corrected Maher, by letting him know that research was done and that it was possible for that character to exist and no pandering happened.







My own writing:
Two days - 1000 words so far. The working title for the NaNoWriMo project is 'In a Moment.' I've been working on how AG Rochelle ended up imprisoned and how Julian discovers and rescues her. As these are Gondal characters, the only clues are really from the poems that Emily about this.
I've spent time cleaning up and updating blogs. I finally moved all of my old NaBloPoMo posts from the old NaBloPomo site on Ning to a new home on Wordpress. I'll be getting the Blog365 posts soon. So now my only presence on Ning will be at the Bolt site.

I need to get going on the radio soap, which I think I'd like to do as a parody/satire, having really enjoyed watching 'Guiding Plight,' which like that great show, 'Soap,' pays homage to while wonderfully skewered the genre that feeds it.



So ends the Day Two Post. See you for Day Three.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

NaBloPoMo - Day One

So it's Day One of the NaBloPoMo thing and the NaNoWriMo thing.


A goal for this year is to definitely be more constant in my blogging for NaBloPoMo. The last two years I thought I would have one feed into the other by blogging about the novel that I working on, especially since I don't attend a lot of write-ins and since I noted in the last day of the first NaBloPoMo that I participated in that finding content is tough. The good thing about NaBloPoMo is that prompts are provided to help with struggling to find content. Though I must say that even with that, I still didn't really use them.

I'm pretty much going back to the "old format" where I combine random posting with posting about my writing. I am also encouraged by the fact that John Quincy Adams maintained a line a day journal. I can definitely do that, the Twitter master that I am.


In addition to posting content here as a part of the official NaBloPoMo, I will still be posting/crossposting at the usual places:



More Explore
http://moreexplore.blogspot.com/


A Writing Exploration
http://ladydayelle.livejournal.com/


My Blog (where the posts from the old NaBloPoMo site and the blog360 site at Ning are housed-I'll cross post the new blog here)
http://ladydayelle.wordpress.com/


My Social Issue Awareness and Action Blog (I blog about issues that come up on Bloggers Unite, Change.org and other current cause)
http://kitlat.wordpress.com/











"There is never enough time to do or say all the things that we would wish. The thing is to try to do as much as you can in the time that you have. Remember Scrooge, time is short, and suddenly, you're not here any more." -The Ghost of Christmas

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

50,333

50, 333 words.



50, 333 words in 29 days. I can't believe it either. I was going to write a very different result for this year's NaNoWriMo, but I somehow found the strength over the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend to go past the 45,000 I clocked in, starting last Saturday.



I did use a combination of paper, Dragon Naturally Speaking and typing to complete the 17 Days collection, which is a scruffy but suitable first draft. I hope to have the strength and desire to edit it.



This year's NaNoWriMo was tough for me. I really did not have it in me at times to finish. I experienced two very emotionally crushing blows. One admittedly was somewhat expected though no less painful. As each day passes and I try to make peace with what has happened though I find acceptance very hard and try to hope for the best, but sitting with the worst.



There was a week I didn't write. And the NaBloPoMo challenge? Fuggeddaboutit. This will be second year I was unable to blog for 30 days straight (unless you could my tweets and retweets). I simply could not channel my pain and frustration and other emotions-not into writing anyway. There are times I miss overnight stocking and outdoors work-I was more successful channeling there. I actually abandoned one of the stories I started, because the parallels were too painful and I knew that this story would not end happily ever after.



(Most of my past creative writing teachers would probably tell you that any fiction I wrote centered on lots of tragedy, sometimes flippantly, but it was there and I could distance myself from it enough to write it.)



I can't say why I picked it up again. I wish I could say that I didn't want to leave something undone, not completed. I wish I could say that it was another promise that I didn't want to lose out on. I can't say.



I just know that I picked up the outline and went over it the way I do at work; figuring out what needs to be done and what problem needs to be solved. Then I started writing. I was interested in seeing where it would go. I stopped paying attention to word counts and just wrote.



It didn't happen without pain, for the residual pain was still there as was the situation that was the source of the pain. Being annoyed with certain coworkers and client for jackassery that made my life more difficult didn't help either. I was tired. I would stop and not know how to continue. Then I would know and continue.



Somehow. I find myself here. On November 30, having written 50,333 words (so said the word validator at the nanowrino site).



So closes another NaNoWriMo for me. Five years of participation. One validated win (this one) that unfortunately I won't ever be able to savour as much as I imagined I would back when I started on November 1st.

50,333

50, 333 words.



50, 333 words in 29 days. I can't believe it either. I was going to write a very different result for this year's NaNoWriMo, but I somehow found the strength over the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend to go past the 45,000 I clocked in, starting last Saturday.



I did use a combination of paper, Dragon Naturally Speaking and typing to complete the 17 Days collection, which is a scruffy but suitable first draft. I hope to have the strength and desire to edit it.



This year's NaNoWriMo was tough for me. I really did not have it in me at times to finish. I experienced two very emotionally crushing blows. One admittedly was somewhat expected though no less painful. As each day passes and I try to make peace with what has happened though I find acceptance very hard and try to hope for the best, but sitting with the worst.



There was a week I didn't write. And the NaBloPoMo challenge? Fuggeddaboutit. This will be second year I was unable to blog for 30 days straight (unless you could my tweets and retweets). I simply could not channel my pain and frustration and other emotions-not into writing anyway. There are times I miss overnight stocking and outdoors work-I was more successful channeling there. I actually abandoned one of the stories I started, because the parallels were too painful and I knew that this story would not end happily ever after.



(Most of my past creative writing teachers would probably tell you that any fiction I wrote centered on lots of tragedy, sometimes flippantly, but it was there and I could distance myself from it enough to write it.)



I can't say why I picked it up again. I wish I could say that I didn't want to leave something undone, not completed. I wish I could say that it was another promise that I didn't want to lose out on. I can't say.



I just know that I picked up the outline and went over it the way I do at work; figuring out what needs to be done and what problem needs to be solved. Then I started writing. I was interested in seeing where it would go. I stopped paying attention to word counts and just wrote.



It didn't happen without pain, for the residual pain was still there as was the situation that was the source of the pain. Being annoyed with certain coworkers and client for jackassery that made my life more difficult didn't help either. I was tired. I would stop and not know how to continue. Then I would know and continue.



Somehow. I find myself here. On November 30, having written 50,333 words (so said the word validator at the nanowrino site).



So closes another NaNoWriMo for me. Five years of participation. One validated win (this one) that unfortunately I won't ever be able to savour as much as I imagined I would back when I started on November 1st.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Lessons in Writing from...Marion Zimmer Bradley-Part the First

I never had a formal writing course. That is, I took creative writing in college, but to fulfill a requirement, not as a focus.Many of my lessons in writing came from paying attention to the general introductions and the mini-introductions to the short stories of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by the late, great Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB).She was a prolific author who wrote in many genres at some point in her life. She lived very comfortably in fantasy. In addition to her Darkover novels (which also showed her sci-fi chops at times), she was well known for her retelling of the Arthurian Mythos from the female perspective in a book known as the 'Mists of Avalon.'I read the Sword and Sorceress (S&S) anthologies beginning in high school.

To this day, I must admit that my first reading of the anthologies were always of those introductions and then I would go back and read a story or two here and there. The mini-introductions reminded me of the irascible grandmother or grandfather, who knew their craft and didn't understand how these kids could get as far as they did without doing things proper.

Tips I picked up from these pages included:

  • Being able sum up a story and/or a novel in one sentence
  • Following the guidelines so that you are giving the editor what they are looking for
  • Working at it until you get it write
  • Watching that grammar

MZB died in September 1999. I found out first by looking at the S&S XVII and noticing that the copyright was in the name of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust. Then I found one of those retail bookstore newsletters that you usually ignore and I saw her picture and then that dreaded term-the 'late' Marion Zimmer Bradley.

There is a website for the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust:

http://mzbworks.home.att.net/

If you don't happen to have the money or the time to collect the S&S anthologies, there is a section at the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust website that just happens to be called 'Articles on Writing,' which just happens to have an article entitled 'Advice for New Writers.' Each article is relevant and full of sound advice told in that MZB style. Definitely worth reading and worth coming back to for a refresher from time to time.

So thanks MZB, for inadvertantly teaching me useful things while I read about strong swordswomen and sorceresses.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Where are your women?

Check that. Where are your women who look closer to the undesirable version of the racial spectrum, but who are just as competent, just as capable and just as curious as the souped up versions that are presented?

We've been treated to lots of stories heroes and heroines saving the world, making a difference and having fun on the internet, the big screen and the small screen. I rarely see people who look like the kind of woman I physically became in those stories. I usually see them as victims, as dimwitted, unimaginative, non progressive people, as an archetype who is a 'magical negro' or who has 'the ancient Chinese secret,' but not leading a full live that has ups and downs and highs and lows except as some sort of 'afterschool special'.

I reflect on the current crop of medical dramas and again notice that women of color as doctors, as supervisors, as specialists are missing in large numbers. I was thinking about 'Grey's Anatomy,' which does have women of color as a part of the writing staff, but none as attendings in the show's hospital staff. Make no mistake-Miranda Bailey may huff and puff, but she and Callie are HNIC and HMIC respectively.

Sci-fi, action and fantasy makes you want to cry because of the dearth. Even if a woman of dark color is presented, she rarely is in on the action and she lives in a vacuum. She's married and/or is a mother and is remote.

Of course, I can write my own stories...but will they ever be read?

Sunday, November 9, 2008

A Sad Literary Trifecta

As I emerged from my week o' congestion and fever, I learned that we lost three major literary talents.

Admittedly, I had not read a lot of Studs Terkel. In school it was far safer to stick with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet than it was to deal with 20th century fiction. His work was about regular people too (often Shakespeare is lauded for creating realistic and enduring portraits of both 'high and low born' in his work), only we saw their blemishes as well as their beauty. They were people we knew and even talked about more than the important and the powerful. Scrappy and knowledgeable, this renaissance man was not just and author, but a radio host, a star of his own tv show and an activist. I knew more about Studs Terkel as a colorful figure that did interviews on shows like '60 Minutes' and talked about the nebulous old days. Perhaps when I am not reading about the latest upgrade of Adobe's Creative Suite, I'll pick up one of his books and read it and enjoy.


Michael Crichton's death was a surprise to me and apparently everyone who was not close to him. Much like a character on a show called 'ER,' he waged a private war with cancer that he unfortunately lost. He wrote books that were interesting to say the least and that showed a certain range. I must admit that I was not as big of a fan of the Jurassic Park books, not because they were not good, but because I believe that there is a gene on the Y chromosome that makes a person love all things 'dinosaur'. As a female, I don't get a Y chromosome and therefore am unable to appreciate dinosaur things on that level. I learned about 6 years into its run that Michael Crichton was the creator of and the executive producer of the long running medical drama 'ER.' It took a bit to reconcile that the guy who was responsible for 'Jurassic Park,' was also the guy responsible for a show where viewers tuned in to see if Dr. Doug Ross and Nurse Carol Hathaway were finally going to get married. I remember being told that 'ER' was based on Crichton's years as an intern and a resident. The earlier episodes do feel like a window upon those worlds, with its outlining of process amid the MTV-esque jump cuts as the unfortunate citizens of Chicago wheel in and out of the ER. I noted with a grim irony that it was fitting that this was the last season of 'ER' since its creator has now passed on.

John Leonard's passing was both unexpected and the one that I felt the most, in so far as one could feel about someone who was not family. I knew of him primarily through CBS's 'Sunday Morning,' a news magazine that profiles topics at a slower pace for those who have the time for more than the highlights. Leonard's reviews of books, tv shows and movies were knowledgeable and acerbic. The fact that my mother enjoyed him definitely had high stock value with me since media critics were not people she paid attention to. Since I had been busy of late, I had not missed Leonard's reviews as much as I might have, but I remembered thinking at times that something was missing from the show and I could not put a finger on it. I learned today that John Leonard left the show to also do battle with cancer-in his case lung cancer. While I enjoy the observations of Nancy Giles and David Edelstein, I will deeply miss the witty skewering and the alliterative praises of one John Leonard.

Three men gone. Two who would have liked more time and one who was ready to go. All who when their time came could look back and say that they did all right.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Crazy Writing festival called November

So it's November 1st and time for me to participate in both the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I am more than prepared to participate. I was please in terms of NaNoWriMo last year, because I hit 36,000 words out of 50, 000. I do want to come out this year with a manuascript to submit this year. I am going to write on the other aforementioned projects (the Angry Gondals, Gollumdas Monogatari, et. al), but my focus will be the reloaded Blanche and Rose.So it will be interesting to see me write and them post about writing daily.

NaNoWriMo:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/

NaBloPoMo:
http://nablopomo.ning.com/


My Blogs:
http://moreexplore.blogspot.com/
http://ladydayelle.livejournal.com/
http://nablopomo.ning.com/profile/KITLAT

Saturday, July 5, 2008

My Writing Blog

I decided that the best blog to convert into a blog that documents my progress on my writing and other writing obervations is my livejournal one which can be found here: http://ladydayelle.livejournal.com/I decided to update the title to "My Writing Exploration." Goodnight "No Particular Exploration to go to" - Good morning "My Writing Exploration."

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

It's been a long, long time.

May 2007. That was my last post. I know many of the reasons why I hadn't posted anything-work and other responsibilities have reared their UGLY HEADS. I could use the same excuses for why I have not done any serious writing that was not business communications.

I am hoping that this will change in the coming month.

November is both National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) (http://nanowrimo.org) and National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) (http://nablopomo.ning.com).

I've participated in the novel writing-this will be my first year blog posting every day. I plan to document my progress on both fronts in this blog and my blog over at the NaBloPoMo site. I almost can't wait to see what I will come up with at the end of a month.

Friday, November 17, 2006

The World of 'The Outsiders'

Well I found out that the author of 'The Outsiders' has a website : http://www.sehinton.com.
It's simple and clean, but leaves an impression just like her novels. I think I will revisit it frequently as I work on my own website.

Review: The Tale of the Dark Crystal

The Tale of the Dark Crystal by Donna Bass My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews