Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 11760

Yes, I’m behind again. Five thousand words every three days can get to be a bit much. I should probably bump myself up to that 2,000-a-day plan, just to compensate for my irresistible urge to goof off. For my latest NaNoWriMo procrastination I’ve set my Mac up to play Filk Radio. So far it’s been more folky than filky in my style, but I like folk music so I’m still listening.

I tried several browsers before I struck one that worked. Chimera, my Mac browser of choice, isn’t fancy enough yet to let the user choose an application for a new streaming file type. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is supposed to do it, but despite following the directions to the letter, twice, all it did was crash. Yet another reason never to use IE, as if I needed more…

So I dug out Mozilla, which, like Chimera, is not officially supported by Filk Radio. I don’t usually run it because it’s not as fast as Chimera, though it’s more full-featured. The setup was much quicker than the unsuccessful IE version - I just followed the Netscape instructions, more or less. It thought I was on a T1 line, but I corrected that little misapprehension quickly. Presto! Filk! Then, once it had passed the streaming MP3 baton to iTunes (the designated helper application), I closed Mozilla and reopened Chimera. I’m stubborn that way.

I don’t quite understand how a cover of “From a Distance” with a couple of pronouns changed qualifies as filk. The ratio of meta-filk - filk about filking - to filk proper - songs about sci-fi - is even higher than the ratio of ville-wank to ville-fic, were that possible. Ah, here comes a real filk, of “Hotel California” - any fannish gear/you will find it here…

Word count: 5 (49,995 to go)

But they’re the most important five words! Yes, I’ve come up with an opening line that summarizes the entire novel. In fact, it’s so telling that I can’t put it at the beginning where (everyone knows) the opening line that summarizes the entire novel goes. I’ll have to hide it after a dramatic, interest-grabbing prologue instead.

I know, the suspense is killing you. Here it is: “Tell me about your father.” Lovely in its triteness, it will slip by the reader like a greased pig. Other NaNoWriters may have stayed up all night to take advantage of their first piece of November; I went to bed. The muse needs her beauty rest if she’s going to pump out 50,000 words without even an outline.

Besides outlining, my wasted pre-NaNo weeks should have been devoted to research. I did manage to stop by the library for a pile of research material before it was, technically, November. It’s rare that I complete something hours before the deadline like that.

Speaking of planning, the obvious approach to NaNoWriMo is to divide 50,000 by 30 and come up with a daily word count of 1,667. That approach, while mathematically sound, is far too pedestrian for my work of speed-art. I prefer to divide 50,000 by 800 to get 63 scenes. That’s not quite round enough, though, so let’s divide 50,000 by 833 to get 60 scenes. That’s 2 scenes a day, a literary concept my muse can wrap her (stolen) mind around. One scene for breakfast and one for dinner, as it were.

Since it’s the afternoon already, I’m one scene behind. The weekend is clearly the time to catch up on such things, so I hope that by Sunday I’ll be back in the running. There’s no hope of my being the first to the finish line - there are 10,000 participants this year, I heard, and I’m no trilogy-writer like the fantasy people. This is just a little sci-fi novel that’s off to a slow start.

I’m feeling uninspired - or rather, drained after a rant on-list about condescension - so I’ll get to that backblog of material now.

First of all, I forgot to mention that it snowed yesterday. In Boston, on October 23rd. The leaves aren’t even properly turned yet and there was snow falling out of the sky in broad daylight. Yet people keep telling me it’s going to be a mild winter.

Second, on the very hot topic of whether the sniper in Washington, D.C. should be referred to as a sniper: yes. I know the real snipers are up in arms because the alleged sniper didn’t use proper military-issue sniping equipment or murder his victims from a sufficiently challenging distance, but you can’t pin this use of the term on the sniper media circus. The dictionary definition of sniping is to shoot at exposed individuals from a usually concealed point of vantage. He shot at people, they didn’t see him - ergo, sniper.

I forgot to mention the forums at NaNoWriMo. They reminded me how much I hate forums. A nice little flat-level forum, say, of the size of the J/C Index message board isn’t bad despite the trolls, but when you get into thousands of posts like at TrekBBS, who has time to follow it all? There are no trolls at NaNoWriMo, but still, a thousand people saying hi, a hundred random topics about novel genre - I can’t face it. I’d rather meet the people in person, though, unfortunately, I’ll be away this weekend so I won’t get to go to the Boston kick-off party.

Liz gave a 1 to 10 scale for ranking fic a while back. There’s a more accurate way to rank fic, though - put it all in order, from Revisionist History to Burning Thistles Amongst Thorns. The story’s score is the percentage of stories that are ranked beneath it. That’s how the SAT’s are scored (or at least, how they were scored before the grade inflation). Of course, a scanner doesn’t have to suffer through the bad fic.

There are simpler ways to do it. One could, for instance, take down the name and summary of every story posted to ASC in the course of a year, or every story in the J/C archive, then ask fans a binary question about the list - say, “Do you remember story X which was about Y?” Then rank the stories by the percentage of readers who remembered them, or remembered them fondly. Anyway, it could be done. People would scream bloody murder if you did it, but it could be done.

The new backblog list is:

• The Jossing of Anya
• Extreme measures in veterinary medicine
• That the things I hate about Buffy are just like the things I hated about XF

As long as I’m here, I’ll add my rant on condescension:

So stop it already.

National Novel Writing Month is coming soon, and I do have a novel in mind. At first I’d decided to write a children’s book, not because I was especially inspired, but because it seemed like the most efficient use of 50,000 words. While it’s the ideal for a month-long spate of novelizing lunacy, fifty thousand words is too much for a novella and too little for a novel, market-wise. In my complete ignorance of children’s lit, I thought it might be an appropriate length for that.

As far as I can tell, a children’s book is a book about children. Yes, it’s shorter than Gone with the Wind and less racy than Anne Rice erotica, but there are adult books that are neither infinite nor smutty. Maybe there are certain factors of tone involved; I think my tone would do. My interest in writing for children is not the smut-free pass, the reduced word count, or even the off-chance of striking it rich with the next Harry Potter phenomenon.

Children’s books are the best-loved books. I may have read better books since the Chronicles of Narnia and Taran Wanderer, but they just haven’t hit me the same way. I think it’s more the childhood than the literature - my attachment to LotR dates to elementary school. Man of La Mancha, the musical, wouldn’t form such a large part of my worldview if I hadn’t grown up on it. So yes, I want to scar youth permanently the way Aldonza’s song did me.

But I won’t be doing it for NaNoWriMo, because another idea came to mind. A certain character has popped up in a couple of my uncompleted novels (the Wrong Novel and the Wrong Prequel, to be precise), and I decided that since he fascinated me so much more than my nice female protagonists, he deserved history - a name and a habitation.

I’ve known for a long time that his name was that of an ex-boyfriend of mine, though I’ve buried it in faux-futuristic versions in the other novels. If I stopped to think about it, I might find some unresolved bitterness in the fact that he’s destined to start a war, end a golden age, and perhaps get a little genocide in on the side. Simple filicide will do for the first 50,000 words of his life, though.

Thanks to Seema for a wonderful link: November is
National Novel Writing Month. It
reminded me of my favorite quote from
rec.arts.sf.composition:
“Hello, my name is Anna, and I write trilogies.” – Anna
Mazzoldi.

From the FAQ:

There’s even a chapter organizer in Boston. I’m not sure whether I’ll do a
fan novel or an original novel, but I’m a sucker for a deadline. Who is with me?