Soon to Vanish Within My Garret

NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be participating. For those who missed my attempt last year, NaNoWriMo is a completely insane quasi-competition in which people from all over the planet use the month of November to write a 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be a good novel. It doesn't have to be publishable, or literary, or even particularly coherent. It just has to be 50,000 words or longer by midnight in your time zone November 30th, with no prose having existing for the novel before the start of the month, for you the writer to "win."

There are any number of reasons why this can justly be called crazy: November is, at least for Americans and most westerners, the second-busiest month of the year, with a holiday, traveling, shopping, family obligations and the like all impinging. It's also a shorter month (30 days), and (well, for some this is an issue, not me) happens November right after the switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, so circadian rhythms can be off.

Why do it? I participated last year, and while I didn't win, having topped out at 28,500 words, it was a seminal event for me as a writer: I'd never generated so much prose at one prolonged whack before. Some of it was even pretty good, and the corpus from last year's effort should be editable into something interesting down the road. I'm not sure whether all the rest of the prose I'd ever generated in my life before NaNoWriMo '05 added up to 28,500 words. It had a miraculous effect on my confidence as a budding writer and eventual published novelist.

So this year, I'm going to win. I've picked a slightly less esoteric subject for my novel this time, so existential and other issues won't be the ones slowing me down. I've put together a mind map of the rough plot, characters, themes I want to explore, and other minutiae so as to clear some of the logistical that roadblocks that slowed me down last time.

On top of all that, the stalwart and steadfast Amy is on board and being wonderfully supportive. Changes the entire landscape when you've got such a lovely cheerleader on your side.

-Rich

PS. And, via Tripp,

You scored as Reformed Evangelical. You are a Reformed Evangelical. You take the Bible very seriously because it is God's Word. You most likely hold to TULIP and are sceptical about the possibilities of universal atonement or resistible grace. The most important thing the Church can do is make sure people hear how they can go to heaven when they die. Neo orthodox 57% Reformed Evangelical 57% Roman Catholic 43% Emergent/Postmodern 32% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 29% Fundamentalist 25% Modern Liberal 21% Classical Liberal 18% Charismatic/Pentecostal 4% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

One of Those Weekends

You know, when you have one of those crazy good weekends, when you throw a big engagement party, invite friends and family, and everything goes incredibly swimmingly with everyone getting along, wishing you and your intended the best, and celebrating your coming life together (together with cheese chosen by her and wine by him, pairing fabulously with one another and the hors d'oeuvres from her mother)?

You know, that sort of weekend? The kind where your parents visit your soon-to-be parents-in-law, visit for hours on end, tour their house and land, and laugh and tell stories into the night?

Yeah, that kind. You know the sort. Amy and I had one of those.

-Rich

On Reestablishing Contact with the Handwritten Word

I have been having an inordinate amount of fun lately with writing. With journaling, plot, theme, character and all that, too, but specifically with the simple, human act of writing by holding an ink-bearing stylus of some kind in my hand, and wiggling that hand in a more or less (usually less) disciplined way as I move it across a sheet of paper.

Most of the rest of the world figured this out back last year or so, what with the Moleskine craze and Getting Things Done movement taking off; but this is the romance of hand-writing, come home to roost in my personal nest.

Typing vs. Writing
Typing has a lot to recommend it, and I type for several hours each day in my day job. But typing, being a digital activity, both in the sense of using the digits on the ends of one's hands, and in the output (these days) being stored in a digital computer, exercises certain linguistic and manual-dexterity parts of your brain, yes. But typing is primarily a process of selection: your brain selects sequences of individual letters and punctuation (representing in their effect the words you want to convey to your target medium) and engages your hand and arm muscles to push the buttons on the keyboard in front of you, in more or less the proper sequence.

Writing, by contrast, is an expressive effort. You and your body are responsible for every contour of the words you write: we draw our handwritten words, and so every person's penmanship is unique, just like his or her fingerprints. Our handwriting's looseness, flow and tidiness vary with our state of mind. It's actually a wondrous thing, considering how each of us is so different from one another, that we can read one another's handwriting at all. Of course, each of us has tried and failed to read a particularly badly scribbled prescription on occasion, so we know it's hardly foolproof.

Everything Old is New Again
I've written a diary entry and/or bit of prose and/or series of story-idea notes every day after procuring my first Moleskine notebooks. It started as a sensual thing: pretty notebooks, nifty pens, but it's since become a comforting end-of-day routine. Feed the dogs, eat dinner, do an errand or two, shutter the lights in the rest of the house, perhaps read for a bit, and then scribble in my notebooks for an hour or so in bed on my lap desk before turning in.

I find, that since typing is faster and more efficient (due to its digitality), I've really had to slow my thinking down when it comes to writing. It's thrown off my e-mail communication rhythm with Amy (poor Princess!) something fierce, but she's been very understanding so far. Typing up this blog entry has helped me reacquaint myself with thinking and typing, actually.

The brain is a funny place. I'm having a blast, and prepping for NaNoWriMo at the same time.

-Rich

An Aside about Writing, and Posh Writing Implements

NaNoWriMo 2006 is coming soon (it starts November 1), and as such I'm trying to be a little better prepared this year than I was last year. I've already got a good classic-sci-fi theme I'm working on involving cloning and time travel, and I collect notes daily for the eventual firing of the starting gun. Very exciting, and I can't wait for the month to start!

One wrinkle that's afflicted me of late is an obsession with hand writing (yep, grabbing a pen and wiggling its pointy end against fibrous sheets of wood pulp), and with a particularly functional and pretty wood-pulp binding: the Moleskine notebook.

Moleskines (some people pronounce them "mole-a-skeen-a," to rhyme with "ballerina," but I prefer "mole-skeen" to rhyme with "nifty keen") are a triumph not only of marketing (it is laid on particularly thick), but also of functional, uncompromising design. The pages are creamy and sturdy without being too thick; the black "oilcloth"-wrapped hardcover binding is buttery to the touch, yet tough; it's got both an inbuilt ribbon bookmark (like in old-school hardcover books and Bibles), an attached elastic strap to flip around and hold the notebook closed a la the Grail Diary in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a slim pocket in the back cover to hold loose pages or other slips of paper. Moleskines have been called the functional-yet-attractive "little black dress" of notebooks, and after filling a number of pages in the few I have, I can heartily agree.

(For those that will eventually say so, yes, Moleskines are also very faddishly "in" at the moment, but that doesn't mean they're not all they're cracked up to be, and besides, they're available from my local Books-A-Million, and they've got me jazzed up on writing, for which I'd pay twice the price.)

Of course, having stumbled upon what may be the perfect notebook, one's choice of writing implement becomes important. Longtime readers will recognize this as a dawning of a New Hobby, and I plead guilty.

Back in the halcyon days of my youth I was into (and decently good at) calligraphy, and as such I've gone through many a Sheaffer No-Nonsense calligraphy pen and chisel-tipped marker in my day. Tripp in particular will remember that my writing derangement actually had me doing dip-nib-in-inkwell work during our sophomore year at the University of Richmond, and looking up obscure hands like Luxeuil Minuscule in which to copy out strange poems in blood-colored ink.

I told you that to tell you this: I'm currently using Pilot G-2 "gel" rollerball pens to write my thoughts and prose in my Moleskines (and I'm particularly enamored of the burgundy-inked one that Amy bequeathed to me from her assortment), but I'm looking to fountain pens as the ultimate match. I snagged a Sheaffer ViewPoint Fine Nib (direct descendant of the NoNonsense Calligraphy Pen) and a Manuscript "Italic Pen" over lunch today, and both are good, but a little ink-heavy, leading to either slight bleed-through of the page, or illegibility on the narrow lines a Moleskine offers.

I also ordered a restored-vintage 1950s Sheaffer Snorkel Admiral fountain pen from eBay (thankfully they're available cheap--no $100 pens for me, thanks), with which I plan to go berserk later, and Amy went with me to pick up some exquisite dip-nib pens at our local "Ambiance" store in the mall over the weekend.

Pray for me. :-)

-Rich

Bonfire of the Inanities; A Sheepish Return

1. Pope expresses dismay at the tendencies of modern and historical Islam toward violence.
2. Offended Muslims riot and burn churches.

Seriously, I'm looking for Jay Leno with a microphone, doing "Man on the Arab Street" interviews. You can't even really parody this stuff any more.

Many apologies for my lack of blogging activity of late: it's been a crazy few weeks (and for half of the last one I was laid out in bed with a gone-out lower back), but during this same crazy period Amy has managed to blog over a dozen times, so I have no excuse. :-)

So, pending blog entries:

• My 2,993 September 11 entry. Inexcusable that I didn't get this done (despite being in bed with the aforementioned bad back), so I'll get this done ASAP.
• A piece on how the news media is cheerfully being used as the foreign-propaganda arm of radical Islam.
• A lengthy (been in draft form for months) rant on Digital Rights Management or DRM, and why it's such a wrongheaded idea, which we'll regret as a culture before too many decades have passed.

Stay tuned!

-Rich

The Won Hand and its Bauble:

Photo the First

Here's a heavily color-corrected photo of Amy's digits and their new adornment. Our first attempt at macro photography (the better to show off the ring's three-dimensionality) was unsatisfying to say the least, so we'll attempt a better photo soon.

There has been much showing-around of the item, not to mention well-wishing and congratulations from all and sundry, though Amy and I wound up using this past weekend more for respite from proposal excitement than for an exhibition tour.

This weekend will be different! Amy has a great deal of family and not a few friends in the Birmingham metropolitan area, and few of them outside of her parents and coworkers have yet seen the Bling, so remedying that has taken on new importance.

For our part, Amy and I are very much enjoying visiting old haunts with the new Bauble, and the happy delirium has yet to subside. Plans for the Event (still looking to arrive in late April or early May '07) proceed apace, but as yet there's still an awful lot in flux. Exciting!

I'm over the moon, everyone. This has been a bit of a trying week at work, but knowing that my fiancée is out there and eager to see me imbues each day with that right sort of purpose, relegating the rough spots in life to simple background noise.

-Rich

A Wonderful Day

The deed is done, the Bauble presented, the question popped and answered in the affirmative. Amy and I are engaged!

I wish I could have chronicled the particular ins and outs of the shopping for the Bauble, the customization of the Bauble, the merry paper chase that was paying for the Bauble after my identity-theft troubles last year (jewelry isn't exactly a purchase for slipping past the pattern-recognition algorithms they use to catch ID thieves), but none of those particularly matter now: I have a fiancée!

I had a plan of my own all lined up (with props, patter and everything!), but circumstances, schedules and other factors kept me from being able to implement it. In any event, Amy and I wound up heading to a favorite Persian restaurant of ours last night to watch a bellydancing friend of hers perform. I managed to get the friend to give me a cue, and proposed to Amy in front of the entire restaurant, to great applause and appreciation.

We're both deliriously happy, and by all accounts Amy is having a grand time exhibiting the Bauble to all with eyes to see. We also have a birthday party to attend tonight, and I have to imagine that her shoulder muscles will receive further exercise there.

A photo of the Won Hand and its Bauble is forthcoming, once taken.

-Rich