So Tuesday turned out to be a tough day. I squeezed out only 320 words, before I was just too tired. (even this post is a day late)
New total: 7,235 (just 42,765 to go!)
More tonight, I hope.
Blog
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NaNoWriMo Day 4
Total words for Monday: 1,186
Project total so far: 6,915
Back to work — it’s the first Monday of NaNoWriMo! — so I expected to get fewer words down. According to the NaNoWriMo 50,000-word challenge, the daily average is 1,667 — so at least for today I am a little bit above average. I expect that to slip a bit.
With the writing, though, I think I still know what’s going on — so that’s a good thing.
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NaNoWriMo Day 3: Time shift edition
Total words for Sunday: 2,826
Project overall: 5,729
So I think I’m sort of back on track, though even having that extra hour always throws me a little of whack. I think I probably should’ve been able to churn out more words today.
Work week returns tomorrow (Monday), and I expect my daily average to dwindle a little.
Good luck to the other NaNoWriMo-ers out there doing this amid full-time jobs and full-time life things!
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NaNoWriMo Day 2: The Lure of Research
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Saturday. Word count: 1,981. Now I’m behind. It’s my weekend, so I was planning on cranking out some words, but I read what I wrote yesterday and knew it could be better, so I worked on that — adding some, deleting a lot of others, but after about 90 minutes I think I netted a solid dozen words that I could add to today’s count.
Then it was time to plunge forth, and I did for a while, until I wanted to learn one small thing, a tiny detail or two, that Google could help me with …
Two hours (and a lunch) later, no knew words, and I still hadn’t quite found the right fact (though I did find something else entirely, and that went right in the manuscript for +25 words). Thing is, I love looking stuff up. I love being able to find the right fact to make my fiction ring true. As a former newspaper copy editor, looking stuff up was most of the job (the rest was more or less just memorizing and implementing AP style, as well as numerous local variants).
Here’s hoping tomorrow goes better. And thank you to all the fellow writers and NaNoWriMo-ers who checked out yesterday’s post. Great to be part of a creative community, joined through the inter-webs.
NaNoWriMo total word count: 2,908
In other words, I’m already behind. Yikes!
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Day 1: NaNoWriMo and Me
For the first time, I’m doing it. NaNoWriMo, that is.
My plan: Expand on a pair of short stories that are linked with at least 50,000 new words.
Who else has done it? How’d it go for you?
At the end of Day 1, I’ve logged about 970 words in about 90 minutes of writing. Only about 49,030 words to go.
Felt good. I tried, and failed, not to edit and re-edit a few sentences. Trying to get into the frame of mind of just putting words down.
Wish me luck.
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Christian Marclay’s ’48 War Movies’
48 War Movies (2019) is a single-channel video that collapses conflicts from the Civil War to Iraq into a horrifying aggregate spectacle of war. Dramatizations are collaged into almost indistinguishable narratives and presented through concentric rectangles, like a flickering conveyor belt of popular cultural content. The forty-eight war films play simultaneously and continuously, and the accompanying soundtrack generates an indecipherable cacophony of wartime sounds. (Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC) -
Throwback Thursday: West Point
One of the joys of riding the train into Manhattan is the river view. A bit cloudy, but always nice to see West Point, where I lived for a time as a wee one. It’s also where my father, uncle and grandfather all graduated.
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‘Some General Ideas About Filipino Communities’
I recently came across the following passage and though it was published in 1909, I suddenly had a feeling it was being written about America in 2019:
The ordinary people of the villages think of the town government, not as something that belongs to them and in which they may share and by which they should benefit, but as something that has to be maintained and to which taxes must be paid and they probably feel that the least of it there is, the better for them. Their ignorance and timidity are such also that it is still very easy for them to be abused by a powerful and unscrupulous man or official, defrauded, and deprived of many of the rights which the laws of the Philippines say that the people shall have.
It was in an essay called “Village and Rural Improvement Societies: A Series of Articles for Fourth Grade” by David P. Barrows, Director of Education, in Philippine Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1909, under a subsection titled “Some General Ideas About Filipino Communities.”
Barrows was in charge of reforming a national public educational system in the Philippines when it was a colony of the United States. In speaking about the “ordinary peoples” of the Philippines — the poorly educated working class that included my ancestors (and thus why I was reading this to begin with, wondering about what the education system was like for my ancestors, what those first years of America’s colonial system was like in the day-to-day implementation of a policy called “benevolent assimilation”) — he could’ve been talking about my fellow Americans who decry “big government” and taxes and think the system is rigged to only benefit the “elites.”
Are my fellow Americans who think like that suffering from some kind of colonized mind-set? Are the American nativists who support the current administration displaying a pattern of thinking in line with Filipinos who had been living for generations in distrust of the Spanish colonial rulers? Is this just one part of the great irony of the racial resentments being given space and time to flourish by certain white people in these United States: that they don’t rise out of the Western tradition of the Enlightenment; rather, they come out of the destructive system of colonization in which the victimized have historically had darker skin.
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