Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Keeping up.
I’m close to 10,000 words as of this morning (9478) with a writing date planned for tonight that should get me to 11,000 at least (crossing fingers) and I’m making all sorts of crazy things up as I go. This morning I finished the tale of a cabin-fevered character, invented a library and a librarian to work in it, and moved three brothers out of the family cabin and onto their own land. I’m nowhere near starting the *main* story yet, however. It’s remarkable how long it takes just to grow your characters up into who you want them to be. It turns out that if I write without thinking too much about it (nitpicking) I can achieve 1300-1500 words per hour. Which is a bit startling to realize. At that rate I could be turning out a novel a year – three months of an hour a day, five days a week is 90,000 words. Given another seven months for editing and rewriting, it’s plausible to come up with enough literature in one’s lifetime to fill a small shelf.
Not that I’m crafting a masterpiece here or anything – but something I hope will have rewrite potential once it’s done. I can’t remember the last time (if ever) I wrote 10-11,000 words in four days, so this exercise has at least been good for that.
They say the first week is exhilirating and the second week is hard so I’m trying to frontload as much as possible on the word count. It would be fabulous is by the end of the weekend I could be close to 20,000 words especially since next weekend I’m going to Victoria for my mother’s birthday and to look at the place Brian and I are thinking of getting married next year (near Sooke, for the family part of things. Vancouver will be the other part of the wedding a month later). I’m pretty sure the writing time there will be severly curtailed.
I’m really enjoying this process at the moment though, and am surprised by how nice it is to turn off the internal editor and just allow things to happen as they may. I’m curious about what’s going to happen next, but I think Frances is about to make an influential friend.
Off now to my paid work, to the talk I am giving Saturday, and a grant request for Resist! which are all on the to-do list for sometime before Friday.
Do I sound smart enough?
Besides writing a novel I’m trying to do about ten other things this week, all of which is making me a little overwhelmed and so instead of actually getting anything done I’m here in my cube at work spinning a little. I’m going to use my blog writing time today for one of my projects though, thus knocking two pins down with one ball. Specifically I’m going to rif here a little on a talk that I’m supposed to be giving as part of a panel on Saturday on Open Source Software and Democracy. I’ve titled my ten minutes “Appropriate Technology: Open Source Software, building democracy, and seizing the means of communication for ourselves” just to get a handle on what is potentially a very large topic. As it is, ten minutes isn’t nearly long enough for what I’d actually like to say.
This isn’t the first time I’ve used such a title, “Appropriate Technology” being the tag line we use at Resist! Communications to indicate both appropriate use of communications tech as well as the possibilities for *appropriating* technology to the ends of increased democratic flow and decision-making. In 2005 I gave a talk titled “Appropriating Technology: Security, Internet Services and the Struggle” so you can see this is the type of title I like alot. Snappy two words followed by three examples of what it is I’m talking about.
It’s unfortunate I can’t use most of that talk from 2005, because I’m having a hard time centralizing my thoughts on the topic I have chosen for this weekend. Not that I don’t have an opinion on the matter, but shaping it into intelligible words is turning into a bit of a problem when I would rather be researching historical details for my novel or otherwise getting stuff done at work.
Essentially I’m going to talk about the history of the collective – our commitment to building infrastructure for social movements, the pitfalls of centralizing activist communications on a few radical services (more distributed services needed!) but the potential using open source software for being inherently more secure despite those pitfalls. I’m going to briefly touch on the open source software products that Resist! uses (Debian Linux, SSL for network encryption, Drupal & WordPress for media and blogging, Squirrelmail and Roundcube, Mailman, Sympa etc.) and how their value to us lies not only in the fact they cost us nothing to operate, but through the open source network we have more security available to us than we would otherwise.
And then I’d like to go on for a bit about why it’s important that we have our own boxes at all. Jessi from Riseup is going to talk about the security apparatus and why “free” services come with a cost…. so I think I will may be go with that only briefly and then delve into the decline in traditional media, and how that provides a space for different types of online news and communications services to come to the fore in the years to come. Why is it important that we own our own media? So our Internet is not the same Asper-controlled conglomerate our news media has been all these past decades.
That’s all pretty loose at the moment but I’m puzzling it through. By Friday I’ll have it written out and ready, that’s just what I do with one-off talks like this…. and on Sunday I’m sure I’ll end up posting it here. Thoughts?
Plot synopsis
In the last two days I’ve managed to get six thousand words towards my 50 000 word goal. As Brian points out – this puts me at 12% done in the first two days which is somewhat heartening when I’ve still got 44,0000 words to churn before the end of the month. Lucky me, today was a flex and Nanowrimo started on a Sunday this year, which has allowed me to get a jump start knowing that there will be days in the month where I will be able to write very little.
Now, I’m not saying that these are 6000 really great words that I will keep in some future incarnation of this project – but on the other hand, my characters are already doing things on their own that I haven’t previously mapped out. And I always love it when that happens. It’s as though the story is already out there in the ether and my task is to pull it into some coherent order on the page. Not a simple task, but I’m detached from it on some level. My characters simply do things and I’ve got to record it with the best possible language. Hard to explain and after 3000 words today I’m a little written-out.
Rough plot synopsis here:
“Frances Eberhardt lives in her small community of White Bay, BC as a woman on the margins of belonging. Instead of shutting herself up forever when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she forges ahead to build her own home by hand and the first store in her isolated community. Despite the difficulties of the Great Depression and the advances of an unscrupulous lover she never loses sight of the life she wants. Told through a series of letters, flashbacks, conversations and points of view, the story of Frances Eberhardt is partially-inspired by true events in an unnamed BC town. “
A month of writing
It’s both National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month (in what nation I’d like to know since these are both international events at this point – when do we get to use International rather than always defaulting to the US?) I’ve committed myself to the 50,000 words that it takes to complete NANOWRIMO and have got off to a start this morning with 120 words so far! But can I also commit to posting something on this blog every day in the month? We’ll see, I’m not as committed to that but surely I can come up with some quip or quote every day. I’m trying to kickstart my writing process a little bit and for the first year in a long time I’m not too busy to participate. So let’s see how this goes.
To start out with a quote from Rilke that has resonated with me lately – “if one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all”. Agreed. Agreed.
Some things I've read online lately
A short list of some interesting articles I’ve read this week:
- The most honest assessment of marriage I’ve read in awhile from the Obamas (of all places)
- A rather creepy short story with a Lolita-like turn at the New Yorker
- An interesting article on why the Internet might be making us more biased – also at the New Yorker
- Why some people believe the National Post is about to fold momentarily
- An interesting and amusing article about smoking cigars in a Cuba on the edge of capitalist transformation at The Believer.
Red Cedar 