My NaNoWriMo Metrics

Testing these widgets out.  Hopefully they'll be a good motivator for me to press on with my daily writing!

Hope I'll be a "winner" this year. ;)


My month shown via widget.  You can see if I've been good or not.

Writer Up!

Out of curiosity, is anyone else doing NaNoWriMo this November?

I set out to do it last year (the first year in which I had no work or school obligations eating up my time), but I planned poorly and wasn't able to get anything meaningful written at all.  I'm quite disappointed with that subpar level of performance, so I truly want to "writer up" this year and get some solid pieces written, polished, and finished.

My current project, The Fracture of a Dream, is already nearing initial completion (if I write diligently this month), so I hope to finish in time to set it aside and then start a new project I have in mind during November.  I also have three short stories that need to be completed.  (Yes, my attention span is short and often scattered all over the place.  The words, you know.  They just come, and sometimes they come from different stories...)

My admiration goes to the truly devoted individuals who write outside of their full-time careers, especially if they are also parents of younger children.  You are amazing, and I could never manage anything like it.  I wouldn't have the energy.

Well, I better get back to writing myself.  Let me know how all of you are doing on your own projects!

Keep writing,
Ren D.

Conversational Glitter, Lack Of

I'd never tell writers or other artists to associate with more creative types in order to discover ideas, though it's true that some of my best ideas and best conversations came from spending time with others who were high in creativity.  With these friends, ideas flew, possibilities hung amply ready for plucking, and our minds worked together in overdrive.  They almost felt fertile.

I had a good friend in college who was my conversational glitter.  He was both a writer and an artist, and we had fabulous discussions about utterly ridiculous, offbeat situations.  Conversations with him could go anywhere.  Picnics could happen at midnight.  Chocolate syrup could be blood, in the right lighting.

As often happens, friends grow apart.  A few years later, I entered a doctoral program, and we slowly lost touch.  I was surrounded by a very different type of person in my graduate program -- it wasn't that everyone was serious and dull (they really weren't!) -- it was just that there was no room for the absurd.  Ideas were concrete; they needed to be quantifiable.  Anything out of the realm of the ordinary was regarded as strange and frightening.

I thrived in the intellectual environment, but my chances to be delighted by the whimsical and thought-provoking simply shriveled up.  I no longer had my conversational glitter.  It's a loss I still feel; no one has come close to matching the likes of my imaginative (not imaginary!) and very intelligent friend.

Though some of the flights of fancy described in The Fracture of a Dream were definitely inspired by silly conversations with friends and my own late-night solitary musings, I can't help but feel like I would be more fruitful, more interesting, if I were surrounded by other creative types who have a sense of humor for reinventing the mundane.

Not every writer (or artist) needs a friend to help recharge one's creativity, but I've realized that, for me, it's practically required.

Ren D.