Thou Shalt Not Wait For The Muse!
Complicate! Add Obstacles!
Sometimes You Have To Roll The Dice! (maybe literally
Shake things up (Chronologically!)
And if all else fails, steal.
Many thanks to Richard “mainframe” Green of the Geek Out with Mainframe podcast for today’s episode!
Go Write!
Will be this year’s NaNoWriMo project.
If you don’t know from NaNo, here’s the basic idea. You. Your word processor. Maybe a bunch of other crazy people in your area. You have 30 days to write a complete novel of at least 50,000 words. You do that? You win. What do you win? Ummm… self respect? Maybe? Bragging rights for another year?
Back in the writing saddle, that is.
Hearing Matt Forbeck’s goal of writing 12 books in 12 months is both scary and inspiring. Basically, Matt is shooting to do a NaNoWriMo-length novel of 50,000 words every month in 2012. It’s made me sit down and start calculating what it would take to hit a million words in 2012. The number is surprisingly small – 1000000 – four NaNoWriMo projects (200,000), minus the shorts I’ve already written for MPF (just north of another 52,000) = about 750,000. Divide by the number of writing days I’ll have in 2012 (313) and I come up with 2,400 words a day. Wolfram Alpha puts it at 2396.16. But what’s 3.84 words among friends?
Day 2 of NaNo, and already some people are starting to freak out. Don’t do that. Trust your instincts, know that you do have something to say, sit down, and start moving those fingers over the keys.
There is always something in the box. Trust that there is always something in the box.
I’ve taken some time over the last few days to start reading the actual Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, “Self-Reliance”. While there’s a lot in here that I agree with and find admirable, there are things in here that I find myself disagreeing with. That’s going to happen, and it’s nothing to worry about. It wasn’t really the point of the #Trust30 exercise in the first place. The main value of Trust30 to me (which admittedly I came up a few posts short in) has been in discovering what I think, and what I believe, and what I hold to be bedrock foundational true. And disagreeing with Emerson is probably something Emerson would have been totally okay with, looking over what I’ve read of his essay so far.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes, it’s always easy to discount your own inspiration. But (and I know I’m venturing again into crazy crypto-religion talk here), sometimes that thought isn’t your own, and dismissing it runs the risk of offending the source.
Well, I think this will qualify as strange, if nothing else. Wild rambling, stream of consciousness, and cheating by way of audio posting.
Maybe I should say it’s not cheating. It’s “Media enriched.”
