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Showing posts from October, 2012

Preparing for National Novel Writing Month

Last year, I hit 40k. Not in income, alas, but in the November novel writing event, known as NaNoWriMo . Produced by NaNo bugs, of course (for those of you with elementary school children obsessed with the newest gadget...) The goal was 50k, which means filling about four 8.5x11 sheets of paper per day. That's a lot. I wasn't too disappointed not to have hit the limit, however, because I did something that I find pretty challenging. Namely, I resolved the story. After rewriting the story, and adding another 6k, I asked my friend Sarah to beta read the short novel. She confirmed my fear, that I never let anything really bad happen to my characters. No suspense. No pain. Only resolution. I'm now in a second rewrite. So this year I am trying to allow bad things to happen. This is counterintuitive. I spend my whole life trying to make sure bad things don't happen. Why would I intentionally make bad things happen to people I like? I guess because I want to prove that t

Spot the Chicken

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We have chickens in our back yard. They are roaming free, though they aren't supposed to be. They're ours, sort of. Also sort of Laurent's coworker, so we are chicken hosts to their two, and we have two. One for each collective child. Lucy and Emile named theirs: Saphire and Chouchou. I'm too tired to chase chickens all around the yard, back into their pen. I had a fun weekend. I took part in the animation challenge by Zorobabel . You can see the results here . We were called on to create 24 seconds in 24 hours, using a prompt of a bunch of geological and cloud shots they posted on their site. I had the brilliant idea to use a paint on glass method, painting Emile in the clouds(ish). I should mention that I had never tried this method before. Paint on acetate, to be dried and scanned, yes. However, paint on glass, to be smoodged around and sculpted, no. Next time I will try using vegetable oil instead of dish soap as the medium. What was I thinking, using so

Beasts of the Childhood Wild

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A friend of mine took me to see The Beasts of the Southern Wild a few weeks ago, before the return of the cold season. Still, a month later, I am still thinking about it. Stories of difficult childhoods often mesmerize me, especially when the magical mindset of youth sways the tides of reality. This makes me a sucker for really good children's lit, and even some that's mediocre. I imagine that some people think adults who read young adult fiction haven't grown up, but I think it may just be a sign of having had a really difficult childhood. The reader searches for other voices to illuminate the unfathomable jungle, one step at a time. The Beasts of the Southern Wild is one such piece of artwork, one that takes the messy and unworkable, screws it up into another form, and proclaims it as our own. The main character is no victim, as much as I cry for her, and her father is no devil, as flawed as he is. Wow. This movie still gives me chills. I have often complained t

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