NaNoFeed: The ship is launched!

Posted on November 1, 2012 by epbeaumont

Woke up later than I’d originally planned, so now at least I’ve put off a bit the bug that’s going around. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ve scored 1941 words according to Scrivener’s word-count. I’ve posted an excerpt here and I’m already liking my protagonist, who is currently being smuggled into the palace at Alexandria disguised as a bundle of laundry. That’s the proposed alternative to the canonical carpet of legend, which seems a likelier alternative. Laundry may be urgently conveyed to officers’ quarters; carpets, not so much.

My buddy Devin Harnois just joined me here in my cafe booth, so we’re going to order some more goodies and then go to it.

Day one of my High Holy Days, NaNo Day 1, Dia de los Muertos, All Saints… and the dead are very much with us, once more.

Best quote yet, from my version of Cleopatra: “What is the difference between a spy and a storyteller but the vintage of the matter?”

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NaNoFeed (On the Eve, Part 2): Unprepared

Posted on October 31, 2012 by epbeaumont

On the edge of the cliff now, and it’s too late to do anything but wait for the clock to tick down to midnight. Two days off from the day job, and two more days of weekend, and I’ve set myself a truly outrageous challenge: 50,000 words in four days.

It’s crazy. I’m not going to make it.

It’s crazy and exhilarating and I am unprepared–except with a checklist, and a rough arc, and about six hundred pages of research.

I’ve been hanging out with the characters off and on since I was ten.

I’m going to step back two thousand years and run the locomotive of history onto a different set of tracks with a little help with some WTF-Physics and a whole lot of epic. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning in the palace at Alexandria as an eighteen-year-old who’s just stepped into the shoes of divine queenship, having apprenticed for the role since age fourteen, in a family where sibling rivalry regularly runs to murder.

Unimaginable.

I’m going to imagine it. I’m going to Go There. Never mind if I reach the station by Sunday night, it’s going to be a wild ride.

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NaNoFeed (On the Eve, Part 1): Music to Wreck Trains By, or the Art of the NaNo Playlist

Posted on October 29, 2012 by epbeaumont

Motorcycle–check. Cliff–check. No helmet? Drunk? Go for it.

That’s the mnemonic I gave a fellow National Novel Writing Month marathoner at the Twin Cities region’s kick-off last night at Nina’s in St. Paul. It gives my Inner Adult a nervous breakdown to see that all alone on the page, so here’s the full version.

Motorcycle–check. Cliff–check. No helmet? Drunk? Go for it.

If the music in your NaNoWriMo play list makes all of the above sound like a good idea, then you’ve picked the right stuff. It should make you feel reckless, ready to sail straight into the Perfect Storm of fate, circumstance, and bad judgment that makes for a novel.

I do a lot of NaNo drafting at lunch hour or first thing in the morning or at public write-ins where half of the attendees are chatting and the rest of the room is having their own conversations, so music and headphones help me to build a wall between me and them. Music gives me a rhythm for the tippytap of fingers and keyboard, and makes me feel a little less implausible getting lost in the story. The alarm on the cell phone will bring me back to the surface of Real Life So-called, but the music will help me to swim through the underwater dream of Story, and will grow me gills so I can breathe down there.

It’s another way of timing a writing bout, too:

  • Write while this song plays, nonstop.
  • Write until the end of the album (that’s good for 35-50 minutes)
  • Write to the last act of the opera. (The four hours of Prokofiev’s War and Peace got me through the final marathon write-in of NaNoWriMo 2010, by being four hours and epic into the bargain.)

A change in the music presages a change in the times, so there is warm-up music and there is melancholy in-search-of-lost-times music and there is epic endgame music. Music entrains the nervous system and lifts us out of ourselves. In my very best writing bouts I have typed in rhythm with the music and let the scene play out without my choosing words.  The music secretly infects the written rhythm, the deep beat that the reader hears in silence, and jumps the gap between the words on paper or screen and the hypnotic rise and fall of the story-teller’s voice around the common fire.

Writing fiction, like acting, is a true possession experience. The things we avoid in life — conflict, danger, bad judgment — are the very blood and bone of story. You’ll come out of it alive even if your characters don’t, but you’ve got to believe that they want to do the thing that’s exactly the wrong thing for them and the right thing for the story.

So put on the music, let them chug that whiskey, toss the helmet aside, rev up the Harley and get ready to jump the safety wall into the Grand Canyon.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 28 October 2012 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

Posted on October 28, 2012 by epbeaumont

 Tristan, whom she’d initially taken for a skinny and somewhat theatrical girl, had long hair that flopped over one eye. His black cloak covered a colorful ensemble rather like a kilt, only made of innumerable squares of shiny stuff, and cinched with an elaborate tool belt that sprouted innumerable pouches and little boxes and metal things on chains. When Tristan walked, he clanked. 

Gunnhild favored layers of trailing draperies, from rich velvets reminiscent of theater curtains, to diaphanous floating chiffons, all in reds and golds and purples, belted with an old-fashioned corset ornamented with a profusion of mechanical devices, including at least three different dangling clocks, none of whose faces counted to twelve. 

Her sister Griselda favored an eclectic mad-inventor look. Her duster might have looked noirish had it been black, rather than glowing purple with little colorful bits of embroidery along all the hems and sparkly facings.

***

Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues is currently being revised for publication.

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Interview: Writing Community and National Novel Writing Month (Part 3), with Becca Patterson

Posted on October 27, 2012 by epbeaumont

Writer Becca Patterson, aka Mreauow, is one of three Municipal Liaisons for National Novel Writing Month in the Minnesota: Twin Cities Region. In this three-part interview series, she talks about writing in community in November and year round.

E. P. Beaumont:  How has writing community changed your practice as a writer?
Becca Patterson: It’s given me a lot more discipline. Before meeting all these writers, I could go about a week between writing sessions. I didn’t finish things and I really didn’t think much about getting published. I wanted to, but I didn’t know what to do to get there. Now, I have people who are checking up on me. It’s a lot harder to slack knowing that tomorrow I’m going to meet with someone who knows that I should have that story finished by now. I can’t wallow in a rejection for a year because friends are going to ask me what magazines I’ve tried so far.
It’s also made it a lot less lonely. I have friends who know what it’s like when your characters aren’t listening to you. Believe me, non-writers don’t handle that idea very well. But other writers, they get it. There is nothing like having someone who gets it to talk to when it’s rough going.
E. P. Beaumont:  What kind of community would you recommend writers who are working alone to seek out? And what would you recommend that people avoid?
Becca Patterson:
It’s hard to say for what to recommend. It’s a highly personal thing. The best advice I have is go to the places you are comfortable and find the people there. Those are going to be the people most likely to be the best fit for you. Join NaNo at least one year and go to write-ins. The ones you like are going to have the community you are looking for. Take some classes at the local writing school, again, if you like it the people there are most likely to be your community.
Avoid:
Don’t go where you aren’t comfortable.
Avoid MFA program without a lot of research into the program and yourself first. My experience with MFA is that they aren’t there to teach you how to write, but how to be a writing teacher (yea, it makes about that much sense). I’ve known a few people who’ve gone the MFA route only to have the love of writing stripped from them by the critical atmosphere. Although I will say that the one MFA program that looks the most promising for actually teaching writing is Hamline University. It is a rare creature though – known to be different among its peers.
Avoid bars – not so good for finding a writing community. And the alcohol only makes you think you are brilliant. The cold light of day will show how much the alcohol was thinking. That’s about it.
E. P. Beaumont:  Were there any final words of wisdom you wanted to add?
Becca Patterson: Hmm… words of wisdom….
Writing is something that once you start, you either have to do or you’ll find it a chore. Sometimes both. The thing is that most writers – the names you see on the bookshelves – are the kind of people who couldn’t stop writing if you forced them. They write, not because it is a lucrative hobby (for most it is not – most authors have day jobs). They write because if they didn’t the world would lose it’s color. If you are one of those, get ready for a life of wonder. As long as you keep writing, the magic will always be there. Put it aside at your own peril.
E. P. Beaumont:  Those would be words of wisdom for sure, speaking as one of Those People.

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Interview: Writing Community and National Novel Writing Month (Part 2), with Becca Patterson

Posted on October 26, 2012 by epbeaumont

Writer Becca Patterson, aka Mreauow, is one of three Municipal Liaisons for National Novel Writing Month in the Minnesota: Twin Cities Region. In Part 2, she talks about the participant-organized events that make this region particularly lively, and her own journey from participant to Municipal Liaison.

***

E. P. Beaumont:  Tell us a bit about the National Novel Writing Month events in the Twin Cities region, and how they grew. 

Becca Patterson: There are three really big ones. The Jump Start weekend, the 28 hour tour and the 24 hour write in.

We’ll start with the origins of the 28 hour tour as it’s the oldest. One year a writer Callipygian King was falling behind on his word count and needed to do something drastic to get caught up. He posted in the forums that he was going to do this marathon write in moving from coffee shop to coffee shop until he was caught up. A few people joined him. They posted to the forums about it all the way along and a lot of other people thought it sounded like fun, so they asked him to do it again. It grew and grew until one of the coffee shops said “you can’t come back, your group is too big”. By then there were enough people wanting to join that it made sense to split it up into a few smaller routes that would converge on one place to spend the night.

Jump Start weekend was the brain child of several writers who all wanted to get a big lead in their writing right at the start of the month (I was one of them). So the four of us decided to book a room at Mystic Lake Casino – because casinos are great for having cheep rooms and food because they expect you to gamble. We had a system of rewarding ourselves for each 1000 words we wrote – we passed around a post it note so everyone could write congrats on it then we stuck it to our computer. By the end of the weekend I was up 19,000 words and my computer was completely covered in post-it notes. That also got a bit response of others wanting to join in so this year we’ve rented a conference cabin at a small resort and there will be at least 9 people in attendance – which will leave us with a bit of extra cash to donate to the Office of Letters and Light (OLL).

Finally we have the 24 hour write-in, started in response to complaints from some writers that they couldn’t make it to the tour because of work. Rather than duplicate the tour, we found a community center (Geek Partnership Society – GPS) that would let us use their space for a noon to noon write-in. We con’t have anything scheduled yet for Thanksgiving weekend, but we’d be happy to help someone who wanted to take it on.

E. P. Beaumont:  So when did each of these events start? (or as they’d say in another context, “How long has this been going on?”)
Becca Patterson: The writing tour, I think started in 2007. The 24 hour and the Jump start both started last year (2011)

E. P. Beaumont:  From talking to other people on the NaNo boards, I’ve learned that our region (Minnesota – Twin Cities) is one of the most active in the nation. What’s the secret of that success? I notice on the calendar that nearly any day during NaNo there’s at least one write-in somewhere in the region.
Becca Patterson: We are a “do it yourself” region. Meaning that if you want an event to happen – plan it. Let the ML’s know so they can put it on the calendar. Other than that, the MLs really only need to be involved if you need special resources (like a community center that will let you be there all night).
Once people realize that they have the power to make things happen, they usually jump at it. There’s no point in complaining that there’s no write-ins in your area if all you have to do is set one up. Just do it. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of people who try to whine about it, but they don’t get very far. We are proud of the fact that you absolutely cannot physically make it to every write-in. It’s freeing in a way. When you can’t make it to them all you don’t feel the pressure to try. You pick the ones that work for you and have a better month because of it.
E. P. Beaumont:  Wow. So what made you want to become a Municipal Liaison?
Becca Patterson: Hanging out with the other MLs. I just happened to like a lot of the same write ins that they did, and I usually got there a little early so I was there when they were talking about things. I just sort of happened that they started asking me for my opinion about various things. Then when Theresa decided to step down, she encouraged me to step up. Since I already knew Nell that wasn’t such a hard thing to do.
Then there was my year-round writing group (MnNaNo). They liked the idea that one of their own would be an ML and encouraged it too.

***

More in part 3, appearing tomorrow! Meanwhile, read about Becca’s NaNoWriMo project at her novelist profile.

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Interview: Writing Community and National Novel Writing Month (Part 1), with Becca Patterson

Posted on October 25, 2012 by epbeaumont

Writer Becca Patterson, aka Mreauow, is one of three Municipal Liaisons for National Novel Writing Month in the Minnesota: Twin Cities Region. In this three-part interview series, she talks about writing in community in November and year round.

E. P. Beaumont:  So, people think of writing as a solitary activity, but you (we) advocate doing it in groups. Could you tell me a little bit about your journey as a writer, and what got you interested in National Novel Writing Month?

Becca Patterson: I started writing in second grade when my teacher handed me my first journal. The weekly assignment was to write five pages. Most of my classmates groaned (“how are we going to be able to write that much?”) I however saw it as a great opportunity.
I wrote more than I had to most weeks and by the end of the year I was the only member of my class to use up more than one journal. I did the normal things like writing about what was going on in my day and of course all the “helpful” assignments (about 4 pages worth) from the teachers. But I also started writing fiction. This didn’t go over so well because my teacher didn’t know what to do with that. I ended up spending a lot of time in the school counselor’s office that year.
Ever since then I’ve been writing in one form or another. It’s what I do to make all the stress of daily life worth it. As long as I can tell my stories, it’s all good.
I first heard about NaNoWriMo in 2000, the second year of it. Back then it was just this crazy idea that some people had to write. I couldn’t join then because I was still in school for Interpreting and November was when all the big projects and midterms happened. But I kept it as a goal. As soon as I graduated I was going to do it. I watched it grow and grow and then saw the first hint that people doing NaNo were getting published. By the time I was able to join in 2007 it was a huge deal.
Of course I missed the point for most of that first month. I sat at home with my computer telling my husband to leave me alone, and was actually rather miserable. Why did so many people have such a good time with this, I thought. So I went onto the site and discovered write-ins. In the last week of November 2007, I went to 7 write-ins. My word count jumped from 40,000 to 75,000 and I was a much happier writer.
The next year I planned on the write-ins and looked forward to meeting up with my new writing friends. Then in 2010, I became friends with out Municipal Liaisons – Nell and Theresa. Theresa was thinking about retiring from being an ML and encouraged me to step up. I did. I found that helping other people figure out what this wild and crazy adventure was all about was even better than just going along for the ride.

E. P. Beaumont:  What happens at a write-in? What are the rules? And why does it work so well for so many writers? 

Becca Patterson: A write-in is when a group of writers gather for the purpose of writing. While they are writing in the same space, they are all writing their own stories. There aren’t any hard and fast rules, but generally, you shouldn’t disrupt the writing of the others. However, if you get stuck, you can ask for help or just complain about the silly thing that your characters just did.
I think that it works so well because you are kind of holding each other responsible. When you are at home alone, there’s no one to notice how few words you are actually writing. There’s no one to remind you that you have a goal to reach and washing the dishes (however important that may be) isn’t going to get you there. When you are at a coffee shop, the others might notice that you are playing solitaire instead of writing.
The other thing that works are the word races and wars. A word race is when two or more writers agree to write 500 (or whatever number) words, and the first person to hit that goal wins. A war is when they decide that they are going to write as fast as they can for some number of minutes and the person with the most words when the timer goes off wins. These are two great ways to add words to your draft in a short amount of time.

E. P. Beaumont:  Now I’m going to turn it around. You’ve talked about what happens at a write-in. Can you talk about what doesn’t happen there–which is to say, what a write-in is not?
Becca Patterson: That’s kind of hard. There are lots of things that don’t happen at a write in (well most of the time). Such as sex, drugs and rock and roll. Write-ins as they are practiced in NaNo are about working on your own project, so you don’t see beta reading or collaborative works going on. There aren’t a lot of long drawn out conversations, although chatting does occur between bouts of intense writing. Usually people who want to talk take themselves away from the write-in (to another table or outside) to have their conversation and return to the group when they are ready to write.

E. P. Beaumont:  How many write-ins do you usually attend during NaNo?
Becca Patterson: As many as my husband will let me.
During the week I’ll hit at least three sometimes four. I have to be home at least one night.
On weekends our region tends to have large scale events that I attend as much as I can.

 ***

More on these writing events in Part 2!

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NaNoFeed: Thoughts on Deep Time II – Of Time and the River(s)

Posted on October 24, 2012 by epbeaumont

In the past few weeks I’ve experienced the eerie synchronicity that visits the writer in research mode. I’ve been taking a virtual tour upriver on the Nile River in three different centuries at once, while learning about the sacred rivers in my immediate neighborhood, the Mississippi and the Minnesota. A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of accompanying a Dakota History and Culture class on a brief tour of well-known Dakota sacred sites in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area. I learned that people held ceremonies and gatherings in these places of power, connected with both the above-ground and underground river systems, but did not settle there. I also heard about the Kafkaesque business of documenting traditional use of such places, when “documentation” typically means “written documents.”

When I returned to the photographs of the massive temples on the Nile, a ghostly voice in my head said, “It looks like a junkyard.”

There is practice and experience on the one hand, and then there are monuments and marks on the landscape.  In thinking about the timeline of human experience in North America, my sense of time shifted; 5000 years is an eye-blink, really, for all that it comprises nearly the entire experience of settled agriculture and so-called civilization. Nearly all of the sources I’m reading glorify empires and their works, although empire, indeed living in cities, is an experiment of very short duration. Living in the same place for millennia, people learn things that aren’t obvious at first glance: the rhythm of the seasons, the flow of the underground rivers, which places are healthy in which seasons, what things are good to eat and how to gather them without driving them to extinction. The civilizations about which I am reading had begun to alter their environment 2000 years ago; the biblical cedars of Lebanon subsist now on the scale of bonsai. The logic of empire is the logic of cancer: steady growth and increasing consumption.

When I was twelve years old, my parents drove from Ohio to North Carolina and thence to Texas to visit my father’s far-flung family. I remember looking at nineteenth-century structures in Wilmington, North Carolina and thinking, “That was built by slave labor.” (In fact, with justice the same can be said of twentieth-century structures as well, given the actual practice of convict labor which served to extend the de facto term of slavery in the United States into my lifetime.)

Now I’m thinking about the grave robbers who took the treasures of the Great Pyramid, against all the cleverness of the builders and within their lifetimes. It must have been an inside job, I think. I wonder how well it sat with those builders and workers, the notion that the boss would continue to be the boss in the world beyond the grave.

And that’s another story.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 21 October 2012 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

Posted on October 21, 2012 by epbeaumont

Annie danced with Rafe. Rafe was not only her date, but her friend. He was family and he was safe. She had never felt quite safe with high school dating, with everybody talking about who had done what with whom. She just didn’t want to think about that yet, and Rafe was fun. He laughed and joked and  she knew that he was perfectly safe because she watched him looking over her shoulder at Apollo dancing with Sunny.

***

Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues is being edited for publication.

 

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NaNoFeed: Thoughts on Deep Time I

Posted on October 18, 2012 by epbeaumont

It’s that time of year again, when I’m starting the work of preparing for National Novel Writing Month. This year’s project, Cleopatra’s Ironclads, started with a three-word challenge: “Afrocentric steampunk Cleopatra” and rapidly took wing from there. Ever since I was about nine years old, I’ve been a serious fan of the last pharaoh of Egypt, though what struck my imagination was not her fabled beauty but her sharp intelligence, and her interesting connections to all sorts of major innovations, from the political playbook of the Roman Emperors (divine kingship was not a native Roman notion) to the Julian calendar (it’s said she was the one who introduced Julius Caesar to the astronomer Sosigenes).

I’ve been sorting through a rich treasure trove of sources, from Shakespeare (whose Antony and Cleopatra is a sprawling non-classical pageant that gave me an idea of the challenges of taking on this project) to Plutarch (in North’s translation, Shakespeare’s major source) to contemporary popular works based in the meeting ground of Egyptology and Classical Studies. The literature is huge, and I’m still on the trail of the medieval Arab scholars who spoke of Cleopatra not as a temptress but as a scholar and wise ruler. There’s no hope of reading it all before November 1, to put it mildly, so once more I go into a November project feeling superficially prepared.

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago has a remarkable list of publications available online. The one I’ve been working through recently is the stereograph “virtual tour” of the Nile Valley written by James Breasted, the founder of the Institute. (It’s one of three such tours I’ve been undertaking, with the Description de l’Egypte of Napoleon’s expedition covering the late eighteenth century and the gorgeous full-color photography of Konemann’s Art and Architecture: Egypt covering the early twenty-first). Breasted’s narrative shows the imperial and racist attitudes of the fin-de-siecle Anglo-American elite in high relief, while emphasizing Egypt as a civilization that was old when Roman and Greek tourists followed the same route up the Nile to admire the pyramids in their original dazzling white casing stone. The Great Pyramids are only the beginning of a sixty-mile parade of pyramids, containing a thousand years of royal tombs.

Once again, I’m traveling back in time 2000 years, but this time I’m staying there the whole time; I’m reminded that my country is a cultural inheritor of the Roman Empire, as I read the “east versus west” rhetoric of the Roman sources, which also equates female political power with moral corruption. Some themes don’t go away, it would seem.

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