Things are progressing nicely, so far. I checked my word count on NaNoWriMo this morning, and was startled by the number (I’d forgotten overnight what I clocked in at last night). My first thought was, Oh my, look at this person’s word count, whose is this? Wait, this is my page… where did that number come from? Did someone leave me some words? Are these yours?
Nope. By cracky, I did 1797 words yesterday! At the start of Day 5 I’m opening with 8551 words, well better than a day up on schedule. Maybe rocking out to the latest AFI release, Crash Love, is more of an inspiration for a novel set in the Gilded Age than I thought. (Honestly, the boys outdid themselves on this one. Davey, Jade, Hunter, Adam, this is your best yet.)
Anyway…
And how about that Pep Talk this morning from Jasper Fforde? Inspired. For those who question why spend time cranking out 50K words of drivel, you know it’s going to be crap going in so why bother? Because it’s part of the process. The way I’ve always phrased it is, before I can write anything decent, I have to write through all the crap, literally, like clawing my way up out of a hole in the ground. If I keep scrabbling at the dirt, it will fall in and fill the hole and eventually I’ll be standing on top where the good topsoil is.
Shooting for the 10000 mark today. Who’s with me?!?
I am not making this up.
I’ve heard of Klingon weddings amongst Star Trek fanatics, but this is new. An Ohio couple had a unique Halloween wedding.
“Vampires” tie the knot in Columbia Township
Jack Holsinger, 61, of Lorain, married his vampiress, Connie Spitznagel, 44, also of Lorain, in a Halloween-themed wedding at the Rockin’-R-Ranch.
…
Holsinger arrived at the “altar” in a coffin via a hearse. His coffin was carried by six costumed pallbearers to the altar, where Spitznagel, dressed as a lady vampire, met him in front of a minister dressed as Jason from the “Friday the 13th” horror movies.
The groom’s son, dressed as Jack Sparrow, served as best man (best pirate?). Instead of kissing the bride, apparently the groom was told to bite his bride on the neck. Aren’t you supposed to save that stuff for the honeymoon? I’m just sayin’…
cross-posted to The Nano Project
I’m off to a rollicking start on word count. Thanks in large part to attending a write-in, I clocked in at 3,337 words yesterday! Wow, I’ve never gotten that much in one day before. Even with the chatting and socializing and inhaling a sandwich, the distraction of surfing the net via free WiFi (thanks for walking me through that, Wairoam!) it was fun and exciting listening to all those keys clicking around me. We had a great turnout, although I’m not sure exactly how many people showed up (somewhere around 12+, I think). If you haven’t attended a write-in, I highly recommend it. Now the question is, can I sustain that, or even half that? Must try… must… back to it…
NaNo is upon us!
Which means I probably won’t be blogging much for the next 30 days. Whatever free time I have will be going towards word count. Anyone for a word war? 
How many times do I have to tell you? Never end a sentence with a preposition!
With mere hours to go to the official start of NaNoWriMo as I write this, I have to admit, setting aside my WIP for a month feels a little like taking separate vacations from a loved one. I know what I’m going to be doing will be thrilling and good for me, but at the same time the idea of being away from those characters for a month stops my heart a little. Farewell, my darlings, I’ll see you soon. MWAH!
I’ve also decided to participate in the NaNo Project, a local collective blog where writers from the Portland, OR area contribute their experiences in NaNoWriMo. I’ve got one post up (“I Don’t Wanna Stop“), and as obsessive as I am about blogging I’m sure I’ll do at least one more for them.
(image courtesy of First People.)
American Indians
First People is a child friendly site about American Indians and members of the First Nations. 1400+ legends, 400+ agreements and treaties, 10,000+ pictures, free clipart, Pueblo pottery, American Indian jewelry, Native American Flutes and more.
Huffington Post has a sobering article on the state of publishing today:
What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Walmart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business. The larger fight is really over what you get to read.
…
One of the dirty little secrets of the book business is that publishers often check in advance with the buyers for the chain stores and mass merchandisers before agreeing to publish a book. If the answer they get is no, the book may never see the light of day.
I have to admit I had no idea the situation was THIS bad. When Target decides what I can and cannot read, it surely is a sign of the Apocalypse. We’ve got three of the Horsemen: Let’s call Walmart Pestilence, Amazon can be War, and Target can be Famine. All we need now is Death. Can’t be far behind.
I’m always on the lookout for new music to write to. I never know where a new sound will take me, what thoughts it can inspire.
And so with that, I want to give a little shout out to a band I just heard about a week or so ago: Sunseth Midnight from São Paulo, Brazil. (the link is to the Portuguese page, but there’s an icon at the bottom for the English page) They’re a goth metal/glam synth/techno band, kind of hard to pin down their style. They sing in English, with just the tiniest bit of an accent .
And at the risk of blowing their hardcore image that the publicity department is apparently striving for in the photos on their site, I have a small story to relate. I was instantly captivated by their music, and unable to locate their CD at Amazon I figured it wasn’t a good sign. I found a generic ‘contact’ e-mail address on their site, so sent them an e-mail asking if they had U.S. distributors for their first CD, “Sun Seth.” I figured it would go to their Web master, get passed along to their record company, and in a week or two someone from the press dept. would get back to me. Well. In less than 24 hours I had a very chatty, friendly e-mail response from Ricardo Campos (the one on the far right with the really long hair and sunglasses in the photo)! Bless his heart, you could have knocked me over with a feather. So Ricardo says the CD is not available in the U.S., it wasn’t licensed here, however he says “but this problem will be solved on our next release, I promise! 
” which they’re working on now, and is planned for release in 2010. What a sweetheart. At least you can hear five tracks on their Web site if you’d like.
I’m thinking I need to work in a new vampire character into my vamp novel. Or maybe learn Portuguese and move to Brazil…
And here we go. I knew it wouldn’t take long before they started with this. To wit: Barnes & Noble’s new e-book reader, the Nook:
And look what we have across the bottom panel: Ads! Right now they’re displaying books, but I’m sure that’s easy enough to change. According to this article in Marketing Vox it’s only the beginning:
As print publishers increasingly seek to diversify into the digital space, these efforts will lead to more granular opportunities to target advertising locally, or by gender, or by consumer taste.
The only thing that surprises me here is that B&N beat Amazon to the punch.
Somehow, they say you can loan e-books, free of charge for up to fourteen days:
You can share nook to nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch®, BlackBerry®, PC, or Mac®, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.
Interesting development. The nook starts shipping in November, you can pre-order them now. Whatever. Just give me the hardcopy.
I’m still at it, thinking about changing names again. I’m 75,000 words into my current WIP, the vampire novel I’m calling “Revenants Abroad” for now, and I’m still not 100% happy with one of the main character’s names. I’ve been testing a new name on her, but I’m not entirely happy with it, either. I’ve been to so many baby name sites, and nothing is really leaping out at me for this gal. One problem is that I haven’t developed her as much as the other two, she is still unsettled in my mind as to who she really is.
When choosing names, I try to avoid anything that’s currently in the top 100, or has been in the last few years. At the same time, I don’t want something that’s too outlandish (or just ugly). A couple months ago I stumbled on a great tool for tracking the popularity of a name , with statistics back to the 1920s, and shows it in a nice visual graph form. Click the link above or the graphic below to go to the site.
Just for fun I picked some common names to compare. In the graph above I entered Suzanne, Mary, Lydia and Catherine. The graph starts in the 1920s and goes to the 2000s. As you can see, “Mary” has been steadily tanking in popularity since the 1920s. The rise and fall of the popularity of the others is not as dramatic, mostly holding fairly steady. I’ve had as many as seven names in the graph at a time, I don’t know what limit it may have. It does get a little hard to follow if you have too many displayed at once, though. To remove one you can click the little X to the left of the name in the legend on the side. To start over, hit the “Clear All” button.
The site also has the top 100 boys and girls names, the most recent data available for May 2009, courtesy of the Social Security Administration. I was surprised at some that made the list: Addison (??) at #12, Brooklyn at #47, Olivia at #6, Trinity at #70 (come on people, get over “The Matrix” already. Not to mention I always think of the Trinity atomic bomb test in Alamagordo in 1945. No, I wasn’t there, but I’m old enough to remember learning about it in school). Madison was almost unheard of until the 1980s and the movie “Splash” came out, and has been steadily climbing in popularity ever since, coming in at #4 currently. Since the information comes from the SSA, it’s limited to name trends in the U.S. If anyone knows of anything similar in other countries, I would love to know about it.
I don’t much care for made-up names, I like names to have a meaning behind them. Unless it suits the character, I also avoid overtly ethnic names. For instance, I’m not going to name a character from a small town in Wyoming after an Aztec goddess unless there’s a really good reason for it, like her parents were archaeologists who spent time in Mexico on various digs before joining a hunt for dinosaur fossils in Wyoming. Or something. It’s jarring and distracts from the story. Seriously, how many of us can even pronounce Coyolxauhqui? (I’m guessing it’s somewhere along the lines of Coil-shau-kwee). So, I think I’ll be finding something more prosaic for my character.
It’s that time of year when everyone is trotting out stories of ghosts and hauntings. So let’s join in the fun.
Digital City has an article listing ten of the creepiest roads in America, reportedly haunted by everything from ghostly children to spectral dogs, Civil War soldiers to star-crossed lovers. Check out the ghostly locales at Unexplained Happenings on America’s Creepiest Roads. I’ve seen some of these dramatized on various tv shows over the years, specifically the one in Texas where the cars roll themselves off the train tracks and tiny, child-sized handprints are found on the powder-coated bumper after the fact.
There is another article on the sidebar, which purports to be about haunted houses. Fair warning: It’s mostly about fun house attractions, although it does cover the Winchester Mystery House in Santa Clara, CA. I’ve been to that, and it is indeed a bizarre place. The rest of the ”haunted houses” in the article are tourist attractions, complete with actors and animatronics.
Ghost cams are fun, too. There are scads of them all over the Web. A quick search on Google brought up 140,000 hits. Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana, seems to be capitalizing on their resident ghost, the Grey Lady. They offer ghost tours, and she’s been seen so often she’s considered part of the staff. Luckily, whoever she is, she is not out to do harm. She seems to like to make her presence known, but beyond that folks are left alone to go about their business.
Even a local theater here in the town I live in is purported to be haunted, and was staked out over the summer by a professional ghost hunting team:
IPRG, which itself has allied teams in Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Germany, is recognized by The Atlantic Paranormal Society. TAPS, for fans of events that defy scientific explanation, is the group behind the Ghost Hunters show on the Syfy network.
They got a little bit of weirdness, rapid temperature changes, and some EVPs (electronic voice phenomena). I must head down there sometime to see if I can have my own ghostly encounter. It seems to be a very active ghost, or ghosts.
Other local ghost hangouts are a haunted hall at a local university, and the McMenamins Grand Lodge, both in Forest Grove. McMenamins is a local chain of brewpubs which specialize in buying up interesting properties and converting them to bars and theaters. They serve their only own beers and wines (although full bars offer everything else). I’ve been to the Grand Lodge many times and have yet to have an paranormal encounter, darn the luck.
