Novel Progress: Slow

I haven't been religious about keeping up with my word count. I'll admit it. I feel bad about this; I feel like I'm slacking off. In a sense, promises you make to yourself are the most important ones of all. There's no one else to disappoint, so really it's a test of your own willpower. How far will you go under your own steam?

On the other hand, I do have a pretty good impetus to get this thing done: that check I'll have to write to a certain group of assholes out in Kansas. I have no intention of ever giving them anything more substantial than the finger. I will NOT be sending them money at the end of this month, because I'll be finishing my damn book!

In related news, many other cooks in the kitchen at Buffalo Wild Wings have expressed interest in reading my book when it's done. One of them, who admitted that he hasn't read a book for pleasure since he graduated high school (!), said that he's eager to read my novel. Another, who never reads for pleasure and works "a hundred hours a week" (seriously, he does!), said that he would make an exception for my book. This is flattering, and does more than a little to inflate my ego, but it's also daunting: it means people are actually going to read this thing!

In a related note, I've been debating whether I should continue on a second project after finishing this book (since it looks like I'll finish the story in less than 330 more pages). I'd like to be able to say that I finished NaNoWriMo this year, not just finished the novel I've been plunking away at for a year. Writing 50,000 words in a month just sounds so much more impressive. But I've only done a quarter of the writing, and I'm halfway through the month. That means I'd have to do three-quarters of the work in half the time.

Part of me says that just finishing the novel is enough, and I'll need the extra time to do editing anyway. What do you think? Should I keep going after I finish? Or stop punishing myself and stick with one project at a time?

NaNoWriMo Update

I've been a bad, irresponsible novelist.

My my calculations, if I'm supposed to be doing about 10 pages a day, then I should have somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 pages done by now. At last count, I've only done 42. That's just over 50% of the writing I should've done by now. In grading terms, that would be a D, or maybe an F.

I need to step up my game. I need to keep my eye on the prize. I need to stay focused. Can't let myself get diverted by easy entertainment, and the petty distractions of day-to-day life.

If I don't take this project seriously, then who will?

National Novel-Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo)

Three years ago this November, spurred on by a friend of mine, I decided to attempt one of the craziest things I've ever done in my life: I entered a literary marathon known as National Novel-Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo).

The goal of an aspiring novelist who enters NaNoWriMo is simple to say, but very difficult to do: write a 50,000-word novel in a single calendar month. The entrant is not allowed to edit, revise, or otherwise worry about the quality of his/her writing in any way; you can save the self-criticism for later. Obviously, it was an insane thing to even try, and there were nights when I gave up an hour or more of precious sleep after working a 10-hour shift, with classes the next morning, just so that I could meet my daily requirement of 1,667 words.

My grades slipped, my social life suffered, and even my sleep cycle was affected. But twenty-eight days later, when I crossed the 50,000 word mark in the Halle Library computer lab at EMU, sometime around two in the morning, I felt what may well have been the greatest sense of accomplishment I had experienced in my life up to that point.

I learned a lot about myself, about what I can do when I've got a goal, a deadline, and consequences for missing said deadline. I learned a heck of a lot more than I would have in "Health & Fitness," that's for sure.

The next year, I gave NaNoWriMo another go, but was defeated early on. I didn't really have a story I believed in. The year after that (i.e., last year) I attempted the task again, this time with a better story in mind. But once again, my resolve flagged, and I allowed the mundane world to swallow my literary ambitions. I chipped away at the massive task over the course of the next year, though I was forced to stop for nearly six months, due to personal crises (such as the basement-flood, and the subsequent Black Mold infestation).

Since beginning my book (which remains untitled), my current page-count sits at 177. That's a lot of writing, and I'm very proud of myself for getting that much done, but I've still got a long way to go. Probably less than a hundred pages, but that's still a daunting task.

But since it's coming up on the anniversary of my starting this novel, and NaNoWriMo is looming once again, I find that I'm seized by the urge to finish the damn thing. I want to formally dedicate myself to the task of completing my manuscript, and getting the whole darn thing off my chest. Of course, the quality will necessarily be low, but NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality. You can go back and edit later; the important thing is to get all your ideas out on paper, before your conscious mind can say Hey, this is the worst thing anyone's ever written, and I should destroy the manuscript before my friends and family find out what an idiot I am.

So, here is my formal declaration:

I, David Frederick Keeber Wurtsmith, by the end of November 2010, will finish the first draft of the novel I began last year, or else I will have a trusted confidante mail a $20 check in my name to the Westboro Baptist Church.

It is up to you, my friends and family, to keep me on track and honest with myself. Throughout the month of November,

I realize that now isn't the best time to try to write a novel. I have other responsibilities: work, friends, my girlfriend, shopping for groceries,etc. But there's never a good time. There's always a bill to pay, or a job to find, or a party you really can't cancel, or the floor needs to be cleaned, or the dog needs to go to the vet, or something.

Even if you wait until you're retired, you still won't have all the time you want, and you'll probably have forgotten half the plot by then. Worse still, you'll probably have convinced yourself that your idea wasn't that good to begin with, and you're better-off not exposing your friends and family to something that bad.

That's why I need to do this now, before I can come up with more and better reasons why I shouldn't attempt it. As Shakespeare had it:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
-Julius Caesar, II.2.33-4

Movies To Avoid: "Dracula" (1931), starring Bela Lugosi

The other day, inspired by the approach of All Hallows' Eve, I had a desire to watch a horror movie. Lacking both money and a library card (I know, I know!), I decided to search you Tube for Bela Lugosi's world-famous 1931 performance as the infamous Count.

I have to say, was deeply disappointed. It started pretty early on; the acting was stilted and awkward, but that was only to be expected. After all, audiences back then expected something very different from their actors than they do today.

The first thing that jerked me out of the experience was the scene in which we first see Castle Dracula, and its inhabitants, both living and undead, which includes spiders (duh),bats (naturally), an opossum (Umm, okay...) and a nest of armadillos (WTF?!). It's like they didn't even think to research what kind of animals live in Europe, or that they might be different from the ones that live in California.

Speaking of uncertain locations, only about half the cast had English accents, despite the fact that the film was set in London, England. One particularly memorable performance, by Charles K. Gerrard, has one of the most gratingly fake Cockney-esque accents I've ever heard in my life. Furthermore, his character, Martin (a guard at Dr. Seward's sanitarium) is entirely useless as both a person and a character. He lets Renfield escape from his cell on several occasions, and is entirely ineffectual at restraining him. Also, his endless interjections ("'E's croizy! Comploitely looney!") are, as a rule, glaringly obvious, and largely ignored by the other characters.


Furthermore, Dracula's facade of normality is so laughably flimsy that it's a wonder that his own wives don't take him out, for his numerous and flagrant violations of the Masquerade. I mean, he doesn't make even the slightest attempt to hide what he's doing, and practically announces his next victims in public. It's a shock that it took Dr. Van Helsing himself to even notice that something wasn't quite right with this Dracula fellow.

Overall, the film entirely lacked any power to frighten, horrify, disgust, or even intrigue any modern viewer. I have a hard time believing that anyone was ever frightened by it. And don't give me any of that "It was a different time" crap! H.P. Lovecraft was still making a name for himself while this was being filmed, and his stories still scare the bejeezus out of me! And eighty years previous, Edgar Allan Poe penned The Tell-Tale Heart, one of the creepiest stories ever written in English. Hell, even Shakespeare told a few good ghost stories in his time. It's not as if no one had ever frightened an audience before 1931.

If you want a scary, classic vampire movie, watch F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. If you insist on knowing how this movie ends, watch Bram Stoker's Dracula instead. It's got basically the same plot, and it does what it sets out to do (i.e., it's actually scary) which is more than Tod Browning's film can say.

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

Oftentimes, when someone wants to express extreme gratitude or well-wishing, they say "May all your dreams come true." I find this very strange and counter-intuitive, as I can hardly think of a more unpleasant thing to wish on someone.

Think about it. What kind of dreams do you have, if you can remember them? Do they tend to be idyllic romps through tropical paradises? Probably not. Most people have dreams about what they encounter in everyday life: friends, family, school, and work. Visions of your old house or school are far more common than a nighttime visit to the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

Researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, divide dream-emotions into five broad categories: Anger, Apprehension Sadness, Confusion, and Happiness. Notice that positive emotions take up only one-fifth of the spaces on the list. Seems to me that joy and contentment are less common in dreams than many people believe, despite extensive experience to the contrary in their own dream-lives.

However, just because "Happiness" is the only positive emotion on the list doesn't mean it's the least-commonly experienced. If it weren't a common emotion, it wouldn't be on the list at all. I'm just saying that other emotions are important, too, and we need dreams in order to explore them. If your brain just replayed positive memories and fantasies all night long, what good would that do? If you wanted placid, inoffensive nightly entertainment, you could just as well watch Lifetime. Dreams dealing with the other emotions are more important than the happy ones, because they allow us tho confront our dilemmas (even ones we're not consciously aware of) in new and creative ways.

If you go to an online dream database and read a few dream summaries, it quickly becomes clear that very few of them are about "happy" subjects. They often include bizarre and frightening imagery, the significance of which is sometimes only known the the dreamers themselves.

Admittedly, positive dreams may be reported less often because they are less memorable, seen as less important, or may express desires the dreamer does not feel comfortable sharing with the rest of the world.

But even so, whatever kind of dreams a person may experience, a wish that they all may come true is clearly a disastrous wish for one simple reason: nightmares.


As anyone who has had a nightmare can tell you, they're not fun. And almost everyone has had one at some point in their lives. So why would anyone wish for all of someone's dreams to come true, if they know that they've probably had at least one nightmare in the past? The only thing about nightmares that makes them bearable is the fact that they end! And when you wake up, they (hopefully) will have no bearing on the rest of your life.

So, with all this in mind, why on Earth would anyone ever wish for ALL of someone's dreams to come true?!

"Republicans For Voldemort," and Other Unhelpful Slogans

Way back in about 2007 or so, I first started noticing a certain slogan, prominently displayed on numerous cars and T-shirts in the Ann Arbor area:


At first, I thought they were funny. Republicans are evil, and so is Voldemort, so it makes sense that they would support him! Har har har! Good one, guys!

But after a while, a niggling little doubt began to gnaw at the back of my mind. Perhaps Repiblicans were not, after all, the Nosferatu-esque monsters I had always assumed they were. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were people. Not real flesh-and-blood humans like you and I, but they do have children (I've seen the pictures!), and so maybe they're not as universally reviled as I imagined.

I began to doubt in the unassailable rightness of my cause. How could I groan at news of Republicans refusing to "cross the aisle" and get stuff done, if I spent my free time accusing them of being Death Eaters.

Even if done in jest, such barbs are often harmful. In a way, the dismissiveness of the slogan made it even worse. As Dumbledore himself pointed out, "[i]ndifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike" (Order of the Phoenix, pg. 834).

Recently, the meme has mutated, producing the virulent "Sarah Palin is actually a vampire" strain. Let me state, for the record, that I disagree with Sarah Palin's views on virtually every subject, from rape survivors' rights to the proper handling of the Gulf Oil Spill.

But I do not hate her. I strongly disagree with her, just as she has a right strongly disagree with me. That's how democracy works. I will not support her bid for any public office, but I know she's not the delusional half-wit that many liberals make her out to be. She can't have made it to the Governorship of Alaska without knowing how to do something right!

Besides, we don't disagree on everything. Recently, she joined a growing list of petitioners calling for Florida-based Rev. Terry Jones to quit being a dumbass and not turn the entire Islamic world against us forever by burning a big pile of Korans on Sept. 11. At least she and I can agree on something. Right?

And so, you liberals out there who still enjoy ridiculing people whose views differ from yours by accusing them of being in league with the villain of a Young Adult fantasy series, I have a request for you:

Stop it. You're hurting America.

Book Review: "American Born Chinese," by Gene Luen Yang

This is actually the second time I've read this book, which should tell you something about how much I like it.

Honestly, this is one of the finest graphic novels I've read. The story is funny and engaging, the art is simple and clean, and the blending of Chinese folklore, modern-day high school drama, and racial politics is deft and precise. Nothing feel arbitrary or out of place. In fact, since it's my second reading, I'm able to look at little details in a new light, and realize that the author was dropping little clues throughout the book. Nothing that could possibly give away the ending; just little things that take on new meaning on the second read-through.

The narrative consists of three seemingly-separate threads:

1) the story of the Monkey King, one of the most-beloved heroes of Chinese folklore;
2) the story of Jin Wang, an American-born Chinese boy who moves to a new, largely Asian-free school; and
3) a purposely-painful sitcom about a boy named Danny, tormented by the annual visits of his unbearably Fresh-Off the Boat cousin, Chin-Kee.



Being a white, upper-middle class American male, it's sometimes difficult for me to really understand what it's like to be seen as an outsider. That said, Mr. Yang's book does an excellent job of conveying that sense of other-ness. Mostly this comes in the form of the seemingly random and arbitrary taunts which Jin Wang and his other Asian classmates receive from white students.

Jock #1: "Hey, I chink it's getting a little nippy out here."
Jock #2: "You're right! I'm gettin' gook bumps!"

It's moments like these, when Jin Wang's classmates gang up on him without any provocation, which make him so powerfully appealing to the reader. It makes you truly understand how the dual pressures of assimilation and rejection combine forces to tear apart the young man's psyche. He wants to be accepted, but he wants to be left alone. he tries his best to act white, but no matter what he does, his otherness is always in the spotlight. He's embarrassed by who he is.

If you're looking for a book that can powerfully and concisely explain to you the difficulties involved in growing up Asian-American, then I strongly recommend this book.

POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILER WARNING!

I hadn't realized this the first time (I'm embarrassed to say), but this is a very Christian book. It wasn't until I read on the back flap that the author "teaches computer science at a Roman Catholic high school" that everything fell into place.

I'd noticed a few hints of Christian imagery here and there (Wong Lai-Tsao and the Monkey King following a star on their journey; the adoration of the infant Buddha, etc.), but I figured it was just part of the original myth. And it may well be. But that doesn't stop it from resonating with Christin themes.

The name of the principal deity of Chinese folklore, Tze-Yo-Tzuh, is here translated as "He Who Is", an obvious allusion to Yahweh, whose name means roughly the same in Hebrew.

The Monkey King eventually gains the title of "Heavenly Emissary". In the later chapters, his abilities and puposes are similar to those of a guardian angel, which is highly appropriate, since our word "angel" comes from the Latin angelus, which means "messenger" or "emissary". (Coincidence? I think not.)

You can find plenty more examples of Christian influence in this book, if you look for it, but Yang never beats us over the head with it. Yang allows the reader to draw their own parallels between the story of the Monkey King and the biographies of any number of Christian saints.