Thursday, November 02, 2006

Novel Day 2


Today is the second day of NaNoWriMo and the second day of NaBloPoMo. So far, I'm ahead of the game in one (4238 words) and right there with the second. Lying in bed last night, I realized a few things.

1) Kit always mispronounces NaNoWriMo, calling it NanoREEmoe, rather than NanoWRYmoe. I say that she is mispronouncing because Wri stands for Writing, not Reeting. HOWEVER! I eat the crow of shame...because No stands for Novel...and it is not pronounced Noe...but Naw. And Mo is for Month, not pronounced Moe, as I have been...but Muh. So I have ALSO been pronouncing it incorrectly based on the words used to make up the shortened version. However, I did read the FAQs on the NaNoWriMo website, and ...well...I can't find the pronounciation guide which I'm PRETTY SURE was there last time I checked. *grumble*

2) I've come to a very weird conclusion...one that just never occurred to me before. (And Jen! Please don't think I'm picking on you...) Jen from Coasting Richly is the one who made my brain twist around this very odd notion. She writes "I once had an idea for a novel but not once, ever, the inclination to pursue it." *blink* *blink blink* That had never occurred to me. Ever. That people might not want to write fiction. It seriously blew my mind. I mean, thinking about it...it makes sense, but I'd never even thought about it before. One of my earliest memories is being pre-literate at my Oma and Opa's house in West Bank, near Kelowna, British Columbia and within an hour, scribbling on every piece of paper that my mom had brought for me to draw for the two weeks that we would be there. (Good grief, could I GET a more awkward sentence? I'm going to go with "yes", in my currently whipping out novel. Oh look. Another one.) My justification? "I'm writing a book!" A whole book in an hour? Dude, NaNo's got NOTHING on my three year old self. I guess it was meant to be.

Ahem...anyway. The point is that I guess I always assumed that everyone had a writer, frustrated or otherwise, inside them. I sometimes look at the world with a running dialogue/monologue through my head, thinking about how I would describe things in print. When my grade four teacher was reading us Charlotte's Web, I pictured how the words looked, and read along in my head. It's so weird. I didn't do this with any of my other activities. I can understand perfectly why someone may not be interested in karate, knitting, art or playing a musical instrument. But because writing was such an ingrained part of my psyche, I didn't even think that people would feel differently about it than I did.

3) I need money. I want to start selling some of my (amazing, if I may say so myself) photos. Brainstorming, I came up with the idea of prints, greeting/holiday cards, calendars, images and that's pretty much it. I'm looking into places I can upload my photos and people download them for a certain amount of money per download. Has anyone out there had experience with that kind of thing? Anyone? Bueller? Alsoplus, I'd like to start selling some of my jewellery online, since I've got a digital camera now. I've become enamoured with Hyena Cart and could definitely come up with some stuff to sell there. Maybe even prints and cards and so forth.

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So, lots to think about. I write in my paper journal every night, and lately I've been having trouble finding things I wanted to record. I wasn't doing anything new. I wasn't trying to think grand philosophical thoughts. My entries were getting shorter and shorter. So, what do you think happened after I went to bed after writing over 4000 words of fiction in 24 hours? I wrote two full pages in my journal. This writing thing...it's like crack!

(edit: and as proof that this writing thing, it being crack like...please note the relative length of this post as compared to the last....six months worth or so. Go ahead. I'll wait. Or, if you don't want to look yourself...trust me. This one's longer.)

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