NaNo WriMo 2008

FINISHED!

The first draft is DONE. More than churned out, more like hewed out, and best described as PUMMELED out of me, eight hours a day on the few good days, and more 12-15 hour days than others. I do this full time. With a husband solicitously feeding me, and doing the groceries, and getting hassles out of my way.

The people who did it with jobs (or two) and children? My hats and socks are off to them.

Editing, re-writing, adding additional scenes will all come in December and January, but for now, the story is done, with THE END.

Hee!

Less than 5 days left...

of NaNoWriMo.

Unlike some people, this never got easier for me, just less impossible. I'm surprised daily that I can push myself to keep writing, and going over the standard 1000words/day I had set up before (and this had been on the good days, pre NaNo).

But as I'm winding things up -- or gearing the plot toward the smackdown -- I'm caught up in:

1) OMG stagefright!!! (I'm finally writing the scene I've been heading for all these weeks. MONTHS)

and

2) OW. MY BACK. I've got gargoyle back, from all the elbow-up typing.

*wants it to be Dec/1 now*

Pictures, people!

I love labels, of the best kind:

Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek's Exactitudes

Strange things...

... I've been wondering if my recent malaise, the ups and downs of blue funk that pulls me under, is not completely writing-related, and might have something to do with age.

And children. (is that why we want a dog so badly right now?)

I've never wanted kids. After years of thinking it over (and as my husband notes, "you bring it up every day"), since I was a kid myself, there wasn't ever a time when I wanted that baby, the way I wanted love and a relationship, graduate school, figuring out life, writing a book. It might be the case where if we do end up with a baby, we'll love it and fall in love with it, but we're not actively longing for one in the abstract.

I just don't see a child in our lives. Luckily, the husband is on the same page. We love our niece (and nephew), but I'd like to keep them the primary kids in my life right now.

Yet, I love reading mommy-blogs. The warm and cozy feeling I get there makes them my new secret lurker fandom. I love reading about their taking their kids to day care, and what they fed them, and their kid-conversations, and frustrating bits.

They bring up the oddest things, stuff I couldn't imagine (is it a good thing we can't remember too much about our babyhoods?). Today: kids bite each other.

How bizarre, and um... kind of scary and cute. In a kind of brutal way, I guess they're more like puppies than I thought.

Obama!!!

It's not even my country, but after we turned off CNN at 3am and went to bed, the first thing I did this morning was check the news. HEEEEEE! (sounds so juvenile a squeal at such a serious thing, but, hey)

:D :D :D :D :D

I have to say, it made me all teary eyed. I was steeling myself for the usual jaded disappointment.

Man, why couldn't they have had someone like THAT all the years I was in grad school. For us, sad ol' fogeys, the first thing that happened after we settled into the PhD program back when, was watch, jaws rolling around on the floor, as Bush won over Gore (whom we thought was a sure thing back then. Brief return to the shock and disgust of 2000). Imagine a room full of radical to mildly liberal international grad students, all going, "No, he didn't just *win* did he? Is this a bad joke? Is it over yet?"

But back to today, YAY. :D :D :D

M. had mailed in his overseas ballot more than a week ago, so it wasn't so much voting, as waiting for everyone else to vote. He was so careful about not jinxing it that he wouldn't talk openly about Obama winning. (See? I didn't hurt it any!)

:D :D :D So it's a pretty darn good day.

NaNo WriMo 2008

For the first time, I'm doing NaNo. That's 50,000 words in the month of November. Writing's not all about word count, but word count is something that gets you started.

Two years ago, when I was starting out, 2500 words a day (fiction) was not big deal. Easy. Then I got more and more careful, until my internal editor nitpicked at every single word as soon as it was laid down. This time last year, 500 words a day drained me. I was terrified of writing. It took quite a while to recover from that.

The bean-counting aspect of NaNo requires 1667 words/day to add up to the final 50K, but the best part is that THEY (not the wishy-washy being I like to call my inner editor/self-motivator) tell you to keep going, and not stop to micro edit what you will end up convincing yourself is a crappy draft. Above all, no throwing it all away after the first week.

So, whatever I end up with I'll have a good chunk to work with at the end of the month. First day: not bad at all: 1800+



([ETA] I realized on the second day, that this widget updates with the most recent number, as the days go by, and won't be a reliable day-by-day record for a blog.)

[ETA2] The hard part is not going back to tweak the bits that are now plaguing my mind. Written fast, what seemed to resonate on some emotional level seems all over-wrought, now. Which is why I am going to sit on my hand for the rest of the evening and NOT TOUCH THE WRITING.

And also, SHALL LEAVE IT ALONE TOMORROW, TOO.

Quotes to get me through

In my seventh year of grad school, when I was trying desperately to finish my dissertation and defend before the summer, I had this typed out and posted on my monitor, under the cartoon of the elephant pushing the bunny in a wheelbarrow, which had been the illustration on our Thank you notes after the wedding. Both of them cheered me up, even on those "writing even one sentence is good enough" days. So, it turned into my favorite quote.

From Anton Chekhov's "Lady with the Pet Dog":


"And it seemed as though in a little while a solution would be found, and a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they still had a long long way before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning."

First Post! Secret Sunshine (2007, 이창동)

At the Film Museum, Amsterdam Oct-8-2008, (Spoken: Korean, Subtitles: Dutch)

Adapted from the short story, "벌레 이야기" (1985) by 이청준

We hesitated a lot before seeing this film. Or at least I did, because of the subject matter: widow with son moves to small town, where son is abducted and murdered, and she is then drawn into company of Christian evangelicals, while (not) dealing with her grief. Very Lars von Trier, and I look forward to LvT as much as a shotgun to the head.

So, Secret Sunshine: yes, very fine acting, very subtle, wry and ironic observations (plus, if you get the broad dialect 경상도 사투리 that some characters use, as opposed to the false, faux-sweet sounding Seoul speak of Shinae, the female lead, that breaks down when she does) Dark humor, if you catch how old-fashioned and hokey the pop music used in the film is (80s, 거짓말이야, 그저 바라만 보고 있지), stuff that makes you burst out laughing at its horrible moments, with its deliberately "classic" kitcsh tunes.

But 3/4 through the film, I kept wondering: can a film be so relentlessly dark and futile, only briefly letting up (with gentle ridicule), and is there a smart way out of this horrible life mess, that doesn't insult our intelligence? And is this the question we're meant to ask: what can you do, if your kid is kidnapped and murdered. Must the story present a solution? Maybe it can't.

Love/Romance? While presenting a gentle "deep down nice guy" in 송강호's character, the film doesn't take this solution. Too predictable, too easy, too insulting, so false. Nope.

Revenge? Well, this isn't a go after the killer, make them pay, then realize the futility of violence, sort of film.

Faith? Religion as a way out is questioned, though not the sincerity of blind (fumbling) faith itself. The Christians, the awful services, prayer meetings, songs, are ridiculed for the crass exterior, but not their belief.

Forgiveness? For me, the best part of this film was when Shinae went to see the murderer in prison, to "forgive him," only to hear that he had found God first, and felt he was granted God's forgiveness already, and how this hits her as a horrible betrayal. How dare God forgive him, when she didn't first.

No solutions, no resolution, no moment of (artificial) epiphany. Just moving on, and life as usual, because, it seems, the grief you carry does not go away by pushing it through a narrative of resolution.

So, the sequence of uncomfortable questions that the viewer might have after the film have already been anticipated and answered within the course of it, without giving you any satisfaction. But without that satisfaction, as with experience, from merely annoying to traumatic, without the narrative of closure (itself a conscious decision that keeps escaping the confines of resolution), it's going to keep rattling inside us, as this film does, while we try to move on. And descend further and further downwards.

Odd how a film that had me weeping in horror and sympathy during the 2/4 to 3/4, is at once so detached and clinical, so emotional in subject matter and so intellectually distanced in portraying it, somehow paradoxically restrained. It makes me feel a little stupid for craving that easily-granted moment of film epiphany.

Not one of my favorite films, but definitely worth watching, and muling over.