Drops of Blood on My Forehead

Share a song you recently realized you can't get enough of... no matter how many times you listen to it.

"Pour Ne Pas Vivre Seul" is a song I first heard in the movie "8 Femmes" (8 Women).  It's sung by an actress in the film, but on searching the internet for it, I discovered this version by Dalida, an Italian singer.  It took me a while to realise I was having trouble singing it because I was doing French 'r's and Dalida rolls hers instead.  Now I roll mine, too, and I can sing right along.  I think this song is beautiful and I can't get enough of it.

I stumbled on a link to a site called http://www.associatedcontent.com.  It's a site that pays (via PayPal, apparently) for articles submitted to them by their members.  It's free to join.  I'm not very good at reading legalese, but their Terms of Use₁ seems to indicate that by publishing something on their site I grant them the rights to use it however they want.  This is the part of writing that I'm always afraid of: copyright issues.  These are going to be non-fiction articles, because they don't pay for poetry or fiction, but what happens if I write an article that I later want to use somewhere else?  My guess is I don't have that right, but I'm not sure.

While I'm near the subject of PayPal, who out there makes a lot of use of their service?  I have an account which is still linked to my checking account.  I was reviewing the idea of getting a PayPal debit/credit card, which would allow me to take any earnings I make via AC right out, without all that tedious mucking about with bank transfers.  (Not that I expect to make more than a few bucks here and there... perhaps enough to buy a few little things I want from the Internet.)  What's the lowdown on PayPal?  I've not had any trouble with them, but I know some people have.  Yes, I'm paranoid.  Does this surprise you? :)

I seem to be somewhat sluggish today.  Is it too much caffeine, or not enough?  Waugh.

ETA: I just found this article about submitting an article to AC as non-exclusive, meaning the author retains the rights to publish the piece at a later date, though it seems AC retains the rights to publish it again if they want to.  

This stuff gives me a headache.

1:

4. Rights You Grant to AC.

A. User Content. By submitting any User Content through or to the AC Network, including on any User Tools or User Pages, but excluding any User Content you submit on AC Blogs, you hereby irrevocably grant to AC, its affiliates and distributors, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, create derivative works from, transfer, transmit and distribute on the AC Network, in connection with promotion or elsewhere, such User Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. Notwithstanding the foregoing, when you submit a text, video, images , AC may modify the format, content and display of such User Content. The foregoing grants shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such User Content, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws under any relevant jurisdiction. With respect to User Content you Post for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of AC Blogs, You grant AC the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Content on the AC Network or on any media. You agree that the foregoing grant of rights by you to AC and its affiliates is provided without any the entitlement of payment of fees or consideration. In addition to the foregoing, any content you submit to AC for publication shall be subject to licenses granted pursuant to the Independent Contractor Licensing Agreement located at http://www.associatedcontent.com/contractor_agreement.html that you agree to upon submission of the content.

I'm currently working on a 'Write Every Day' project, known as "AIC" or "Ass-In-Chair".  The goal is to write 250 or more words Each and Every Day, No Matter What.  For three days, I've been doing this.  I've been writing the stuff into a Word document, and also posting it privately on my VOX.

I'd like to share it with peoples here on VOX, and with my other Internet friends.  My question is this: is writing "Copyright 2008 H.L. Myers" at the bottom of each post enough to ensure that nobody will yoink my writing?  I don't pretend to be a fantabulous writer who's in constant danger of getting plagiarised, but it's a concern.  If, during the AIC project, I manage to write a wonderful, salable story, I'm paranoid enough to worry that someone will ruin it for me.  See, I've admitted to being paranoid. :) 

My limited knowledge of copyright law doesn't really extend to the Internet.  Can any of you share information on this topic?

You paged S with 'Sometimes I get (forgive the wording, 'cos that's where I am right now) almost drunk on words. It's the best time for me to write, those times when things just tumble out of my brain and onto the page or screen. It's kinda cool, but there's a thing in my head that wonders if it seems ...pretentious. :S'
S pages: I can't imagine you ever being pretentious. :)

A writer friend of mine has long spoken of A.I.C. as his method of keeping his writing going.  It stands for "Ass In Chair".  The principle: sit the heck down and write 250 words a day, minimum.  "Each Day, Every Day, No Excuses."

I started today.  I had some ideas during my walk, I scrawled down some quick notes while I was walking, and several hours later, wobbling from tiredness, I finally opened my word processor and wrote 254 words.

An interesting thing happens when I write when I'm really tired. I discovered this the first week of NaNoWriMo but I forgot it until now.  When I'm really tired, the Inner Editor and a lot of other controls in my mind switch (mostly) off, leaving me free to write flowing prose that (I hope) sounds good and not pretentious.

It's a neat phenomenon.  I open up to this flow of words I usually don't have allow myself access to.

I hope I can succeed in keeping up with the A.I.C.  It took less than half an hour to write the 254 words, but I had them mostly stored in my head to begin with.  Tomorrow will be harder.  But 250 words is a very small amount!  I looked at it!  It's minuscule!

Clearly, I'm still tired and should shuffle off to shower/reading/bed.  I have a lot of things to do tomorrow.

The Day of the Jackal

I currently have four books out of the library, none of which I have started reading.  It's time to rededicate a time slot for reading in my day.

Sitting on my beside table is Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal.  My father was watching the end of the film version a few weeks ago, and I've read Forsyth's Dogs of War and enjoyed it, so I put in a request for this title.  I've barely started it, and it's due back next week!

Rainbows End

White Night (The Dresden Files, Book 9)

Also on my desk is White Night, so far as I know the last Dresden Files book to be published.  I really enjoy these books.  Butcher's style appeals to me, and the snarky internal monologue of Dresden always amuses me.  The man seems to get into deeper, but yet still interesting, trouble every book.  Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.  But somehow he comes out of it, more burdened or scarred than before.

Ten Big Ones: A Stephanie Plum Novel

Dresden's tendency to find trouble wherever he goes reminds me of Janet Evanovich's novels, where Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter not-so-extraordinaire, manages to get into successively more but different trouble with each book, sometimes with each scene!  I place both Dresden's and Plum's adventures in my 'fluff' pile, because they read quickly and are always entertaining.

Hunting and Gathering

The last book on my desk is Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda.  This novel was one I saw listed in the Doylestown Bookshop's reader's newszine and decided to pick up.  It was originally written in French, which appealed to me, though I, of course, ordered the English translation.  My French isn't that good yet.  I read the first short chapter while standing at the kitchen table and was struck by the deep and powerful mood Gavalda evoked.  I was also struck with the hope that things would get somewhat less depressing in the coming chapters.

Refugee (Bio of a Space Tyrant, Vol 1)

This made me think of Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant series.  I read the first of these in high school, and while I thought the book was well-written, it depressed me so severely that when I reached the end of the novel I swore never to read another in the series.  "Sorry, Piers," I thought, "no offense, but I just can't handle it."  Perhaps I was just excessively prone to depression in those days.  Okay, I was prone to depression in those days.  But, though I will resist the temptation to pick the book up again just to see how much of the effect it had on me was due to my own emotional states and how much to Anthony's writing, I do wonder.

A Separate Peace

And to round out the list, a mention of To Kill A Mockingbird prompted me to make a request for John Knowles' A Separate Peace, another book I read in high school but found powerful, emotional, and a wonderful read.  I read the first several pages on Amazon.com's reader and was reminded of some of the reason I enjoyed this book.  Knowles has a way with words; his prose is quite poetic in places and just a joy to read.

I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.

I can't wait to get back to this one.

Looks like I've got some serious reading to do!

Though I swore I'd sit down this month and spend it finishing the NaNoWriMo manuscript I wrote in 2005 (which reached a conclusion to the story but was only 26000 words long), I didn't.  I'm sitting here with it now, as I wait for the promised arrival of the DirecTV repair technician.  As I read over the summary of the 'this is what comes next' pages, I realised that the story is in fact complete, and that my summary would seem to describe either a sequel or the second half of a two-part story.  The part that's already written has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and even a brief epilogue. 

I really like this story.  I feel it has a great deal of potential, and I'm planning to take the first two chapters to the writers' group meeting tomorrow night, even if it's just two people who make it there.  It's sad; the first meeting comprised half a dozen people.  The woman who organised it said a lot of people thought it was going to be a class rather than a critique/discussion group.  No one else has shown up since the first meeting.  I hope it picks up again after the dreaded holiday season is over.

But I really like this story!  It has strong characters with clear motives, a spooky bad guy, a thugly bad guy, and a climax full of excitement and wonder.  At least I think it does.  I may be biased, being the author.  But I've never been one to blow my own horn, so there may be something to it.

You can take a look at the first three chapters of the story here.

Nano_07_winner_large

I am proud to declare that, for the first time since my initial pathetic attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days in 2003, I have crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line.  My story isn't pretty, taken all together, and there are lots of places where I started writing something and gave up on it, leaving it as a dangling bit which will  be among the first bits to go when I take a look at editing it in a few months or so.  But it is 50,000 words, and that's good enough for the folks at NaNoWriMo.

So why do I feel empty?  When I first got the 'You Won!' page, I pumped my fist in the air and shouted with joy.  I felt happy and accomplished ... for about five minutes.

What good is it to write a manuscript that's so obviously plagued by plot problems, dead ends, and characters whose names changed mid-novel?  Okay, that last one is very fixable, but the point is: I could have done better if I had tried.  With Week Two a disaster which netted me perhaps eighteen hundred words, I had to race to catch up, just in word count.  NaNo is all about word count, and while that's an excellent exercise in 'you can do it if you just keep plugging away at it!', I don't know that I see a future for this particular story.  Not as a novel, anyhow.  There's a section that can stand on its own as a short story, and I may just yank that out for use as such.  I feel as if I cheated by using techniques I resorted to in the last few days, such as quoting lyrics and going into exquisite detail over things I don't think really deserve that much attention.  I wrote things this month in ways I wouldn't bother writing them if I didn't have a deadline like this.  I let things go.  Again, it's a wonderful exercise in freeing your creative mind to just go and play in the sandbox, but why did I do this?

I have struggled the last couple years with NaNoWriMo because I hold myself to very tight standards, and because I don't have a lot of stick-to-itiveness.  (Aside: I've also got addicted to typing Ctrl-S every few hundred words to save my work, which my browser takes offence to.)  I plan in December to work on finishing my 2005 NaNo attempt, which, while a very good story, so far, is only about 26000 words long.  But a few thousand of those are summary of stuff I just didn't push myself to write.  I'll be doing that next month.  If I'd reached 50,000 with that novel, I would have felt like I had truly won.  I've shopped almost half that story around to writers' critique groups and met with a lot of encouragement. 

I don't know what the future of this manuscript is (I'm not going to call it a novel, because it's not really a complete story.  Of course, I've spent so much time on it that I've lost track of it, really.), but for the moment, I suppose I ought to try to be happy at what I have accomplished: I didn't give up this year.  I didn't emerge from my horrid Week Two and throw the towel in.  I kept going.  I didn't quit when I began to suspect I was going to run out of plot well before I hit 50,000 words.  I didn't even quit when I realised there's quite a bit of this manuscript that is entirely frivolous, to the tune of at least 5,000 words.  I plugged along, despite the screechings of my inner pessimist.  And to show for it, I have a purple progress bar and a spiffy winner's certificate.

And I guess that's not too bad after all.

I've been hard at work on my NaNoWriMo novel, to the tune of 48,433 words.  Only 1,567 to go! 

I find I ran out of plot a few days ago.  Last night I spent a thousand words or so writing about Ren feeding a Pop Tart to Dobroy, the little alien guy.  Oh, and they watched a documentary about the dung beetle, but it turned out I didn't know enough about dung beetles and really wasn't interested enough to spend more words paraphrasing from Wikipedia, so I gave that up.  The Pop Tarts thing was more interesting.  Mostly.

It's winding down, and I pray I'll find fifteen hundred words' worth of story to write.  I've loosened my hold on the idea that I should have a complete novel at the end of NaNo.  I have the plot points complete, I think.  The trouble with writing a story about a person who randomly jumps about in time is that without a road map (which I started writing in my Moleskine but kind of let slip about midway through the month), I've kind of lost track of exactly which bits go where.

But it might still be able to be wrangled into a decent novel someday.

My post-NaNo plans include playing Puzzle Pirates (I'm dying to get in on a long pillage: I need money!), getting back to some of the other online communities I've partly shunned during this month, and working on the editing of my non-winning 2005 NaNo novel, "The Rise of Umbra".  Well, finishing "Umbra" first, then editing it.

It's been a trying month.  I've learned a lot about myself as a writer, again, and as a person.  I've discovered (again) that if I put my mind to it and push through the resistance and the lethargy and the apathy that seems to settle on me when I sit down to write some days, I can get things accomplished.  During the 2005 NaNoWriMo I had written two inspirational messages I'd gleaned from WriMoRadio onto index cards and taped them to my computer monitor: "Keep Pushing" and "Never Mind The Yetis".  The first one is easy enough to understand, but I confess I don't entirely remember what was up with the yetis. Something to do with fear, I think.

Less than twelve hours from now my NaNo profile will be sporting a purple winner's bar!  I'm so excited!  I can do it!