November Nanowrimo

I love the fact that I made a huge post about being BACK on blogger and then subsequently fell off the face of the earth. Oops?

So the past 6 or so months have been fairly full of writing. I wrote about 78k total in June and July for June nanowrimo. I'm looking at picking that project up again in the new year to finish the draft (A friend will be reading what I have so far over Holiday Break and I'm waiting to see what her thoughts on it are before I dive back in).

I started classes Evergreen, they have been going quite well. I was able to use November Nanowrimo as my sustained writing piece of a class this quarter. I did not finish nano unfortunately. I hit 36k, got sick the second to last day of november and decided it wasn't worth killing myself over. So my goal for December is to write 1000/day to finish the first draft (give or take a week). This story may be familiar to people who have been followers of this blog in the past, it's a reboot of Red Inside (which, sorry, is no longer available for public reading). And when I say reboot, I do mean reboot. The structure has been completely and radically revamped. The narrative is 3rd person though it vacillates between omniscient and limited, jumps forwards and backwards in time, loops back on itself and generally feels like something radically different than anything else I've written.

Because I have been writing it in conjunction with my class, I've also incorporated outside materials in a way I've never felt compelled to before. Chapters have epigraphs and scenes have quotes from my peer group work and from readings in class. I've also been incorporating "responses" if you will to Thalia Field's Experimental Theatre (link) as narrative excursions. It's been an interesting trip and I'm pretty far from being finished with it. For those interested, keep reading for an

Excerpt, from Red Inside (da) by K Rumsey (do not copy, reproduce, use without permission etc)

And we're back, paranoia over

So the thing is, I miss blogging on blogger? Like, I really like it and I like my layout and there are things I dont like (such as the comments set up) but I can live with it so... we're back! Excerpts are still restricted to mine eyes only and I probably won't be posting lengthy new excerpts but I WILL be talking about my writing. Or at least, that is the plan.

Long time gone...

Hello all and sundry, I realize it's been ages since I've posted. Life's been busy (ish) and mostly uninspired. Ive done very little writing since the end of January unfortunately (two months and maybe 2k max it's terrible) and havent felt very creative. Mostly this is down to stress, more stress, personal stress, terrible class choices in school and my propensity to avoid stress by ignoring it.

April is Script Frenzy month so if you are at all intrigued by the idea of writing a screenplay in a month check it out. I kind of want to do it though I dont have a lot of practice writing scripts so we'll see what happens.

The primary purpose of this post is to link you all to a meme I'm doing this year, it is 365 Movies in a Year. I've got a late start and Im not sure I'll manage a whole 365 movies but I do plan on keeping a record of the films (no tv alas) I watch and at the very least starring them. Might even do a bit of review, thoughts, analysis with the ones that strike up a chord. So the document for that is here and a more permanent sticky post here at the blog will probably be forthcoming if I get bored and want to jazz it up lol

That's all for now, hopefully I'll have some script frenzy news to post soon ;)

-KR

The periodic Glimpse @ the Writer's Notebook post

When I get stuck on a story I tend to start neurotically outlining. This is a glimpse at my notebook (which I'm messing around with instead of working but we'll just ignore that). And yes the posted notes are actually covering up even more crap.

A page out of my book

 

An average 'outlining' page from my notebook. Shows the breakdown of three sections, basic beat for each section, and detailed list of possibilities for a specific beat.

Because I am heartsick

Regarding the recent blogposts concerning drinking and rape -

"Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky 'bravely' ventured that maybe us laydeez really do need lecturing about 'how taking more drugs or drinking more booze than you can handle is stupid.'"

(Quote taken from feministe, read the full article here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/12/16/girl-on-girl-victim-blaming-action-or-the-most-terrible-time-of-the-year/ )

First and foremost this statement is wrong because it is still VICTIM BLAMING.

Would you ever tell a man not to drink because it leaves him vulnerable to being raped? No? Because you do not define his existence as a human being as an object to be raped.This double standard that requires women to be constantly vigilant, putting the responsiblity and the blame on their shoulders, not only continues to perpetuate the victim-blame-game but highlights what is WRONG with socialized standards of thought.

By existing a woman is not asking to be raped. That's a choice on the part of the rapists. Rape happens because rapists rape, there is no consent involved, the rapist is not interested in consent. That anyone is going to disparage a victim because they werent able to fight back in a situation where THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAD TO FIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE, is deplorable.

And here's the point, women shouldn't have to be constantly vigilant. We shouldn't have to live in fear of being raped and assaulted and used. We shouldn't have to curb our behavior anymore than any man has to. We only have to be wary and fearful and constantly on our guard because there is something BROKEN and wrong with male patterns of thought; with this insidious, persistent idea that a woman by the simple act of breathing, is first and foremost, something to be fucked.

You want to know why chivalry is bullshit? There shouldn't be a need for protection in the first place.

This is not consent - June Jordan

Recapping november

Recapping november and writing since the end of NaNoWriMo....

Well, I hit 12k for my nano novel. Not great but it's still a pretty significant amount of writing to accomplish (for me). It averages out to like 4k/week but really I think I was doing more like 7k/week for the last two weeks which is not too shabby.

Since then I've been giving myself a tiny brain break by writing a fairly serious take on a crack Inception Kink Meme prompt. It's good. I started it about two weeks ago and have a little over 8k written. Not too shabby at all considering it was the last week of instruction + dead week (ie study for finals week) + FINALS this week. Am going to try to write 1.2k on it today and hit around the 9.5k mark if everything goes according to plan. I'm confident the entire fill should reach 15k possibly 17k. After that I need to write a couple short fills for Angst_Bingo since I REALLY want to write a blackout for that this round and April is the deadline (I think that means 25 fills at a minimum of 500 words/fill but knowing me they'll all be closet to 700-1500/fill)


Am looking at possibly being expelled from school. I'm basically 100% certain I'm going to fail one of my classes and theres a cap on how many classes you can drop in the course of your ENTIRE academic career which I used up last yr. What kind of policy is that? Ugh. So I'm going to get an F and I'm feeling pretty worried that this will lower by gpa too much. In the event of possibly expulsion though my plan is to finish my AA via online classes with SPS and get a job and save up enough money to go to film school.

Handbag meme

crossposted from my livejournal: the handbag meme!


I love this meme and seeing all the things people carry around. My handbag is actually quite sparse just at the moment because I've been switching between it, a backpack and not carrying one at all so many things are not in their correct places...



Vera Bradley crossbody bag my sister got me a few years ago (three or four?) because I am deeply in love with turquoise



(going L to R, top to bottom)

comp book (strictly for stories), Sense & Nonsense in Crime Control Policies for class, day planner I do not use, plot of a story written on notecards, pencil & pen, MacBook (sticker courtesy of a customer at my old coffee job), floss, mini stapler (no staples, I cant find mini size x.x), tic tacs, toothbrush, two random pennies, swiss army knife, valentine from one of my old coworkers and BBFs (has a water tattoo of a scull inside which I always forget to stick on me as a joke), deck of cards, earplugs (courtesy of my father because you never know when you'll be on the shooting range and need some earplugs, no really), last jiffylube statement to remind me to fix things on my car, and my old car registration.

Things that are missing? phone, earplugs, class notebook, spare scantrons, wallet, grocery sack & a bottle opener

Soundtrack post for TV/AM

This is a very rough list of songs inspiring The Victor/Ayn Marriage


1. Marry Me - St Vincent
"We'll do what married people do. We'll do what Mary & Joseph did without the kid."



2. Memory Serves - Interpol
"It would be so nice to take you, I only ever try to make you smile. You won't have to say that you'd love to, but baby please that you want to, someday."



3. Hero - Regina Spektor
"I'm the hero I don't need to be saved."

Only 10,700 word left to catch up with nano. This is me setting a goal to write 2k more tonight

What will I be writing....

So we've got just a couple more days until NaNoWriMo which is pretty exciting. I havent actually got anything of what I MEANT to have finished by now finished (I only wrote about 10k of my planned 85K woops?) and I have two papers to finish for school due within the first week of November AND I have angst_bingo which I have yet to really set started on but this just means I have lots of reasons to give myself a swift kick in the arse.

This year my plan is to write The Victor/Ayn Marriage for nano. This story grew out of a bit of misanthropy, general dislike of the modern hypocrisy concerning marriage & sexuality, and a rather strong dislike of the soupy RomCom genre. The title is meant to be a riff on The Victorian Marriage.

"In a time and a society enthralled by the RomCom, this is the story of how an emotionally absent artist and a self-imposed asexual lawyer navigate a marriage of convenience in the modern world, defying the mainstream hypocrisy 'romance,' and rewrite the stereotypical notions of companionship and commitment."

Angst_Bingo card & ramblings

Round 3 of angst_bingo has started over on LJ. We've got a week until Nanowrimo which means I probably should not have signed up but what can I say? I'm a masochist. I really love bingos and I also think that the challenge will be good for me (even though last time I only finished 3 stories -.-)

My card tended to skew towards physical ailment prompts this round which is NOT my angst preference or strength so completing a blackout will, I think, be somewhat difficult but here it is:

Aging	Voyeurism	Bodyshare	Outsiders	Nausea
Stranded	Telepathy	Holidays	Disabled	Physical imperfections
Post-traumatic stress disorder	Recovery	WILD CARD	Inanimate objects	Assault
Child abuse	Murder (attempted or successful)	Accidents	Getting physical	Pregnancy
Marriage (arranged or otherwise)	Sensory deprivation	Chance encounters	Hypothermia	Dub-con

I've got a few vague ideas to fill 'Aging' and 'Chance Encounters' with Inception, 'Nausea' 'Telepathy' 'Disabled' 'Pregnancy' and 'Sensory Deprivation' with XMFC but that feels like... idk a cop-out? Too easy/too obvious. I'm following so many different fandoms atm it's a bit of a clutter in my head.

Since this coincides with nano, I think I might do a few original fills, particularly 'Marriage' since that fits nicely with the nano story I intend to write.

Knitting Update

So I've been knitting and watching NCIS instead of writing lately (that will of course change when NaNoWriMo goes live in a couple weeks) and I've finally opened a small Etsy store in an attempt to sell some of the stuff I've been making.


Clicky!

More stuff to come as I finish it.

Small Writing Update

I've managed to write about 800 words of the Trixi story. Pretty pathetic but I've felt pretty brain dead with school going on.

I drove up to Spokane this week to the Mac store there and got a new computer battery, super happy with the new performance (ie my laptop lives for longer than a single hour if it's not plugged in XD). Gotta love 3 hrs in the car for 6min trying to find the store/having your laptop diagnosed/spending $140 and leaving. It will be worth it thought if it keeps my baby ticking for at least another year (preferably 2/3), I'm very partial to it and I don't relish having to replace it with the Air.

we've got about a month to go and counting until NaNoWriMo, can't wait. Thought I'm sure I'll spend most of that time crying and making excuses and failing and being terribly stressed out trying to finish up my classes and write an INSANE number of words (for me) a day at the same time.

Today's inspiration comes from drinking tasty mochas, nomnomnom

a History, long, slightly rambling, and probably of little interest to anyone but me

In some ways, or possibly many ways, I write for the 'wrong reasons.'

My whole life I've wanted to be creative. I've been painting and writing since I was old enough to dip a finger in paint or dictate a story (my parents still have some very strange "abstract paintings" from my pre-school years and yes I was purposefully painting abstract at the time being all of age 4). I "wrote" my first complete short story when I was in kindergarten (it was a slightly exaggerated piece of non-fiction about my dog the particulars of which have been lost to the chaos of my memory).

I did my first real piece of acting in the first grade (it was a one act performance at the annual 4H meeting, I was the only person to memorize my lines or assemble a costume-- anyone whose acted with me knows the ridiculous degree of seriousness I put towards costuming)

I want to be creative. I want to be good at being creative. I want that to be what I do for a living. I joke about how if I had any sense I would move to Vancouver and get a job with a tv studio. It's really not a joke, I think I'd be really really suited for it.

But lets take a quick side trip to discuss parents and their wishes for their children. My parents really do want whats best for me. They both grew up in various degrees of poor in a rough part of rural Texas. My mum was the only girl in a single family home who took care of her brothers. My dad was one of five kids supported on their father's blue collar salary. Neither of my parents completed a BA degree, my mum finished what was approximately an AA and got a few lucky breaks in the retail industry. My father got certified in law enforcement and became a cop.

And this would have been a relatively comfortably tale only my parents moved up to washington so my mother could attend Evergreen (which she finally did about 1 1/2 yrs ago and completed her BA \o/) and my father was disqualified from transferring to the local PD because he is colour blind. Instead he's taken a string of different jobs all mostly related to hardware and repair until finally landing his current position at a local school (he's the head maintenance technician, essentially he and one other guy keep everything working) and he hates it. Not necessarily the work but the bullshit politics that come with the job and the fact that he's an incredibly intelligent person regulated to reporting to petty, narrow minded, weasels.

Moneys been a problem for our family off and on, especially putting two children through private school, but we've always managed to tow the line between actual poverty and lower middle class (a sucky place to be because we don't make quite enough to be comfortable in the middle class sense but too much to get a lot of aid).

So lets wrap this back around to me :) since this is my blog.

My father is an extremely practical person. and while he's always supported my creativity as a hobby (buying my musical instruments, going to all of my plays, and even occasionally reading some of my crappy short fiction) he's too practical to believe it's a viable career choice. I know he is deathly deathly afraid that I'll wind up like him, stuck under the thumb of people far stupider than myself and miserable. So he pushes me, academically, and frowns anytime I suggest a career thats less than practical, that isnt guaranteed to pay be a high 5 figures right off the bat.

Criminal Justice is our compromise instead of Law School. It's practical, there's tons of way I could take it, lots of jobs out there for it and generally it should make good money. It took a bit of convincing on my part for him to be ok with me becoming a cop (with a vision to become a detective down the road) but once we were on board for that he essentially drew up a plan of all the things I would need to learn and that we'd have to prep (ie joining the gun club and working on my shooting regularly, self defense and martial arts classes etc)

And this is not to say that I don't find criminal justice fascinating. I grew up watching crime shows before they were popular.

The thing is, a part of me desperately just wants to be creative and be my own boss. And a part of my keeps trying to write, or thinks about writing, hoping that it'll click, that I'll finally find the way to finish something and polish it and that it will be good enough. I keep waiting for one of my projects to come to fruition and validate my desire to pursue a creative career.

I don't believe in white knights. But in some ways my writing is my white knight. I keep waiting for it to save me from obscurity.

It's been quiet here and I don't have much to report. School has been taking up most of my energy. I feel like all I do is read and write notes, and the result is I have zero creative energy left to write. I think I scribbled about 50 words of Amelia yesterday in the theatre waiting for Warrior to start (excellent film btw, worth seeing especially if you're at all a Tom Hardy fan which, really, who isn't? The man's body of work is stunning).

I have been knitting quite vigorously as a means to relax (knitting and watching film after film after film). I'm about 80-85% finished with the cardigan I began working on back in, hm, March? I hope to finish it possibly this week, then I have to start working on a hat for the BiL's birthday. I'll post some pics when the cardi is finished. It will mark my first successful ready-to-wear garment I've finished for an adult that wasn't completely hideous and/or lopsided. /knock on wood/

The only other news to report is my crippling new Avengers obsession. Tony Stark and his emotional damage is just fascinating. Thor is out on DVD tomorrow. \o/

Born Under a Bad Star ( a Trixi of the Fenidadd story )

Little bit of background: Trixi is the central character of several stories I've begun writing and discarded over the years. Her people have been called many things from Little People to Breen and now Fenidadd. Her companions have, excepting a few spelling adjustments, remained the same stalwart fellows over the years (Cuz, Caspian, Kate & Phil). Essentially they are Pixie sized forest people living on a temperate island. They have no family but each other, and they get it loads of trouble, usually because Trixi is bored and something dangerous and possibly stupid sounds like fun. They have fought giants, pirates, sorcerers, bigotry, and now a blood thirsty water cult.

The story of Trixi&co is very dear to my heart. I first hatched the shape of the idea in fifth grade when I ran around at recess with a gang of friends I wanted to help me explore ideas for a series of short fantasy adventure tales. I wrote the first complete draft of The War of the Giants, and surrounding events when I was in sixth grade (It received second at the ACSI Young Author's fair) and was the longest thing I'd ever written (If I remember correctly it was about 30/40 double spaced typed pages so I'd estimate about 10k words).

The second draft of War of the Giants was written my sophomore year in high school over the course of my thanksgiving break in a last ditch effort to finish nanowrimo in 5 days (I got to 16k before I ran out of time). That remains, in my mind the best week of my literary career. I was ecstatically proud of those 16k words. I had never been up to then or since, so prolific.

Of all the stories in my head, Trixi's is one that I genuinely wish I could figure out how to tell completely and share with others.

This latest incarnation draws more heavily on scotch gaelic/celtic and less on Sir Barrie/the Caribbean.

The coille shelters many things. The stature of the Fénidadd may be short but their memory is long and as far back as the elders of their people now remember, they have made their homes along the southern edge of the coille, the great forest. It is the mother of all, providing shelter, food, and inspiration.  

My Process, as flawed as it is, and oh, it is flawed

Unless you've run into me camped out at one of my regular coffee shops or down at the pub you probably don't know that I write the most when I write by hand. I find that writing first drafts on a laptop or desktop to a) be too much of a distraction b) an idea killer. Excepting a handful of short stories I almost never write straight into a computer. I always carry around a couple notebooks in my purse or backpack that are designated for various stories I'm working on at the moment. When I get a few pages done, I will then and only then type up what I have because I'm also obsessed with knowing my running word count lol.

I prefer to write in either small (5" x 7") journals or composition books. This past year comp books have been my material choice (pens are always Sarahsa's) and I've been needing a new one for a YA novel I started plotting this week but if you've been school shopping this year they are fucking expensive. We're talking $2.50 compared to a spiral notebook which clearances at about $0.99. So you can perhaps appreciate my absolute glee when I walked into a Moscow, ID Staples and found comp books being clearanced at $0.99!!! I just about squealed and did a little dance right there in the store. I bought 5 new notebooks and a graph paper one as well (because I have to take two research & stats classes this year and I hate doing math on plain lined paper, always have). I also got a new pack of my multi-colored pens for $5 (about a dollar off). All in all a very profitable trip :)

Re:Comments, housekeeping I suppose this might be called

Some lovely people have been giving me feedback about the excerpts which is AWESOME. I dont have a writing group so it's a relief to have people reading and leaving concrit. I've been fiddling with various Blogger hacks pertaining to REPLYING to comments so that people will be notified and I honestly cant judge my success. Theres a reason my fandom blog has lived exclusively on Livejournal since '03 and will never move and thats the fact that nuts and bolts features over there are so much more polished and logical.

My point is I think i'm pretty good about responding to every comment (or i try to be) and I dont want anyone to think that i'm not reading and responding to their comments just because Blogger frankly kind of sucks at stacking replies and layering discrete replies and actually notifying anyone. and also to ask if anyone is getting notifications from @[blogger userid] <----- style replies

What's the hardest part about writing for you?

I was reading an article about how to find a good balance of Narrative > Action > Dialogue and it helped me highlight (in my mind) the biggest problem with how I write: my "style" is much much too Action heavy. This bogs down the flow of my story, makes it difficult for me to figure out how people get from point B to point C to point D because I'm buried under the details of them eating lunch and opening doors and running down stairs.

The reasons my writing is hampered in this manner are basically 2 fold.

1. I purposefully made myself start writing like this several yrs ago after a second read-thru of Frank Herbert's Dune because if my memory serves his style is fairly action heavy in sections and I wished to emulate him (though I never did it more than very poorly). I also wanted to boost word counts and action description is a relatively simple and lazy way of doing just that.
2. Most of the time when I write I see the story like a film in my head. And my instinctive desire is to portray the story in much the same ways you might a film, ie with long camera pans setting up scenes, locations, viewing action without words to highlight character action, changes and development. Often I find myself trying to capture, with words, the play of light and atmosphere and sound that a film gives you.

So balancing Narrative & Action is the hardest challenge I face when writing and the biggest thing I need to work on. What about you?