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Mars is Bright Tonight
How the best of intentions can come to nothing.
The craziness that is Camp Nano started today. To be on the safe side, this serpent set a daily goal of 2,000 words rather than the recommended 1,666 in order to reach the end of month target of 50,000 words.
But the map is never the territory. What was supposed to be a twenty minute sprint of adding quotes to an essay and page numbers to the quotes to keep the nitpicking Grammar Nazis happy rapidly expanded to blow out that time slot to a good two hours.
All this effort is part of an online sci fi and fantasy course with a weekly reading list and essays on the readings of no more than 330 words and a goblin word counter that prevents word hogs from even submitting their bloated efforts.
The certificate has no practical use whatsoever and no street value. It will just gather dust like the rest of the rotting fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
It seems crazy to waste so much time on a mere 320 word assignment especially when faced with a random selection of other participants assigning the dreaded peer review grades. For that is the price of this free but quite tasty lunch.
It was naive to think that producing a rough draft yesterday would make a considerable difference to the time spent during precious Camp nano nights. That took nearly an hour in its own right. It is rather like building a house. Getting up the main structure of floors and walls is a relatively quick process. It is the finishing touches of plastering and painting, adding carpets and fittings that is the real black hole.
I was commenting on the forums recently that a weekly 320 word essay is more work than 1,666 words per day for Nano. For at least with that you can just make up stuff.
So why bother? It turns out that regardless of useless peer reviews, the very attempt of trying to find something interesting and insightful in a book and to distill it down to a mere 320 words is a most valuable writing exercise indeed. It teaches one to be a hard task master when it comes to choosing words.
To quote from a writer recommended by the Cat ""No word ever made it into his documents until it had been grotesquely tortured and failed to confess to the existence of a better synonym."
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
A good forty minutes was spent this evening cutting the fat from a 370 word essay. That's right. Spending a minute to get rid of each excess word. Blasphemy and sacrilege of the highest order.
So of course the sixty minutes of rationed camp writing time dwindled down to twenty. Did manage to clock up 440 nano words before the pen turned into a pumpkin.
The experience was as different as chalk and cheese.
Did manage to spend another twenty minutes of intended writing time sitting in the garden sipping a glass or two of sparkling wine and looking up at the stars. One of the brightest of all is not a star but a planet. It is supposed to be red but is more a shade of bright orange. Got to watch it at Astrofest a few weeks ago along with a few of Jupiter's moons.
It sort of suited this evening's theme. But in order to avoid the grammar nazis claims of plagiarism, will post only one or two sentences of those hours of effort. (Seriously, some box ticking idiots have accused people of plagiarism because they go entering essay texts on Google search and they turn up on some one's blog. Not a whole bunch of blogs but only one - that of the original writer. Of course the assigned essays are anonymous but even a pea brain should be able to work that one out.
So a few sentences of this serpent's offering.
A Tale of Two Houses
In Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, the best of houses and the worst of houses mirror each other in striking and significant ways.
.......
The rest will follow later and hopefully with something better than the usual pretty average 4/6
The craziness that is Camp Nano started today. To be on the safe side, this serpent set a daily goal of 2,000 words rather than the recommended 1,666 in order to reach the end of month target of 50,000 words.
But the map is never the territory. What was supposed to be a twenty minute sprint of adding quotes to an essay and page numbers to the quotes to keep the nitpicking Grammar Nazis happy rapidly expanded to blow out that time slot to a good two hours.
All this effort is part of an online sci fi and fantasy course with a weekly reading list and essays on the readings of no more than 330 words and a goblin word counter that prevents word hogs from even submitting their bloated efforts.
The certificate has no practical use whatsoever and no street value. It will just gather dust like the rest of the rotting fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
It seems crazy to waste so much time on a mere 320 word assignment especially when faced with a random selection of other participants assigning the dreaded peer review grades. For that is the price of this free but quite tasty lunch.
It was naive to think that producing a rough draft yesterday would make a considerable difference to the time spent during precious Camp nano nights. That took nearly an hour in its own right. It is rather like building a house. Getting up the main structure of floors and walls is a relatively quick process. It is the finishing touches of plastering and painting, adding carpets and fittings that is the real black hole.
I was commenting on the forums recently that a weekly 320 word essay is more work than 1,666 words per day for Nano. For at least with that you can just make up stuff.
So why bother? It turns out that regardless of useless peer reviews, the very attempt of trying to find something interesting and insightful in a book and to distill it down to a mere 320 words is a most valuable writing exercise indeed. It teaches one to be a hard task master when it comes to choosing words.
To quote from a writer recommended by the Cat ""No word ever made it into his documents until it had been grotesquely tortured and failed to confess to the existence of a better synonym."
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
A good forty minutes was spent this evening cutting the fat from a 370 word essay. That's right. Spending a minute to get rid of each excess word. Blasphemy and sacrilege of the highest order.
So of course the sixty minutes of rationed camp writing time dwindled down to twenty. Did manage to clock up 440 nano words before the pen turned into a pumpkin.
The experience was as different as chalk and cheese.
Did manage to spend another twenty minutes of intended writing time sitting in the garden sipping a glass or two of sparkling wine and looking up at the stars. One of the brightest of all is not a star but a planet. It is supposed to be red but is more a shade of bright orange. Got to watch it at Astrofest a few weeks ago along with a few of Jupiter's moons.
It sort of suited this evening's theme. But in order to avoid the grammar nazis claims of plagiarism, will post only one or two sentences of those hours of effort. (Seriously, some box ticking idiots have accused people of plagiarism because they go entering essay texts on Google search and they turn up on some one's blog. Not a whole bunch of blogs but only one - that of the original writer. Of course the assigned essays are anonymous but even a pea brain should be able to work that one out.
So a few sentences of this serpent's offering.
A Tale of Two Houses
In Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, the best of houses and the worst of houses mirror each other in striking and significant ways.
.......
The rest will follow later and hopefully with something better than the usual pretty average 4/6
no subject
Have you seen the Russian cartoon video inspired by that story? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfI69DC_jaw) Used to make me cry every single time I watched it!
Yeah, 320 words is a devious invention, but it's kind of fun, and satisfying in the end, unlike the mental diarrhea of "freewriting" - I'm trying the morning/daily pages once again, and already starting to feel disappointed yet again.
What's your newest camping tale is about?
A Mouse in the House
A Tale of Two Houses
In Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, the best of houses and the worst of houses mirror each other in striking and significant ways.
Especially important is the portrayal of both houses as living embodied beings with ‘an attic brain’ and ‘oak bones’, ‘a hidden and tell tale heart” (1) and emotional expression ‘immense sighing and moaning’ (167), shuddering, cringing and quivering in pain.(2)
The Martian House of Usher is a ‘desolate and terrible’(p162) abode remaining in perpetual October darkness regardless of real seasons. It was built at great expense and with evil intent. In contrast, the McClellan family home exists solely to serve the needs of its occupants even in their absence. It began as a bright and airy house basking in the sunshine of Allendale, California. It too would have been extremely expensive to build.
The houses are filled with robots and rodents. Usher’s prancing rats add to the aura of death and decay while Allendale’s hordes of mice clean the place spotless. Incinerators dispose of corpses, be they mortal enemies or the family’s dog. They are both houses of culture. One built as a vengeful monument to Edgar Allan Poe and the other where its last dying voice ‘read poetry aloud in the fiery study’ (p255) to its non existent occupants.
Their fates are tied to fire. Usher ll was born from the ashes of Stendahl’s library in an act of defiance while the McClellans’ house collapses after its failed efforts to fight a fire. The Allendale house has a charred west wall with images of the family burnt into it after they were vaporized in a nuclear war (3) It is left with one wall standing when its “cold venom of green froth’ failed to conquer the fire while Usher has its own form of charred green darkness.(4)
Both houses suffered an untimely demise.(5)
“For of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!”(p164)
Works Cited
Bradbury “The Martian Chronicles” Harper Collins 2011
(1) “Under their dancing feet the floor gave off the massive pumping beat of a hidden and telltale
heart.” p174
(2) “The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed…. “ P254
(3) "The entire west wall of the house was black, save for five places." p249
http://www.walltowatch.com/view/32432/The+Everlasting+Shadows+Of+Hiroshima
(4) “Pikes with the bitterness in him as deep as a black, charred well of green acid.” p170
(5)"They looked at the great House, smiling. It began to crack down the middle, as with an earthquake...."p181
Of course it was a day after the deadline that I figured it should be "the best of homes and the worst of homes" and an idea that their greatest hour was the moment of their demise.
For the next book here's hoping to have the rough draft done long before Monday so the inner serpent can tweek it to perfection.
It will be titled either
The Dream Weaver or The Eye of Moshe
That course on mysticism should come in most useful in either case ;)
"Winter is coming" was very tempting but would suck for an interesting idea.
While the story is so slow and sluggish and so little happens, it's full of lots of religion and politics. Just the sort of snack this serpent loves.
Was at the Writers Group this evening meaning of course that today's quota has not even been started. The whole free writing vs intensive haiku like snippets is a juicy topic worth a post of its own.
Re: A Mouse in the House
For some reason, I loathe politics-heavy literature, with very few exceptions (such as zombies, or if it's really funny). Perhaps it reflects my immaturity and egocentrism. Love religion, though. Just finished playing a game with an awesome story, which you would've enjoyed if it didn't involve mousing around the screen... alchemy, inquisition, secret cults, torture, betrayal... what's not to like?
Re: A Mouse in the House
3 of them just left the comment boxes blank. The other 2 liked it but one complained that I didn't mention the second story by name.
I have dumped the theme of the Drem Weaver for the next essay and chose human sacrifice instead. Only yesterday did I finally finish the drudgery of trekking through 50 tons of snow. And the rough draft only took 20 minutes to write. But will now have to toss out the old stash of quotes and make up a new list