Pink Martini at Starr Pass amid Documented Accomplishments

Shuffling Pink Martini on my iPod.

Documenting my teaching accomplishments.

Curled up on a couch in a boulevard-sized passageway outside the ballrooms with massive glassed views of saguaro, ocotillo, a golf course, and, farther down the vale, the city stretching across the floor of the valley.  The crispness of the day refreshes me.

Enjoying the last couple hours of solitude among colleagues and music, writing and thinking.

NaNoWriMo No Naps! Day 5

I'm sitting here in my room at Starr Pass at my National Board Candidacy Working Retreat, trying to write the instructional context passage for Entry 1 of my portfolio.  And it is so quiet.  So quiet.  And my eyes keep drooping mid sentence. 

Several times today, I took a break from my National Board work by opening up my novel and adding to it.  I am writing in fragments, writing the chunks I know I will need.  I am allowing myself long paragraphs of telling, figuring I can go back and turn those passages into scenes at a later time. 

I have decided to have the point of view shift from first to third person throughout the novel, although I'm not going to tell why... that would be giving too much away.  If it doesn't work out I could always go put it all in first person...  see?  right there I was falling asleep in the middle of a sentence.  It's so quiet here.  I haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks.  The weird thing is, I haven't had any vivid dreams for a long time, either.  I was hoping writing fiction would maybe bring some dreams on, but so far, no.  Not even anxiety dreams.  Isn't that funny?

I'm going to go lie down, now, and snooze a little.  I'm sure I'll be continuing to work tonight.  On my professional writing and my nanowrimo novel.  The professional writing, I'm sure will be fine if I devote the time and effort to it. The novel?  Well, it's getting better as we go onward.  I'm thinking it's a young adult novel... unless I can find a way to bust it free.

Can My Setting Be Wonderland? Young Writers Want to Know! NaNoWriMo and Intertextuality

Yesterday, a student wrote me with a great question.  She wanted to know if she could set her NaNoWriMo novel in Wonderland. 

I answered her question the best I could, saying that fanfiction was all about borrowing from other texts, and literary allusion was all about borrowing from and referring to other texts.  To me, the biggest issue is one of ethics.  Are you openly borrowing and transforming, reinterpreting, and reinventing?  Or are you stealing under the guise of originality?

She answered the question for herself somehow by finding out about the issue of public domain.  To her, now that she knew there was no copyright ownership of Wonderland, she could use it in her novel.  But I told the class that although copyright is certainly a consideration, the issue really goes beyond that to one of ethics and artistic integrity, but that there were multiple grey areas we could discuss.

I googled intertextuality, and of course a boatload of postmodern academic linguistic semiotic mumbo-jumbo came up, which I could read and interpret and try to simplify for my high school students... or I could spend the next half hour working on my own word count on my novel, from which I am drawing on Celtic mythology, and Chinook stories and language. 

If anyone out there knows of a plain-language explanation I could use with my students, or an interesting and accessible set of interconnected texts we could use to discuss the issue, please leave me a comment.  Thanks!

NaNoWriMo Day 3

Word Count: 3817

Well, I am quailing.  My ideas are getting more fragmented vs. more linear.  No plot is materializing.  In addition, I have realized the extent of the research I need to do to pull this off.  Also, my scenes feel devoid of motivation for the characters.  Maybe I should just throw the selkies and the tsunami back in there and just go with it, cheese or no cheese.   At any rate, I have another 900 or so words to write today. 

I wish I had some books of Northwest native american stories. 
I wish I had spent more time at the tidal pools in Oregon.
I wish I could talk to Rich for an hour about prosthetics and the ins and outs of C-legs vs. conventional legs.  For instance, can a person walk up stairs with a C-leg?

Off I go to... rescue this novel from mediocrity and half-assedness. 

NaNoWriMo Day 1

I am attempting this alongside my students because I don't think it would be very fair to expect them to do something I had never done.  Besides, I would be envious if they had won NaNoWriMo and I hadn't.

Once again, I am discovering that I don't think in plots.  I think in places.  Sometimes I can think in people.  I think in images, in abstract notions, and even in sound.  But plot is beyond me.  So we will see how it goes.  These students!  They think in plots!  I am so envious.

So, the first scene that I write is my character on the cold Oregon beach in a wetsuit, thinking about entering the water despite her mother having forbidden it.  She doesn't go in, but that's not the problem.  I kind of like the scene, except that my character is a double amputee and is on the beach with her sand wheelchair with huge ridiculous plastic wheels.  She wakes up from a nap on the sand, and has a few moments with her two dogs, and... how the hell does she get off the beach?  Her single mother can't afford a motorized sand wheelchair.  She probably had to rent the sand wheelchair she has.  Who the heck pushed her out onto the sand, and how is she getting back home after these solitary moments on the beach?  Perhaps I'll have to turn it into a dream.  Damn it.  Leave it to me.  This is what I'm talking about.

At any rate, my word count is 1880.  Woo-Hoo!