It's a good feeling...

...when you accomplish something really hard. I got this letter today:

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It's an amazing accomplishment, and we're proud to have had you writing with us this year.

I'm pretty proud to have done it! Now I'm going to take a bit of a break from it, then I'll have to take it up again, finish off the last two chapters (at least I figure it will just be two more chapters), then return back to the beginning and smooth out the rough edges. That'll be the labour intensive part.

But it feels good to have set myself a challenge and to have met it, even when at times I felt like giving up.

Record breaking

Why does it have to be that the year we come back, we start breaking records? It hasn't been this cold here in ten years!

UPDATE: We set a new low -30.1C last night. Coldest it's been since 1896.

The response from either side seems to be "this is ridiculous!"

Ran across this obscure new item: a man was ejected from a gym for grunting during his workout. Much of the internet reaction to this story has been cries of 'ridiculous!' from hard core bodybuilders, but I find the ridiculous part of this story to be this patron's reaction to having his membership revoked - he's suing for defamation of all things because people are making fun of him for getting kicked out.

Now, I had a membership at Planet Fitness. I've had memberships at several different gyms, and been a guest at several others. I've worked out in university gyms, women's gyms, hard core gyms, and Planet Fitness. And I've got to say that Planet Fitness was one of the best gyms I've ever worked out at.

Why were they one of the best? Because they lived up to their tag as a "Judgment Free Zone". I'm not one to be intimidated by the big muscle-y guys in the "guys" weight room. I plow on ahead and enter, moving the pin waaaay back up on the machine and pulling the seat all the way up, but it took me some time to muster up that kind of courage, to enter the "muscle" zone. (Mostly, I think of how much money I'm paying and how much I want to use the equipment I'm paying for and that gets me over any reluctance I might have to tread on sacred masculine territory)

But when I first started going to the gym, those big muscle-bound guys were intimidating. Many of them seemed to hang out just to try to intimidate anyone who didn't have as much muscle mass as they did.

Now I can respect that someone might choose to spend hours in the gym every day to get their body into peak performance. I also can respect the person who simply wants to go in once or twice a week, do some light toning and exercising and spend the rest of their time doing other things. But that respect isn't always evident in gyms, and I've been given the annoyed look for coming in and messing up the place where "real" men are working out. I've just learned to live with it.

What Planet Fitness is doing is trying to create a gym that makes casual exercisers comfortable. They're very upfront about it. Their policies are all over all their material and their website. You walk into a Planet Fitness and you immediately notice that there are more ellipticals than free weights. That tells you something. There are plenty of gyms out there where the emphasis is on weights and you know it the minute you walk in.

What I think is a bit ridiculous, is for someone to walk into a Planet Fitness thinking it's a Golds Gym. They're not the same. And if you want Gold's Gym, you should go there, not the Judgment Free Zone. Crying foul because you thought you could tranform one into the other strikes me as just plain ridiculous.

Reflecting on Writing

After reading the latest issue of Reconstruction, blogging is on my mind again.

Always when discussions of the use of blogs, or the appropriateness of academic blogging makes its rounds through the blogsphere, or emerges in a journal issue like this, I am reminded of the Tribble-like concerns that so often get expressed: that blogging is a waste of time; that it's self indulgent; that it does little to further one's career and can in fact damage it; that scholarly blogging has no merit because it isn't peer reviewed etc. etc.

Of course I make no claims to scholarly blogging. I'm a scholar who blogs, but when I do mention my research, it is usually because I think readers might find it as interesting as I do, or because I'm trying to organize my thoughts about something particular. The primary (or even secondary or tertiary) purpose of this blog has never been to work through scholarly arguments. That should be self apparent to anyone who's read it. Reading the Reconstruction issue got me wondering though if this blog might be a way for me to work through some of the challenges I've been having in my academic life lately.

Some of the challenges I've been facing lately that might benefit from more frequent academic blogging blogging could include:

1. Improving my writing. This is a big one. I have an advisor who tells me my academic writing is stilted and awkward, that I don't seem to have found my own writing voice. I agree that sometimes my academic writing is too strained. Part of it has to do with my training - remove every mention of the personal - and part of it I think with my relative inexperience in writing.

I've been admiring academic writers who can thoughtfully connect their personal positions and identity with their academic topic, and I'd like to emulate that. I'm still not sure about what kind of academic "voice" I have, which makes it difficult to know what I need to be going to develop it. Perhaps writing about academic topics in an open, everyday forum like this blog will help loosen that writing up.

All this practice would presumably make writing an easier process, which would have the added benefit of making my writing tasks easier when it comes to producing them.

2. Providing unity. Blogging more about my academic projects might unite the disparate pieces of academic work in a way that explains their commonalities.

Right now along with the dissertation research, I'm juggling a chapter revision, a collaborative book proposal, a conference presentation, and an organizational committee for another conference. Since each of these activities involves a different topic or area of interest, I'm finding myself compartmentalizing them in a way that I don't necessarily think does me much good. Since they are all academic endeavours, there is a commonality in them, and I think if I could find a way to incorporate them all into one category, I might find fruitful interchanges between them, instead of boxing them each up as a separate activity.

3. Working through the difficult parts of my research. Right now, I'm faced with a research task for the dissertation that I see the value of, but don't relish doing. (Isn't that the way so many things in these kinds of projects, or life in general, are like?) I've made little headway on this aspect right now in part because it pushes me in a research direction that I'm unfamiliar with and I'm having some difficulty figuring out what material I should concentrate on the most.

Perhaps blogging my reading would help me articulate how useful the material is as I work my way through it. A bonus might even come if I have some readers who could help me navigate through the quagmires of the reading as well.

This blog has remained mostly personal to this point because that's what it started out doing. I don't really wish to abandon the personal, since it gives me a great deal of satisfaction knowing that people who I care about stay in touch with me this way. I'm not sure if this blog will work as a combination of academic and personal posts.

Then again, after the Storyworlds post, tw asked if I was going to post some of the Nanowrimo writing, and I've been considering doing that (after I clean it up a bit since it's awfully rough right now). Although the fiction writing has nothing to do with the subjects I study academically, I'm finding the process of writing to be similar. Although I've written a bit of fiction here and there, this is the first time I've written so much in such a short period of time. It has made me much more aware of the writing process itself as I struggle to figure out how to get from one plot point to another, find a new plot twist opening up in the context of trying to write about something else, and taught me that much of writing is simply sitting down and plowing through what needs to be done. Inspiration be damned, just write!

So at the end of this post, as I consider everything I've said so far, I guess all I've done is confirm for myself that this blog will remain fairly eclectic, and given myself permission to make it even more eclectic if needed by discussing my academic work from time to time. I suppose this post itself is a good example of reason #3 above - working/writing through a problem to find a solution. Thanks blogreaders for coming along for the ride!

Plugging Away

Still behind.

But even more so now. I was doing really good coming into 25K - I was even a bit ahead at that point. But then I had a child who was ill, and it scared her. So I spent a lot of time just being nearby. Which of course means a lot of things got put on the back burner. Nanowrimo included.

Now I'm playing catch-up again. I don't think it's impossible for me to catch up, so I'm giving it a try, but it will require a lot more time than I feel like I can afford right now. Work is starting to get busy, my boss is out of town next week, so we want to get some things done right now, and we've just added three new projects to our roster over the next several months. There's variety in my work - which is great - but it means there's lots of it.

But I don't want to quit Nanowrimo. I set myself this challenge. I think I can meet it. I want to meet it. I keep saying I'd like to try to write fiction. Now's the opportunity to do it. With structure. And a goal. And a deadline. These are things that motivate me. So. I'm. Not. Giving. Up.

(At least not yet)

Last week, I wrote that it was difficult to get words on the paper, not because I didn't have ideas for the story, but because it was just hard to arrange them. This week, I am running out of ideas. Well, not really running out. I have ideas, I just don't know how to get the story from where it is now, to where I want it to be. Even when I do get words down, I have to still the inner critic whispering - okay, I have to yell to get her to shut up - who I have to ignore and just keep writing. The goal here is to get the words down. After comes the time where I make them into good words. But even with carte blanche for vocabulary, grammar and ANY sense of style, I'm still struggling.

But. I'm. Not. Giving. Up. At least not yet.

Gender bender

I realize I'm not the girliest girl on the planet, but it's a bit disturbing when a celebrity face recognition program shows the highest matches with men!



And who the hell is Christiano Ronaldo?!?!?!?

Shocked

Today started pretty ordinarily. I began work in the morning and took a break a few minutes ago to have some lunch. We recently started getting the newspaper by subscription - I haven't subscribed to anything other than small local papers in years - and sometimes I read it while I eat lunch.

There I was, eating leftover Chinese food, when I turned the page and saw a picture of my former sister-in-law.

She disappeared 16 years ago and they just now charged a man with her murder.

I'm shocked. I hadn't really thought much about her since my divorce. I had only met her once, and briefly, and even then, I don't think she said much more than two words to me. I don't think she particularly liked me. But she was also fairly young when we met, so maybe it was just teenage standoffishness to a stranger, since that's what I was to her. Either way, I didn't really know her at all. She hadn't been living at home for several years before she disappeared, but I remember how hard her leaving had hit her mother.

Even though I barely knew her, reading about this case and being reminded of it, has affected me more than I would expect. I think the thing that makes this feel so shocking is how it will affect people who I care about - my stepdaughter in particular. I hope when this news unearths memories for her as well, it isn't painful, but might provide some relief knowing that there will be some closure with the pressing of charges against the man believed to be her aunt's killer.

Scattered

Too many things.

Too many different things.

Too many things to keep track of.

Too much work to do.

Storyworlds

For my comprehensive exams, one of my areas was narrative theory, which is an area of inquiry that examines the features and functions of narrative. Sounds simple, and in some ways it is, but there are some subtleties that I never would have thought about had they not belonged within this category.

But that's beside the point of this post. My point is that one of the concepts of narrative theory is the storyworld. It's really big in theories that explore the function and interactive nature of video games in particular. If you've ever read a book set in a place that you didn't recognize (which is most books) or played a video game, you've got an idea of what narrative theorists mean by storyworlds.

Rawdon Wilson describes how the axioms of a storyworld contribute to the kind of story you get. He uses a parable of two brothers who tire of reality and reimagine it to describe what happens in the use of storyworld axioms. The first brother creates his world by inventing counterintuitive propositions and accepting the axioms that would grow from them. This is what science fiction or fantasy is often seen to do - to take a proposition and follow it to its logical conclusion.

The second brother employed a code of normality which was interwined with a code in which anything might happen in his creation of a new imaginative world. This is magic realism. These brothers eventually become difficult to tell apart in their creation of new worlds to their followers.

Now, obviously Wilson's definition leaves out the third kind of storyworld, where the writer (a third brother so to speak) reproduces the recognizable world, even if it is part of the world that is unfamiliar to the writer or his readers. But that probably goes without saying.

I got thinking about storyworlds after I had a very strange experience this weekend. At one point, within a small group, we were talking, not about anything in particular, but just the kind of banter that happens when friends get together. Anyway, someone said something, and my first thought was to relate it to the storyworld I've been creating in this novel writing endeavour. I almost opened my mouth, because it made so much sense to me to say what I was going to say. But I stopped myself before saying anything by realizing what seemed very real and logical to me, the creator of this storyworld, would be incomprehensible to someone who didn't know that storyworld. Had I made a comment that made perfect sense for me buried in this world I'm creating, it would have sounded like sheer idiocy to anyone else.

Wilson didn't talk about what happens when fictional storyworlds invade the real one, but it doesn't take much to realize how disastrous it can be when you can't tell the difference between the two.

My kind of poetry

"WINTER POEM"

a poem by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

" SHIT It's Cold! "

Just a little behind

If you've been curious how the Nanowrimo is going, well, the post title says it all.

On second thought, the title doesn't quite cover all of it. I am a bit behind where I should be at this point in the month in order to reach the goal of 50,000 words by November 30th. But I'm not terribly far behind, and today is the day I'm going to try to catch up to where I should be.

I need to average just under 2000 words a day to reach my goal. Right now I'm about a day behind. Part of it is because I've never undertaken something like this before. It's been a strange experience, working on a long piece of fiction with this kind of deadline/challenge hanging over my head.

It's also hard. There are some days that as I'm writing, I'm checking the word count every 200 words or so because it seems so hard to get them on the page. It's not that I don't have ideas for the story. I know where I want it to go, and I've got it mapped out for the next 5,000 words or so as well as some episodes that I want to include later on. But sometimes translating those ideas into those black marks on a white page is much harder than I ever thought it would be.

It makes me wonder whether other writers struggle in the same way, or whether it comes more easily to them? I don't know the answer, but I'm clinging to the hope that it will be like other things that I've tried. At first, they're really hard, but then get easier as I get more experienced at doing them. My academic writing has been this way. As an undergrad, I used to struggle a lot to get papers written. Not because of a lack of ideas, but just the process of getting it onto the paper in a format that I was satisfied with. But as I've progressed through my degrees, it's gotten easier. Not that it's easy. Just easier. I still feel like I'm sweating bullets at various points in an article. It's just that there are also places where I can sail along relatively unhampered by difficulties our doubts about what I'm writing.

Part of the reason why I took up the Nanowrimo challenge is because I wanted to see if that same thing could happen to a piece of fiction. I guess we'll see when November 30th rolls around.

I didn't even know these things existed outside the movies!

When the robots take over, they won't be running in the streets killing people - they'll be hitting us where it really hurts, our cars.

That's Calgary for you!

Yesterday during my run, I was getting quite warm and at one point thought to myself, "Boy, that breeze sure is nice"

Today it's snowing and I'm dreaming of warm sunny beaches.

Miscommunication, or non-communication?

Yesterday got entirely derailed and now I feel out of sorts, like my plans are in ruins and I don't know how to get back on track.

See, yesterday I had planned on finishing reading a theory book, and making significant headway on one of the novels.

But my boss called at 10 am. And he had a huge list of things to do. He's been in Hong Kong for the last three weeks, so we've really only communicated by email. I had a clear idea of what he wanted me to get done before he left, and I did all those things, but when he called he seemed disappointed that I hadn't done more.

Now, I hadn't failed to do more because I was lazy or just didn't think it was important. I'd done everything I knew he wanted. I had also sent him an outline that he wanted to forward to our client. I sent it twice. But when he called, he told me he needed it to be more detailed. Which confused me, because I didn't see how I could get much more detailed without actually starting to create the content, which we didn't want to do until the client approved the outline. And then he was disappointed that I hadn't created the outline for another project. I was under the mistaken impression that we hadn't even secured funding for that second project, so I didn't work on it (if we don't have money for the project, I won't get paid for doing the work, right?)

After he told me we did have funding, I got on the outline right away, but I was still puzzled by the request to expand the other outline. Luckily I wasn't puzzled for long because he called back and told me he'd found it in his inbox. He just wanted some minor notation changes, which were easy enough to do.

All in all, it was only a few hours of work, but I have mixed feelings about it because I think he's disappointed in my lack of work while he was gone, whereas I feel like I wasn't given a clear indication of what he wanted. It's a little frustrating.

Actually I think it all comes down to email. I'm fairly comfortable with email, and although sometimes I don't exactly get my point across right away, I keep trying. I feel comfortable having an extended conversation over a series of emails, but his are generally very short and often don't directly answer the questions I've asked. So when he goes away again next month, I'm afraid we're going to have the same problem. All I can hope is that our projects are well enough established that I'll have a better idea of what they need for us to pull them off and I'll need to rely on his email communication less. But I'm still a bit concerned that miscommunication or lack of communication might make this ideal job less than ideal.

Maybe that's why today it feels hard to shift gears and get back into my own work. But I've got to find a way to shift back and forth more effortlessly, or this kind of thing will keep on happening. And I've got to figure out my boss's communication style before he leaves town again.

I'm near Carl Sagan! Don't know if that's cool or scary...

So I was wandering through the internets a few weeks ago when I found this. It's a Worldview Quiz, which is supposed to give you an idea of where your beliefs and values fit in reference to some well known figures. According to their description:

Half of the questions deal with beliefs about how the world works; for instance, to what extent your worldview is based in faith, science, or both. The other half deal with opinions about what is important, especially as relates to humankind and the future; these values questions are outside of the realm of science.

As you can see, I mapped up in the top right corner, which I can only assume belongs to eternally optimistic science geeks. Some days I'd say I can fit in that category, but other days don't feel that way; other days I feel way too pessimistic about everything - including science - to ever think things will work out for humanity. My position on the chart reminds me of the transhumanists I've been reading about (for example here): they believe that we will transcend our current biology and technology and in so doing, transcend many of the problems in our world.

At the same time, I'm highly skeptical of such a project, since I doubt adding technology and changing human beings into posthumanity will solve the problems we already have. I suspect we'll drag them with us into the posthuman future, where they will simply be amplified (some of the texts I'm writing about in the dissertation explore this very question).

Maybe the day I took it I was feeling especially optimistic. Or maybe it outweighs my pessimism slightly. Either way, for what it's worth, I'm apparently a believer/valuer of progress and science.

Winter

Fall is awfully short here. I'd forgotten that. Actually, when we went to New England, I marvelled at how long the fall was, but coming back, I'd forgotten that the reverse was true, that it's very short here.

Since the snowfall last weekend, it has felt wintry, even though I know all the snow will be gone again by the end of this weekend and it will feel much nicer outside. Which is good, because I'm not quite ready for cold yet.

I've been trying to be more diligent in my running schedule and quit making excuses for not going. Cold weather one of those excuses I'm really happy to use, and I don't want to start using it... at least not yet. But I think I'm going to have to get some better cold weather running gear.

When we were here before, I lived a couple of blocks away from the Olympic Oval, which has a beautiful 400m track around it and is open to the public whenever the speedskaters don't have it booked (you can just barely see the track running just outside of the ice surface in the photograph). I sure got spoiled having that facility next door. The temperature at ice level was perfect for running, whether in the heat of summer, or the cool of winter. Now I have no access to an indoor track, so if I want to go, I have to venture outdoors. Hence, the quest for better outdoor running gear.

The snowfall did allow me to impress my oldest daughter however. The main roads are pretty good - it's not really that cold nor have we had that much snow - but the side roads to her house are pretty slick. I came around one corner and the backside of the car began to slide, so I went with it and pulled it through the corner. I pulled up in front of her house and she said to me. "That was so scary. But you just kept talking as if nothing happened!" (It wasn't really scary - I've had scary slides, and this was nothing more than a little slip of the rear end around an icy corner - but she's now starting to pay attention to these things) So she thought I was pretty cool to handle it that way. Kinda neat when you're kids think you're cool, even when you know you're not...

4755 words

That's a lot of words, or very few words, depending on your perspective. It's very few words for a novel, or some long piece of academic writing like, say, a dissertation. It's even only about 1/7th of my master's thesis.

But it's longer than a conference paper, and about the length of some seminar papers I've written. It's also really long for a blog post.

I'm pretty happy with the number though. That's how many words I've written for Nanowrimo, which is right on track for getting to 50,000 words by the end of the month. Actually, it's even a bit ahead of the game, which is good, because I can anticipate a certain level of reluctance creeping in as the month goes on. Thirty days solid of that kind of writing production is pretty intense, even if it's really rough writing. And it is. I'm not thinking about which word to use, or how to phrase something as much as I 'm just concentrating on getting the ideas onto the paper.

I'm having fun - so far - and it's kinda cool to think that if I can keep this up, I might just have an interesting story by the end of it.

But that's a long way off, and there are a lot of things that could derail me before that point. One day at a time is all I can count on. I've done things that way before - one day at a time - sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always in the end, feeling like it was worth the effort. So here I go again, with something else this time. One. day. at. a. time.

Too much of a good thing?

One of the disadvantages of living in a house bigger than a closet is that there are so many more places to put things and forget where you've put them.