But can you ever be just whelmed?

3 points to the namer of the movie that the headline comes from.

Word question of the week: is mittently a word?

Approximate Context: An occasional event that happened intermittently began occurring mittently.

My conclusion: While I can see what point the speaker was trying to convey, he actually used an obsolete word wrong. Mittent means "emitting" - or did. It's no longer in use. He made it an adverb, but that doesn't work. Back to grade school:
How did the event occur? Mittently.
I'm not buying it.

Tweeted the question to Mighty Red Pen this morning and generated a lot of interesting insights. Twitter's growing on me.

That's all for now.

NaNoWriMo, Day 2 - The muse is...Hemant?

Our VP, Hemant, stopped to chat with me over lunch. He's got a brilliant background in physics and business, and he gives me and Rina a hard time for being artists. So he asked about the NaNo hashtags I've been using on Twitter, and he asked what I was writing.

So I kinda bumbled around about my niche is mythology, but specifically re-centering myths, but usually it's from a female perspective rather than male, but this one's been frustrating because it's about Achilles and he keeps talking too much... and I pretty much made a big mess of it.
And then, the most amazing (writerly) thing happened: I started telling him about this specific story, and what came out of my mouth did not match the notes on my page. It had it's own creative momentum, and it drew from all the research I had done, and it was true to my self-proclaimed re-centering niche. The muse! She's...Hemant!

So here it is, more coherently than it's been thus far:
I'm writing the story of Achilles, but told through the eyes of the women who loved him and who he loved.

Suddenly, there's less oppression in my mind. I might even give each of the five women their own Word doc, and let them ramble away. Hmmmm.

Truth is truth - to the end of reckoning.

Adaptation of a Stephen King quote: All fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.
I've found in past writing experiments (and we're talking strictly fiction, here, people - the stuff I really love) that the truth always shines through.
By truth I mean this: the things I believe, the principles I base my life on, the hardest core bits of me that will never break up no matter the intensity or pressure from the outside. I think we can argue that fiction is fabricated so it can be completely separated from the person who made it up (and we do argue this to protect ourselves - from pre-judgements, from pigeon-holing, from criticism).
But at the same time, I think it can be argued that creators - no matter what medium they use - must infuse the work with some of themselves. A sculptor cannot create a piece of art without touching the stone, running his hands over the planes and textures, dripping sweat onto its surface, scraping his knuckles against it. In the same way, a writer cannot write a piece of fiction without leaving traces of herself in the work.
I would have it no other way! While it makes the writing process infinitely more painful - picking at threads of your soul and weaving them into a story other than your own leaves you frayed, to say the least - the end result carries that ring of truth that we all search for in books. It becomes a human work that speaks the same language as its readers.

All of this is going somewhere, I promise.
I've been encouraged to join NaNoWriMo this year, and I have. I'm terrified. I don't think I've ever written for a month straight. I am full of stories, though, and the terror is tempered by a building excitement.
So if you're interested (thousands of people all over the world writing 50,000 words in one month? curious...!), you're welcome to follow me: here at the WriteMe blog and on Twitter @ScribbleMeJ. Beginning November 1st, this blog will be a scratch pad for the NaNo process. I'll try to get the fancy word count widgets and such, but I make no promises (I suck at computers).

Man reading should be man intensely alive.

"The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

Labor Day weekend we cease from our labors (or labor at play).  I chose to spend as much time as possible in the delicate weather that was balancing between summer and fall.  Days were spent sunbathing and nights in long-sleeves with hot tea.  And every moment that my attention was not required (by family, or chores, or Puck), I read.

Robin McKinley's newest book, Chalice, was airy and perfect.  I literally could not stand to put it down.  By the end, unconsciously wistful for bees and living earth, I found myself in the backyard, lying in the grass in late sunlight.  And it had a wonderfully triumphant ending.  McKinley has maintained her place as one of my favorite-est fantasy writers yet again!  Other books by her that I'd whole-heartedly recommend: The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, Sunshine.

I'm about ten pages from the end of Spelling Mississippi, by Marnie Woodrow, which I'll devour for lunch.  Woodrow's first novel is clearly that: she struggles a little to find her rhythm, but I found myself willing to read her choppy prose.  She wrote with such a clear idea of her characters, many well-tangled and interesting story lines, and such a powerful sense of place that I really couldn't give up on her.  The book is not ending as I'd predicted, and I feel confident that even in these last ten pages or so, I will continue to be caught off guard.

Others on my shelf (in various stages of reading and enjoyment) include: Oxygen, by Carol Cassella (who could resist the title or the cover?); The Little Bookroom, by Eleanor Farjeon (courtesy of my compatriot bibliophile, Josh); Mirror, Mirror, by Mark Pendergrast (we're all narcissists, but why?); and One More for the Road, by Ray Bradbury (he's just fantastic; period).

In other news, I'm considering joining the Twitter movement.  Thoughts?