ROW80 April 6 check-in

Well, the time has arrived for my first official Round of Words in 80 Days check in!

I actually slightly changed my goals since my first post on Thursday. I got a little more ambitious, what can I say?

So to recap, my goals are:
1. Work on short-story (working title: "101")
2. Write first 50,000* words of full length novel Zombies!!
3. Write at least 5,000** words per week
4. Take a picture every day!

*this used to be 25,000 words
**this used to be 2,100 words

Monday -- So, I have to admit I got very excited after officially signing up on Thursday. I started writing stuff before the official start date. Which was good because I didn't get a whole lot done on Monday since I had a psych test the next morning. I did manage to get some writing done in the hour I had between English and my study date (at Cafe Strada, of course. I may have to dedicate an entire blog post about Cafe Strada soon, but just trust me, it's....it's magical) so that's good! I do not have an actual word count on what I got done Monday, because I am atrociously bad at keeping track of word counts. More on that later.

Tuesday -- My amazing roommate's 19th birthday was Tuesday so I had to spend a good amount of time taking care of IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY THINGS, but in the evening she had to get some work done, so I made her go to Strada with me where I spent 90 minutes happily pounding out the end of Chapter 3 of Zombies!! I also had time to transcribe the notes I'd jotted down for 101 during lunch.

Wednesday -- This is today. I've just sat down to write in the library. Probably could have spent the afternoon being more productive, but I really want to finish Breakfast of Champions before my dad sends me my copy of The Road so I spent a moderate amount of time reading (and napping).

Total word-counts since last check-in:
1. 101: 500 words
2. Zombies!!: 685

So far so good!

A Round of Words: Goals

Hello, non-existent blog followers! It has been quite a while since I posed, but rest assured nothing monumental has happened since my last post. At least not to me.
But this coming month is the Round of Words in 80 Days challenge. I found out about this (earlier today...like an hour ago) from Claire Legrand's blog.

I do not know Claire Legrand, but I'm sure she will be thrilled to have her blog linked to and read by my multitudes of followers. Anyway that post kind of explains the whole idea about Round of Words in 80 Days (hereby referred to as ROW80) so I won't get into it in too much detail here. I will just say that I like the idea of it, because it is flexible and because it is personal. I have done NaNoWriMo in the past, and as a college student I'm just sadly not equipped with enough time to attempt it again anytime in the near future. But ROW80 is perfect, because I get to set my own goals and decide what I want to accomplish.

The only caveat to that is that I am meant to check in on my blog (here) every Wednesday and Sunday. This is good, because it means I will be utilizing this blog more often, which I should be anyway.

So, I guess now would be a good time to outline my goals for ROW80. I have done my best to keep them realistic, because I am in college and I do have about 4 more papers, not to mention finals, to contend with as well.

ROW80 Round 2 Goals:
1. Write (yet to be titled) short-story.
2. Write (at least) first 50,000 words of 1st draft of novel (also yet to be titled, affectionately referred to from here on out as Zombies!!. With two exclamation marks.
3. Not a separate goal, but to facilitate #s one and 2, I will set a weekly word goal of 5,00 words. This is just about 700 words a day (a little more), but I don't yet have to discipline to write every single day, so a weekly word count makes more sense for me. If I'm planning to write a short story of about 7,000 words (#1) and 50,000 words of novel (#2) then this works out perfectly. I have already written about 4,000 words of the novel. Just to make the parameters absolutely clear, the weekly/daily word count WILL count words written during planning/outlining stages. Mostly this just affects the short story, since I am almost nearly done with my outline for the novel.
4. Not technically a word challenge, but something I have wanted to start doing: take a picture every day. Of anything. Post said pictures to tumblr, facebook, etc.

So there you have it. My first ROW80 goals. I will be back in a week (Wednesday) to check in on how it's going. (ROW80 starts April 4 and runs until June 23.)

Facebook Drinking Game

To be played while looking at your, or your friend's, newsfeed.

Take one drink when:
+someone posts lyrics as a status
+Someone changes their relationship status
+someone bitches about love
+someone bitches about bitches
+someone posts vague and seemingly poingant observations about life
+someone posts sarcastic/ironic thing making fun of the above
+someone posts pictures of a party
+someone drunk posts/comments
+someone has a conversation on a comment to someone else's status
+someone changes their profile picutre to include a SO

Comedy Night Done Meta?

So I, along with something like 14 million other Americans, love to watch NBC's Thursday Comedy Night. I mean, honestly, this must be one of the best line-ups to grace network TV since...well, long before I was born, probably.

If you are for some reason not familiar with the comedy gold that is Thursday nights on NBC, let me break it down for you:

8pm -- Community starring Joel McHale of The Soup fame as an ex-lawyer caught cheating the system who has to go back to community college and get his degree, teaming up with a ragtag group of misfits along the way.
8:30 -- Perfect Couples. I don't watch this show so it's not really part of this post. I do like Olivia Munn though!
9pm -- The Office. I don't think I need to explain this one. It single-handedly brought back "that's what she said" as a viable joke option, but we can't fault it for that.
9:30 -- Parks and Recreation has finally returned to NBC with Amy Poehler leading an awesome cast made even more awesome with the addition of Rob Lowe (as a dedicated fan of West Wing, I have to say GENIUS) and Adam Scott (who I am currently mildly in love with after his staring role on the short-lived Party Down).
10pm -- 30 Rock. My loyalty to The Office does not quite allow me to say that this is the funniest show ever made, ever. But, um...it is. Tina Fey is everything I hope to be and probably never will because she has a kind of complete and total genius that only manifests itself once in a century. The last person with this much genius was probably Einstein, and he was not even close to being as hot as Tina Fey is.

One thing I've noticed about all these shows is how much self-referencing they all do. NBC apparently likes to order their sitcoms with extra meta-sauce. I mean, you have The Office and Parks and Rec, which are "mockumentary style" with its characters constantly self-referencing and breaking the fourth wall.

Then there's 30 Rock, which is about making a TV show (admittedly a much more lowbrow one than 30 Rock), a premise that is ripe for making meta jokes.

And even Community is not safe, because while the characters don't talk directly to the camera or talk about making shows, there's the character Abed who maybe kinda sorta thinks he lives in a television show (and yet he doesn't seem to realize he does) and is constantly hanging lampshades on everything his cohorts do. They have episodes that parody genres, which include Mafia movies, astronaut movies, and post-apocalyptic movies.

All this to say, meta is in. Meta is so in that probably it is meta to say so.
Ok well time to watch more Community...

The Hunger Games, pt. 2

The fact that this second post is coming so quickly should tell you about how quickly I finished Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I stayed up until four am reading it, and then quickly finished it before my 2:40 flight into Berkeley today. I guess you could say that is proof that I was proved wrong about the book, but actually, I wasn't.

Like I thought, once the setting and exposition about the characters was through, the book became every bit as meaty and compelling as I wanted it to be. I devoured it. The book is divided into three parts, and the second part sizzles with action, conflict and tension. It follows classic dramatic structure to a T, a trait I appreciate in a primarily action-driven story. But I still have my problems with the first part and, to some degree, the third.

It really, I think, comes back to the use of first-person present-tense. Just no matter what gruesome death is occurring, it still feels very young-adult fiction-y. Obviously not a problem if that is what you are aiming for, but when I'm reading young adult fiction, I want to forget what genre I'm reading because I get too caught up in the story. That never happened with The Hunger Games. While I was invested in the characters and their conflicts, I never forgot that this was a book aimed at young adults.

That said, I will be continuing the series at some point in the future to see what fate awaits our heroine Katniss.

The Hunger Games

Today I went to the bookstore to spend the gift card my dad got me for my 19th birthday. I've been hearing a lot of good things about The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, like how it has very adult themes at its core and it's well plotted and blah blah blah, the new Harry Potter, so I picked it up.

I am about a chapter and a half in and so far the book is a far cry from the "mature" and "perfectly paced" (sorry John Green) book I'd been promised, I have found myself reading, well, a young-adult fantasy book. Harry Potter defies this conventional genre classification somehow--it's a somewhat indescribable quality of JK Rowling's writing that, aside from being enthralling and compelling, the books are, quite simply, literature.

Not so with Suzanne Collins. The main ideas of the book are intriguing and very salient in this age of reality television and, let's face it, terrible economy. The whole idea of the Hunger Games, while far-fetched, is interesting enough to merit my continued reading. But so far, the writing is just not there. For one thing, Collins makes use of the first-person present-tense, which can sometimes come off gimmick-y, as it does in this book.

Mostly, though, it is the colossal info-dump that Collins deploys throughout the first two chapters that has really turned me off. I am bored and frustrated with the constant asides about everything from why the main character is nick-named Catnip (some inane story about being misheard and followed around by a bobcat) to the rules of the reaping ceremony that takes place in the first chapter.

It's not that these details themselves are boring. Some of them are actually quite crucial to the story. But due to the first-person narration, Collins can get away with using cheap info-dumps instead of letting the information come out organically, or even--gasp!--letting us figure it out for ourselves. That seems a concept which is particularly lost on Collins, because so far everything from the purpose of The Hunger Games to Katniss's feelings about her family has been way over-explained.

Here's a good example of that -- a scene where our main character Katniss is thinking about her younger sister, Prim, who is having her name put into the drawing for the Hugner Games for the first time (tesserae, as it was explained like six times, is food and oil you get in exchange for entering your name in the drawing more than the required number of times).

I hug her, because I know these next few hours will be terrible for her. Her first reaping. She's about as safe as you can get, since she's only entered once. I wouldn't let her take out any tesserae. But she's worried about me. That the unthinkable might happen.

Okay, how much of this paragraph do we really need? The first sentence, sure, that's fine. The second? Okay, a fragment for dramatic value. But the part about her being safe, well, if you'd read the long exposition on how the reaping works, you definitely already know this. The part about not letting her take out any tesserae? Definitely cut that. We already know how much Katniss cares about her sister (since it's been explained to us like ten times), I would guess this by myself. Or even a sentence about how Katniss took out extra tesserae, without saying that it was in place of her sister would be better. As for Prim being worried, I'd much rather see that in her actions that have Katniss tell me. After all, how does she know?

Another example of too much telling over showing, which occurs after Katniss volunteers to take her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games:

At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means goodbye to someone you love.

How much more emotionally effective would that part have been if we already knew the meaning and context of that gesture? If, for instance, we had seen someone perform it at a funeral, or a ceremony honoring a district hero. Katniss's father, as it was explained a few times, died tragically in a coal mine and was given a posthumous medal of valor. Why couldn't Suzanne Collins show us this funeral/ceremony and explain the gesture in that context? It would have made the above scene much more moving.

There are tons of other examples of this clunky, over-telling type of writing. This is the type of writing I expect to see in mediocre young-adult books. I was told this book was something a bit different, but so far I feel too much like I'm reading a kids book. I never feel that way when reading Harry Potter. JK Rowling assumes her readers can figure certain things out on their own instead of spelling them out to us as if we were idiots (or, you know, children). That is the difference between crappy teen books and real literature.

I am going to continue reading this book to see if it will improve. I hope that now that we know the general workings of the world these characters inhabit, we'll get more action and less info-dump. We'll see.

Hammock Dilemma

So one of the best things to date that my sister and I have invented is something called "the Hammock Dilemma."

The idea of the Hammock Dilemma originated when my sister and I were on vacation in Fiji. It was evening, we were staying at this pretty cool place on the beach that also had a pool. It being Fiji, there were just a shit-ton of hammocks tied to palm trees. I'm not even kidding. It's not a stereotype, it's real.

My sister and I were sitting in one of these aforementioned hammocks reading an excellent book called Overthrow* when it occurred to us that it might be awesome to go for a swim. The only thing left to decide was--should we swim in the ocean or in the pool? And then there was the enticing possibility of remaining in the hammock with our book. What were we to do? We were paralyzed by our inability to chose one possibility over the other. They were all equally wonderful, and would likely all equally result in us being satisfied and happy.

This is a classic Hammock Dilemma, my friends. It's when you are rendered immobile by a choice between two (or more) awesome alternatives.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I'm experiencing such a dilemma right now and I don't know what to do! Should I have cookies and cream ice-cream, or peppermint tea with mint Milano cookies? My inability to choose has led me to write this entirely asinine #firstworldproblems ridden blog post.

*Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer, is a great book that I recommend to anyone who has at all, even the slightest inclination to learn about covert CIA operations that resulted in regime change in other countries. It continues to be one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time.