A WordsDay Special

It’s crunch time.

I’m about 8K words off-pace on my novel, and I only have a few days to go.

I’d like to say this update on my National Novel Writing Month project, which was due on Thursday, was delayed because I was hammering away at my novel, but no—I was giving thanks, just like most other Americans.

While I stuffed my face with turkey and sweet potatoes and collard greens (yes!), my novel sat, alone and lonely, quietly whispering my name and saying, “We’re falling so far behind on NaNoWriMo, we’ll never catch up. I thought you had this?”

NaNoWriMo’s website suggests that I should be at 43,334 words. I’m at 35K. That means I’m staring down a double-barreled 8K deficit. That means I have 15K words to crank out in four days. That means I have to average 3,750 words a day in order to win.

I got this.

I think. Full story »

I won’t lie. It’s getting ugly.

I’m running about a day-and-a-half behind pace on my novel writing. According to National Novel Writing Month’s official website, the cumulative word count is supposed to be 30,000 as of today. I’m a little shy.

It’s not that the words aren’t there—they are. What’s missing are the hours in the day. There just aren’t enough of them. I physically don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do (join the club, eh?) let alone write everything I need to write.

And oh, yeah, there’s this rotten little voice in my head saying, “Fix that! Now!” Full story »

by Maria Rainier

For those of you who aren’t acquainted with Yehuda Amichai, he was a brilliant poet with a strong command of both the German and Hebrew languages, born in Germany in 1924. He died just a decade ago of cancer, leaving a legacy of both greatness and unconventional behavior. As Israel’s greatest modern poet, his writing was well respected, yet controversial – though Amicahi was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, his poetic imagery has been called sacrilegious by critics.

To many others, myself included, this is one of the many absorbing traits of Amichai’s poetry: he doesn’t claim to be certain of faith, religion, or social mores. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Week Two usually takes a heavy toll on the writers participating in National Novel Writing Month, but for Lindsey Grant, the week has offered a little bit of a reprieve. NaNoWriMo’s program director has been fighting off a cold—a gift everyone in the office has been passing back and forth for days.

“Usually everyone’s sick in December, once we all crash from the adrenaline of this month,” Grant says. “This year, I guess it just came a little early.”

During Week One, she lost her voice and had to offer to do interviews by e-mail. But by the middle of Week Two, the 28-year-old Grant was back up to speed. “I’m surrounded by soup and tissues,” she laughs.

Grant is one of five full-time employees, assisted by another two part-time tech supporters and a team of contractors and interns, who run The Office of Letters and Light (OLL), the nonprofit organization in charge of NaNoWriMo. The event also depends on some 590 volunteers who act as liaisons in more than 528 different regions around the world; an additional 350 volunteers assist in various other capacities.

“We eat, sleep, breath this,” Grant says. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Saturday is NaNoWriMo’s National Back Up Your Novel Day. I’m a pretty dutiful backer-upper, so I’m doing okay (knock on wood), but I figured I’d take the opportunity to remind my writing buddies to do the same.

But why, I asked NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey Grant, do we need a special day devoted to something writers should be doing anyway? Full story »

It’s “Week Two.”

For veterans of National Novel Writing Month, Week Two has the same kind of cheerful reputation as Darth Vader. It’s so evil it gets its name capitalized.

Week Two has become so notorious it’s become a verb, as in “I’ve been Week Two’d.”

“For participants everywhere,” says Lindsey Grant of the NaNoWriMo home office, “this has become the week to survive.”

Week One started off with a bang. Like other NaNoWriMo writers, I was full of energy and enthusiasm. I hammered out extra words each day beyond the daily goal of 1,667. I was cookin’.

But Week Two, veterans say: that’s the tough one. People start to run out of steam. Plots begin to bog down. Characters begin to stagnant. Enthusiasm flags.

Brick walls. Writer’s block. End of the road. Full story »

I got this. 6,668 words? Yeah, I got this.

Except I’m 294 words short of the goal for today. To get my 50K-word novel done by the end of November, I have to average 1,667 words per day. By today, Day Four, I should be up to 6,668 words.

As of right now, I’m at 6,374.

I started out National Novel Writing Month going gangbusters: 2,604 words in my first sitting, which took about two and a half hours.

But the week has been so hectic at work. Looooong hours. I’ve not settled in to write until well after ten p.m. most nights. Already, I’m only averaging about four-and-a-half hours of sleep a night.

I got this, though. I’m hopped up on a six-pack of Diet Mountain Dew and seven cups of coffee (no kidding). I only need to crank out 294 words tonight to stay on track. Cake. I’ll do that and then some. I just have to pound out my S&R story first, then I’ll turn my attention to my novel. I so have this.

When I look at the word counts some of my friends have posted, though, I get a little worried. Full story »

Today is a day for politics and all that signifies. I suppose, as dark as the times have been of late, we might be forgiven if we approach the polls with a bit of cynicism. Certainly many of our very greatest poets have shared our misgivings over the political forces that shape our lives and dictate our opportunities, including my personal hero, William Butler Yeats.

If you’d like to bolster your perspective, I recommend a quick trip over to The Agonist, where Bruce Jacobs has a Poem for Tuesday that’s exceptionally salient for the task ahead. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Fifty-thousand words in thirty days.

It’s a journey that would make Jules Verne jealous.

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I’m going to take the plunge. With any luck—and lots and lots of caffeine—I’ll have a novel come December.

NaNoWriMo started as a lark back in 2000 when a bunch of pals in San Francisco decided to spend a month cranking out novels. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” writes NaNo founder Chris Baty in his book No Plot? No Problem! “The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

In the eleven years since, NaNoWriMo—which bills itself as “thirty days and nights of literary abandon”—has become a worldwide phenomenon. In 2009, some 160,000 people around the world set out to replicate Baty’s feat.

This year, I’ll join in, too. Full story »

“Never stop dreaming,” said the king. “Follow the omens.”

Caught as I’ve been in the throes of personal transformation—a life relaunch drastic enough that I call it “Chris v2.0”—it was hard not to look at Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as an omen.

That’s not surprising, I guess, since the book is about the power of omens and how following them can help a person achieve his or her destiny. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation,” the book says.

The novel follows the adventures of a young shepherd who has an encounter with a mysterious stranger. The stranger, who turns out to be a king, encourages the shepherd to seek out his own Personal Legend. In the language of Joseph Campbell, it would be akin to following your bliss. Full story »

“This city is dying and we are the ones killing it,” writes Craig, a U.S. soldier stationed in Abu Ghraib, in an e-mail to his twin brother, Peter.

But Craig’s statement is playwright Christopher Shinn’s metaphor for the larger War Against Terror—just as it also captures the very private, personal dysfunction between Craig and his wife, Kelly.

First produced in London in 2006, then exported to the U.S. in 2007—where it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama—Dying City is a taught, simmering little play that focuses on Craig’s deployment and the heartbreak he, Kelly, and Peter all suffer as a result.

The action takes place in Kelly’s apartment. “I imagine a design that lives in naturalism but suggests something beyond it,” Shinn explains in a note at the beginning of the script. There are doors that lead offstage to a bedroom and a bathroom—important points to note in order to allow the play’s main conceit to work: Peter and Craig, as identical twins, are played by the same actor. Full story »

Edgar Allan Poe’s grave marker sits immediately inside the front gate of the Westminster Hall cemetery in downtown Baltimore. It’s not quite the location you’d expect for a cemetery—at the corner of Fayette and Greene streets in the downtown’s west side—at least not until you walk through the wrought-iron gate and you realize just how old and gothic the cemetery is and how it had laid claim to this space long before the city ever thought of growing so big, long before it ever would have dared to encroach upon the dead.

At least Westminster Hall, all weathered brick and moss, still looks like a church even though its days of serving a Presbyterian congregation are long gone. The building, now owned by the University of Maryland Law School, serves as a private space-for-rent banquet hall and meeting place. Full story »

In addition to being a blogger and a marketing whore, I’m a poet. Actually, that’s what I enjoy the most and what I’m best at. Sadly, poetry doesn’t pay the way I’d like. Still, I do it because it matters a great deal to me. Lately I’ve been writing more and thinking more about how I can better promote my work and be more effective at publishing.

To this end, I’ve launched a new Facebook page: Samuel Smith Poetry, and if you appreciate the magnificent ways in which words can be twisted to do our bidding, you’re invited to stop by. Here’s what you’ll find: Full story »

If I’d not heard him channel before, I might’ve been a little weirded out when he started mumbling under his breath at super-speed. Then he would stop, rewind, then repeat in his normal voice what he’d just speed-whispered. Then the fast-forward mumbling would interject, and onward he’d speed, and then again he’d stop, rewind, and repeat in his normal voice. On and off. On and off. On and off.

“It’s very natural,” he tells me later in the conversation.

As staccato as it might seem, it is very natural. I’ve known Paul Selig for a decade, so I know from first-hand observation and experience that his channeling is smooth and comfortable for him. Its fast-and-slow rhythm takes some getting used to for a listener, but it’s also fascinating to behold. There is a bit of wonder in it.

And wonder is important to Selig and to his Guides. It’s a key ingredient in their new book, I Am the Word, released this summer by Tarcher/Penguin. The book guides readers through a process of psychological, spiritual, and existential self-actualization by offering insights and exercises that help them realign their energies.

In other words, the book wants readers to open themselves to the possibility of being all they can be. Full story »

I didn’t get a WordsDay up on Thursday, so I’m doing it today. Sue me.

I first picked up The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea because of the title, which was waaaaaaay too interesting to pass up. It was 1995, and the first Vintage International edition of Yukio Mishima’s book had just been issued in the U.S. only the year before. It was my first foray into 20th century Japanese literature, and it promised to be intriguing.

The back cover provided a hint at something wildly sinister: “a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness the call ‘objectivity.’ When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.” Full story »

What do the following things all have in common: tobacco safety and the dangers of secondhand smoke, the Strategic Defense Initiative, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and the recent attacks on Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring)? According to the new book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, they were all manipulated by a very small group of once well respected scientists whose radical free-market and anti-communist ideologies corrupted them to the point of attacking scientists, scientific organizations, and ultimately the process of science itself.

Merchants of Doubt focuses on seven different areas that are presented roughly how they’ve occurred chronologically, starting with the safety of tobacco in the 1950s, proceeding through nuclear war and the misguided defense of SDI, the opposition to regulation of both acid rain and CFCs, and finishing up with the recent attacks on global warming and attempts at historical revisionism with respect to Rachel Carson and the regulation of DDT. But through all of these areas, the main cast of characters barely changes, the methods used to attack scientific conclusions remain remarkably consistent, and the goals of the attacks become clearer and clearer. Full story »

“A prime number is a lonely thing,” says the book jacket for Paolo Giordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers. Primes can only be divided by one and themselves, which make them interesting mathematical phenomena.

Prime numbers also serve as the metaphor for Giordano’s lonely protagonists, Alice and Mattia, forever unable, it seems, to articulate their love for each other.

Mattia, a brilliant mathematician, studies primes, in part because they fascinate him and in part because he relates to them. “He suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason, they couldn’t do it,” Giordano writes. “This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.”

His brilliance might have been the socially isolating brilliance that beleaguers many grade-school nerds, but a childhood tragedy magnifies that isolation to crippling proportions. Full story »

I’m in Nanjing because of Iris Chang.

In fact, like many Americans, the only reason I’ve ever even heard of Nanjing is because of Iris Chang.

Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking had a profound effect on me when I read it a couple years ago. Ever since, I’ve wanted to visit the city, to walk the ground, to hear the whispered cries of the war-dead who’d been so long forgotten until Chang finally wrote their story. She wanted to make sure no one ever forgot that story—ever.

It was December, 1937. Full story »

I love the idea of a poem in my pocket.  As I searched for something to post for today’s feature, I found myself moving from poem to poem, nourishing places inside me long neglected amidst the practical rationality of my daily life.  I wonder how different my days might feel if I began each of them with a poem. I couldn’t possibly choose a single favorite, though I can identify many favorite poets. Among them is Pablo Neruda. I love the sensory immediacy of his language, the way his words embody the rich physicality of being. Although his love poems are those that move me most, here’s a delightful paean to what one might think of as an otherwise ordinary object:

Ode To The Lemon
by Pablo Neruda Full story »

Only in the shallowest of senses are the sonnets in Fatal Interview “traditional,” as they are often damned today. They are traditional, in outward form—Millay never went overboard for the epidermal innovations and prosodic gimmicks that tantalized contemporaries like e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore—but jarringly new in substance and sentiment.

Cristina Nehring: Last the Night

Full story »