House Shopping on the Internets

I did not get any sentences written on my main story, sorry. It turns out I started writing too soon and needed to go back and get some foundational shit done.

So this evening I spend two hours house- and job-shopping (kind of reminds you of last spring, huh?), and I got a lot of things figured out. Here are some of them, in no particular order:

Chanson, Colorado
Miles Tariq
Chanson High School, black/gold, Pioneers
10 miles outside of town
class conflict
solar farming

The solar farming part is especially brilliant because it is an incredible stroke of irony. You'll see. I am starting to see how things might turn out later, which is very, very good. I just have to get so excited by my plans that I can't wait to write the first draft, otherwise I'll spend the rest of my month planning and not writing (isn't that like 75% of a "real" novelist's work?).

Words Today: 0 (4 pages planning notes, though)
Total Words: same as yesterday
Sentence: sorry.
Brain Flashes Had: at least 11, maybe 12

Today's Stats

Before I post my word count, let me first say that 1) I did most of the actual writing in class while my students were working, 2) I spent lots of my writing time reading a book on novel writing, and 3) I worked on my story notes--to the tune of like 4 pages of character and plot stuff. Hopefully doing lots of planning up front will help get the draft written.

Words today: 255
Total word count: 1646
Sentence: Even when he brushed his teeth in the morning, Stephen seemed hardly to see his own reflection in the mirror. (You will understand why this is awesome when you know what's going on.)

Today's Stats

Words: 877 (Paltry, I know, for someone who wants to be done by the end of the year, but everything I wrote I did in six-minute chunks while I made five pounds of home fries for the Honor Roll breakfast tomorrow.)

A sentence: Stephen debated for a moment between the right answer and the correct one.

Words and Sentences

So. NaNoWriMo started November first, and, in typical fashion, I am getting around to it late.

Tyson and I can't in good conscience (or good credit) get each other the iPhones we were going to for Christmas, so we're going to write novels together. We figured we've got an extra hour or two in the evening that we might as well be using for something productive.

So I got an idea, and let me tell you--actually, I can't tell you. My idea is literally so good you will be unable to keep from stealing it and writing your own thing, or selling it to a producer of movies.

People who have writing to do sometimes need to find an activity that puts that writing off for just a little longer. One of the things these people do is join or keep a sentence a day blog where they post a daily word count and the best sentence they wrote for the day.

Here's yesterday's:
"All in all, Stephen looks as though he might have just emerged from the dryer."
Word Count: 514, plus 2 pages of notes
Total Words: 514

God Bless America

I am halfway through reading Al Gore's recent book, The Assault on Reason, and you know what?  It may well make a flag-wavin' American out of me yet.  I'm glad to see someone with money and some degree of power and influence who thinks there is something fundamentally wrong with things, but that our society can be saved, and, in fact, is worthy of more than continuing to live in Backwards Land.

But besides making me feel smarmy and hopeful, he really lays out the egregious ass-fucking we've been receiving since, oh, January of 2001.  That was the first presidential election I could vote in, and I was so, so excited to be involved.  Then, when Bush became president, I adopted a "duck-and-cover" mentality when it came to news--I was like the paranoid depressive who knows everything is so bad, you might as well not leave the house so you can avoid seeing the specific ways in which everything is screwed up, and instead pulls the curtains and sits on the couch, clutching her knees and rocking back and forth under a ratty afghan.  So I missed an awful lot of the Bush Legacy, apparently.  The McCain Amendment, anyone?  The fact that there are more than 100 prisoners at Gitmo that we actually tell people we don't want going free, but we have no intention of ever charging with a crime?  I think I'm gearing up here for an extra-fancy blog post, complete with all sorts of hyperlinks and stuff, but I'm not going there right this second.

A Retraction

My freshmen are about ready to kill me for making them read the unabridged version of Great Expectations, and I can understand, seeing as I'm only about four chapters ahead of them myself, and only because I have to teach the damn thing.

So I cut a deal: we'd strike some of the chapters, because I just couldn't deal with the bell-to-bell reading we were having to do to get everything done in the next four weeks.  That's right, we had 300 pages to do and 19 class days to to do it in.

So today I read all the chapter summaries over at Spark Notes, and I have to say, that book gets pretty good!  People are all drowning and catching on fire and sneaking up on each other with sledgehammers, and we haven't even gotten to all the crazy "you're-actually-her-long-lost-father" soap-opera drama yet.  I so should have done this about ten months ago; then I wouldn't have been stressing out since Christmas about this damn book.  

Maybe I'll take on A Tale of Two Cities or something after that magical day, June 4th.

F*cking Dickens

Not the quaintly old-fashioned expletive, the author.

After 3 months, I finally finished reading Crime and Punishment and have vowed never to make that mistake again. It was itself a punishing experience. So I took a quick break and read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in two or three sittings, and since I have to actually teach Great Expectations in a few weeks, I figured I'd give it another go and attempt to actually read it beforehand. Well, it's still dumb.

Sorry, Dickens fans, but if he were a person, he'd be the guy at the coffee shop who comes over and talks to you and won't go away, and you pretend to be interested for a while just to be polite, and then you start to look around and make sure no one you know is eavesdropping on this conversation and thinks you actually want to talk to this goober.

Plans, etc.

So I met yesterday with my new DC at Foothill to go over some general school/course information, and I got a better idea of what I'll be doing next year:

English I Honors (9th grade):

1. Great Expectations
2. Romeo and Juliet
3. The Importance of Being Earnest
4. Of Mice and Men
5. The Odyssey
6. Tom Sawyer

assorted grammar/vocab/writing stuff

American Lit (11th grade):

Chronological everything, from early Native American oral tradition to contemporary poetry. I flipped through the textbook, and I'm not liking some of the stuff they picked from authors I usually like. There's no "Rip Van Winkle" or "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" for Irving, a single essay from Melville (hello?! Where's "Bartelby"? Or "Benito Cereno"?), nothing good from Hawthorne (I'll just have to find "Young Goodman Brown" or "Rappacini's Daughter".)--basically, it reads like an anthology of B-sides from famous American authors. They should call the textbook What They Also Wrote because very little of it is the best, famousest stuff. And really, this is high school. They can just read the famous stuff for a while longer.

On the upside, lots of my paperwork, such as drafting semester exams and course syllabi, is pretty much done. Woot.

Now I can start getting some really good thinking done.

The Latest Thing I'm Reading

I'm reading Henry James right now (well, not right now because I'm typing), and it's really my first return to so-called "canonical" literature for pleasure in a long, long time. Maybe since I graduated high school.

I was reading during a cardio workout at the gym last week, and this part made me laugh out loud:

"She had no talent for expression and too little of the consciousness of genius; she had only the general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior. Whether or no she were superior, people were right in admiring her if they thought so; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly than theirs and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confused with superiority. It may be affirmed without delay that Isabel was probably liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; she treated herself to occasions of homage. Meanwhile her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying. Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines which had never been corrected by the judgement of people speaking with authority. In matters of opinion she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. At moments she discovered she was grotesquely wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever; for it was no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself."

And that is about the best thing I've read lately, with the possible exception of Bill Bryson's new book, which is just as witty and as well-put, but for longer stretches at a time.