Friday, September 4, 2015

Nanowrimo's coming up!

For Busan and the surrounding province of Gyeongsangnam, I am a co-ML or municipal Liaison for Nanowrimo this year.  This is exciting news and I am now working on reading through the materials to be an informed volunteer.

Last year, Busan didn't have an ML and now we have two.  There are also two in Seoul and at least one in 'Elsewhere'.  The Seoul ML last year did a great job and has offered a lot of advice to me already.

One thing she was good at was getting us to focus on our writing while in the chatroom.  It being a place for chatting, I occasionally tried to learn about my fellow writers after my own quota was met. The ML entertained a few minutes of discussion, then urged us into another 'word sprint'.  The word sprint is a race to get as many words into your story in a set time -usually twenty minutes.

On the one had, contests with prizes are bad for creative output but on the other hand, not for quantity output.  The emphasis on speed reduces self-editing and is a core feature of brainstorming as well as our writing event. Typos should be ignored as best as possible. The typos I made in 2014 were mostly understandable with one big exception and it was an unusual typo.
This was his fifth dive on the grounds and the best one yet, no matter what the plates contained  He was not a particularly ** man but the cold was as good a timekeeper as the candles that Oldham carefully observed above.
I think I wanted 'sensitive' and that will do, but I skipped the entire word while typing.  I'm sure I skipped several prepositions and mentally added them when I reread the story months later, but this one jarred me into confusion.
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In slightly related news, I was listening to Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing podcast and heard the word Rejectomancy.  Ah, it's related because she does a daily podcast during Nanowrimo.  The word refers to efforts to understand why your book or story wasn't accepted for publication by  publisher.  It could also refer to guessing why your job application wasn't accepted.  What does, "Not what we are currently looking for" mean?  Mur offered some advice but the magical thinking implied in the word is well-deserved.

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