Your regular NaNoWriMo goodness

Damn, a lot has happened since last week and a lot more will probably happen. Y'all lucky.

So here's some excerpts for you to rend your clothing & gnash your teeth to. This is actually three chapters stuffed into two sets, I ended up fragmenting a good deal because I wrote a lot of this while I was in a bad mood. A really bad mood. Like...bad.

Here, immediately after Ash & the dragon have a little chat, a miracle occurs. I think. I have no idea. It just healed okay?

The "that's all" is a regularly occurring feature in this story, I don't think it's always in the excerpts but it's usually when Ash is talking to an authority figure. Just one of those happy accidents and I thought I'd keep it. Fun facts! Write em down for when I get famous & shit.

And...lulz this pretty much represents how my week went last week.

Immediately after that again, Ash returns to his cell and some odd things begin to happen. This is probably the "DOES THIS LOOK FAMILIAR PAY ATTENTION" part, but other than that it's some filler and, again, I was in a fucking vile mood. I don't actually hate therapists/counselors (sometimes), I just needed this one to be sleazy for the sake of plot.

A small bonus, since I wrote A LOT (surprisingly; did I mention I've been mad?). I really needed things to move along or we would be contemplating our navels forever, so Ash is sick of it all and decides to get shit DONE, son! And reality sort of breaks down right about...there.

There's a heavy emphasis on sleep in this, I've realized, even for a story about...well, sleep. I'll tell you I've been a bit influenced by the game Yume Nikki and my own troubles sleeping--I think I'm a closet insomniac or something like that, and when I'm in the throes of depression I noticed two things: I'm either literally afraid to sleep even if I don't dream, or just not interested in sleeping. And so this story is a-drownin' in the sleeping metaphors, extensive descriptions, etc. I told y'all this shit is my life.

That'll be all for now. This has swung wildly between pretty damn good and pretty damn awful, but I'm going strong and I feel like, dear god I may actually finish this.

INNOVATION!: Blog changes

Sup everyone, I spruced up a bit.

So I meant to introduce these HOPEFULLY with a brand new blog layout; but reality has been kicking my ass quite a bit lately so I said fuck it and took the easy way out. So let me point out a couple of significant changes:

-I know I'm crap with font sizes and font colors, what looks pretty and readable on my screen isn't always so with everyone's computer or if you have any visual impairments. I just so happen to be near sighted myself. So rather than give you all massive eye strain, if you look over on the side bar you can now decrease & increase font sizes at will. Y'all know me, I stay genius.

It's not fancy but it's pretty simple and I think it works without making things go wacky, so try it out if you need it & let me know.

-Did I mention I'm participating in NaNoWriMo? I said that right? All over Twitter keeping word count and shit? Well now you can further taste the madness with my new widget! Look down--waaay waaaay down and there you'll see it, so now you can berate me/encourage me instantly and at your leisure!

That's about it for today everyone, stay tuned for more innovation.

Obfuscating blackicity

So I thought I'd stop talking about NaNoWriMo for a day or so and talk about talking about NaNoWriMo

I'm so transparent.

Anyway, so if you've bothered yourself with any of my excerpts you may have noticed my main characters--actually most of the characters in the story--are people of color if not necessarily black. My protags & antagonists are black.

You see, I got my start writing mostly anime fanfiction (old shame). When I moved up from that, it was movies, then bands before I decided I didn't want to write fanfiction anymore (although I delve into it now and again just for lulz). So anyway, since last year and the year before that's utter racefail with regards to people of color in speculative fiction, I've been making a conscious decision to include more people of color in my work as more than just background/cannon fodder.

I think it's been a natural transition since I'm not afraid of researching or maybe observing my friends. And...damn dude, I'm black myself. The great thing about original fiction is that you have to start literally from scratch and work from the ground up. So building characters can be a little daunting, I understood that part of the argument at least.

But let's talk about me & how I'm prosperin' right now. As I said, my own protagonist is black. To boost my word count I've been describing people at great length and I'm starting to have random moments of crises.

For instance, describing my main character. I simply called him dark and tall without going into a lot of detail as to what "dark" would mean--dark brown? Black? I like to let the readers just make up their mind usually but that bothered me for a bit. I describe a few others as brown & tan in an attempt to really drive it home that "yooo these aren't tanned white folks we talkin' bout". There's been a couple of instances too where I just left white characters with little descriptive clues except hair color to give away and let the reader return to default--that is, assume they're white.

It sounds like a weird crisis only I would have, and it's really only this story that's made me think of it just because I've been doing so much shit to pad my word count out. I could easily just go back and edit though--I'm probably just slipping in my writing a bit.

Then there's dialogue. I mean...you guys know how I talk. We all know black folks don't strictly stick to the "ebonics" that the dominant culture so pins to us. In other words, we ain't ignant.

But I'm starting to wonder how believable my dialogue is/will be; everyone's more or less talking "intelligently" and just because I and most of my friends talk this way doesn't mean...bleh.

So you see I'm actually struggling, maybe too hard for something that's essentially for whiling away the long days and pushing myself to THE DANGER ZONE. It's turned out to be a greater challenge than I thought because it's forcing me to challenge my own assumptions about minority groups as well! I feel strangely like a white ivory tower liberal sometimes with my own peeps...

Long, beautiful hair

GIVE ME A HEAD OF HAIR

Wait, don't leave, I have an actual post.

I've been curious lately. I finally bleached my hair so I could go to the school I be tutorin' at without a head cover--I have a natural hair color even if it's clearly not my natural hair color. And yes my hair is natural. Now, even though I'm totally drunk off my natural hair natural product dyed and flipped to the side mess, I still have my insecurities.

I've never had long hair before. I think this so far is probably the longest it's been, and it's approaching neck length just about uniformly now. For the kids I hadn't seen last year, they seemed a bit surprised at how short my hair is. I usually just have it afro-style and with water and shrinkage of course it looks pretty short.

"Why don't you wear your hair down and long?" the girls asked me. "Why don't you let your hair grow out?"

This...this started to bother me a little bit since the girls I tutor have rather nice, silken, long hair--two girls of color and one white girl for the record. I began to feel my insecurity coming out and I thought ruefully, well I caught one part of the beauty standard but I'll probably never attain the second.

I can't point why this made me so irate inside--am I still not comfortable with myself even after all this time? I felt more comfortable with myself when I finally stopped those atrocious perms. They're only kids, I can't exactly sit them down and chat about imposing beauty standards. I do wear my hair down sometimes when I feel like actually looking like a girl.

I just don't...I don't know. School has been giving me such grief lately I'm not sure what to think, other than I'm disappointed that having long hair will apparently make me pretty or more feminine still. It seems I can't escape..

Wednesday NaNoWriMo goodness

Yeah I'm still kicking at it. If you're reading this right now I'm either at work or trying hard to do something not novel related.

Anyway, these excerpts take place immediately following Monday's episode, in which Ash is in jail and it's sleepy time. Or. Is. IT?

Please note these chapters are dialogue heavy...because they boost my word count. I won't bother you with a lot of explanation except that if you've seen my angry rantings before some of the, shall we say, over reaching themes at work here may start to sound familiar, hint hint.

Edyt: I keep forgetting to add, don't forget the brief warning/disclaimer here.

Ash has a dream--or so we've been told.

Oh dear! Well that just sucks for you Ash! Some brouhaha later and our hero ends up in the big house infirmary with a nasty injury on his leg--who on earth could have done that? And we take a moment to explain things in annoyingly Socratic fashion--again, it boosts my word count.

And that's it for today. Tune in next week when hopefully even more shit will go down.

Late night NaNoWriMo goodness

Although I posted Sunday anyway, I said Monday & Wednesdays would be excerpt days because these are in fact when I would write the least. Today was a little surprising since a chain of events lead me to get down about 1000 words and boost my count up to about 5010. That puts me about a day in advance! But I need to keep pushing on...

TO THE DANGER ZONE

(no I don't actually listen to this while writing...but maybe I should)

So here's some fragmented excerpts. Fragmented because I chose to, er, leave certain parts out for the sake of audience--what I mean is they were just weird. Even by my account, they were weird.

So meet our actual protagonist, Ash. I just like that first name & should probably give him a last name. Anyway this chapter was inspired by a few Facebook statuses of all things, and some people I know. Yes, even his partner. This is another one of those make the ordinary extraordinary things so yeah.

...Okay so obviously that was a trap, Mike does something really daft, and now Ash is going to jail. Here's part of his interrogation scene--cut because it was...hilarious and crucial in its own right, but bad--and oh shit is that a framing device? Xands you are a goddamn literary genius.

I wuss'd out a bit on prison life, which I do know a lil somethin about, but I'll go back later & elaborate; I kind of had to move shit along already. Ash's life on the outside will become really important later on so I can't totally skimp it. Also it's obvious I wrote a lot of this while I was already pissed so excuse my contempt.

How the media treats murder

Well, I'm a bit out of my funk. I was browsing on ONTD_P today and it's been kicking up a storm lately. Shall I tell you something you already know...?

How the Media Treat Murder

Why isn't the story of several missing women in North Carolina getting attention?

Ten women have been found slain or have been declared missing in Rocky Mount, N.C., in recent years. But the rest of the country hasn't heard about a possible serial killer stalking the young women in this Southern town of 60,000. The latest victim, Elizabeth Jane Smallwood, was identified on Oct. 12. Why have the Rocky Mount homicides been largely ignored?

"When you think about the famous missing-person cases over the last few years it's Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, and Laci Peterson," notes Sam Sommers, associate professor of psychology at Tufts University. All these women had a few things in common—they were white, educated, and came from middle-class families. The victims in Rocky Mount—which residents describe as a "typical Southern town," and is about 40 percent white and more than 50 percent black—were different. They were all African-American, many were poor, and some had criminal histories including drug abuse and prostitution.

"If it was someone of a different race, things would have been dealt with the first time around; it wouldn't have taken the fifth or sixth person to be murdered," says Andre Knight, a city-council member and president of the local NAACP chapter. "All these women knew each other and lived in the same neighborhood; this is the sign of a potential serial killer. When it didn't get the kind of attention it needed, it made the African-American community frustrated."

Surprise you...Vitter Confronted By Rape Victim Over Franken Amendment

Last month, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) opposed a congressional measure to prohibit the government from working with contractors who deny victims of rape or assault the right to bring their cases to court.

And now, the issue isn't going way. Vitter, who was one of only 30 Republicans who actually voted against the amendment, was pilloried in local newspapers, and has also seen the issue become an early focal point of his re-election contest.

At a town hall meeting this past weekend, meanwhile, the Senator was confronted by a constituent who, after recounting her tale of being raped, demanded to know why he opposed Sen. Al Franken's (D-Minn) amendment.

The exchange was contentious, heart wrenching, and potentially damaging.

(video with transcript at source)

Well...

/semi link round up, relevant to your interests

I have a name you know...

Forgive me, this will probably be a typo-heavy angry post. I'm trying to exercise some demons & I've already pretty much left death threats over Facebook and what not.

I want to bring up an issue and you may look at the subject line and think, "excellent, more identity crisis issues!" Yes it's been a fun few months trying to pull the pieces of myself back together. I'm missing a few...can someone help me?

In anycase, I just want you all to know that I actually have a first name. I know, I don't mention it often--you can actually even call me by it.

This...this happens a lot. Now that I'm in college it's pretty rare that even my professors would know me from Jenny over there despite obvious differences--I just blend in that way, even with strangely covered hair. I'm offered referred to as "*finger snap*" or simply "her/she". That's all I get. In some instances I'll get a "Miss".

This is pretty infuriating to me. At least ask me. Why does this drive me up a wall so much? I don't know. A few minutes ago I'm standing right next to this stranger bitch one chick I've lived with for over 2 months and she can barely refer to me by name most of the time. I don't know how this is possible.

I often find this flat out disrespectful, but what I can I do? Pull your hair and make you scream the syllables in a totally non sexy way? I don't know. I'll probably fail all my classes simply for never speaking enough--it's not my fault though, my name isn't "Hey you" or "*snap snap*" or "*point*" or "she". I don't answer to these, maybe if you'd refer to me by name more often I'd socialize...

This post was brought to you by Screaming Rage, Lack of Sleep, and Kinda Hungry