Mars is Bright Tonight
How the best of intentions can come to nothing.
The craziness that is Camp Nano started today. To be on the safe side, this serpent set a daily goal of 2,000 words rather than the recommended 1,666 in order to reach the end of month target of 50,000 words.
But the map is never the territory. What was supposed to be a twenty minute sprint of adding quotes to an essay and page numbers to the quotes to keep the nitpicking Grammar Nazis happy rapidly expanded to blow out that time slot to a good two hours.
All this effort is part of an online sci fi and fantasy course with a weekly reading list and essays on the readings of no more than 330 words and a goblin word counter that prevents word hogs from even submitting their bloated efforts.
The certificate has no practical use whatsoever and no street value. It will just gather dust like the rest of the rotting fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
It seems crazy to waste so much time on a mere 320 word assignment especially when faced with a random selection of other participants assigning the dreaded peer review grades. For that is the price of this free but quite tasty lunch.
It was naive to think that producing a rough draft yesterday would make a considerable difference to the time spent during precious Camp nano nights. That took nearly an hour in its own right. It is rather like building a house. Getting up the main structure of floors and walls is a relatively quick process. It is the finishing touches of plastering and painting, adding carpets and fittings that is the real black hole.
I was commenting on the forums recently that a weekly 320 word essay is more work than 1,666 words per day for Nano. For at least with that you can just make up stuff.
So why bother? It turns out that regardless of useless peer reviews, the very attempt of trying to find something interesting and insightful in a book and to distill it down to a mere 320 words is a most valuable writing exercise indeed. It teaches one to be a hard task master when it comes to choosing words.
To quote from a writer recommended by the Cat ""No word ever made it into his documents until it had been grotesquely tortured and failed to confess to the existence of a better synonym."
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
A good forty minutes was spent this evening cutting the fat from a 370 word essay. That's right. Spending a minute to get rid of each excess word. Blasphemy and sacrilege of the highest order.
So of course the sixty minutes of rationed camp writing time dwindled down to twenty. Did manage to clock up 440 nano words before the pen turned into a pumpkin.
The experience was as different as chalk and cheese.
Did manage to spend another twenty minutes of intended writing time sitting in the garden sipping a glass or two of sparkling wine and looking up at the stars. One of the brightest of all is not a star but a planet. It is supposed to be red but is more a shade of bright orange. Got to watch it at Astrofest a few weeks ago along with a few of Jupiter's moons.
It sort of suited this evening's theme. But in order to avoid the grammar nazis claims of plagiarism, will post only one or two sentences of those hours of effort. (Seriously, some box ticking idiots have accused people of plagiarism because they go entering essay texts on Google search and they turn up on some one's blog. Not a whole bunch of blogs but only one - that of the original writer. Of course the assigned essays are anonymous but even a pea brain should be able to work that one out.
So a few sentences of this serpent's offering.
A Tale of Two Houses
In Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, the best of houses and the worst of houses mirror each other in striking and significant ways.
.......
The rest will follow later and hopefully with something better than the usual pretty average 4/6
The craziness that is Camp Nano started today. To be on the safe side, this serpent set a daily goal of 2,000 words rather than the recommended 1,666 in order to reach the end of month target of 50,000 words.
But the map is never the territory. What was supposed to be a twenty minute sprint of adding quotes to an essay and page numbers to the quotes to keep the nitpicking Grammar Nazis happy rapidly expanded to blow out that time slot to a good two hours.
All this effort is part of an online sci fi and fantasy course with a weekly reading list and essays on the readings of no more than 330 words and a goblin word counter that prevents word hogs from even submitting their bloated efforts.
The certificate has no practical use whatsoever and no street value. It will just gather dust like the rest of the rotting fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
It seems crazy to waste so much time on a mere 320 word assignment especially when faced with a random selection of other participants assigning the dreaded peer review grades. For that is the price of this free but quite tasty lunch.
It was naive to think that producing a rough draft yesterday would make a considerable difference to the time spent during precious Camp nano nights. That took nearly an hour in its own right. It is rather like building a house. Getting up the main structure of floors and walls is a relatively quick process. It is the finishing touches of plastering and painting, adding carpets and fittings that is the real black hole.
I was commenting on the forums recently that a weekly 320 word essay is more work than 1,666 words per day for Nano. For at least with that you can just make up stuff.
So why bother? It turns out that regardless of useless peer reviews, the very attempt of trying to find something interesting and insightful in a book and to distill it down to a mere 320 words is a most valuable writing exercise indeed. It teaches one to be a hard task master when it comes to choosing words.
To quote from a writer recommended by the Cat ""No word ever made it into his documents until it had been grotesquely tortured and failed to confess to the existence of a better synonym."
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
A good forty minutes was spent this evening cutting the fat from a 370 word essay. That's right. Spending a minute to get rid of each excess word. Blasphemy and sacrilege of the highest order.
So of course the sixty minutes of rationed camp writing time dwindled down to twenty. Did manage to clock up 440 nano words before the pen turned into a pumpkin.
The experience was as different as chalk and cheese.
Did manage to spend another twenty minutes of intended writing time sitting in the garden sipping a glass or two of sparkling wine and looking up at the stars. One of the brightest of all is not a star but a planet. It is supposed to be red but is more a shade of bright orange. Got to watch it at Astrofest a few weeks ago along with a few of Jupiter's moons.
It sort of suited this evening's theme. But in order to avoid the grammar nazis claims of plagiarism, will post only one or two sentences of those hours of effort. (Seriously, some box ticking idiots have accused people of plagiarism because they go entering essay texts on Google search and they turn up on some one's blog. Not a whole bunch of blogs but only one - that of the original writer. Of course the assigned essays are anonymous but even a pea brain should be able to work that one out.
So a few sentences of this serpent's offering.
A Tale of Two Houses
In Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, the best of houses and the worst of houses mirror each other in striking and significant ways.
.......
The rest will follow later and hopefully with something better than the usual pretty average 4/6