Welcome to My New Creative Writing Blog!
You may have noticed my heading and side-bar things indicating that this is now my creative writing blog, but since this is my first official CW blog post, I figured it was worth announcing still. Amongst all the purposes my blog has served, this is really the one that describes me the best, because for many years, I have fancied myself a writer and identified myself as such. I love the written word and the act of creating it, and anyone who knows me well knows this. So, while I do like taking pictures and analyzing literature both very much, this iteration of my blog is the one that best represents me.
I learned today we will not just be sharing short excerpts of our writing, but that we will be sharing all of our finished pieces on our blogs. I must say, this will greatly affect my writing style this semester because I do write differently when I know that anyone in the world will be able to see what I am writing. Any time I write a blog post, I find myself thinking about how various groups of people will read it. I think about how members of my family will read my posts, I think about how my friends will read my posts, I think about how my teachers will read my posts, I think about how random strangers who don't know me at all except through my writing will read my posts, I think about how people who dislike me will read my posts, I think about how vague people I've met only once whose names I don't even recollect will read my posts... And of course, it will influence my writing style that I try to always remain anonymous on my blog so that my unknown readers will always know me as Vivi and won't know my true identity unless they know me in person, as I always stay mostly anonymous on the internet.
I guess it's just something I've always done, keeping my real name off the internet. Maybe I'm kind of paranoid, I don't know, but I think I'm mostly just private that way. There's something very awkward about putting pieces of yourself, even under a fake name, where everyone can see you. I like that when you google any of my names (I also like that I have multiple names, which sounds very mysterious), you don't get me. When you google my real name, you get mostly little old ladies, more than one obituary (apparently I died in 1952 and my middle name was "Fausnaugh" (which, this much I will tell you, it actually isn't my middle name. But I won't tell you whether I died in 1952. I might have. You'll just have to wonder...<insert mysterious ghostly noises like woooooooh>)), as well as some pictures of this one blonde lady who was some kind of myspace model, or at least you always used to, I don't see her anymore. When you google my penname, oh, that's new, now you can actually see my NaNoWriMo profile :) That's actually cool. I'm alright with that, I guess, because for one it's under my penname rather than my actual name, and for two it's probably good, if I'm going to publish anything under that name, to be getting it out there a little. I kind of like the idea that people can find the fictional me, and I think I/she am/is pretty well represented as who she/I is/am (being multiple people gets complicated ;) ). But I'm still happy that it's not connected to my blog and that all the other results are also old, dead ladies. I guess my real and pen names are both very old fashioned, which I like.
The only problem with my NaNo profile is that it shows my epic wordcount deficit--16,173 words out of 50,000. It occurs to me that now might be a good time to explain what NaNoWriMo is. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and it's an annual contest which takes place in November. The goal is to write an entire 50,000 word novel in one month, or an average of nearly 2,000 words a day. I'd heard about NaNo a few times before, but this was the first year I tried it. Of course, the only days I made word par were the saturdays when I was able to sit at my laptop all day and write for literally the whole day, but that was a wonderful experience. Well, and I also made word par on the very last day of November, when I wrote from around 9:30 at night until midnight, and so I made a great deal of progress in a short while, but really that night hardly counts.
As the time got later and later, what I wrote on my novel was less and less about my novel and more about sheer wordcount. At the very end I introduced a random, irrelevant character who believed he was a squirrel and who served no remote shadow of a practical purpose in my novel whatsoever, but who did help me get over a thousand words in a little more than an hour. I say this doesn't really count, though, because I probably will take out everything I wrote that night, because it got quite simply atrocious and irrelevant to my plot. It felt good to make my final word count go up, though, just to make it look better. The rest of the month actually did really help me make sincere progress on my actual novel, and it was a very good thing to do for the most part. Considering I am a senior in high school, I think I did rather well on the whole, despite my gaping word count deficit, and it was well worth doing.
This blog post seems to be a wonderful demonstration of my chain of thought. I sat out to welcome you all to my blog and briefly explain things, but as it turns out I seem to have given you a decent introduction to myself as a crazy, confusing, humorous, parentheses-over-using writer. I do tend to blather on about random things. Another interesting way this demonstrates a bit of who I am is that we are to do three blog posts a week from Sunday to Saturday, and today is Friday, I have been working on this post since Monday, and it is still my first post. I am a lengthy, slow writer, and a horrible procrastinator. So, most likely, a second blog post will be coming your way around midnight tonight, and the third, probably Saturday evening. I also have a rough draft to write (due today) and now I need to figure out what my next blog posts are going to be about. I should go do that! And here I am, editing some things I saw in this post, on Saturday at 7:00pm (or whatever time it is in Norway, if you'll still believe I'm there. I mean, of course I am in Norway...). Time to get blogging! Nice to have you all meet me! Oh, by the way, it's something of a blog-tradition I have to sign off with a little note about what's going on in my fantastical land that lays beyond the mysterious, swirling violet mist. This week beyond the violet mist, things are getting a little chaotic, but we're working on it, and we're still very excited to be an imaginary society in a mysterious, invented land of adventures, whose adventure shall now be to write!
I learned today we will not just be sharing short excerpts of our writing, but that we will be sharing all of our finished pieces on our blogs. I must say, this will greatly affect my writing style this semester because I do write differently when I know that anyone in the world will be able to see what I am writing. Any time I write a blog post, I find myself thinking about how various groups of people will read it. I think about how members of my family will read my posts, I think about how my friends will read my posts, I think about how my teachers will read my posts, I think about how random strangers who don't know me at all except through my writing will read my posts, I think about how people who dislike me will read my posts, I think about how vague people I've met only once whose names I don't even recollect will read my posts... And of course, it will influence my writing style that I try to always remain anonymous on my blog so that my unknown readers will always know me as Vivi and won't know my true identity unless they know me in person, as I always stay mostly anonymous on the internet.
I guess it's just something I've always done, keeping my real name off the internet. Maybe I'm kind of paranoid, I don't know, but I think I'm mostly just private that way. There's something very awkward about putting pieces of yourself, even under a fake name, where everyone can see you. I like that when you google any of my names (I also like that I have multiple names, which sounds very mysterious), you don't get me. When you google my real name, you get mostly little old ladies, more than one obituary (apparently I died in 1952 and my middle name was "Fausnaugh" (which, this much I will tell you, it actually isn't my middle name. But I won't tell you whether I died in 1952. I might have. You'll just have to wonder...<insert mysterious ghostly noises like woooooooh>)), as well as some pictures of this one blonde lady who was some kind of myspace model, or at least you always used to, I don't see her anymore. When you google my penname, oh, that's new, now you can actually see my NaNoWriMo profile :) That's actually cool. I'm alright with that, I guess, because for one it's under my penname rather than my actual name, and for two it's probably good, if I'm going to publish anything under that name, to be getting it out there a little. I kind of like the idea that people can find the fictional me, and I think I/she am/is pretty well represented as who she/I is/am (being multiple people gets complicated ;) ). But I'm still happy that it's not connected to my blog and that all the other results are also old, dead ladies. I guess my real and pen names are both very old fashioned, which I like.
The only problem with my NaNo profile is that it shows my epic wordcount deficit--16,173 words out of 50,000. It occurs to me that now might be a good time to explain what NaNoWriMo is. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and it's an annual contest which takes place in November. The goal is to write an entire 50,000 word novel in one month, or an average of nearly 2,000 words a day. I'd heard about NaNo a few times before, but this was the first year I tried it. Of course, the only days I made word par were the saturdays when I was able to sit at my laptop all day and write for literally the whole day, but that was a wonderful experience. Well, and I also made word par on the very last day of November, when I wrote from around 9:30 at night until midnight, and so I made a great deal of progress in a short while, but really that night hardly counts.
As the time got later and later, what I wrote on my novel was less and less about my novel and more about sheer wordcount. At the very end I introduced a random, irrelevant character who believed he was a squirrel and who served no remote shadow of a practical purpose in my novel whatsoever, but who did help me get over a thousand words in a little more than an hour. I say this doesn't really count, though, because I probably will take out everything I wrote that night, because it got quite simply atrocious and irrelevant to my plot. It felt good to make my final word count go up, though, just to make it look better. The rest of the month actually did really help me make sincere progress on my actual novel, and it was a very good thing to do for the most part. Considering I am a senior in high school, I think I did rather well on the whole, despite my gaping word count deficit, and it was well worth doing.
This blog post seems to be a wonderful demonstration of my chain of thought. I sat out to welcome you all to my blog and briefly explain things, but as it turns out I seem to have given you a decent introduction to myself as a crazy, confusing, humorous, parentheses-over-using writer. I do tend to blather on about random things. Another interesting way this demonstrates a bit of who I am is that we are to do three blog posts a week from Sunday to Saturday, and today is Friday, I have been working on this post since Monday, and it is still my first post. I am a lengthy, slow writer, and a horrible procrastinator. So, most likely, a second blog post will be coming your way around midnight tonight, and the third, probably Saturday evening. I also have a rough draft to write (due today) and now I need to figure out what my next blog posts are going to be about. I should go do that! And here I am, editing some things I saw in this post, on Saturday at 7:00pm (or whatever time it is in Norway, if you'll still believe I'm there. I mean, of course I am in Norway...). Time to get blogging! Nice to have you all meet me! Oh, by the way, it's something of a blog-tradition I have to sign off with a little note about what's going on in my fantastical land that lays beyond the mysterious, swirling violet mist. This week beyond the violet mist, things are getting a little chaotic, but we're working on it, and we're still very excited to be an imaginary society in a mysterious, invented land of adventures, whose adventure shall now be to write!
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