Nanowrimo is Not a Town in Texas

Back again for the weekend.  I have to say for a while I didn't think this weekend would come. It's here now, so let's rock.

Thursday of this week is the beginning of National Novel Writer's Month or NaNoWriMo for short.  Y'see, that's not a town in Texas, that's a sort of acronym, it just sounded like a clever joke the other way. While one may feel inclined to pronounce the "i" like an "e", it is actually a long i sound like in the word writer.  I'm educational. My dreams have come true.

Now, November was chosen to be the month for NaNoWriMo probably for more sophisticated reasons than the one I'm putting forward.  You see, of all the months out of the year, only one starts with the letters N-O-V-E, letters that are also shared by the word novel.  This is the only clear cut justification for choosing this month above all others.  On this basis I hold that my right to be clever with regards to this occasion are entirely justified in that its founders probably didn't have a serious reason in choosing November. You could call it Novelmber, but then it would sound like a weird pagan spirit festival.

With all that said, I feel like of all months, another one should've been chosen.  Since December is the season to be jolly, November has become the one where we run in circles, tear out our hair, stomp our feet, and scream high into the night sky (exactly like a weird pagan spirit festival) to make sure December is the jolly month we hope for.  We've got Thanksgiving going on, Black Friday after that, countless Christmas rehearsals for anybody musical, students of course have papers and tests en masse, professors have to grade those papers and tests en masse on top of the usual lectures, and through the great winter reckoning, it was decided that writers should try to write 50,000 words on a single project by the end of it all.  With all respect possible, I think a better month really could've been chosen, but I can't complain since I agreed to do this.

Luckily I have a story idea, an excellent group to be writing with, and to make this more interesting, I'm going to post my word count progress against the goal of 50,000 words in my weekly updates.  That way I'll be able to have some bizarre nonsensical peace of mind in this project.  You can come to this blog, see how I've been, see how much I've been writing, or just drop in for musketeers and pagan spirit rituals. I'll try my best to not disappoint.


Before I go, I'd like to say that there's too much to say for a single post, and I am considering also posting on either Tuesday or Thursday.  It won't be both of those days, just one, I don't want to do too much too fast.  My plan is to have posts on those days be in a sort of different format than these weekend posts, probably talking more about the things I like than the things I'm doing.  If I had to guess from previous experience, I'd say the intentions expressed above could sound like a plan.

Alright, 'til then,
                       Dave out.

The Beginning of Something Most Excellent

By request of some old friends, I've decided to start this up.  What prevented me from blogging before was not really knowing what to blog about.  I considered blogging writing, which would be fine if only I did more in the way of writing.  I also considered blogging about social stuff, and I'm sure there's room for that at some point or another.  Then I asked myself what kind of blog would a blogger blog if the blogger wanted to get blogging. Not really, that brand of logic would've gotten quite circular at some point.  Unrelated, I also asked myself why the Three Musketeers run around with swords while the name would imply they fought with muskets.

At some point, I figured the best thing to talk about is something I like.  On the basis of the title and a night of brainstorming, nerd stuff (in about every form it comes in) and literature (both read and written) seemed like a broad enough thing, and there'd probably be some of that other stuff mentioned above.  Honestly, I'm just happy to be writing something.

The URL Pixels and Print was already taken, so i just shortened the conjunction "and" to the Guns n' Roses-esque conjunction "n'".  I quite like n' anyway, it allows for something intense to be followed up by something equally intense but made chill.  COWBOYS n' aliens... DUNGEONS n' dragons... SIMON n' Garfunkel... (doesn't really work for that last one). It's not like we're speaking a standard either.  We're speaking English, not some uniform linguistic tradition passed down for millennia to define nationalities or social classes. Not something that is modified with scrutiny by colonial schoolmasters and an obsessive compulsive lexicographer.  We all need to calm down, people.

Seriously though, why do the Three Musketeers have swords?  I guess it takes a really long time to reload a musket and they aren't accurate enough for three and/or four guys to be standing in a straight line.  Would really kill the suspense.  Also, a title like The Three Fencers would probably be misunderstood to be about three agrarian nobles who are very much concerned with enclosure.  Food for thought, I suppose.

Anyhow, I promise I'll come back with things I like that are more related to the blog.  Saturday sounds fair enough, aye?