NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH

November is National Novel Writing Month, known by its acronym NaNoWriMo. There is actually a nationwide contest going on, and the goal of the event or the contest is to write a novel in thirty (30) days, or the month of November. By all accounts, this contest has become gargantuan, frenzied, cultish and is probably now part of the American literary landscape.

You can google this event, as there are dozens of articles on it. It is a very interesting phenomenon, well at least to would-be novelists, writers, journalists, bloggers and other types of wordsmiths around.

First of all, if you wanted to join the contest, it is too late, as it has started. Let me take that back. You may still join the contest, but you are now at a distinct advantage, because the other contestants have had a big head start on you.

You see, your novel has to be at least 50,000 words. My calculator shows that is an average of 1,667 words a day. That is not formidable for a wordsmith, but don’t forget, you are writing a novel. You will need, well, a story. You will need plot, characters, locations, sub-plots, interesting twists and turns, some historical red herring ala-Da Vinci Code, etc.

But wait, there is another kicker. The goal of the contest is just to finish a novel. It is really more about quantity than quality. The whole idea is for would-be or budding novelists to get that novel out. Your novel may be raw, disjointed, unedited, even incoherent and unintelligible, but if it is in novel form, and the words total to at least 50,000, congratulations, you have written your first novel.

The final kicker is that anybody who is able to finish a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month is a winner. Nobody will even judge your work. I doubt if anybody would even want to read your work.

I seriously considered entering the contest, or participating. On one hand, it would definitely be a challenge. Since I fancy myself a writer, and feel I can churn out a better best-seller than those pap being regurgitated by Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, I want to see if I have it in me, if I have the discipline and creativity and intestinal fortitude to grind out almost 2,000 words a day and come up with a novel in 30 days.

The biggest negative is the whole rationale of the exercise. What in tarnation will I do with the finished product? Some people go to Kinko’s, have their novel bound and put it on a shelf as a trophy or reminder that they did it, like climbing Mt. Everest.

Do I go back and edit my manuscript, and really try to produce a best-selling novel out of it? That is already one month out of my whole life that I had to invest in this exercise. I will probably spend the rest of my life making heads of tails of what I wrote.

Well, I have one year to mull this over, and consider next year’s contest. Is it cheating if I start outlining and researching my novel now? Will it be unfair advantage if at least I starting thinking of my opening line? How about this one, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

I like that one so much I might try to catch up with the rest of the contestants this year. I am now stoked. Excuse me while I start thinking of the second sentence.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HOLIDAYS

The holiday season is upon us, or have been upon us for a while now. I have just been ignoring it.

I just want to wish you and yours a merry but blessed Christmas. If you are one of those offended by the word Christmas, have a happy holidays.

For some of you who read my blogs, we have some tenuous connection—martial arts, Modern Arnis, the Philippines, internet networking, etc. Some of you are probably surfers. But our common bond is really belonging to the human race. Deep down, we have the same aspirations, same fears, same needs.

So enjoy Christmas and good will with your family, loved ones and friends. But try to celebrate it with the whole human race as well. We need some tradition of peace and inclusion, even for such a short period of time.

God knows there is enough strife and ill will the whole year round.

THE ASSASSINATION OF THE KING’S ENGLISH AT THE INTERNET

I am an immigrant to the United States, which means I learned my English in a foreign country. Fortunately, I matriculated at a school, or several schools to be exact, that emphasized being able to write and speak good English, so I was not handicapped in that respect coming to the United States.

I came to the United States as a young adult. I was gratified to find out that my spoken or verbal English was slightly accented, lightly sprinkled with archaic words but articulate enough for use in both the business and social world. Even now I still speak with a slight accent which others, especially ladies I am delighted to mention, rather like.

But I was really heartened to find out that my written English was even above average. Early in my corporate career in the United States, I found myself being asked to write documentation, reports and even manuals over native born Americans simply because my English was a wee bit more grammatically correct, concise and precise.

So with just some slight adjustments, including getting hep on slang and colloquialisms and other nuances of American English, I was not hard pressed to utilize my re-tooled brand of English here in the United States.

Now I find myself having to make slight adjustments again, upon joining up with myspace.com and other internet cyberstations . While visuals, graphics, and pictures make up the bulk of websites, straining its bandwidth, one still has to communicate with the written word. It is a hoot reading some of the comments and remarks in myspace.com and other websites.

Instead of being concise and precise, the idea nowadays seems to be more of abbreviating and coming up imprecise but creative words or phrases to convey a paragraph full of innuendoes. Misspellings are either tolerated or are now accepted for what I will call cybercation or cyberspace communication.

Abbreviations are probably the legacy of texting, and they are now part of both texting and cyberspace communication. “u r” of course is much faster to write than “you are” and even the uninitiated can figure out what “u r”
stands for.

Misspellings now run rampant, and they are the result of both economy of keyboard strokes and just sheer wanton lexicon disregard. The most egregious examples are “you’re” and “your” with the latter word winning about 99% of the time, as in “your hot.” Other examples include “their” and “there,” “were” and “where,” “bare” and “bear” and many other synonymous words.

I love the creative contractions, like “waddup” which I believe is a progression from “what’s up?” to “wassup” to “waddup.” Is “waddup” the past tense of “wassup?”

The word “very” has been banished from some people’s vocabulary and has now been replaced by the word “fuckin” or “friggin” to give it a more superlative kick, as in “fuckin hot” to convey the idea that the lady in question is not just “very hot” but “fuckin hot.” Even the sexually uninitiated should be able to get that picture.

The saving grace of all this is, as I have pointed out in previous blogs, is that myspace.com is a microcosm of the human universe. The young and the restless and the cool are entitled to their colorful, unique and contemporary version of written English.

For now, I am happy to report that the addled purists like myself, decrying the death of the King’s English in the internet, are still permitted their concise and precise, albeit old-fashioned and archaic brand of English to exist side by side with the new cybercation (internet or cyber communication, remember?) See how many strokes I saved? I will get the hang of this yet.

A NIGHT OUT ON THE TOWN

Last night, Saturday, I did something I have not done in quite a while. I went out to town in downtown Los Angeles.

To be exact, we meandered our way around JapanTown or Little Tokyo. First we had a simple but filling fare at a Los Angeles landmark, the sandwich place of Philippe. As it was dinner time, the place was packed. I had a pork sandwich and pineapple pie. Then we browsed around some shops at the JapanTown mall. Finally, we ended up at the venue for the entertainment of the evening.

The venue was the Japan American Theatre, and the entertainment was the band Hiroshima. It was their fifth annual “Spirit of the Season” annual concert.

Hiroshima is described as a jazz fusion band with Japanese or Asian influence, based in Los Angeles. They have been around a while and have enjoyed a loyal following all these years. They announced that they were working on their 16th CD. The current members include
June Okida Kuramoto, koto
Dan Kuramoto, saxophone, flute
Danny Yamamoto, drums
Kimo Cornwell, keyboards
Shoji Kameda, taiko

Guests artists for the evening included StuccoRainbow, Mia Doi Todd, Terry Steele and Roy Firestone. Yes, that is Roy Firestone the sportscaster and he turned out to be funny (as a comedian) and can really sing.

I enjoyed the show. I like Hiroshima because their “hardcore” songs have a mild martial arts, Japanese timbre to it reminiscent of a “Black Rain” or “Rising Sun” movie score. I would have preferred Hiroshima performing their regular songs versus the Christmas numbers they performed but it was understandably a Holiday performance. The near-capacity crowd was very appreciative and the atmosphere, festive.

All in all, it was a decent show and a fun evening. With the pulsating thump of taiko drums and the plaintive notes of the flute still echoing in my ears, we walked out into a slight drizzle. There is still life in downtown Los Angeles, the City of the Angels.


Copyright, Jay de Leon 12/10/2006