Merry Christmas

After enjoying the Victorian State Singers as part of yesterday's "Carols by Candlelight" on Channel 9, we've been listening to their "Nine Lesson Carol Service" while unwrapping presents: a new King Arthur novel (never can get enough of those), and the soundtrack to Avatar -- some fantastic writing music. Lucky Cat Sparks isn't here -- I know I drove her mad with the Return of the King soundtrack while at Clarion, and I'll be the same with this one: playing it on loop while I write. Beautiful!

Anyway, here's the link in case anyone else wants to listen to some beautiful Christmas music. (VSS is a youth choir in Melbourne, led by Doug Heywood. They're centred in Williamstown (in Melbourne) and looking for new members, so if you're 30 or under, love singing and live in or around Melbourne, here's their website!)

Avatar -- 3D

Mild spoiler alert . . .

Tonight, my kids and I went to see Avatar in 3D. As I walked out of the film, I heard a man lean across to his wife and say, "This is the best film I have ever seen." Princess Sleepyhead said to me, "That's a keeper", meaning it's one we have to buy the DVD for, and I said, "No, that's not a keeper, that's a let's-go-and-see-this-again film, as in right now." The film reminded me of the passion I used to feel for Star Wars (known these days as Star Wars: Episode 4: A New Hope or just A New Hope to some of the younger generation). I saw Star Wars more than thirty times in the cinemas, could hum the entire soundtrack in order and recite the whole movie. My friends thought I was a freak; my parents thought I was a freak. Well, not really, but it's in their interests not to believe that seeing as I had to inherit such freakiness from somebody. To me it was a passion -- and it's the same thing I get from my writing, or perhaps take to it.

I came out of Avatar tonight at 8.40, and the next session was at 9.00. I said to the kids, "Do you wanna see it again? We could go to the 9 o'clock session", and Princess Sleepyhead nodded yes, and grabbed my arm and said, "Really?", whereas Sir Talkalot tilted his head to the side and said, "Are you joking, because I can't tell whether you're joking or not?" I assured him I wasn't, and only then did he give me an enthusiastic endorsement.

Now, unfortunately for all of us, I didn't have a mobile to contact my husband and tell him what we were doing, so we went out in search of a public phone box. There were some inside the shopping centre we were at, but it was already shut. We found one nearby, but someone was in it. Can you believe it? We headed to the nearest large train station, and I was so busy spotting the two there that I didn't notice the traffic island in the middle of the car park and straddled it neatly with all four wheels, crunching the undercarriage of the car, much to my own horror and that of the bystanders. Whoops! No damage done to anything luckily, but by then I was too shaken up to do anything but drive home. The repeat will have to wait now until Tuesday as we have something on tomorrow, and I have a solstice party tomorrow night.

The 3D aspect was interesting, especially the breathtaking views of the planet and spaceships. OMG, was I in heaven, or what? But there were some scenes where the effect was ruined by the painted backdrop. These were only occasional though, but it did effect suspension of disbelief. Sometimes this is noticeable in 2D films, but the effect was more marked in 3D, but aside from that -- I *love* this movie. (My one other critique was I wanted a little more on Trudy's motivation to make her role completely believable for me, just a little more . . . And also Avatar # 3, whose name I don't remember, seemed to disappear for a lot of the film. I thought he hadn't made it to the Na'vi camp, but he was there at the end.)

So, what exactly do I love about it? The story, the world, the characters -- all of it. Also the soundtrack, the special effects. In many ways the Na'vi (alien race) remind me of my own Myrads, except my Myrads are neither as tall nor as elegant. (And there are no romances between my aliens and humans, nor are they capable of having sex -- they're too anatomically different. This isn't a criticism of the film -- after all the Na'vi are interacting with avatars that are anatomically the same as they are, not humans. Whether or not such unions could produce a viable offspring isn't addressed in the movie, so there's no stumbling block there in the science for me. Not that this is a big part of the movie anyway -- it's not.)

I completely bought into this film and was swept up by it and its splendor. James Cameron's wait for the technology to catch up with his vision so that he could do this film was worth it. I believed in the Na'vi in a way I could never believe in the Ewoks. To me the believability is all in the eyes of the character, and whether they can use their eyes to express emotion. The Na'vi could. Chewbacca could. The Ewoks had buttons for eyes. Go figure.

I have the website open as I'm writing this, listening to the soundtrack. I can tell already that I'll be buying it in the next day or so: it's good writing music -- my last four writing albums were the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Gladiator (oh, and also "More music from Gladiator"). This is similar and different, just what I'm looking for. Already some of the leitmotifs are embedding themselves in my brain.

Okay, so see the movie already. This one has shot up into my top ten favourite movies of all time, and that's saying something considering I've only seen it once!

EndoWriMo

Day....Written....Wordcount

1..........0..................0

2..........0..................0

3..........4209...........4209

4..........227..............4436

5..........1802............6238

6..........0..................6238

7..........0..................6238

8..........3439...........9677

9..........0..................9677

10........0..................9677

11.........0..................9677

12.........0.................9677

13.........0.................9677

14.........0.................9677

15......... 3193...........12870

16.........0.................12870

17.........3061...........15931

18.........0.................15931

19.........0.................15931

20.........4133...........20064

21.........1944...........22008

22.........0.................22008

23.........6422...........28430

24.........0.................28430

25......... 2626...........31056

26.........0.................31056

27.........8239...........39295

28.........0.................39295

29.........8015...........47310

30.........7439...........54749

So, here's the summary of my NaNoWriMo stats, taken from my official NaNo stats on the site -- three big days at the end. This table isn't quite accurate (although two of the last three days are), because I was NaNoing on a computer that doesn't have internet access, which saves me being interrupted by the ping of emails landing in my inbox, a great distraction, particularly if the writing's not going so well. So, for example, the first three days I wrote every day. Most days I did something, though sometimes it was only a couple of hundred words. The stats are also out because sometimes I updated after midnight. I mean, really, when does a session end at midnight? I did have a couple of days where I wrote till I was so tired I didn't make sense anymore -- one time I realised my sentences were no longer coherent, and another they were individual coherent sentences but had no bearing on the sentences before or after them, so I had a sequence of sentences with not only no logical progression of thought but no one thought in common! At this point I left them and they were included in the day's count, but then deleted the following morning, so there were words I had to make up. (And, yes, the NaNo rules are you don't edit or delete, but I always do. I know I'm not alone in that. Horses for courses.)

So, the crazy month is over, and I'm left feeling excited and very much "in the zone". That's what I love about NaNoWriMo, sometimes I hate it, and it's hard, and I ask myself why am I doing this crazy thing to myself, but when I get to the end, I have something substantial to work on, and it's amazing to have done it and been part of it. But some days . . . some days, to use a cliche, it really is like getting blood out of stone. Some days the blank screen is god and it dictates there shall be no inspiration, but countering that is the NaNo dictation: thou shalt write regardless of whether thou feels inspired or no. And so I put my head down, bum down, and plough on, plough the most rugged of fields, hating every moment, every word that comes out mired in crap, hate it, hate it, hate it. Less often are the gifts: days when inspiration is there for the taking and the story flows. I could have wished for more of these, but it's good for all of us to know we don't have to wait for them. I always remember hearing John Marsden talk about the days when the writing was agony and the days when it was gold (not his words, but I can't remember exactly how he put it), and I asked if he could tell the difference in quality between the two, and he thought about it for a little while and then said that no there was no difference in quality. That was a particularly enlightening and liberating moment for me.

The whole NaNo thing -- the loving and the hating it is my relationship to writing really. Sometimes I love the first draft, but mostly I don't. Mostly it's hard work. For me, the pleasure is in the rewrites, the editing passes. The reimagining. The redescribing. The fleshing out and the cutting back. NaNo gives me something to wreak my pleasure on! To take my pleasure from. It's hard but exhilarating and hard and fun and hard and hateful -- look at all those zeroes -- and hard, most of all, but it does say something about the power of deadlines. At least my stats do. There were times when I thought I wasn't going to make it, but I remember last time I did it, two years ago, when I really had to pull some big numbers and thought that I could do it again if I had to. And I did have to. More often. But I did it, and never mind that my husband had to cook dinner every night and no cleaning got done. Writing got done, and that's the main thing.