General Announcement April 20, 2008
Posted by marcosavintage in Home.add a comment
I have talked to many of you about doing Nanowrimo. As a refresher, Nanowrimo is a contest with yourself. The contest is easy. Try to write 50,000 words in one month. I am emailing you because you have shown some interest in accepting this challenge, or because I am trying to peer pressure you into doing something that we all know will be good for our soul. Officially, Nano is held every November and is a becoming a national phenomena
To clarify: you can write about whatever the hell you want. Non-fiction, poetry, diary, fantasy, magazine articles, daily news, sex, end of times, cook book, sci-fi, heartache, auto biography and whatever other things that you can dream up. The only goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. Its a bit like golf in the sense that you are the one that scores yourself and you are playing only to get better. That amounts to 1,667 words per day in a 30 day month. Personally I took the challenge in November and only got as far as 24,000. The fact that I didn’t hit the goal didn’t really matter… I was having fun beyond what I thought possible. I became a complete nerd en route to writing a fictitious story about a boy from Detroit. I started meeting other nerds at “write ins” held at cafes, feeding from them talking about elements that they were writing about and difficulties they were having. One of the things that I found we all had in common was the realization that our characters began to form a life of their own and the stories took wild, unexpected turns right before your eyes! We even played typing games that consisted of everyone with a laptop (at a cafe) wrote in their story for 15 minutes. The fury of people smashing out words at a breath-taking pace was pumping my adrenaline the entire time. I ended up writing 503 words in one 15 minute session, only 400 words behind this chick that was the typing queen! (Yes this makes me an official Nerd, move past it! LOL)
I am going to start the “unofficial Nano” on May 1st.
Yes, we all have very valid reasons why we cant dedicate enough time to do this… why we need to spend our down time staring at the TV or the computer, or doing one of a hundred different things that we routinely use for excuses on why we don’t nurture our creativity. But this is our chance to do something totally different for once. Its only 30 days (actually May has 31 so we get a freebie) that we are recommitting to our creativity. That’s it.
Excerpt from Kodiak April 20, 2008
Posted by marcosavintage in Excerpts from Writing.add a comment
Isaiah opened his eyes as he got stuck on a line that he tried to figure out where he was going with his gospel. “are you gonna stand out or stand up?” he tapped his pen on the seat in front of him as he contemplated his options…
Standing out was what many of his class mates strived for, to be seen or noticed so usually they acted out. Cat calls to females, bustin’ out people so that everyone notice, or rockin’ the flyest chain. He also realized that popular culture hated that about black people. White people would make comments about how the athletes these days need to shut up and play ball, and stop being flashy. Isaiah always fought against supporting stereotypes against black people. It was hard enough to make it in the world as a black man, so he didn’t want to give white people any more ammo to snicker or fuel their fires with. He took his writing seriously and often spent way too much time dissecting the meanings of his rhymes.
It wasn’t like white people were listening to his stuff, but when he got his big break and had to crack open the rhyme book he didn’t want any regrets. Today he was heading to meet Chino, who was going to get him into the studio to drop his first LP. He looked at his watch and it was close to 7:00pm. The sun wasn’t due to drop below the horizon for another few hours, and by time he got out of the studio it would definitely be dark. He didn’t like being out when it was dark because of the whole Raiders incident, so he usually stayed at the crib playing video games, chess with his sister or writing rhymes.
Isaiah noticed that his stop was coming up and he pulled the yellow cable above the old man’s head to signal to the bus driver that he wanted to get off the bus at the next stop. The bus slowed down and pulled over to the curb and the French doors in the back swung open. Isaiah gathered his stuff and stepped off the bus, only to notice that the white guy was getting off at the same stop. He turned and walked down the street. Across the street Chino noticed Isaiah and whistled for him to come over. Isaiah looked both ways to avoid traffic and jogged across. Chino smiled a warm smile and proceeded to give him a hug before they walked into the studio.
Chino was a friend of Isaiah’s sister Avalon. Chino and Avalon had met through a mutual friend when Isaiah was in elementary school. He was a large half black half Mexican cat with tattoos that littered his body. He had always been a fan of Isaiah’s freestyles and written rhymes that a few months ago he had promised that he would try to get him studio time with Ryan Hastings a.k.a Big Spliff, Detroit’s dopest upcoming producer. Isaiah was grateful although he never really trusted Chino after he caught him stealing money from his sister about a year ago. He had approached him on it and Chino said that he was going to get her a surprise and then slipped out of the house. From that moment on Isaiah felt as though he was a closet fiend although he didn’t show any other signs of drug abuse. Anyways, this was a great opportunity to kick it for a top flight producer so Isaiah was geeked at the chance. Out of curiosity he looked back to see where that white guy was headed but couldn’t see where him anymore. He turned his attention back to the task at hand and walked into the studio.
