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Yesterday I spent the afternoon in Starbucks in Geneva but found no inspiration there. I was surrounded by NaNoWriMers from around Switzerland and a few of them were writing quite succesfully. some of us though just spent a few hours talking. That was good too. It’s only as I was driving home and looking at the road, the signs and the night drive that I found inspiration to write once I got home. The first thousand words came easily, within a short time they were down on paper. What I did struggle with were the second thousand words I had to write to get to my personal goal of fourty thousand. I was up till one am looking for inspiration. I wrote something, then re-wrote, finally I found the order I liked. I checked and there I was, at fourty thousand words in 22 days :-) I want to get the writing finished with. I really want to wrap up the story and start proofreading. There are certain chapters that need a lot of re-working and others that I could publish with just a tiny bit of re-working. I really want to make it readable, and I want to make sure the story is coherent. In five days I think I will have finished it properly :-), two thousand a day :-)

richard - Nov 2, 2008

Sukhjit: For the past three or four days I have been watching hours of documentaries. They have nothing about celebrity, nothing about real market value. They simple provide information about subjects that interest a certain portion of the population. There’s an interesting series called Evolve and two subjects were “Skin” and the second was “Gugts”. These are topics that may not be interesting because there is a low chance that people would buy them. At the same time it’ like video encyclopedias. Rather than look at this information on a page you actually see it. Much as with David attenborough’s Life on Earth Series from the 70s I really think there’s more to television than mindless entertainment for the masses. I also think that music, games shows and other programs are not the only form of entertainment. In fact that’s why I never watched the five channels available in England. Frieda: There’ a lot that can be done when you’ve got unlimited airtime, as is the case on the web. They might as well take advantage of that and produce some original content.

In an age where mobile video streaming is cheap in comparison to the past it’s a shame that youtube do not showcase this technology and have three hundred people streaming from one city for example. Why is it that they chose to cover live music events instead. Of course music is cheap to cover, excluding rights issues. Get three or four cameras in a room to cover the action on stage, two or three more cameras backstage and you’ve got a program, That’s not all though. It’s something you can rehearse. The singers do their sound checks, the vision mixers and directors know the music, know the cues. Everything can be well orchestrated. The production will be flat and boring. The BBC stopped top of the pops and now you’ve got Youtube doing live music programs. Of course it’s a different program, of course it’s a different technology, but of course it’s just one more step on the trip towards a different age of television. I love new media and new technology but I wish they would do something more creative with their time. Look at Autumn watch for example. Camera crews went to beautiful landscapes to cover the wildlife. They even broadcast whilst scuba diving. They use the website as an addition and they’re doing some outdoor event. That’s what we need more of. In an age where everyone walks around with a video camera, whether flip, mobile phone or other so the broadcaster, especially when it comes to entitities like youtube, should reflect their user’s method of covering the world. They should get out of the studio and get twenty cameras in a city, and cover everything that’s going on in real life, nothing setup. Just capture life as it happens. If that’s too boring then do some research, see of a live event that you could cover, whether it’s a car show where you’ve got lot’s of drifting, a festival where you’ve got hundreds of things happening at once or a ski resort where you’ve got snowboarders, skiers and other activities taking place. You could have cameras at the telesièges, at the teleski, you could have some at the summit and some on the other side of the valley filming as people ski down. You could have dynamic cameras. Just get out of that studio and give us something that’s not an advert for someone’s latest single. That’s just dull.

Today it snowed.

[caption id=“attachment_826” align=“alignleft” width=“500” caption=“Reason for twitter downtime”][/caption] Yet again twitter hoped for the best and as a result went down for several hours. It’s a simple illustration of why I remain critical of the way twitter is run. What I love best is the “It’s a problem we knew about…”

Danica - Nov 3, 2008

Are you in collaborative writing project? What is the goal?

It’s to pick up the writing habit. it’s part of the www.nanowrimo.org project. Everyone just attemps to write 50,000 words in a single month.

With just under two weeks of writing left for Nanowrimo I have reached over 31,000 words in that space of time. That’s an average of 1750 words a day. It’s been a good experience so far and its now that I’m starting to worry about the proofreading part. It takes long enough to proofread an essay or dissertation, let alone 50,000 words from a document such as this one. I did feel good about reaching those 30,000 words. The chapters have grown in length and I have experimented with dialogue. I have started to think about narrative in more detail and I know that there are a few things that I would do differently. There is one thing that surprises me. Whilst a lot of people are aiming to write for Nanowrimo most of them are slightly behind the word per day count. Some are really behind. I read that last year 15% of those that took up the challenge did not complete the task. I wonder what the percentage is this year, and how many have participated. We’ll see how it feels when I hit at least 50,000 words. How will I celebrate getting that far into writing a story? Not long left anyway.

I always go to social media events and meet a lot of geeks who love to use new technology such as twitter, seesmic and more. For once it’s a little different. I’m in Fribourg where I’m surrounded by writers. There are a lot of PC rather than Mac computers. The hot chocolate is good and the city is nice. At the time of writing there have been two word wars. The concept is simple. Write solidly for five minutes at a time and see who has the highest word count. So far I’ve written 313 and then 328 in two sessions, not bad. Word count is now over 24,000 words.

I’m enjoying the process of writing for Nanowrimo and to get some ideas I’m looking at maps offered up by google.
View Larger Map It’s quite funny because until five minutes ago I had not yet looked at the city of Pompei as seen from the sky although I’ve walked the streets many times. I thought that you too might enjoy this.

And so I reach 20,000 words after 12 days, not quite as good as I had hoped but good nonetheless. The story is developing well and there will be quite a bit of re-writing to be done but I can depend on some friends to help with that. [caption id=“attachment_815” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“20,000 words for Nanowrimo”][/caption]