NaNoWriMo

I should be writing about Mayor Newsom following the lead of South Carolina Governor Stanford and disappearing, but the National Novel Writer's month contest sponsored by The Office of Letters and Light is much more important to me right now than following Mayor Newsom's supposed stressed jaunt. If you want to know what stress is, you should see me hunched over my notebook, sipping tea or coffee as I write a 50,000-word novel from scratch in the thirty days of November. Why? There's no money involved; just a certificate of accomplishment. But, it's more than that. It's the challenge to join others striving for the same goal; a draft novel in a race against time. It stimulates even the worst procrastinator to write. I was successful last year, hitting the 50,000 verified word count in twenty-one days with “Welcome Home, Naomi,” so I jumped at the challenge again this year. I'm into day seven on “Climbing a Glass Wall, a sequel to last year’s novel, running well ahead of the daily word count, and hoping to reach twenty thousand by Monday. Excuse me, for bowing out so abruptly, but I’ve got to get back to my novel.

Time for Change

BLOG UPDATE. Time to get serious. No more frivolous posts – well, not that many. I've cleaned up my act (deleted old posts). No more personal pics. Okay, maybe a couple. Violet’s Vibes is switching to writing tips and techniques and words of wisdom. (Hey, I can do that. I’m old enough to be considered an oracle.) Maybe I’ll drop in a haiku or two or a community blurb.

So, as soap opera radio announcers used to say, “Tune in tomorrow.”

Take A Hike

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford said about his recent absence, "I let them down by creating a fiction with regard to where I was going. I said that was the original possibility. Again, this is my fault in...shrouding this larger trip."

Revelation

Merriam Webster Dictionary online defines the word revelation foremost as something divine from God to man. The next down-to-earth definition in Merriam Webster and Encarta Dictionary online is “Information that is newly disclosed, especially surprising, or valuable.” In the California Writers Club, Tri-Valley Branch May Critique Group meeting, there were many revelations, or at least some very surprising and valuable edits. As each of the ten members received printed stories critiqued through an editing program, it was clear that there were different interpretations of capitalization. A recurring question was when to capitalize family titles like father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, nephew, and niece. Professional editors suggest lowercase when a familial title is preceded by a pronoun (my, her, his, our, their). Example: “My uncle George is the oldest person in English 1-A college class.” When the writer omits the pronoun, “The oldest person in English 1-A is Uncle George,” uppercase is preferred. The greatest revelation is that these rules are not permanent. Somewhere, a group is deciding the future rules for familial titles while I write my first mystery novel. I suppose my best choice is to characterize my protanogist as a loner, perhaps an orphaned only child, so there will be less editing for familial titles.