The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Through the years, I have eschewed scary costumes for Halloween. I am a little sensitive when in comes to violence, and have never been able to stomach fake blood on my face—or anywhere else for that matter—when dressing up. That somewhat limits my options for costumes.  I fear it has also resulted in rather abstract or just plain silly Halloween attire.

Let’s take a look back at some of the more ridiculous and nonsensical costumes from Halloween’s past:

2008: Enough said.

2009: I was an aquarium, which is not at all apparent…

So this year I went in a different direction and tried to use the proximity of NaNoWriMo to my advantage.

While most of the population doesn’t know what a plot bunny is, I felt very safe here in the office where everyone knew exactly what I was going for. Next year, maybe I’ll try a monkey costume. Or a shovel. If you have any NaNo-related costume ideas, send them my way! I guarantee I’ll need them.

As we mentioned earlier this month, a bunch of us in the office have been reading Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom. While we can’t give you a play-by-play of all 576 pages, we thought we’d let you know some of our thoughts about the book. Did you read it? What did you think? And, what should we read next?

Lindsey: Before reading a book, I take great pleasure in guessing what the title and cover art might mean. Then, after finishing the novel, I can go back and see how off—or spot-on—I was in my guess. In the case of Freedom, I never would have guessed that the beady-eyed bird on the book jacket was representative of the cerulean warbler. Makes sense, though, right? What I’m still uncertain about is the meaning of the title. Freedom. I wish I had counted the number of times the word, or some variant (freeing, free) appeared. I noticed Franzen’s liberal use of the word around page 100 (I know…it took that long?!?!?) and pondered the meaning throughout the rest of my reading. So here’s my question: Is Franzen saying that the freedom of choice presented to modern middle-class Americans is ultimately destructive to our decision-making and moral fiber? The Declaration of Independence states that the principles of a free society are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps that “freedom” that we strive for and, dare I say, our society is based upon is more destructive than we ever supposed.

Chris B: The Only Correct Assessment of Freedom *: I want Jonathan Franzen’s brain. Yes, he’s a incredibly talented writer. But more than that, he seems to be a ferocious thinker—a writer/anthropologist whose decades of fieldwork amongst certain inland and coastal tribes of American families has provided him with a complete map of every thought, ritual, emotion, gesture, and linguistic tic that comprise their culture. I loved Freedom for a lot of reasons, but I think the thing I liked about it most was the way Franzen smuggled so many of these offhandedly genius observations about human beings into his characters’ thoughts and conversations. The book did drag at times (hello, long section about the land trust). But 90% of the time, Freedom soared. Way to go, Jonathan! Now give me that brain.

*Claim not verified by all staff members.

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This blog post fueled by Twinings’ Lady Grey tea.

Every year, I look forward to November for two very important reasons. The first is NaNoWriMo. The second is tea.

Growing up in Southern California, otherwise known as the land of perpetual summer, November was the first month when drinking warm beverages made sense. Each year, I’d eagerly await the moment when it became cold enough to indulge in tea, or peppermint hot chocolate, or a perfect caramel latte without feeling like it made more sense to order it over ice. In fact, the Bay Area’s slightly more inclement weather was one point in favor of my moving up here for college: the “tea season” begins earlier in Berkeley.

I have always loved wintery drinks, but when I began to participate in NaNoWriMo, my holiday favorites acquired an entire new significance dependent solely upon their caffeine content. It’s easy to switch from coffee to espresso, but in the past, the most problematic part of November was the switch from herbal tea to black tea, which I never really liked.

Then I spent last year studying abroad in London, where I was taught (by fellow Wrimos, no less!) how to prepare a proper cup of black tea—and everything changed. Now that caffeinating season has rolled around again, I feel it’s my duty to share my black tea tips with the people who might need them.

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Recession—what an unpleasant word. Unfortunately, we’re kind of in a global one. Aside from the general unpleasantness of recessions, they also make donating money to your favorite nonprofit organizations quite difficult. Fortunately, we’ve come up with some super-sneaky ways to donate to OLL without spending a penny.

1. Vote for The Office of Letters and Light in the Classy Awards! We’re competing against seven other nonprofits to win up to $10,000 for our use of social media, and it’s completely vote-based. It only takes a minute or two—you can find voting instructions on our Donating When Broke page! Voting runs until November 5.

2. Download the Goodsearch toolbar for your internet browser! The nonprofits with the five highest rates of toolbar downloads in the month of October win $1,000 each. Unscientific studies show that people who download toolbars in October are 183% more likely to make it to 50,000 words in November.

3. Participate in the Great NaNoWriMo Book Drive! Bring your old books to write-ins and give them to your ML. If you’re feeling extra-philanthropic, roam your neighborhood and encourage your neighbors to give away their old books, too! Not only are you being sustainable and earth-friendly, you’re giving new life to old books and donating to OLL too! That’s killing about six birds with one stone. Not that we condone killing birds.

4. Sign up for GiftTool and get sponsored! Sponsorship offers you a secure way to fundraise and get some awesome donor goodies—check out our Get Sponsored! page for more information.

5. Volunteer! If you live in the Bay Area, visit our Help Wanted page—it’s regularly updated with fun volunteer opportunities. If not, contact your Municipal Liaison and find out if he/she could use help with regional activities!

Do you have any other clever ways that you donate without spending a dime? Share them with us—we’d love to hear about it!

[Photo by Flickr user dolmansaxlil]

In the giant pile of awesomeness that was the comments to my blog post about planning vs. pantsing, several people asked for more detail on how I outline. Since I am a dedicated planner, I thought I’d write some more about the novel-planning process and how it works for me. The key part of that sentence, of course, is how it works for me. I am waaaay over on the planner side of the panters/planner spectrum, so please don’t let this description stress you out about how much or how little you’ve planned your novel.

And yes, it snowed here in Edmonton yesterday and I took my poor notebooks outside and got them all damp so you can all appreciate your likely-warmer climates.

I start out with a vague concept and a main character. I’ll jot a few things down and start letting the idea roll around in my head for a while. Eventually, I’ll start making a few more notes—scenes or characters or ideas or other little tidbits. I’ll start writing lists of questions I need to figure out, internal logic that needs to be sorted out or character details I want to establish before I start writing. It’s not very organized, and I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed on the inevitable day when I’m a bestselling novelist and people want to pay millions of dollars to see my notebooks. (I’ll wipe my tears of shame on my big pile of money.)

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Last week, I received one of the best envelopes ever. It was filled with Origami owls from Sylvie (sinful_cinnamon) one of the MLs for the Ontario region. And guess what the mascot for their region is?

An owl!

Why didn’t I know that?!

Well, there are a lot of very important things I don’t know, like how the Harry Potter series ends and how robots are made, but what I do know is that Sylvie is awesome (as are all the Canadians I know) and that my new owl looks right at home next to my other giant, and possibly intimidating, owl.

As you can see, she is a true Canadian. I’ve also spread the owl love to office mates.

Now Chris Angotti has something on his wall!

So, what I’m wondering is: What other mascots exist in the NaNo community? Since owls are already taken, I am proposing the office mascot be the marmot or the squirrel, but wanted to check in to see what was already taken out there.

I love this poster! I happened to stumble across it this weekend when I was perusing my favorite design blogs. I saw it in three different places, so I know I’m not the only one who loves it! Of course, the beautiful design jumped out at me, but I also have a soft spot in my heart for glasses. I got my first pair of glasses when I was in third grade. I remember them well: twice as big as necessary, purple seashell rims. It’s safe to say I wasn’t the coolest third grader around, but being able to see the board was nothing short of a miracle for me!

As I grew up, my vision got worse and worse, and I’ve gone through a lot of different glasses over the years. In high school I enjoyed a sleek pair of black plastic frames, the kind that have become ubiquitous among the hipster crowd today. These glasses were eventually stolen in Spain (along with everything else in my bag) and I replaced them a few months later in South Africa. I broke those glasses—a nice, square-ish, green pair—when I was camping several years later.

I discovered my favorite frames of all time in a little shop in New York, just a few blocks away from my old office in SoHo. I would walk by the window each morning on the way to work and peer in, coveting the little silver and blue almond shaped frames. After months of swooning through the window (I’m sure the shop owners didn’t appreciate my drool on their clean panes), I finally purchased them. And they were glorious! Until I promptly lost them a year later in India. Who knows where. I’d like to think they they floated away in a muddy monsoon. At least that seems like a romantic enough version. Pretty sure I just left them on a train.

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This NaNoWriMo may just be my hardest challenge yet: I’m taking three English lit courses (one of which is my senior honors thesis course) and beginning to learn French, interning and co-MLing, running a writers’ workshop, working as a writing tutor—oh, and applying for graduate school on two different continents.

But I’ve won NaNoWriMo for five years and counting, and it seems lame to let something as insignificant as figuring out what I’m doing with the rest of my life interfere with my winning streak.

So how am I going to win this year?

Simple, really: I’m going to cheat.

I’m not talking small-scale cheating, like writing out my characters’ inordinately lengthy full names every time I talk about them, or eschewing contractions. This year, I’m aiming for the biggest “cheat” of all: I’m writing a novel based on a stolen plot. I mean, if someone can write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, what’s to stop me from writing Pride and Prejudice in Space?

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For this edition of “I sold my NaNoWriMo novel!” I interviewed Pete Twohig, whose 2009 NaNo-novel, The Cartographer, was just acquired by HarperCollins.Pete lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where some of the world’s best surfing may be had, rides a Moto Guzzi California, and writes full-time.

Can you tell us a little bit about The Cartographer and where the concept for the novel came from?

The Cartographer is the story of a 10-year-old boy, and is set in inner (working class) Melbourne in 1958. The boy witnesses a murder and is seen by the killer. Though he knows the murderer may be out there looking for him, he is compelled to continue his explorations. His solution is to draw a map of the route to the murder house, to take on future explorations, to help him to avoid the place. As his explorations increase, so does the map, with which he becomes obsessed. His obsession, and his compulsion to explore, soon get him into serious trouble. His solution is to reinvent himself as a series of superheroes: The Cartographer, Railwayman, and The Outlaw. In desperation, he finally adopts the persona of his recently deceased twin, for whose death he feels responsible. The boy tells the story himself, and weaves the story with a tangle of references to 1950s music, radio and TV drama, movies, comics, and pop culture.

The concept came to me suddenly while I was out on my motorbike in April of last year. I wrote a one-page synopsis, then put it aside because I was working on another novel (which I finished on October 31).

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No, not your plot—don’t be silly. I’m talking about your writing talismans, the special little objects that make you an unstoppable tornado of noveling power. Here are two of mine:

The key element here is the orange notebook. If you look closely, you’ll see that someone (me) has affixed a high-tech label made of masking tape and Sharpie ink that reads “NOVEL BIBLE (vol 1).” This is a grid-ruled lab notebook with sewn binding, re-purposed after I dropped BIO-150: Plant Biology several years ago. It contains every vital piece of information relevant to my novel (the one I finished rewriting on Saturday) and is the ultimate authority.

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I’ve been thinking about this story since I read it on Sunday. It has a “stranger-than-fiction” quality: a beautiful woman drifts in the world, before settling into the second act of her life (and a new name) as a fixture at a New York City fish market. There, she provides for the workers like a “profane mother”—selling untaxed cigarettes, washing fish clothes, and running errands. These guys, who have names like Stevie Coffee Truck and Joe Tuna, have no clue about the rest of her existence. They know her only as “Annie.”

A unique, sadly beautiful piece, and well worth your time if you have a few moments.

Almost exactly one month from now, on November 21, 200 novelists from all over the world will be descending on San Francisco for the fourth annual Night of Writing Dangerously.

You could be one of those writers.

The Night of Writing Dangerously—also known as the Write-a-thon, the NOWD, the WAT, and that awesome party that always gives me a candy hangover—is a noir-themed writing extravaganza, featuring a delicious dinner, a bar stocked with such delights as the Cosmonovelton and the Noveltini, Cybele’s famous Candy Buffet, fabulous door prizes, and spectacular grand prizes for the top fundraisers. All the details for how you can attend can be found here. I want to tell you about why you should attend.

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Well, it’s getting to be that time of year again, that time of year that everyone looks forward to—that’s right, Halloween! If you’re looking for some spooky, theme-appropriate music to jam to on that special night, look no further than Dead Man’s Bones. Even if you’re not so into the holiday spirit, this band is awesome all year round—I got turned onto them last spring, which is seasonally about as far from Halloween as you can get.
 
It may surprise you to learn that Dead Man’s Bones is fronted by Ryan Gosling of The Notebook, but if you hated that movie like I did, don’t hold that against them. Gosling has actually made some pretty good films since then, and listening to his voice is surprisingly similar to what I imagine it might be like to be serenaded by sexy (yet respectably frightening) vampires. Beyond that, Dead Man’s Bones has a sound that’s hard to classify. They love to throw in some creepy sound effects—howling wolves, shattering glass, creaking floorboards—and on several tracks they use a children’s choir to great effect. Most of their songs sound like they were written from within a haunted house. In fact, their main influences are the Disney Haunted Mansion, doo wop, and ’60s girl groups. And “My Body’s a Zombie for You” is the closest thing to a love song on their self-titled album. If that’s not enough to get you interested, then I have nothing more to say to you. Go check them out!

– Tavi

Hello, OLL world! It’s Tavia. You may have thought I’d never appear on our beautiful new blog, but I have finally emerged from the Donation Station and Store vacuum I’ve been living in for the past couple months, and I’m ready for some feedback. I’d love to know what everyone thinks of this year’s merch! What’s your favorite new addition? What would you like to see added? Though I won’t be able to grant every wish, I can work to grant those that are asked for the most. So post away; I’ll be checking this blog for guidance.

Looking for a great place to write this November? Look no further! If you’re in or around the Bay Area, the Office of Letters and Light invites you to come write in our windows!

These windows need decoration. And writers!

What: Come write your novel in one of our office windows and participate in a month-long word-war with other window writers!

When: Sign-ups begin immediately; actual writing begins in November!

Where: The Office of Letters and Light in Berkeley, CA

Why: Wrimos who participate in our window wars will have their starting and ending word count as well as their total amount of time spent writing logged by our staff. We’ll keep a running chart of words-per-minute values achieved by the people who come write in our windows, and there will be prizes awarded at the Pan-Bay TGIO party to those who wrote the most!

Some Logistics

– All sign-ups will be for two-hour time slots on Wednesdays and Fridays from 12-2pm during the month of November. Two writers can make a combined request to split the two hours.

– Two writers interested in going head-to-head with each other can make a note of this in their sign-up.

– No writer will be allowed to sign up for a second time-slot until their first has passed. 

– No writer will be allowed to sign up for a second time-slot until all interested writers have been allocated a first time-slot, unless no first-time writers can fill an open time-slot.

– Sign-ups will initially only be considered for the first three weeks of the month. The last week of the month will be reserved for participants low on their word count who are nominated by MLs or other participants as being in need of the extra push!

– The time slots directly before and after the Write-a-thon will be reserved for Write-a-thon participants. Priority will be given to Wrimos who’ve traveled the farthest in order to get here!

What to bring

If you’re selected, you won’t just get the opportunity to write in the window. For the two hours of your time slot, you’ll get the opportunity to make the window your own. 

Each window is pre-fitted with a desk and chair, but beyond that, any ornamentation is up to you. Feel free to bring anything that will fit in the window and improve your overall writing experience. Theme designs and costumes are not required, but are certainly encouraged!

We suggest that you bring your own music and headphones to drown out the noise of our office staff’s outrageous productivity.

In addition, we request that you not bring children or dependents, non-service animals, or anything that would disturb the process of getting work done in the office. It’s all right to tell your friends and family to come observe and cheer you on, but they should expect to do so from outside the office.

Interested? Contact Candace Cunard to sign up!

This large fiberglass whale is next to the Ape House at the Kansas City Zoo. Its presence as an illustration for this blog post is a stretch, and we apologize for that.

Cripes! You know what happened while we were busy relaunching the websites? We had another NaNoWriMo manuscript become a New York Times Bestseller! The honor goes to Sara Gruen’s new novel, Ape House.

Sara’s previous NaNoWriMo novel, Water For Elephants, also spent a bunch of time on the New York Times Bestseller list, and is currently being made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and that guy with the big hair from Twilight. Congrats, Sara! 

I like to think of myself as a whimsical, spontaneous person, but as you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, I get sort of fixated on certain things. Sometimes it’s a knitting pattern, and I don’t do much else until I finish it, or I make six in a row of the same thing. Sometimes it’s a TV show and I watch the entire series, even if it’s seven seasons and I decide I need to watch it all in one weekend.

But the most frequent target of my slightly obsessive nature is books. I read a lot. I always have. I also reread a lot, a necessity when you read as much as I do. And sometimes, I will read a new book, love it, and then immediately have to devour everything that person wrote.

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One of the great things about never knowing what I’m going to write for NaNoWriMo is the pleasing sense of possibility that comes from pondering all the books I might end up writing. A terrorist-filled thriller set at a mini-golf course? Could be! A comedy of manners starring a family of long-distance truck-driving werewolves? You never know!

My autumn life is swoony with potential, and then I read the Book, and everything changes. The Book is the random novel that the universe seems to send me every October to serve as my spirit guide for that year’s NaNoWriMo. I read it, I fall in love with it, and I come away from it thinking: “Forget the werewolves! I need to write something like that.”

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On Sunday, the great Solomon Burke passed away at the age of 70. It would not be out of line to think of him as the prototypical soul singer: the grit of Otis Redding, the smoothness of Al Green, the showmanship of James Brown; he had them all. I was lucky enough to see him once. He sat down mostly (in a throne, of course, reigning as “The King of Rock and Soul”), an attendant occasionally dabbing the sweat from his forehead. And he still completely wrecked the place. That voice, unmistakable, boomed with enthusiasm and emotion. I’m sad that we won’t get to hear more. 

 Solomon’s best known song is 1962’s “Cry to Me,” posted above. I also strongly recommend his 2002 “comeback” album, Don’t Give Up on Me, with songs written by fans like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Elvis Costello. It’s a classic.