The Office of Letters and Light Blog
Hello there!
My name is Lydia, and I will be interning at OLL until the end of June. I am so excited to be working for a wonderful organization run by such awesome people.
I’m not sure if this is normal or not, but I Google myself sometimes. And nothing interesting comes up. So this post will essentially be my cyber-debut—my chance to make a good impression on anyone who Googles my name (AKA myself). So let’s see…
Mrs. Krebs’ eighth graders self-published their November novels! Man, they look awesome. Follow these guys’ complete NaNoWriMo journey in the class blog archives.
If you were a 2011 NaNo winner, you have until June 30 to receive your proof and order your five free copies from CreateSpace.
Already self-published your novel? How’d it go? Tell us (and shamelessly promote it) in the comments!
– Chris
A short time ago, in a galaxy most of us call home…
Excitement and joy filled the air as people from around the world gathered for Maker Faire. Putting aside all personal squabbles, engineers, Victorian-era spies, and bounty hunters joined together to celebrate and peddle their services.
It was into this bustle that two representatives from the office full of both ABCs and glorious light arrived. Carrying the banner of National Novel Writing Month, the burden and responsibility of standing in for Wrimos around the globe weighed heavy on their shoulders.
Could writers find a place amidst this bastion of fire-breathing metal, land sharks, and robot petting zoos? The question remained…
We’ve heard many tales over the years from Wrimos who tap into realms of intuition and imagination as they write during NaNoWriMo. It turns out that there might be an actual change in our brains as we write with reckless abandon. Charles Limb, a doctor and musician who studies how creativity works in the brain suggests that turning off your “inner editor” opens up a flow of expression. Read on!
Tell us what you discovered when you studied the brain activity of improvisational jazz musicians?
Charles Limb: In our study, musicians played a tune they had memorized and then a tune they invented on the spot, and we observed their brain activity using brain-imaging techniques. With the shift to improvisation, a region of the brain associated with careful planning and self-censorship called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex became dormant, while parts of the brain connected to the senses—hearing, seeing, feeling—became especially lively.
Most interesting, a brain area linked to autobiographical storytelling also showed increased activity. When jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition—and turn on those that let self-expression flow. Essentially, a musician shuts down his inhibitions and lets his inner voice shine through.
I guess the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is what we unscientifically call “the inner editor.”
Limb: That’s not such a bad phrase. The real key is that it’s not just a single cluster of neurons that is that editor, but a whole region.
Do you think your findings about improvisational jazz could apply to improvising in writing as well?
Hello, campers! I’m Ben, your new OLL intern, and summer camp counselor!
I’ve spent much of my life working at one summer camp or another, but this one may be the strangest. I’ve worked at space camp and adventure theater camp, but I’ve never worked at a camp where I only meet the campers online before! I’m thrilled to be here, and eager to help with Camp NaNo. Areas of my expertise include fireside storytelling, surviving camp food, avoiding dehydration, handling homesickness, and of course pranking other cabins.
Wondering what makes an OLL intern? Read on for the recipe below:
Recipe for One Letters and Light Intern
Well, today is my last day as an intern here at Script Frenzy. When I think about it, it’s amazing how much my life has changed in the duration of just four months. There have been a lot of transitions: leaving my apartment to move back home, leaving UC Berkeley, and now leaving the Office of Letters and Light. However, I know all these endings will lead to new beginnings.
Educator Cynthia Garcia doesn’t just teach noveling or scriptwriting to one class at her school in Fairmont, WV. She brings both NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy to the whole student body. We always love her enthusiasm and were excited to hear how her April went. Here’s what she told us about the school’s first ever “Frenzy Festival.”
April was pretty chaotic at our school. Between Easter break, spring break, standardized testing, and “weather days” (Fridays off of school to substitute for the snow days we had built into our calendar but didn’t use), we only had a handful of actual school days all month.
Two years ago, I might have figured April for a lost month, but that was before two NaNoWriMos and a Script Frenzy. I knew better. I put up my “Script Frenzy is Coming!” posters in March, sent for my classroom kit, and let the buzz begin.
We are thrilled to introduce Marissa Meyer, long-time Wrimo and YA fiction writer, who joins us to talk about her debut novel, Cinder, which came out in January from Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan.
Can you tell us a bit about Cinder?
Of course! Cinder is a retelling of the classic Cinderella story, but with a science-fiction twist. Our heroine, Cinder, is a sixteen-year-old cyborg, meaning she’s part-human and part-machine. In a world where cyborgs are considered second-class citizens, Cinder earns her keep in her stepmother’s household by working as a mechanic at the weekly market. Her reputation brings the handsome Prince Kai to her booth one day, and soon Cinder is caught in a political battle of wills between Earth and the Lunars—an evolved species of humans who live on the moon and have developed powers of mind-control and manipulation.
Cinder is the first of what will be a four-book series called The Lunar Chronicles, each of which is inspired by a different fairy tale. Book 2: Scarlet, based on Little Red Riding Hood, will be out in January.
What’s the connection between NaNoWriMo and Cinder?
Today is my final day interning at the Office of Letters and Light, which is pretty nuts considering it feels like it was just last week that Tim asked me to write my introductory blog post. I can’t believe that Script Frenzy and all of its writing madness is already over, and that my time with OLL has come to an end. But despite the brevity of my internship, I’ve had a ton of fun working with the OLL staff, and I’ve gotten a taste of what it means to work at a nonprofit.
In middle school, I had a science teacher who, if you didn’t turn in your homework for the day, would make you stand up in front of the whole class and give a reason why. Of course, science was never my strong point, so, at least once a week, I would have to stand and explain where my homework was. Now that I think about it, maybe this was my first brush with creating fiction.
I never went with the classic, “My dog ate it,” but did try to explain my lack of homework with excuses such as: “My soda exploded on it,” “I left it at the library,” or “My mom threw it away”. Those are believable, right?
Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here is that excuses are for excruciatingly boring homework assignments, and maybe work—not for the mad joy of Script Frenzy. And because of that, I admit with a clear conscience that I didn’t finish my script this April. Unfortunately, I fell about sixty pages short.
Last week, I went to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo for the first time. It was, in fact, my first real “con” experience, at least of that scale. I’d contemplated going before, but when they announced a full reunion of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation I was finally sucked in.
It feels appropriate that it was TNG that got me to a con, since that show was really my first foray into geek culture. These days, I sort of dabble in the pool of full-fledged fan geekery; I don’t read comic books or dress up for movie premieres (except for the brown coat I wore to the opening night of Serenity), but I will get fanatically attached to certain TV shows and am pretty literate in internet geekery.
The sixth year of the Frenzy had a combined total of 20,284 Frenzy adult and Young Writers Program scriptwriters who wrote 356,622 pages from all around the world. We had eleven fantastic Cameo writers, who shared tips about everything from adapting a feature script into a TV show to rewriting and selling a script.
I loved reviewing the Frenzy stats so much that I thought I’d share them with you, too! I’m going to make this a regular practice from here on out because digging into these numbers is just so juicy! I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
General Stats
For Script Frenzy main:
• 16,358 Frenzy participants.
• Wrote 312,363 pages.
• This averaged out to 19 pages per person.
• We had 1,832 winners, which gave us an 11% win rate.
For Script Frenzy’s Young Writers Program:
Since going off to college I haven’t had access to a television. At first, I thought it was going to be great: I figured I’d end up wasting less time being brainwashed by commercials and nonsense like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and instead spend my time doing something more positive (like going outside!). Unfortunately, that’s not how it went down. As soon as I went off to school, I discovered Hulu and Netflix’s Watch Instantly, a.k.a. the kryptonite of productivity.
It started out small. I used to visit Hulu once a week to catch up on 30 Rock, or Lost; it was when my friend told me that I could stream full-length movies and entire TV series on Netflix that things really got out of control. Before I knew it, I was watching all sorts of shows and movies online that I didn’t even care about. I began following mediocre series out of boredom. Now it’s gotten to the point where I can’t get dressed in the morning without watching The Daily Show or The Colbert Report online. I feel a need for constant passive entertainment.
What is Camp NaNoWriMo, you say? Well, I’ll tell you! Launched in 2011, Camp NaNoWriMo is a pared down, camp-themed, non-November version of the 50K-in-a-month NaNoWriMo noveling challenge.
For anyone out there who can’t possibly wait until November to write their next novel—or for whom November is not a noveling possibility—Camp NaNoWriMo provides that same hard deadline and abundance of encouragement to get you from “blank page” to “rough draft” in one month.
Camp NaNoWriMo 2012 is running two month-long sessions for you to bash out the rough draft of your novel(s): in June, and then in August. Pick a month—or participate in both—to write while paddling a virtual canoe or in a web-based cabin, novel next to an invisible bear while eating imaginary marshmallows, or in the middle of a purely fictitious sack race! You can do all this and more at campnanowrimo.org.
I just finished reading Hannah Pittard’s 2011 novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. It’s a naturally intriguing story: a 16-year-old girl goes missing without a trace, and her suburban classmates obsessively speculate—in both the short and long term—about what may have happened to her.
Pittard’s choice of perspective makes this narrative even more absorbing. The entire book is told in the first-person plural: the collective voice of the boys who dreamily wonder about the girl’s fate.
We interrogated each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth. As it turned out, we’d all seen Nora the day before, but seen her in different places doing different things—we’d seen her at the swing sets, at the riverbank, in the shopping mall. We’d seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store.
The result is wonderfully opaque. A plural perspective can never be definitively pinned down, and so the narrative drifts and bobs—as elusive and unreliable as the certainty of Nora’s circumstances.
What books have you read that make use of unusual perspective or narration? Have you tried this technique in your own novels? How did it work for you?
– Chris
In the past few weeks of my internship, it has become more and more apparent to me that my formal literary education has guided me in one direction: towards death. That is, my bookshelves are lined with authors that are no longer capable of writing because, you guessed it, they’re all dead. From Woolf to Wilde to Joyce to the Brontes to Frances Burney, I like my books old, and my authors’ reputations set in stone.
You may already know me, even if you don’t think you do. I’m known colloquially as Dragonchilde, the all-seeing, all-knowing moderator of the NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy forums.
Dragonchilde is the handle I chose for myself way back on November 3, 2002. I started writing on November 4, and had over 16,000 words that first day! I hit 28K on November 6. I finished on November 20, 2002.
I also apparently invented NaNoWriYe. (Seriously, I had no idea.)
Since that fateful November, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo every year. Some years I’ve won, others I’ve lost. My current win record is 50k in ten days. I don’t recommend that, by the way. I couldn’t use my right hand for a month thanks to carpal tunnel.
In 2003, I volunteered as an ML for the Macon, Georgia region, where I helped build a strong region of great writers, including the most precocious and fun young writer I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. She started college, this year. (You know you’re getting old when the people who started NaNoWriMo at 12 go to college!)
The past few weeks have been pretty wild for me: in addition to all the Script Frenzy craziness, I’ve been finishing up my bachelor’s degree and trying to envision what the rest of my life will look like. Last Thursday was my very last day of college classes (maybe forever). I’m still finishing up papers and preparing for my final exams so it hasn’t completely hit me yet, but when I do stop and think that I may never again stare creepily at a cute guy in class, or participate in an argument over the meaning of a phrase in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I don’t know whether to smile or throw up—right now I’m leaning towards barfing.
I’ve been a student my entire life, and it’s become a pivotal part of my identity. I also just straight-up enjoy learning and working with inspired professors and students; who wouldn’t? If I was certain what I wanted to do with my life I would pursue that career, or a higher degree, but I don’t so the only plan I have is to embark upon a vague soul searching mission—exciting, but also really scary. I might just lose it during my graduation ceremony and accost the head of the English department crying, “Please don’t make me leave, I don’t know anything else!”
I’ve been pretty tired lately. Between Script Frenzy and some big personal projects, I’m working a lot, and thinking even more. Staying alert has necessitated a sizable influx of caffeine, and I’m stockpiling my supply like a fiend.
But today marked a decidedly low moment, as I actually reheated some coffee we brewed in the office last week. We’re talking at least four days old and cold as the rock at one of those weird ice cream mix-in places. Sad as it was, I needed the quick fix to get through my afternoon.
Help me, folks. I know that us Wrimos and Frenziers love our caffeine, but what other energizing wake-up methods did you make use of this past month? How do you non-chemically spur yourself on through a marathon writing session—or just a marathon work day?
I’m a fan of a wonderful little iPhone game called “Fruit Ninja”. Have you heard of it? I’m sure the majority of you have, since it’s always ranked as one of the top 10 apps. Anyway, to get to the point (or to get to a point) I was playing the game today in “Arcade Mode”. It was amazing—I was slashing oranges, apples, and my favorite: watermelons. Then, almost out of nowhere, the highly anticipated yellow-and-red-striped banana appeared. I slashed it and a frenzy began—the “Fruit Frenzy”, that is.
Suddenly my small iPhone screen was being bombarded with fruit. Combo after combo, my score was growing until I surpassed my high score of 892. After a celebratory mental high-five to myself, I had an epiphany: “Fruit Ninja”, and its “Fruit Frenzy” could be used as an analogy for Script Frenzy.
