The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Marathon TV Watching

The other day, I added the entire six-season run of The Larry Sanders Show to my Netflix Instant queue. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, and I plan to take it down in one big gulp—a few solid days of rigorous sitcomming during the winter months.

Obviously, I’m not alone in this style of marathon TV watching. DVD and video-on-demand have made the practice a common part of the cultural conversation. I can’t jump on to my Facebook or Twitter feeds without hearing about someone working through a season or more. (A friend’s run of Cheers was the most impressive.) Recent episodes of Portlandia and Up All Night have noted the intense commitment people feel to the shows they’re mainlining. And many media critics have spoken up both for and against the “binge.”

(Our office, meanwhile, houses some serious Downton Abbey marathonners: Sarah and Grant just knocked out the first season.)

Are you a fan of watching TV shows all at once? Why or why not? If you are, which ones have kept you couch-bound? Any notable marathons that you regretted or repeated?

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user jayneandd

The Office of Mittens and Brrr

Here in the Bay Area, we’re having a quite beautiful, quite temperate winter.

But in the OLL office, we cannot get out of an ongoing cold wave. Try as we might, even with the heater pumping, we’re just not feeling the warmth. I blame our high ceilings and big windows—nice the rest of the year, but they provide insufficient structure for maximum toastiness. At least one of us has even taken to wearing a Snuggie at the coldest points in the day. (It’s a leftover merchandise sample… Did we ever tell you that we thought about making NaNoWriMo Snuggies?)

Many of you live in colder parts of the world, and we thought you might be able to help. How do you stay warm while working—whether on your writing or at your day job? Better yet, give us your most ridiculous idea to stave off the cold, and we’ll take a picture of a staff member wearing or doing it.

Thanks in advasbnm,ce (Whoops, mitten-related typo.)

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user Syniq

Thanks for Your Readership

Some time during our office’s holiday nap, this blog quietly reached 10,000 Tumblr followers. A pretty sweet milestone.

Today I reread the staff “Blog Manifesto” that started it all, and this phrase jumped out:

We want to show people who we are and what we care about.

I think we’re accomplishing that—through posts both silly and serious, on topics from the height of NaNoWriMo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and everywhere in between. And even more importantly, we’re learning a lot about our readers through the great discussions that happen in the comments section.

But, we can always do a little bit better. We’d love to hear from you: What’s your favorite part of reading the OLL blog? What features do you want more of? Any new ideas or questions?

Thanks for your readership, and thanks in advance for your thoughts. We appreciate you making OLL a part of your day.

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user mollybob

A Creative Path for 2012

Lately, I’ve been lurking in the Big, Fun, Scary Things forum. I like it there. So many of you are so positive, and have such exciting goals for the new year. As I read these lists, something else impresses me: they’re so definitive.

Definitiveness, or the lack thereof, has been my creative bête noir for the better part of 2011. I have a drive to make stuff, but so much of the time, I’m not certain where I should direct my efforts. Instead of starting work, I choose from any number of avoidance methods: new lists, notebooks, Google Docs, etc. As a result, the 12-month graph of my productivity is more of a sad scatter plot than a proudly rising slope.

Read More

A Nod to the Nog

The office is especially full of winter cheer today. We’re counting down the hours to our annual staff holiday party, where we’ll don our coziest sweaters and our finest nog-drinking mittens. Oh, and this year, we’ll also be playing bocce.

The high point of the night is always the white elephant gift exchange. Man, it gets intense. Last year, the in-demand items included a Star Wars USB drive, a brass-knuckles coffee mug, and zombie card game. Who knows what strange and wondrous goods await this evening?

What are your office holiday parties like? Any good stories? (We promise we won’t tell HR.) What’s the best, worst, or weirdest thing you’ve ever gotten in a gift swap?

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user H. Michael Karshis

A 30-Day Writing Retreat

As you read this, 19 teenagers and four staff members are in a cabin in Durango, CO working on their novels. They’re part of Unschool Adventures’ November writing retreat, and they’re basically living, breathing, and eating NaNoWriMo for 30 days. We had to know more. Luckily, the participants were able to set aside their notebooks and laptops long enough to answer our questions in video form.

How about you? Have you ever attended a writing retreat—either for a few days or a whole month? Would you like to? Why or why not?

– Chris A.

The YWP’s NEO Novelists

Each year, NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program offers underserved classrooms the opportunity to borrow NEO word processors—simple, rugged little laptops—for their November writing. We asked a few of those teachers to give us updates on how their young novelists are doing this month!

Melanie Kish Kirkman – Shuksan Middle School, Bellingham, WA

NaNoWriMo is highly motivating for my students. They love that they get to set their own goals and work on a story of their choice. The materials online are extremely helpful for students and fit well with our curriculum and the Common Core. My students ask over and over throughout the day about when we will start writing time. They work on stories at home, over lunch, and come to school early just to write! My favorite story is about a student I have with autistic spectrum disorder. He has a hard time writing by hand, but has excelled with his NaNoWriMo story. He has eight chapters written in a thoughtful, carefully plotted story about mysterious weather changes. It is his one moment throughout the day where he can be focused and show the world all of his thinking.

Read More

NaNoWriMo YWP’s (Early!) Launch

When NaNoWriMo.org triumphantly launched on Monday, the precocious Young Writers Program had already been up and running for a week. After all, there’s only so long you can wait when excited young authors are ready to get going. The YWP didn’t get fancy new innards this year (soon, we hope), but we are still pretty hyped about the 2011 site we put together.

Read More

What’s your favorite OLL shirt?

As you may have heard, we are celebrating the 13th year of NaNoWriMo with a very special sale. Through next Thursday, September 22, all t-shirts in the OLL store are just $13. It’s an opportunity to pick up a design you’ve always coveted at a nice price, or stock up on extras for winter-layering in November. Who needs a coat?

We really love all the shirts we’ve designed over the years, but we each have our own special favorites. Here, let us tell you about them. And once you’re done reading, be sure to post in the comments about your favorite OLL shirt!

Read More

Let’s Get Philatelic

Even though we at OLL remain big fans of writing letters (and of shipping radical new merch, like these YWP “First-Class Novelist” buttons), the U.S. Postal Service is having some tough times lately. Business is down more and more each year, and 3,700 post offices are being considered for closure.

Fortunately, that’s not stopping them from cool initiatives, like the 2012 poetry stamp series! Who doesn’t want to think about Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” while addressing a Father’s Day card, right? Anyway, this new set got me curious about which authors the USPS has honored before.

On this list, all the biggies (Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hughes, Steinbeck, Seuss, etc.) are accounted for. Even Ayn Rand is there, but I think rational egoists only send self-addressed stamped envelopes.

Which literature folks do you think deserve a stamp, either now or eventually? (This is not a US-exclusive question, though we’re tempted to exclude the UK based on jealousy of their Harry Potter series.) Do you buy special stamps, or are you happy with whatever generic ones your post office has at the ready? Have you ever saved an especially neat stamp from a received letter?

– Chris A.

What do you “do” to your books?

Geoff Dyer’s New York Times column this week is about what we do to the books we own—how we interact with them as physical objects. It’s an interesting topic, as every book lover seems to have a different approach to the condition of his or her library. Some of us like to keep our books in tip-top shape; others, like Dyer, prefer that they show the wear of reading:

[T]he book should be in near-mint condition when I start reading it, but I am not obsessive about keeping it that way. On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans.

He gives the example of a World War II book that he read and dragged around for a long period of time, to the point that the pages curled and the spine wrinkled—in addition to his usual pencil marks and blood stains (that part’s kind of gross).

Me, I like to keep books as close to new as I can, but I dig the idea of accidental marks that indicate the circumstances of my reading. My Fitzgeralds and Hemingways still bear the price tags from my college bookstore, and I’m sure a fair number of pages in my collection have coffee drips from my hours in cafés (but no blood, sorry weirdos). Still, I’ve never made notations in anything, as I want any re-readings to be fresh.

How about you? Do you like your books to show wear or gleam brand new? Do you write in the margins? What book in your library is the most beat-up and well-loved?

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user Jon Madison

Potent Quotables

We’ve been thinking a lot about quotes around here lately. We’re designing some merch for NaNoWriMo 2011 that is very… quotable, shall we say? (Teaser alert!) The process has me considering the pithy ideas that we surround ourselves with, whether it be at our writing desks or in our email signatures.

I keep a Google Doc of quotes about creativity by folks I admire. I don’t look at it every day, but I’ll add to it when I come across something, and give it a good skim when I need a creative boost. An entry, for instance, by Louis C.K. (from a recent Louie episode):

“I’m bored” is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say “I’m bored.”

What quotes about writing, creativity, or life in general do you keep nearby? How do you display or remember them? And why do they appeal to you?

– Chris A.

Photo by Flickr user ingridtayler