NANoWriMo - Plucking dreams

I've done something I've been wanting to do for the last three years. I have signed up for National Novel Writing Month. This happens every November. For 30 days, writers around the world, well, they simply... write. 50,000 words to be precise. A novel. A book. A living, breathing beast of a story. 

I have heard it will make me euphoric. I have heard it will drive me crazy. I have heard I will sit, rocking at my computer wondering what the hell I've signed up for. I have heard I will be punching the keyboard with delight. Words will flow, flounder, flail and fall onto the page. 

I have to tell everyone I am doing it. Some, out of respect: you will not hear from me for 30 days. I will not have died. I am just writing a book while trying to live my normal life. Some, out of hope: please help me and support me and ask me how it's going. Please: keep.me.sane.

I like a challenge. The challenge can be physical: run across the Andes in three days. Or it can be mental: write a word-a-thon for charity. I have done both. And it's true. There are hellish moments. My legs don't work. My brain can't think. I want to stay in bed and listen to the football. But, you keep going. Someone is relying on you. YOU are relying on you. You keep running. You keep writing. It doesn't matter if it isn't pretty or perfect. It is what it is. It is yours.

So, I am excited for the month of November. It will be a momentous, harrowing, spectacular journey. It will seem long and arduous. It will seemingly fly by. And at the end of it will be something, hopefully, resembling my bookish dreams. Something I have created that is whole and wonderful in parts, if cracked at the edges. That's OK. From December 1st the paint comes out and it is time to make it beautiful. 

Without doing this, ideas are dreams. My dreams may follow me, but I have to pluck them to make them happen. If I want that book on my shelf, the one with my name on the spine... well, then, I've got to write it. 

For more information on National Novel Writing Month see: http://nanowrimo.org/

Words

I'm getting this post up today even though I posted for another site already. Tomorrow I fly back to my native island for a wedding so am going to be technologically mute for a couple of days. So, this prompt is from the folks at Studio30 Plus. The word is... WORD.

This is a poem I wrote in 2009 when the English language reached its one millionth word. I was very excited in the build-up as newspapers and linguists around the world placed bets on what that pinnacle official word would be. Then it came. The 1,000,000th word in the English language was...

WEB 2.0. 

I wanted to vomit. That's not even a word.

So I wrote this in response and I share it with you today.

Web Two Point Zero

How did we get here
From there?
From one word to a million.
How we say this and that
Has changed,
Gone are the rules in this word game
So that nothing ever remains the
Same.

Technology discovers
And wakes the dictionary.
It opens and finds a space,
As the world explores
And pours in more
So out of our mouths
It becomes commonplace.

When the grandfather cradles
A baby just born
He knows in another century
His meaning will have torn;
But that this little miracle
Will understand enough to say
Those words he knew
In a different way.
He feels sad how changes speak
Across years and countries
As new senses they seek:
Ones he will not realise,
Words he will not say,
Meanings he will never meet.

Years later, after a million more
His great great granddaughter listens, abhors,
To the children in their virtual world
As they compurite and intereed
And never ink or paper need.
She shakes her head and reaches for
The secret in her bureau drawer:
Those golden letters, they never faded,
Neither his words inside those pages.
She reads and delights in joined letters,
Painstaking care to get it right
And no disgusting number in sight.
So two remains two and too as well
Not like now, she’ll sadly tell
Her own grandchildren and she will let them see
Her great great grandfather’s life-long diary.

First one was born because it was the first
Words followed from a naming thirst
And to a million we have now arrived
The most amount of meaning ever survived.
But before we drop our heads to charge on,
To pass another inevitable million
We must remember words are more than letters strung
And they started with a meaningful 
One.

To read other writes on the prompt WORD or the other of this week's prompts, SICK visit:

The news article when, for some, this language crossed that million word barrier:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8092549.stm