A Monday for All Mondays



    It is Monday. It is THE Monday after Thanksgiving Break.

    It is Monday. It is THE Monday after a 9 day vacation.

    It is Monday. It is raining and the wind is blowing. In the words of Forrest Gump, "Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night..."

    It is Monday. And my family is long gone.

    It is Monday. And Christmas Break is 3 weeks away.

    It is Monday and all of life is needing to be done. (Again!)

    So I leave you and me with a quote and remind us both that work came before the Fall:

“Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

     

Happy Monday,

   David

NaNoWriMo...What?

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   A couple of months ago, I heard several of my runners talking during a warm up and they kept saying one of the oddest words over and over, but I couldn't quite hear it. So, I sped up a little and tried to listen in and they kept saying the word, "nanowrimo". I worked up the courage and asked them what the heck they were saying and they said, nanowrimo, you know, nanowrimo..." I let them know that I had no idea what that meant and they told me. Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. And I was still clueless. So, as usual, I pretended I knew what was going on, sped up again,  and then waited till later and looked it up on the old, googler. And as usual, the googler came through and all I had to do was type "nanowrimo" in the ole' googler box.



   NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Each November the folks at, The Office of Letters and Light, host something that has the catch phrase of being, 30 days and nights of literary abandon. Each November, since 1999, The Office of Letters and Lights, has sponsored a novel writing month. The first year found it in San Francisco with just 21 participants. Now, thirteen years later, the event is international with over 200,000 people participating. And there has been many famous manuscripts to come out of the program. The most recently being, Sara Gruen's, Water for Elephants.

   The Office of Letters and Light (OLL) is a Berkeley-based nonprofit that produces writing events where children and adults find the inspiration, encouragement, and structure they need to achieve their creative potential. OLL's programs are web-enabled challenges with vibrant real-world components, designed to foster self-expression while building on local and global levels. (That bit was from their website. don't want you guys to start comparing me to James Fry or anything.) The three biggest events are NaNoWriMo, Young Writer's Program, and April's Script Frenzy.

   I love the idea behind this challenge. Even though, it sounds very stupid, the hardest part of writing is the actually act of sitting down and writing. It is not the planning or thinking about the story, but it is the putting of pen to paper. That is what NaNoWriMo will be to me. It will be a force making me write. I have about 20 story ideas and have written the beginnings to even more, but they just sit inside my beloved Moleskine journals. Now, we have this event and I have to write.

    So, I have been meaning to post this blog for several days, but a virus from the hot place (or from someone posing as the NY police department) attacked our computer with a vengeance, my students turned in their Insect Projects which gave me hours, and hours of work, and about a hundred other little things. Hope you enjoy. Maybe you could join the challenge. As of today, you're only about 12,000 words behind. I guess that's nothing if you write like Thomas Wolfe.

David