Wordle of my first chapter :)

So. The weather is crisp and Novembry, and I am eating chili and drinking cold coffee. (I don't drink coffee hot. I burn my tongue too easily.)

I'm thinking I'm going to make this blog a bit more personal, and figure out SOME way to increase my readership. (Note: LiveJournal readership is much more easy to establish.)

I downloaded the Scrivener for Windows beta. That's right, if you haven't seen it elsewhere in the blogosphere, there IS a Windows beta for Scrivener out, right now. They're still working out some bugs but I find it's working extremely well. Being a somewhat messy nonlinear writer, I'm a big fan of organizational writing software (however, computers should just stay out of helping you improve "creatively" -- I mean really). I've now tried both Liquid StoryBinder and Scrivener, and have experimented a bit with Office OneNote. All of these programs have pluses and minuses. Liquid StoryBinder is extremely immersive in environment and will definitely distract you from web surfing and gaming (however, it's a bit tricky to see your entire project all at once, since there are so many windows and file types--it's almost like a number of programs all in one that crosslink with one another, and it has an old school, slightly Final Fantasy game, DOSsy feel that is appealing yet easy to get lost in). Scrivener is only slightly less inspiring (I like being able to set my writing color backgrounds), and less customizable, but much more accessible, providing a bird's eye view of your entire manuscript and research all at one time, and can be used for pretty much anything LSB can do, except mindmapping. I wrote most of my novel in works (on a PS1, no less)/word/wordpad, filled in most of the gaps in Liquid Story Binder, and am polishing/finishing in Scrivener. (OneNote is better for scrapbooking than anything else; there is no good way to write finished looking pages in it.)


I'm doing NanoWrimo, and I'm something of a rebel, because I'm using nanowrimo to attempt to finish my novel (so, unless I write 50,000 new words this month--which I am dubious will happen--I won't have my word count (around 75,000, I anticipate, whenever it's done) processed and verified on the site at the end of November).

themes I'm working with

Child vs. Adult

Child as ecstatic -- immersed in surroundings, adults as ennui--wrapped up in self and image and projecton

Morality vs. Ethics which subthemes into Love vs. Hypocrisy
sex vs. love (extremely subtle)
Man vs. Wild

Woman/Child/Girl as wildness
Man/Adult/Scientist as civilization, rationality

Animal vs. Human

Human vs. Humane

sustainablity vs. deep ecology

language vs. meaning

profit vs. charity (subtle)

male "vs" female (subtle on this)

overall message - Wildness needs to be rescuscitated

Sustainability vs. Deep Ecology

One of the most horrifying things I ever read while researching tigers was a sentence or two in "How the Tiger Lost Its Stripes" about an environmentalist who was arguing that zoos needed more tiger cubs to attract more tourist attention and more money for the plight of wild tigers. I was fourteen when I was reading the book, and more tiger cubs sounded fabulous, until this person explained that they would have to be euthanized after they got old enough the public wouldn't enjoy them anymore, because there wouldn't be any space for more grown tigers to live. I looked up the word euthanize just to make sure it meant what I thought. Basically he was in favor of murdering tiger cubs to keep the zoo system, and conservation, rich. In my naive little child's brain, this seemed to me to defeat the entire purpose of conservation. We love tigers ultimately because they have soul.


Anyway, this was one of the issues that was burning in my brain when I started work on my novel. I'm getting to the part of the draft where I have to address some of these issues and I hope I can do it while at the same time staying entertaining. I'm telling myself that the tiger--and endangered species in general--need all the help they can get from as many sources as possible, and novels have often been an instigator to inspire social change.

Conservation has to be about preserving individual animals, not just species, and not just individual species but our world, or the whole movement is a farce and more about sustaining dollars than sustaining wildlife. Preserving animals can't be all about finding ways to make a profit off of them. We have to learn to see the profit of animals as the profit of ourselves.

At heart, I'm kind of a deep ecologist here. When I was five years old, my mom used to tell me everything in the universe was alive--just in its own way. Even the molecules in rocks had energy, she said, they were just vibrating on a different level. Science seems to be confirming she was right. As science progresses, we are learning that our very nature is embedded in the cosmos. Self organizing--birthing, dying, self recreating--systems occur on all levels, from the chemical to the galactic. Tap an electron in your shoe and you could disturb an entangled electron in the heart of some strange creature in Andromeda. Science in and of itself cannot breed compassion, but if we look deeper, we realize that selfish genes isn't the full story. Our compassion, our virtue, and our sense of Love is not bred into us from some unnatural societal source outside of us but rather totally natural, part of the force driving evolution, a deep part of the interconnected framework of who we are.

As we come to see ourselves in this entangled weblike framework, where a map of our brain cells and the intergalactic web coincide and reveal a greater symmetry than any one of us could know in illusory isolation, we begin to realize the folly--the sheer insanity--of environmental exploitation, which is no more or less ridiculous than the gumption of a cancer cell who wishes to achieve immortality at the expense of the universe it inhabits. Yes we must sustain, but at a deeper level we must cooperate, interrelate, and realize we are all sailors on the same darn boat, and the rules of this ship were written and evolving long before any of us come onto the scene. Understanding nature and working with it, rather than against it or by exploitation, are the only ways we can save species and ourselves.

I've wondered off the beaten track, but back to making money off of tiger cub murder:
if we lose our very humanity, the species can't be too far behind.

Tigers and villagers and relocation, oh my...

http://hotnhitnews.com/Out_of_the_green_into_the_dust_Tiger_protection_Maoists_n_forest_rights_Jenabil_Story_989_10059.htm

Conservation is complicated.

Reductionism vs. Emergence ... (full article evolving soon...)

When you're writing, don't think like a reductionist.

A novel is an *emergent system.*

It's more than the sum of its parts, and sometimes it evolves unexpectedly....

OmmWriter. Wow.

http://www.ommwriter.com/

It's free and very weird and very cool. The idea is to provide you with a distraction free, meditative writing environment. If you use a mac you should definitely try this. It's definitely the first time I was tempted to use a word processor ad as a meditation background.



P.S. Annnnd....if you're like me and having trouble waiting for the Windows version to come out...check out this clone: http://www.creawriter.com/ There is a free version and a donor version. The donor version (which costs around $7 US dollars) is the same basic idea as OmmWriter. The free version isn't quite as nice (the killer thing for me are those awesome keyboard sounds, which are free with OmmWriter but CreaWriter makes you pay for).