YOUR URGENT HELP IS NEEDED
NAFADOYBIMSCOM, aka NAtional Finish A Draft Of Your Book I Mean Seriously Come On Month, is nearly half over. And yet I am not nearly halfway done finishing a draft of my book.
Clearly, there is no time to blog. So here's what we're going to do:
I would like to ask you, the loyal readers of the sparksflyup blog, to do my blogging for me over the next few days. How will you do this? Why, you will use the comments section of this blog entry to 1. link to interesting things, and 2. make jokes that aren't all that funny, and 3. complain about how hard writing is, and 4. talk about how much you like your wife, and all the other things that are usually contained in regular sparksflyup blog entries.
Thanks for your assistance.
posted by John Green @ Monday, November 13, 2006
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Can we also complain about our teeth?
I'm doing lowly old NaNoWriMo (I know, nowhere near as cool as, erm, that other thing) and I just gave myself Looking for Alaska and Abundance of Katherines as an early finishing present. Amazon tells me they will be arriving around the time November is through, so here's hoping they behave themselves and arrive when I will again have time to read!
Oh John, I'm falling off the NAFADOYBIMSCOM bandwagon. I'm chugging along, but I might not make it!
Congratulations on your NY Times review. Very, very wonderful, as always!!!
You go, boy!!!
:-)
Yaaaaay. This is the moment I've been waiting for. I'll use it as my trial run for my world domination plan. I get to take over John Green's blog!
NAFADOYBIMSCOM is so freakin' impossible that I never started. I know. I'm a failure. A bad excuse for a human being. But what can I say? I'm a lazy ass. I could say, "I have my end of year exams in a week!" But who I am kidding. It's not like I'm studying for them.
Now, I'm from New Zealand, so as well as having to order An Abundance of Katherines from the States (for insane amounts of money - it's worth it though), I also have never experienced life in ... New York. Luckily, a wonderful website exists to bring a little of New York to my computer screen! You can find it at www.overheardinnewyork.com
and if you don't love it like I do ...
I don't really want to hear it.
Coz I'm like, obsessed with my own opinions and stuff.
And here's a shout out to my lovely Nicotine: she's not my wife, however we got a divorce this one time. So naturally I like her heeeaaaps.
It isn't on the list of approved topics, but I think John Green would approve. USA Today lists 3 bluegrass albums in the review section. The thing that struck me is that bluegrass musician must be as hard a life as blues guitarist, one album has a singer with muscular dystrophy and another contains a blind fiddler.
Check it out here: http://blogs.usatoday.com/listenup/2006/11/this_weeks_revi_1.html
Also writing IS hard.
Meeting any of the deadlines for my Creative Writing class is ridiculously hard. Which making the writing part even harder. I almost never have time to set against and write. Plus I don't really understand the whole short story genre? Anyone have any insight? If I have a story to tell, I'm going to keep going until it's finished, but the fact that I have to write a short story makes it so that I just underdevelop everything. And it's short. But bad. Sigh...
How was that?
Not up to John Green wittiness, but I really am confused by the whole short story genre!
Short stories. I love them. It's not about an entire story for me, it's about one moment that gives insight into a person's entire life. Mostly the reader has to do the work to figure out what's happened, you just lead the way. It's a challenge, definitely, but it's fun. I've written a story where actual time was probably five minutes, where nothing happens but a guy in a bar watches at a couple sitting at a table.
It can work.
Link to interesting things, huh? OK, John, prepare to meet your new internet obsession:
Ms. Dewey
She's kind of like a sassy librarian for the internet. Give 'er a whirl.
Hi there,
This is also in response to your request for blog fodder and discussion, and not addressed to any particular posting...
I have a general question, for you (and for anyone in the YA field, I guess) regarding your take on the "chick-lit" label and phenomenon.
Because you've written novels that allow quite a bit of focus for relationships, and for romantic relationships in particular... do you think that if you were a woman, and your central protagonists were girls, that your work would have been classified as chick-lit? I just wonder if, in your experience, you think that being a male author has let you escape the pressures of that label... and all that goes with it? Or, alternatively, have you ever felt a pressure NOT to concentrate so heavily on relationships-- that this was somehow a lesser pursuit? Or... even that, because of your gender, reviewers might tend to focus more on your novels' larger themes and ideas, and neglect those relationships? (Not, of course, that themes and ideas would necessarily be separate from character and the ways in which characters relate.)
These are all just wonderings and musings... arising not just from your work, but from the dynamics of the YA market as a whole... dynamics which are also
certainly present in the rest of the publishing industry, but which seem to take on a certain slant in the world of children's literature...
Anyway-- I realize that this is a potentially hot-button question... but was more just curious to get your take on it (or anyone else's!)
Thanks,
Sarah
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