The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": NaNoWriMo and Ganguros

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

NaNoWriMo and Ganguros

I just signed up for the NaNoWriMo even though I'm not really sure of the rules yet. I want to try to write an adult novel and I figured it might be fun to do. I know you can't have started the manuscript yet, except maybe mentally. Of course I don't have a whole lot of time to devote to this, but I can try. It's really a way to force me not to agonize and just get stuff down on paper, and it might be fun to do it with other folks. I actually don't know anyone who writes adult books...maybe I will after this. And I think there are forums, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

In other exciting news, I am HAPPILY REVISING. Now that might seem like an oxymoron, but I can assure you, it's not. Usually, I approach revision with the same enthusiasm I approach a pile of ironing with, which is to say none.

I suffer through revision. I feel very, very sorry for myself and console myself with hidden stashes of chocolate (not Mars or Hershey's either, the good kind, from Europe) I work slowly. I consider abandoning writing and taking a full time job in a middle school where I force twelve year olds to circle the subject of sentences. I stop and start and stop again.

This time, I didn't take advice. I just went with what seemed right to me and it's coming out much, much better than I thought. It may not be perfect, but I think confidence in actually listening to yourself is a writing skill that is largely ignored.

I'm always worried about craft, about having it sound exactly the way I intended it to, but if someone, even someone who doesn't write or doesn't read much, says, "Hey, have you ever thought of including Satan in that picture book?" I stop to consider that as an option.

This time, I just did what I thought would be better and it worked. You would think I would know that by now, but you know what they say (actually, I'm not sure what they say, but they must say something about learning things after the fact, I just don't know what it is)

And things just keep getting better and better. After several days of wondering how I went so woefully wrong as a parent that my daughter wants to go out as Snooki for Halloween, she has decided, instead, to be a Ganguro Girl. Apparently, she liked a specific cheetah print dress that Snooki has worn, and when the idea of wearing that wore off, she landed on the Ganguro Girl. After she showed me a picture - here are Ganguro Girls:

I got really worried that they were a certain class of working girl in Asian society that Emma may not realize. But they're not.

Apparently, researchers in Japanese studies think ganguro is a kind of fashion revenge against traditional Japanese society. I have no idea how she found out about it, but she does read fashion magazines. I am just really hoping they are not a form of the Japanese Snooki.

13 comments:

Bish Denham said...: Well, what with this mentorship with Angela I will be learning how to better evaluate my own work and that will help, I think, with my aversion to revising.

LOL on those ganguro girls. They look like overdone, overmade, Barbie dolls!; Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: I'd almost rather do anything than revise. But yeah, evaluating is key, and that's definitely a skill that can be learned.

And the ganguros - yeah, they do sort of look like that. They seem clownish to me, but I'll take them over anyone or anything from the Jersey Shore cast. (I think most people would...); Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
K.C. Shaw said...: The great thing about NaNo is that you can do whatever you like as long as you write 50,000 words during November. It's most fun if you start a brand-new project, but I plan to finish a project that's been languishing for a year. It's awfully fun!; Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: 50,000 words, you say? In 30 days? Wow. So some of it, maybe a lot of it, is going to be awful, but it will be written. I LIKE the sound of those last four words there: it will be written.

I hope it's fun, just wondering what the drop out rate is...; Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
Anonymous said...: Interesting fashions.

Happy revising.

I'm not ready to Nano yet.; Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
Marcia said...: Good luck with NaNo!

I'm half tempted to throw caution to the winds and sign up, even though my November calendar is positively insane. What with holidays and family events I'll have to strike 10 whole days already, and that doesn't include any ICL lessons, Thanksgiving prep, or Mom's medical. I dunno. I wish they'd do this in February.; Wednesday, 20 October, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: It took me a long time to be ready for Nano, Medeia, and I'm not really sure I am. I'm just going to try it.

I think they did that deliberately, Marcia. It's all the more fun with so many things going on in November (and for me, I have to start holiday shopping). I'm approaching it as an "I'll try" more than "I'll make it" kind of exercise.; Wednesday, 20 October, 2010
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Mary Witzl said...: I've been happily revising for over a month, but suddenly I'm stuck in a patch of mud and going nowhere. I'm trying to get my swing back, but it's tough.

Those ganguro girls a have been around for ages, but they're really in the limelight now. They used to hang out in Harujuku, in Tokyo, where people used to go just to watch kids do crazy things. I have some sympathy for them, knowing how rigid the Japanese school system is, and having taught a few, I know they're individuals in their own way. But they still look like horses' asses to me. If I had black hair, I'd never dream of bleaching it. And that white lipstick? Ewwwww.; Sunday, 24 October, 2010
Unknown said...: Good luck with NaNo! I'm looking forward to trying it out for size as well! I'm a little nervous but I am looking forward to succeeding.

What a bright young girl to come up with something so different. I love the pictures!; Sunday, 24 October, 2010
Nora MacFarlane said...: I love revision, it's the actual writing that's like sweating blood for me -but I'm a glutton for punishment.

Speaking of... I did Nanowrimo once. I didn't make the wordcount (I couldn't silence my inner editor), but I did get 27,000 new words. Even if you don't make the goal, you still come out ahead.

Good luck!; Monday, 25 October, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Yeah, revising is like that, Mary. You get this "swing" going (to steal your verb) then it, poof, vanishes sometimes.

I am not world traveled; I consider going to Brooklyn traveling, so I had never heard of ganguro girls. I really have no idea how Emma knows so much about them, but as long as they are just kids/teens and not anything more sinister, I can stand it for one day.

Everyone says Nano is worth it just to fight off that slowness and procrastination that plagues writing, Jen. So I'm going to try it for that.

And Emma is a sweet kid. Just the kind of kid that looks at me when I hand her a pair of socks and says, "Why are they the same? I never wear socks that match." Eccentric. I blame her father...

That's the EXACT reason I am trying Nano, Nora - to silence that pesky inner editor. She never shuts up, but she's going to have to for Nano. I want to practice just writing quickly for once. Should be fun.; Monday, 25 October, 2010
Jemi Fraser said...: I've never heard of the Ganguro Girls either! Good luck with nano - it's my 3rd year and it's fun :); Saturday, 06 November, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

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Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***