NaNoWriMo: an excuse to write

Many thanks to New Jersey author and BHPL blog contributor Robert J. Daniher for this post about National Novel Writing Month.

Attention wannabe novelists! November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month; a push encouraging people to write a 50,000 word rough draft throughout the month. The idea is to write around 1,600 words a day. It can be a difficult undertaking but, also a tremendously exciting one. Imagine the sense of pride in completing a novel in 30 days.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “I’ve got a house to clean, a job to go to. There’s no time to write.” But, even the most accomplished novelists had a day job with responsibilities when they first put pen to paper. And if they could make the time, so can you. The best part of NaNoWriMo is that it’s strictly up to you how you proceed with the challenge. There’s no prize for winning and no punishment for losing. It simply encourages you to write every day. Trying to write 1,600 words a day will certainly park your rear in a chair for at least 30 minutes. If you’re only able to put down 200 words in one sitting, it’s 200 more than you did the day before. And that’s an accomplishment. If you carve out 30 minutes a day; as soon as you wake up in the morning or just before you go to bed, by the end of the month writing will become a habit in your life. And after a few weeks, your 200 words a day might become 2,000 words day.

So what if you only write a few thousand words by the end of the month instead of 50,000. That’s still more than you would have written had you not challenged yourself. Just taking that first step is a chance to embark on a journey you always wanted to, and it might be a defining moment in your writing career.

Robert J. Daniher


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Related websites: National Novel Writing Month http://www.nanowrimo.org/

College on a CD

Rainy fall days like this remind me of the beginning of the semester in college, when you poured over the course catalog (do they even still print those anymore?) dreaming of what classes you'd take. In that spirit I offer you BHPL's "course catalog" of Teaching Company courses that the library owns on CD. It's like college, but without the tests and papers. Each lecture is only half an hour and is taught by professors selected by the Teaching Company for their "award-winning teaching abilities, their profound insights into their respective fields and their ability to instill in students the sheer joy of learning." Hmm, what to pick first? Broadway musicals, or the joy of science? Shakespeare, or Books that made history?

Philosophy
Argumentation: the study of effective reasoning
The great ideas of philosophy
Great minds of the Western intellectual tradition
No excuses : existentialism & the meaning of life
Philosophy as a guide to living

History
American ideals : founding a "Republic of Virtue"
The Age of Henry VIII
Between the rivers.: the history of ancient Mesopotamia
Books that have made history : books that can change your life
Churchill
The Era of the Crusades
European thought and culture in the 19th century
Famous Greeks.
Famous Romans.
From Yao to Mao : 5000 years of Chinese history
Great battles of the ancient world
Great pharaohs of ancient Egypt
The history of ancient Rome
A history of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts
A history of freedom
The history of the United States
The Italians before Italy : conflict and competition in the Mediterranean
King Arthur and chivalry
Medieval heroines in history and legend
Mr. Lincoln: the life of Abraham Lincoln
The Peloponnesian War
Rome and the barbarians
The United States and the Middle East, 1914 to 9/11
The Vikings
The wisdom of history
The world of Byzantium
World War I, the "Great War"

Religion
St. Augustine's confessions
The book of Genesis
Great figures of the New Testament
Great figures of the Old Testament
Great World Religions. Buddhism
Great world religions. Christianity
Great world religions. Hinduism
Great world religions. Islam
Great world religions. Judaism
Introduction to Judaism
Jewish intellectual history: 16th to 20th century
The story of the Bible.

Music
Beethoven's piano sonatas
Concert masterworks
The concerto
Great American music : Broadway musicals
Great masters. Brahms, his life & music
Great masters. Haydn, his life & music
Great masters. Liszt, his life & music
Great masters. Mahler, his life & music
Great masters. Mozart, his life & music
Great masters. Robert & Clara Schumann, their lives and music
Great masters. Shostakovich, his life & music
Great masters. Stravinsky, his life & music
Great masters. Tchaikovsky, his life & music
How to listen to & understand great music
How to listen to and understand opera
The operas of Mozart
The symphonies of Beethoven
The symphony
Understanding the fundamentals of music

Science
Biological anthropology : an evolutionary perspective
Biology : the science of life
Earth's changing climate
Einstein's relativity and the quantum revolution : modern physics for non-scientists
The history of science: 1700-1900
History of science : antiquity to 1700
The joy of science
Science in the twentieth century: a social-intellectual survey
The theory of evolution : a history of controversy

Literature
Classics of American literature
Classics of Russian literature
The English novel
How to read and understand poetry
The life and writings of C. S. Lewis
The lives and works of the English Romantic poets
Machiavelli in context
Masterpieces of short fiction
Shakespeare: the word and the action
William Shakespeare : comedies, histories, and tragedies

Linguistics
A history of the English language
The story of human language

If you'd like to take a course with assignments and interaction with your professor and classmates, try Universal Class, which offers continuing ed classes in over 500 topics. Go to bhplnj.org and click Remote Databases to get to Universal Class.

D.I.Y. Friday

Browsing the non-fiction shelves turned up these three do it yourself (D.I.Y.) crafts books.

Sue Havens' Make Your Own Toys, sew soft bears, bunnies, monkey, puppies and more! makes me remember the sock monkeys of my childhood. You could make one of the Simple Gifts, 50 Little Luxuries to craft, sew, cook & knit by Jennifer Worick in time for the holidays. Make it Wild! 101 things to make and do outdoors by Fiona Danks and Jo Schofield includes projects for ice lanterns, tie dying, go cars, natural paints and more.

Related websites:

A personal favorite of mine: The Crappy Crafters Be sure to leave comments about your own 'interesting' crafting attempts.
Or if you try to make some crappy crafts and make an awful mess instead, just post it on or read about others at CraftFail the brainchild, or maybe evil stepcraftingchild, of Heather Mann, creator of Dollar Store Crafts.

OK, blogophiles, you've got the whole weekend, get crafting or just lie on the sofa and peruse these and other arts and crafts books from BHPL. I know what my plan is.

PS: if you really have time to kill, Google 'sock monkey' and you will be amazed at the cult of sock monkeys that exists on the internet. http://www.sockmonkey.net/

OK, that's all, folks. Happy Crafting!

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Little Bee, published as The Other Hand in the U.K., tells the story of Sarah, an English fashion magazine editor, and Little Bee, a refugee from Nigeria, whose lives collide on a beach in Africa. Sarah, married to Andrew, a foreign affairs journalist, is bored with her upper middle class life, bored with her husband,  and feels guilty about the affair she has been having with Lawrence, a civil servant hack from the Home Office. So Sarah proposes an exotic vacation to Nigeria, a completely arbitrary choice made mostly because she received free tickets to go there and because she fancies herself as someone who does daring and different things while on vacation.
A quick Google search finds the October 19, 2010 U.S. State Department travel alert advising that non-essential travel to Nigeria is not recommended:  "Violent crime committed by individuals and gangs, as well as by persons wearing police and military uniforms, remains a problem throughout the country." However, Sarah did not "Google" Nigeria and seems unaware of the dangers; she thinks a trip will heal her marriage. The pivotal event of the book occurs when Sarah and her husband have ventured out of the safe hotel compound to the beach where they encounter soldiers searching for two girls who have witnessed atrocities related to the destruction of their family and home because there is oil beneath the ground of their village. The reader learns that violence and corruption arising from the oil-based economy have plagued the country , even though officially Nigeria is regarded as a relatively democratic and thriving African nation.
The soldiers on the beach demand that Andrew cut off a finger with their machete in order to save the girls. What would you do? Andrew declines the bargain, Sarah chops off her own finger and the soldiers march  off with the girls anyway. Two years later, the younger sister, Little Bee, shows up at Andrew and Sarah's home outside London.
The story is told in the alternating voice of Little Bee and Sarah and the truth, or details, of that day on the beach is gradually revealed, as is the story of the two horrifying years Little Bee spent in a British detention center for refugees. The reader learns about the awful conditions in these centers filled with desperate people suffering from post-traumatic shock.
The story of Little Bee sets up so many moral dilemmas that exist in the relationship between wealthy countries and the developing world and how those moral choices can play out between individuals that this book is a very good choice for a reading group to discuss.
To learn more about the problems caused by oil drilling in Nigeria, author Chris Cleave's website  links to sites that show the human and ecological cost of oil exploration. Cleave recommends the website, The Global Detention Project for further study of the plight of international refugees.
Despite its serious subject matter, the book Little Bee does not take a scolding, moralistic tone and there is humor in the irony of the situations the characters find themselves in.

Revolution '67

In July of 1967, 26 citizens of Newark died after the police beating of John Smith, a black cab driver, ignited 6 days of rioting. It was one of the most deadly racial disturbances on a per capita basis in U.S. history. On Tuesday, October 26 at 6:30 p.m., BHPL will screen an award-winning documentary, Revolution '67, which not only reconstructs the riots but goes back into Newark's history to discover its roots. Revolution '67 was selected for the PBS documentary series P.O.V. and attracted more than a million TV viewers when it aired earlier this year.
From the POV site:

Revolution ‘67 reveals how the disturbances began as spontaneous revolts against poverty and police brutality and ended as fateful milestones in America's struggles over race and economic justice. Voices from across the spectrum — activists Tom Hayden and Amiri Baraka, journalist Bob Herbert, Mayor Sharpe James, and other officials, National Guardsmen and Newark citizens — recall lessons as hard-earned then as they have been easy to neglect since.

Revolution '67's filmmakers, Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno, will attend the screening at BHPL. Dr. Mark Krasovic, the Geraldine R. Dodge Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers-Newark's Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience, will lead a public discussion afterward. This program is funded by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, through its series "Justice: a Dialogue Through Film."

This program is free and open to all. Registration is recommended. Light refreshments will be served.

UPDATE: The discussion of Revolution '67 at BHPL was filmed by HomeTowne TV (channel 36). We're at minute 22.