BLUE ULBE BLUE ULBE BLUE ULBE

All right, all right, alright, orrite, er, bleaurgh, what am i supposed to say now?  Errrmmm...
Words.  Yep, more words, issuing forth from the plastic clatteration which will shortly settle down into something less like automatic writing.

Ooh, i know!  Cliff Richard, who has dead eyes apparently, once made an LP called "Good News".  Its cover looks like this:

http://www.chartstats.com/art.php?release=36540

That reminds me of NaNoWriMo and people's peculiar tendency to find it hard to write.  Writing is easy, particularly with a word processor or a computer.  For instance, i can do this:

Good News good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news  good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news  good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news good news .

However, the quality of my output there is not high, and this is the problem.  I once filled two pages of an exercise book with the words "BLUE ULBE" repeated over and over again in a sort of chessboard pattern.  That was easy but time-consuming.  Nowadays, things like that are not time-consuming, though presumably they will once again become time consuming what with the end of the world coming up an' all.

People want quality though.  They prefer writing not to suck, and this is my problem.  I never know if anything i do is good or bad, not just in writing but in all situations.  It is, however, particularly relevant to my attempts to write because i can't stop myself.  Some famous sculptor once said that it was easy to sculpt, say, Mercury out of a block of stone.  It just involved removing all the bits which look unlike him.  In a similar way, good writing is easy.  You just write stuff which isn't bad, or write anything at all and remove the bad bits.  How is this relevant?

Well, it might be relevant because it appears to descend very rapidly into nonsense to many of today's ears, unless the object between them happens to have a degree in English, has recently emerged from a time machine, or maybe if the ears are deaf.  Come to think of it, even the first bit probably sounds like nonsense to most ears, partly because those organs are usually placed elsewhere than on either side of an Anglophone human brain.  They're more likely to be on the shins of a cricket, the head of a frog or in other places rather unpromising to comprehension.  On the other hand, they might be quite useful to small animals as a signal that a large, dangerous animal is in the vicinity, and those same ears might be quite useful to prove that when a tree falls in a forest, lots of tiny ears respond to the sound, and maybe everything is a tiny ear, so there's no such thing as a tree falling in a forest when unheard and therefore that it always makes a sound unless that forest is for some reason on a small planet orbiting Delta Pavonis which has lost its atmosphere or something.

Meanwhile, here is an edifying document of unknown quality:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/115310503/blueulbe

And then of course, there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HypmW4Yd7SY

and this:

Bye.

Grinding to a halt - or not

NaNoWriMo, in which i have not participate this year, is about to end.  I decided to bookend it with two videos.  The first is here:

The second will appear tomorrow morning, and that's what this entry's really about.

I was thinking about the nature of this blog this morning, after this entry on publicising blogs.  It has changed from a place to stick rants to a place to stick ranting videos.  As she points out, you can make a blog private, but as i also point out, i have pen and paper for that.  So why is this here?  I suppose that question is more about cause than reason.

The main reason this has been here in the past is that i wanted to give people the option not to see my rants.  In order to remove that annoyance, i've done what i sometimes do on Facebook - created a place where i can rant away to my heart's content safe in the knowledge that it will never be read.  The questions arise, however, of why this is public, and why this is not a piece of paper. if it isn't.  The answer is that, like my wife, i am afflicted with hyperlexia.

As i sit here doodling on this keyboard, Liz sits behind me at the table with a hand possessed by a demon, writing poetry and the like in a notebook, which is a considerably saner approach than mine.  My own approach is to sit here in a stupor with both hands incessantly clattering the plastic, and it's simply easier to do that on a blog than on paper because paper needs to be bought, we often run out of pens, i sometimes break pens - it's a time-honoured tradition that, actually, going back to the early '70s - and i have to get up and find a wad of paper and a working bic, or make some ink for the quill.  Hence this blog.

Now you could be forgiven for asking why i can't just not write.  Sadly this is unfeasible.  I write anyway, in one way or another.  The result of stopping this blog would be me posting walls of text on other bits of the web and wallpapers of text on this house.  It won't stop.

This is called hypergraphia.  It's a recognised condition.  I see it as something like having a sebaceous cyst or an abscess, incessantly producing a secretion or exudate which i proceed to smear over all available surfaces like some kind of dirty protest, except it's not a protest so much as a compulsion.  It's got to go somewhere.

So is it a problem?  Well, yes.  One of the issues is that just as i cannot evaluate anything else, i cannot evaluate what i write.  I err on the side of caution by assuming it's all rubbish.  I certainly hope it is.  If it isn't, it confers some kind of responsibility on me to filter out the crap, and i probably have more important things to do in my life.

One thing it isn't is an illness.  It's one of the several things which is a sign that i have abnormal temporal lobes, along with my paraphilia and religiousness.  However, abnormal is not the same as pathological, and it's tempting to seek identity and absolve oneself of responsibility through medicalisation.  Therefore i eschew this route - it lets me off the hook too easily.  What i am in fact doing here is wasting my time, and since all i would do if i switched activities would be to waste my time in a different way i don't feel bad about that.  Actually i do, but - well, i still feel the compulsion.

Back to NaNoWriMo.  NaNoWriMo is, as i have said, an annual novel-writing activity which takes place in November each year where authors seek to write a book in a month.  Said book aims to have something like five or six myriad words - i can't recall the exact figure.  I did it last year or the year before, and obviously i found it easy.  Or rather, i found it fiendishly difficult, but for the opposite reasons than you might expect.  It is hugely difficult for me to write only 60 000 words in a month.  As a result, i proposed NaNoNOWriMo, which is the attempt to shorten one's output by 60 000 words.  More specifically, and i think this has morphed a bit from the original notion, you take something you've written and you make it sixty thousand words shorter.  This seems to be a much more laudable aim than lengthening it.  Douglas Adams was good at this, which is why he missed deadlines - he was polishing and honing his text, which usually made it shorter.  Also, i think it was Mark Twain who once apologised for the length of something he wrote because he hadn't had time to make it short.

As it happens, although i'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo, it is the case that i will self-publish a book on 30th November, namely 'Here Be Dragons'.  I'm not happy with it but the deadline is 30th November 2012, so i have to publish it then.  Apart from problems with the text, it hasn't got enough illustrations, which is a bit of a problem for a picture book.  Nonetheless, the deadline is when it is and unlike Douglas Adams i do not miss deadlines, so unfortunately that seems to be it.  I urge "you all", oh spambots, not to buy it.  There will be another one along in a minute which will be much better.

Oh, and here's today's video, which is a God one so probably best ignored too:

NaNoWriMo

Every November, some people get together for mutual support and encouragement online and in person in a project to write a 50 000-word novel in a month.  This is called NaNoWriMo and it's here:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

At the end of the month, you get a certificate recognising that you've done it and in some places there are local groups who have a get-together to share their success and celebrate it.  I did it last year, when i wrote a  novel called 'Seven Stories', which took inspiration from 'Walking On Glass' to tell seven stories with no apparent connection which were woven together at the end.  I'm not doing it this year because i'm too busy writing my own projects.  I waffle a bit more about NaNoWriMo and self-publishing here and in the text underneath it:

(YouTube seems to be really committed to making my thumbnails as awful as possible).

Therefore, if you want to read more about that, go and watch the video.

I have something else to say really, which i briefly touch on in the video:  NaNoWriMo seems to address the opposite problem to mine.  My difficulty is brevity.  I have no problem at all writing 50 000 words a month, although writing 50 000 words of good stuff is imponderable because i have no idea what would make it good or bad (see http://homeedandherbs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/why-i-dont-read-proper-books.html for more details).  Leaving that aside, my version of NaNoWriMo is NaNONoWriMo - write 50 000 words fewer for a month.  That's a little facetious though:  what i mean is, shorten what i've written by 50 000 words.

I am pretty sure my writing falls into the category of hypergraphia, and i sometimes think Liz's has done so as well on occasion.  Hypergraphia is a nicely medicalising word which means a compulsion to write.  Since it's associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, that makes it more likely.  My problem is not fluency but achieving brevity and stopping myself from writing.  Writer's block does happen to me but it manifests itself as writing something other than what i'm aiming to write, not being reluctant or unable to write.  I go off-topic rather than stop writing, but i write more off-topic than i would've on what i'm supposed to be writing.  It would be interesting to know what subjects are common in hypergraphia because of other associations with temporal lobe epilepsy.