It’s almost NaNoWriMo Eve, boys and girls! And what does that mean? It means Linda has to get ready to write another novel during November as part of the annual self-flagellation ritual known as National Novel Writing Month! Yay!
This year’s novel will be a romantic comedy calledHit the Road, Jack! I’ve been doing a lot of planning for this novel…
Let’s see…
Basic plot points logged in the Plottr software… check!
Basic character sketches typed into Scrivener… check!
Book cover done and ready to use… check!
Scary horror movie reruns on repeat all through October… check!
Massive amounts of Halloween candy consumed until I want to throw up… che—WAIT! NO! I’m not ready!
I knew I was forgetting something! The chocolate! But I can solve this dire situation in plenty of time for NaNoWriMo Eve, thanks to socially distanced grocery pickup and a little bit of will power (so I don’t eat all the candy before the little brats—I mean, the cute kids in adorable costumes—get here next week).
Sure, they’re kinda cute, and sure, I’m gonna have bowls of candy ready for them, even if their costumes are just unwashed pajama pants and dirty, used N-95 masks, but they’re not getting my stash of Fun Size Hershey’s Miniatures!
Everybody knows that—after cheap liquor and cigarettes—chocolate and coffee are both classic novelist fuel. (Kinda like rocket fuel, only better tasting.)
So, once I’ve got my rocket fuel here alongside me, and once the little brats—I mean, cute little trick-or-treaters—are done nibbling away at my candy stash, I’ll be ready for NaNoWriMo 2020.
Because, after the year we’ve all had, what could go wrong? I figure sitting at a typewriter, hooking myself up to a coffee drip I.V., and inhaling chocolate for a month is a sort of mirror of the past six months anyway.
I hesitate to post a review because I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for anyone who decides to give it a try. I found out about the Secret Library through an ad on Facebook and purchased two event tickets—one for myself and one for my son and his wife for their anniversary. Chris, Courtney, and I have a long history of playing board games together—including the aforementioned Clue—but we’ve missed out on a lot of gaming sessions this year. Years ago I played Clue with all four of my kids, and we each used a spiralbound notebook to take notes. Chris’s notes were the scariest because of his insane level of detail… and he always won, so we stopped playing after a while because the rest of us had learned our lesson.
Chris could have used a spreadsheet with details like this!
Anyway, this Secret Library, this virtual live-action board game seemed like the perfect substitute in these weird times. So, at 8:00 tonight, we all went in, each from our own house. The game allows a bunch of people on one screen/ticket, but I paid for two screens because Chris and I live 50 miles apart.
Kudos to the bunch of writers and actors who pulled this event together. (There are a bunch more time slots available in the upcoming weeks… and I gotta stop using the word “bunch” or you’ll think I’m bananas. And yes, I did that on purpose just now. I have no social life to speak of.) The writers and actors had to find a way to make their story interactive, interesting, and difficult without being vexing, especially since they’d have no idea what sort of people would be showing up on their screens.
You know, people like my son, who’s a web coder and knows his stuff. And also people like me, who couldn’t get her microphone to work properly for half the game, which was a source of amusement to some of the actors. (I caught a lot of ribbing from the Gardener, in particular.) Honest, I’m not a tech idiot. I’m a geek wannabe—I’ve been online since 1987, pre-Windows—but my microphone just wouldn’t cooperate. No, seriously. Quit laughing.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the Secret Library. Here’s an instructional screenshot we got not long before the game began:
The whole experience was a delightful and clever use of the technology available to us, at a time when actors can’t perform live and stage writers can’t get their work performed anywhere. Factoring in the fact that this is a relatively new use of these forms of tech, I applaud everyone involved for thinking outside the box to provide more than 90 minutes of fun, distracting entertainment. If you buy a ticket, and read the materials provided, and show up early to test your tech (which I totally did—honest! It wasn’t my fault!), you’ll quickly move beyond the tech and find yourself immersed in the story and the ongoing interaction with everyone around you, both actors and fellow participants.
Now that someone’s starting to test the boundaries of how to use interactive tech and webcams, I look forward to more such stories from creative minds like these guys. I hope I can find more experiences like this in the near future.
If you’re curious about the Secret Library and want to know more, try the link, or contact me at linda@lindaau.com. They gave us a discount code we can pass along to our friends, even the ones who tease me about my inability to get my microphone to work for the first hour.
Honestly, it wasn’t my fault. I tried a bunch of things to fix it. A bunch…
My two-year-old grandson, affectionately known as King Arthur, came to stay with us this past weekend. He’s at that fun age where he can finally communicate his wants and needs verbally (instead of simply grunting or pointing), and in most cases I can now figure out what he’s saying.
The “toy bomb” detonated within five minutes of his showing up. I’m still not sure why I purchased a set of a bajillion wooden blocks and a set of a gazillion pieces of plastic food, but they were all dumped out and spread across the living room floor as soon as the weekend started. Walking around the house for the next two days was like walking through a minefield.
But King Arthur has always been a cheerful, delightful kid, so I spent a lot of time down on the floor with him playing with those blocks and all that plastic food (which looks better than most of my actual cooking). When my back and my knees announced that enough was enough, I quietly hoisted myself up and watched him continue to play from the safety and comfort of the couch or my little recliner.
What struck me this past weekend was that even a two-year-old with limited vocabulary and verbal skills is drawn to telling stories. I caught him recreating The Three Little Pigs, with the toy basket and the block basket as “houses” he blew over as the Big Bad Wolf. The story starts about halfway into this minute:
He also told himself completely unique stories, with characters he moved around, anthropomorphic trucks and trains, and lots of smashing and crashes along the way (with proper toddler sound effects).
At the time I didn’t think much of this, but I’ve been marveling at it all week since he left. If you’re a fiction writer who wonders if storytelling has any relevance anymore—in this world of anger, divisiveness, disease, and turmoil—let me assure you: YES, YOUR STORIES MATTER. And they’re NECESSARY.
How do I know this now? Because one of the first things a child learns as they come into language skills is HOW TO TELL A STORY. I realized this weekend that a lot of what a two-year-old does when left to his own devices is to tell himself stories. Not just ones he’s heard, such as The Three Little Pigs, but ones he makes up himself.
Let that sink in. This is a human being who has only been in the world for two years. He’s had to learn how to feed himself, how to move himself around, how to help Mommy and Daddy dress him and change him, how to understand and also speak words and sentences (thereby learning how to understand ideas). He’s had to learn the physics of almost every move he makes. He’s had to learn EVERYTHING.
And yet, within two years of his arrival in Life, he’s already spending a good amount of time making up fictional stories.
Nobody told him to do this. Nobody coached him that this might be a good use of his playtime. He decided on his own to sit in my living room and tell himself stories.
I’m convinced that stories are built into our DNA, that we need them. And frankly, if there was ever a year and a time when we need the comfort of storytelling, THIS is it.
So, tell your stories. You’ve probably been doing it since you were a toddler. And right about now, we could all use a few good stories to get us through.
