My Nano novel isn't failing badly enough.... yet

My nano novel Bakoun has been stalled for some time, as readers can see from my lack-of-progress meter. But that level of failure isn't good enough. If I'm going to fail, I want to do a good job of it! So I have the following plans:

1. Everything I have written so far is to be junked. Yes, there is a character or two I can keep--- well, one character, anyway. But all the actual word count is to be zeroed.

2. I'm changing the time in which the story is set. Well, actually, the story starts in the Victorian era and then goes to 1984, 1994, 2004 and so on until the actual near-future invasion starts. I'm thinking of setting the whole thing in the Victorian and or Edwardian era.

3. The setting gives me the chance to go all steampunky. Though anything I write could never be true steampunk. According to my sources (random internet sites) steampunk has to be correctly punk by being in rebellion against a prescribed list of things. I never rebel against the correct things in the correct manner.

4. My new plans require me to write up a brief timeline of Esperanto history, and of the eugenics/euthanasia movement. There are lots of cool quotes about the need for 'lethal chambers' which I can work in.

5. Another research requirement: I must throw together an outline of an alien invasion novel (Worldwar: In the Balance) so that I can see how a real writer handles a global story with multiple groups of characters, including alien ones.

6. The Korean characters I was planning to introduce will now be living in the American West, and running a Chinese restaurant (which serves Korean food, since Americans of the time can't tell the difference.)

7. There will be a boy named Alf from Linz, Austria who might be Hitler. There is a man who may be a time traveler who wants to kill him.

8. There will be robots. Big ones. And steampunky computers. Perhaps the result of alien technology being leaked? Perhaps also a steampunky 'blood-reader' machine that scans DNA?

9. Given these plans, by the end of NaNoWriMo, my word count should be around zero. Is it too early to think about National Novel Finishing Month???

Can you give a baby shower for a pregnant cat, part deux

Chachamaru, stolen kittens Jess and Tess, son Joel

I blogged about my cat Chachamaru several times before. The first one was entitled 'Can you give a baby shower for a pregnant cat?'

Today I brought Chachamaru in the house to spend the day with lonely house-kittens Kitten Jack, Gwen and Myfanwy. I'd had to remove the kittens' foster mother/thief Psychokitty as Psychokitty has health problems that her stolen babies don't need to deal with.

As I carried Chachamaru into the house, I noticed that she's pregnant. This is NOT okay! Outdoor cats are NOT supposed to get pregnant at this time of year!

I guess Chachamaru thinks she's owed some kittens because she had a litter of six this spring with no survivors. But she stole Sarah's 3 week old kittens Jess and Tess, and I thought she was fine with it. (Sarah's also the real mom of kittens Kitten Jack, Gwen, Myfanwy, and their brother Ianto, who passed away.)

Chachamaru must have been listening at the doors to those EWTN shows that talk about being open to life. I've tried to explain that this doesn't apply to unwed cats, but she doesn't buy it.

Alien invaders as a parasitic class

One thing we humans like to do when we are feeling uncharitable is to cast some group of people that we are NOT a part of in the role of a parasite class. It can be the parasitic rich people or the parasitic poor people or the parasitic telephone sanitizers. It's better to keep this as just talk because when you try to take action based on this viewpoint, you will end up like the old Soviet Union who essentially got rid of their parasitic class of telephone sanitizers and then died from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

But the idea of alien invaders as a parasitic class on the backs of the human race is quite a useful one. It certainly provides a possible motive for an alien race to go to the trouble and expense of conquering Earth.

Conquering aliens with an advanced enough technology to keep themselves in the saddle could live on Earth in vast numbers without having to trouble themselves with dirty jobs such as farming or factory work. Their entire workforce could consist of supervisors and military/police members--- higher status jobs, in Earth cultures at least.

Aliens desiring to create a slave-owning colony are a bit more logical than aliens here to ship food, mineral resources, or edible humans back home. The expense of the travel is likely to make such trade wholly unprofitable. But creating new colonies --- especially ones with a native population to do all the menial jobs--- is something that might be worth a great deal to an alien race.

Creating colonies might be something that alien races would do because it helps things at home--- the colonists and soldiers they ship off might be dissidents or potential dissidents, or the whole enterprise might prove stimulating to a stagnating culture.

In my (stalled) NaNo novel 'Bakoun', the aliens also have the motive that their current primary planet--- also a conquered world--- suffers from some problems. The natives of that world, after some thousand years of captivity, have rapidly falling birthrates, and are increasingly less efficient workers. In the experience of the Bakoun, this is an expected thing, and they have a cure--- conquering a fresh world. And the world that they have chosen is Earth.

While the aliens may plan to let the Earth folks do all the heavy lifting, one must be careful not to make them too much of a 'parasitic class'. In the real world, when one looks at things more closely, even a person who seemingly consumes resources without producing, such as a retired senior citizen, may be making highly valuable unsung contributions. Our future alien overlords, likewise, are going to be making some contributions to our society whether they want to or not.

Alien invaders might introduce beneficial advances in technology and medicine. They may end warfare and tribal fighting among humans, if only by giving humans a more tempting target than one another.

In addition, aliens may be more beneficial for some Earth cultures than others. In Harry Turtledove's Worldwar/Colonization series, the alien Race liberates the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto from the Nazis, becoming the Jews' liberators. The Race doesn't care much for the Nazis, however, and, among other things, nukes Berlin and other German cities just to show off their power. The result is that other humans reject the Jews for sucking up to the alien invaders, and make nice with the Nazis in the common cause of fighting the Race.

Question--- if you were writing an alien invasion story, in what way would the invaders be 'parasitic'? In what way would they be beneficial? Which human groups would suffer more under alien rule, and which ones might benefit?

La Sankta Biblio: My personal world mission apostolate (ministry)

Yesterday I started a new Facebook page, La Sankta Biblio. It's similar to Facebook pages like The Bible or Jesus Christ or Soldiers of Christ, only it's in the international language Esperanto.

The mission of La Sankta Biblio is to encourage study and reading of the Esperanto translation of the Bible by Esperanto speaking Christians and Jews, and to encourage international religious fellowship using Esperanto.

It is also an outreach to Esperanto speakers who would NOT normally touch a Bible or be receptive to what the Bible teaches, but take an interest in the Esperanto translation purely for cultural and linguistic reasons. (The Old Testament of the Esperanto Bible was translated by Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and has been used as an example of good language usage.) Can not God use this to touch a soul?

What I'd REALLY like is for all my blog readers to run out, buy an Esperanto Bible, spend a couple weeks to learn Esperanto, and volunteer to become co-admins of the page.

What I'll settle for is if a few kind souls would visit the new page, like it, perhaps even share it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To get an Esperanto Bible:

You can usually buy one through ELNA at their site:
http://www.esperanto-usa.org/

You can try Amazon.com
La Sankta Biblio [The Holy Bible In Esperanto]

Or you can read online:
Jesus Army Multilingual Online Bible
La Sankta Biblio on steloj.de

Nano 2011 - Novel stall, or losing sight of the goal?

My Nano novel is stalled, at least as far as true forward motion is involved, ever since I realized a chapter wasn't working in a way which would affect the other chapters.

The official Nano cure for that situation is to pretend you had already fixed it an move on. But what if you won't know exactly what the fix is until you actually make it?

The whole Nano thing is about piling on the word count, which is good for new writers to develop good writing work habits and learn to finish their projects.

But the goal is also to have a novel when you are done. Or at least most of one. I believe if you find yourself piling up random chapters, it is perfectly legit to junk some of them, to re-plan, to re-write, if it means that you come up with 20000 words of some one novel rather than 50000 words of scenes which will never make up one novel.

I realize that saying this might encourage some to re-write when they need to be pushing forward. If you have not tried writing a novel before, I'd say DON'T re-write, just push ahead until you meet the word count goal.

But if you are a person who has written before and has a certain degree of experience with how your own writing self works, I'd say feel free to do some needed re-writing--- IF that re-writing is the re-visioning of a key point of the novel and not just re-arranging the novel. (Yes, I know I have an over-active hyphen this morning.)

My novel Bakoun is based on a set of ideas that became my Nano 2005 novel Viridian (uncompleted). It's gone through many changes of characters--- it's more of an idea story than a character story.

I guess it was inspired by the Worldwar/Colonization series by Harry Turtledove. He has his aliens invade in the midst of World War 2. In his story, the humans succeed in standing up to the aliens (but not driving them off Earth) because the humans are more innovative and scientific progress comes more quickly to us, while the Race (the aliens) moves forward at a glacially slow pace.

I was inspired to a story in which the human advantage is not in technology development, but in language. Humans have many languages, and can continue to learn new languages throughout their lifespan. The Bakoun (aliens) can learn language only during an imprinting period in infancy and early childhood. It IS possible for a Bakoun child to be imprinted with two languages, the Bakoun language and an Earth language, but that increases the risk that the child will not learn any language at all (and be killed as defective). Adult Bakoun can learn to say personal names derived from other languages, and perhaps laboriously memorize one or two simple words, but they can never get to a point where they can construct sentences in the language. A nice contrast to all those fictional aliens that can learn Earth languages in twenty minutes or less.

So, my goal for today's Nano work is more to make a simple road map of some of the early chapters, add a few needed chapters and perhaps junk a few others.

Another goal involves my chapter headings. Each chapter begins with a Bible verse in Esperanto, and ends with a repetition of the verse, the English versions, and translations of the key Esperanto words involved. Yes, this is a plan that only a few language geeks could love.

My problem with it is that I wanted the verses to be both faintly relevant to the chapters, and progressive--- that is, the easier verses at the beginning. This is not working, so I have to go through and plan the verses a little better. I think what I'm going to end up doing is rough out a few chapters of something I've had in mind for a while 'Esperanto through the Bible' --- an Esperanto textbook teaching basic Esperanto through Bible verses. And use the first few example verses as my new chapter headings for 'Bakoun'.

What I need to do about that today is collect a massive list of very short Bible verses. I had a good source in an old catechism book that was my mother's (or perhaps it's just the same as my mom's but bought second-hand), but I can't find the book for love or money. I welcome any short-verse suggestions, or links to short-verse websites, from all my readers the public at large. They needn't all be uplifting memory verses--- I plan to use 'Judas went out and hanged himself' at some point, but I hope no one's going to 'go thou and do likewise.'

NOTE: 'Esperanto through the Bible' is going to be one of those 'Creative Commons' things so that anyone so inspired can translate the English bits to their own language.

Andy Rooney: 4th Grade Atheist and 60 Minutes Man

Just heard this morning of the death of Andy Rooney, who formerly worked on the television show 60 Minutes. Note to my mom--- NOT THE SAME DUDE as Mickey Rooney.

Andy Rooney was also a well-known advocate of the belief system I like to call '4th Grade Atheism' --- atheism for rebellious Bart Simpson-type children.

The tenants of 4th Grade Atheism seem to be as follows:
1. There is no God and the Bible is bogus.
2. God is a mean old sociopath and the Bible proves it.
3. The words 'logical' and 'rational' are stripped of their traditional meaning and are now merely terms of praise for fellow atheists and their remarks, no matter how illogical and irrational those remarks might be.

I remember one episode of 60 Minutes where Andy Rooney really let his 4th Grade Atheism out to play. He was all upset at the sheer numbers of churches of various denominations he saw around them. They only use those buildings one hour a week, he whined. Shouldn't those nasty Christians have to all share a very few buildings instead?

Forget being appalled that any middle-aged man could remain so culturally illiterate as to think church congregations only use their church buildings one hour a week. Doesn't he realize that until the Commies come and abolish private property, we still have the right to dispose of our funds as we see fit. If folks want to pool their funds to build a building that's only used one hour a year, we have that right until all rights are abolished save those of the Central Committee members.

The 4th Grade Atheist in Andy Rooney was appalled, evidently, any time his delicate eyes had to focus on things like churches, synagogues, mosques, crosses, menorahs, yarmulkes and anything else that reminded him that he had to share the planet with people who didn't agree with him on the religion thing.

Rooney was canny enough, however, to confine his remarks to Christian churches. He never did a companion piece calling for shutting down mosques or synagogues, because if he did, he would have been called an anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim bigot, and he'd have been about as welcome at 60 Minutes as the Grand Dragon of the KKK.

Rooney's remarks on that occasion crossed the line from mere non-belief in God to actual hatred and intolerance of Christians. What harm does it do any of us to see churches, mosques, atheist club-houses, Wiccan groves or any other thing, that would justify taking away the rights of Americans to build and maintain such structures from their own private funds?

And when you take on Christian churches, you are taking on the number one engine for both fundraising and in recruiting boots on the ground for the charities that give aid to the world's poor and disadvantaged. Until atheist charities are created and atheists find some reason to give in the same proportion as Christians do, society depends on the existence of a significant percentage of Christians in the population.

NaNo 2011 - The case for NOT finishing your chapters

All too often as I write a chapter I reach a point when I get fatigued and discouraged with the chapter in question. Or I start thinking the chapter needs to be re-written in a way that will also require re-writing all the previous chapters.

This kind of thing is fatal to forward progress. So today instead of finishing the first chapter, I wrote a second chapter all the way through (I love short chapters) and began a third. I also went back to the first, inspired, and wrote some more so now the end is in sight.

So I've decided that's how I'm going to do this year's Nano--- each new day, start a new chapter. I can finish the unfinished ones at the end of a writing session. After all, when you reach that certain point in the chapter you know the rest of what is going to happen in it, and you can wrap it up at any time.

Word Wastage Department:
Some days I just can't think of words of my own to start with. So each chapter is starting with a more-or-less relevant Bible quote. In Esperanto of course. Which requires me to repeat the quote at the END of the chapter with a translation. Well, actually, 2 translations, one is DRV (Douay-Rheims Version, a Catholic translation) and the other is KJV (King James Version, the traditional Protestant translation.)
Also at the chapter-beginnings, I give a few clues to understanding the Esperanto version--- give the meaning of a few key words. It's like each chapter begins with a word game, and the reader can see how much he can figure out on his own, or cheat and turn to the chapter-end.
For those of you who are my friends on Facebook (or are willing to become my friends), the explanation behind the foreign-language Bible quotes I've been posting is that they are the Esperanto Bible verses I've been using in my chapters.

yWriter update:
Yes, I'm using the free writing software yWriter to write this novel. It works very well, it's available for PC and Mac, and, did I mention it's free? The advantage of it is that you can move chapters and scenes around, and it does word counts for you at the bottom of the page, both total count and today's count. I'd very much recommend it to all NaNoers (Nanites? no, that's something else altogether.)