lin·gua·phile

lettersandlight:

Way back in the day, when many of us were still young and naive, and all the cows in the world were calves, the Office of Letters and Light had an executive director by the name of Chris Baty, and a Script Frenzy program director moniker-ed Jen Arzt. These storied figures came together for this year’s Frenzy as one mega-writing-team, a scripting Megazord, if you will. Taking time from this meeting of their creative minds, Chris and Jen sent us this missive in which they interview each other about first kisses, wooden eyeballs, and the co-writing process so far:

Chris: This is the first time you’ve collaborated on a screenplay with someone. What important life lessons have you learned from working with me?

Jen: Coffee tastes better with a friend at your table.

Chris: Our screenplay is loosely based on an 1890s ghost story we made up involving a vanishing train and a seven-foot-tall murderer with a wooden eyeball. Neither of us knows anything about trains or wooden eyeballs. What were we thinking?

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Man, I miss working for and with these people!

theotherausten:

sensedelirium:

Is Mr. Darcy a Hipster?

While I was watching the new, brilliant episode of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, my initial thought was: “OH MY GOODNESS, THEY SHOULD MAKE DARCY A HIPSTER!! ASDGHJKL-” Now after some further thought, I realize that it wasn’t a half bad response.

Can’t one say that Austen’s Mr. Darcy is a regency era version of a hipster?* He frowns upon many of the activities which were popular during that era, such as dancing. … Do I have to say it? He finds it too mainstream.

Also, one of the reasons why most people today have a rather negative view of hipsters is that they can give you the impression that they find you ignorant, silly and not nearly as intellectual as they are. In Pride and Prejudice, most people view Darcy as being self-absorbed and condescending, and in many instances, he is. 

Hipsters often seem to feel a longing for some kind of cultural knowledge and want to flaunt/spread it with others. Darcy emphasizes greatly how important he finds it for a woman to have a cultural intake, an “improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

Another point is that hipsters are part of a subculture that is very hard to define. Because of this, we often form our own preconceived (and usually negative) ideas of what they symbolize. In the same way, Lizzie’s lack of knowledge about Darcy’s true character leads her to her many prejudices (ba-dum-tss) about his arrogance and pride (ba-dum-tss).

I love LBD and what it does to my brain.

*I am here using the word hipster referring to the contemporary “subculture” of hipsters today, not the much more interesting subculture of the hitchhiking beat generation hipsters of the 40s.

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I CALLED MR. DARCY A HIPSTER BEFORE IT WAS MAINSTREAM. I’M HAVING A META-HIPSTER MOMENT
 

In my gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice in space novel of 2010 (yep, that’s an actual NaNoWriMo project that happened!), Williamina Darcy gets deridingly called a “space hipster” by Ellis Bennet.

New blog post, prompted by the opening of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, about how I fell in love with printing while working on a NaNoWriMo novel and how this love affects the way I read literature:

Printing quickly came to take up a great deal of space in the novel. I talked with librarians, checked out musty old books, and researched the history and the art of printing. I parlayed this information into a final project for one of my first-semester courses, in addition to insinuating it piecemeal into my November novel, but even after the semester was over, this new-found fascination wouldn’t leave me alone. I examined the bindings of old books in the local used bookstores; I sought out laid paper and fell in love with the way it felt beneath my fingers. I enrolled in a research seminar taught at the rare books library. When I had the opportunity, I took a graduate history course entitled The Hand-Printed Book in Its Historical Context, where I spent six weeks learning the history of hand-printing via a series of example books culled from the library’s extensive catalogue, and six weeks using that same Albion press that had sparked the obsession a few years earlier to typeset and print a short manuscript of my own.

Click the link to read the full post!

Just booked plane tickets for this summer’s adventure: England (mostly London) and Norway (mostly Trondheim, which is apparently where this picture was taken) in June!

I find it incredibly amusing (and also possibly expressive of certain key facts about my life) that the people I’ll be staying with/spending time with in both of these places are people I met through NaNoWriMo: all the London wrimos I befriended while studying abroad, and the two East Bay wrimos I met while one of them was studying abroad in Berkeley.

It feels so good to prepare for another adventure, especially in such good company. And now when this semester starts to get crazy (which, let’s face it, will happen almost as soon as it’s begun), I will have something amazing to look forward to!

(via beadchic)

Actually, I think this applies pretty well to most writing, but I’ve made use of it most frequently with regards to NaNo.

The problem: You’re 1/3 of the way through and it’s getting harder because you’re getting bored(er).

The bottom line: If you don’t like what you’re writing, then how is someone else supposed to?

The fix: Think about the last book you read or movie you saw or TV show you watched that made you laugh or cry or think. Think about why and how it did that. Then — and I don’t care if you think you can’t do this, because you’re wrong — take that thing that that book or movie or TV show did, and do it in your novel. Not the same way (because that would be boring, which would get us back to the original problem), but there’s no harm in it bearing a family resemblance.

Example: My novel has a cross-dressing alternate-history subplot thanks to Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy. And even when the rest of the novel gets boring, knowing that “Dorian Bell” is really Dorothea Bell will never NOT be awesome.

nabokovian:

Hello applications,

Starbucks holiday cups,

carpets of leaves,

Christmas shopping,

hot cocoa,

and scarves scarves scarves.

Hello November.

Hello National Novel Writing Month! Hello too much caffeine, too little time, and just the right amount of words.

But seriously, I love November. I was in love with autumn before NaNoWriMo waltzed into my life six years ago and demanded that I devote 1/12th of my life to it, but that love has only deepened since.

(Source: yourheadisnotright)

english-dreamer:

justbethbrown:

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is hands-down the most thrilling, frustrating, and gratifying event in which I’ve ever participated. Basically, you commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days or less.

The epic quest begins on November 1st. If you’re considering signing up, you…

I’m participating and would love to know if any of my other followers are thinking of doing this. It’s my first time…so I’m going to need lots of love and support when I’m slogging through my 50,000 words…

I may be crazy, but I’m planning on writing my 7th (!) NaNo-novel this November. Right now, it is either about a boarding school for eligible ladies in Regency London, OR a serious exploration of the limits of modern knowledge with the lovely and frivolous title The Science of Surviving Your Werewolf Ex-Boyfriend, OR a modern reimagining of the Arabian Nights that may or may not be somehow situated within an English PhD program. (Or all of them combined!)

(via the-eyre-affair)

Any time I see a shot of the Hungerford foot bridge, I think of all of those Monday nights I took the District line from Mile End to Embankment and walked across it to the Royal Festival Hall for Million Monkeys write-ins. And it hurts, just a little, to know that it might be a while longer than expected before I get to make that walk again.

(via the-eyre-affair)

Chris Baty, interview with Writer’s Digest, October 2009