News!

All right, so I know I haven't been the best blogger. I haven't ever, really, except for those first few days when I had this blog. Man, those were the good days.

But anyway, NEWS! I am delighted to inform you that I am now an intern for a literary agent, who shall remain unnamed and the agency unrevealed, just for general privacy reasons. But I am le EXCITED, guys! It's amazing. I've already started on a couple assignments (I already get to dabble in queries!), and when I do the work, it doesn't feel like work at all. I adore it. I don't know if I'd ultimately become a literary agent or anything (but we'll see as the internship goes on...), but let's just say that I would not say no to a job in publishing. I feel at home.

As for my own writing, and not just my reading of others' writing, it's been slow lately. I've been needing to concentrate more on school lately, and on top of reading for my classes (because all my classes are reading intensive) and reading for my internship, I haven't found enough time or energy to invest myself in my stories. I've been thinking about them a lot, for sure, but I just haven't been working on them. I mean, I'm sure if I looked hard enough I'd be able to find the time, but I read the energy that I'll need to spend that will take away from the work I need to do now.

Can you believe it's almost February? Craziness.

I was about to say that time seems to be moving so quickly, but then I realized that no, it didn't. Not really. It just seems to be moving at a normal rate. Strange.

I hope you're all well! What are your latest endeavors?

BOO.

Did I scare you? No? 

Drat.

Well, hello, blogging world! I've been absent for a while, but I've slowly gotten used to my new (shiny~) computer and am pretty much up and running again, even though I have a bit of a lack in blogging topics and don't have enough material yet to warrant a Teaser Tuesday. However, the evil Blog Muse Eater will not prevail! Because today, I'm going to talk about NaNoWriMo.

So, if you're my writing buddy right now on the NaNo site, you might see that I already have a title up for my NaNo 2010 project. (If you would like to be my writing buddy, CLICK!) A funny thing happened with that title this morning. Before, when I posted that title up, I had a vague idea and thought I had written it down somewhere. Well, apparently not. This morning, I discovered I only had the title, with no notes to speak of.

I was quite upset. 

But then I got over it and wrote out what I remembered of the idea in my story idea document, and it turned into something that I am now RIDICULOUSLY excited to write. So that's a super happy ending, though it's not quite an ending yet, seeing as it's still September. I have a while to wait.

Anyway, from now on I wonder if I should just leave little hints like that around, rather than writing out a paragraph of my idea. Because even with that little hint of a title, I got something that I am now really looking forward to, rather than something I just thought of one day and decided was going to be my NaNo story.

Just a musing. I wonder what else my wacko brain can come up with. :) 

A question for you: How do you keep track of ideas for the future? How much of the plot do you trust your brain to remember?

Hope you're all well!

Why Write?

In my time roaming about the cyber world of writer/agent/author/editor/reader blogs, I've come across this question at least once: Why write if what we put into the world won't be remembered past our lifetime?

I don't know about you, but I don't think any true writer can say, at least when they start writing/are the the midst of selling of novel, that the novel they wrote will be "an instant classic" or something that teachers will shove at their students to understand the depth of "real literature". J.D. Salinger didn't sit down and say, "I think I'll write a goddam book today that will influence tons of goddam teenagers and be taught in goddam phony schools everywhere." Or, maybe he did, but I highly doubt it. No author expects to be the subject of school essays, and to even have a place in what book lists would call "great American literature". Some aren't even necessarily comfortable with flirting with the concept; after the success of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee never published another book. Heck, she had never even expected the book to sell, and was bracing herself for scathing reviews.

So... why write?

I write stories that might not be remembered past my lifetime because of the things that I'll never expect. And because of the things I do expect.

People like stories. People like the feeling they get when they hear or read stories. Countless times, I have seen agents or literary interns posting on Twitter lamenting the themes and morals that authors throw around in their queries, while all the agents want to know is plot, plot, plot. They want to know what's happening in your story, not what you want to teach the world. As a writer, my intent in eventually becoming published is just to share something with the world, and have a voice in my take on things. I like to make people laugh and to feel. Whether that will be to an audience of five or an audience in a classroom fifty years from now that I may never meet, it doesn't matter. I write because I like to share.

This post isn't really entirely coherent. I hope it is to you.

You never know what will happen. Why write something that won't be remembered after you died, or even while you're still alive? Because it's there, and it's happening. And you never know what may happen in the future.

So, lovely readers, I pose you the same question:

Why do you bother to write when your stories may not even be remembered in the future?