A Second NaNoWriMo update!

I fell behind in my writing last week and am struggling to catch up, but I'm past the halfway point. I have the long Thanksgiving break to get some work done, so I hope to get well ahead in the next few days.

Ethan has since dropped out, deciding that while the NaNoWriMo process is cool and definitely an amazing cultural and social experience, it's not his way of writing. I respect that and am still sending... encouragement from time to time. I on the other hand have reached the point of obstinate. Having started and made it past the halfway point I am more determined than ever to finish successfully. The process has become a challenge for me, and I will win, encouragement from other people or no.

The farther I get into this, the more I'm realizing that the characters and the story have a life of their own to me. Sometime in the next week I'm going to write the suicide of one of my characters. It makes me terribly sad because I know it has to happen and I have to put him through painful hell to get him there. The groundwork is being laid and at this point there is no alternative. It hurts to write because he doesn't see it coming.

Anyway, some choice excerpts since my last update:

I squished a very pregnant spider today. Felt bad about it despite the utter hideousness of the thing. I tried to warn it and shoo it toward the window, but it wouldn’t listen to me, so it had to die. It was that or burn the building down and I rather like where I live.

Anyway, food. I made it. People love me and unanimously voted me queen of the dorm and are officially starting a petition to secede from the University so we can operate under a benign monarchy with me as its head. It’s good to be queen. Maybe as a queen I can have tea with Elizabeth II. That would be amazing.

As you can see, Myra has quite the voice. She's not bossy so much as occasionally demanding.

Adrian on the other hand seems a bit more subdued.

It started to snow last night and did not let up until early this morning. I awoke to the most amazingly tranquil and breathtaking scene outside my window. I wanted so badly to capture it with my pen, but as with many things that are this beautiful, it was fleeting. Like a spring butterfly it alighted upon my nose and was gone as I stood there blinking. Jonathan and Eleanor and a few of the neighbor kids were out the door and frolicking in the powder before I was properly awake. The curse of being a teenager, I suppose, our bodies are a war zone of biological weapons priming and immunizing us for adulthood, we need all the rest we can get and yet give ourselves very little.

 We'll see where this goes from here.

 

The Rules

I once took a personality text to define what kind of alignment I am based in the D&D rules set. http://www.okcupid.com/tests/the-alignment-test1

I got Lawful Good. Some notable examples given are Superman, Sherlock Holmes and:

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

I was reminded of it when @Billchu13 and @Dahamburgler approached me one day while I waited for a friend for lunch and asked what alignment I thought the X-men's Magneto would fall under (for the record, I answered Lawful Evil)

I bring this up because of a recent thought brought on by my writing and then thoughts on life in general. You see, I believe rather strongly that you must know the rules in order to be able to break them. Be they the rules of the game, the rules of convention or the rules of society. Not to say that you cannot break the rules if you don't know them, but to break rules unintentionally is ignorance.

This is a matter of intention and creating meaning. The act of breaking a rule, knowing full well the consequences of your actions makes the act a political statement against the rule or system the rule represents. So there is a morality to the breaking of the rules that define our morality.

Comparing this to the ideas expressed in the Avital Ronell clip from Examined Life, we find that the honor of the Lawful Good or Lawful Evil is exactly the kind of alterity that maintains a level of consciousness about their actions. They are bound by their moral code, it is the law that obligates them to act honorably and in doing so occasionally question the higher authorities that ask of them to compromise for the greater good.

In starting over with parasites, we are effectively rewriting the rules, but this requires us to break the old rules.

Destruction is a messy process.

But so is rebuilding.

If love as Serres puts it is the great inbetween, the included and excluded third connecting two points, the parasite, then this what we are doing is an act of love. It is the chaos of noise before we habituate (there I go using that word again). This rebuilding is the fever that we talked about in class.

In that sense then, what we are doing is an intentional act. We know we are breaking the rules and are making a statement in order to create the kind of meaning we want to get from this class.

On a completely separate note:

While watching @low's clip of Melville I started thinking about Cinema as an act and how it relates to this class.

Cinema is a performance. Cinema is noise. Cinema is a "labor of love." Labor -> pregnancy -> production. See that thought process? It is the incubation and internalization of all the work being put into the production. Cinema is the intermediary between audience and director/producer in the same way a book is the intermediary between author and reader.

And it is uttered from the mouth of the actors.

I really have no idea if or how I was going to develop this any further. I just thought I'd share in case it made any of you readers felt compelled to question any of this.