In which I discover Paradise.

Try and understand what part you have to play in the world in which you live. There’s more to life than you know and it’s all happening out there. Discover what part you can play and then go for it. --Sir Ian McKellan

The Internet is an amazing place, and don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

The hype right now in our culture is all about how Facebook and handheld devices are ruining our lives/destroying social interaction/turning us into braindead automatons who will one day be ordered to take over the planet. There was even a Roberts Reads on that a few years ago, and the author came to speak about the dangers of technological advancement. It was all terribly Puritan and full of Deep Thoughts that I doubt half the population on campus understood. 

I'm not saying all of that is lies. I'm just saying, there's a bright side.

As a writer and a generally creative person, I'm very familiar with the p-word: procrastination. GASP. Yes, I am a sucker for wasting time on the Internet when I should be writing/sketching/plotting/harvesting braindead automatons. It's just so seductive. And it's not like I can just switch it off. I need the Internet, for music and research and character name generators and and and....

The list goes on. But as I delve into the whole novel-writing business anew, there are some Internet things that have come to my attention that are seriously awesome. Especially for me and other writerly ilk.

First, NaNoWriMo. What a mouthful. November is National Novel Writing Month, and at nanowrimo.org you can sign up to write 50,000 words in one month. Ever slogged out two thousand words for a mediocre "response journal" in a Dr. Mrs. class? Multiply that. Times twenty-five. I did it waaaay back in ninth grade and produced the really very terrible first draft of Medusa, which got written and rewritten about five times (one of them about three years ago in another NaNo attempt) before dying a slow and horrible death in the deepest recesses of my hard drive. 

I stayed away from Internet challenges and serious writing for a few years. Then, I discovered Camp NaNoWriMo! The summer camp version of the November slog, done in both April and July. I'd doodled a few words here and there for a potential post-apocalyptic-type storyline, so I decided to give it a go. By day four I had over 7,000 words. By day six I'd decided to up my wordcount goal to 60k, and the next day I had roughly 16k+ of raw, unedited story sprawled across my laptop, my mom's laptop, and two notebooks.

Today, day thirteen, I have thirty-thousand words: halfway to my month's-end goal, and three days ahead of schedule. That's an average of 2,320 words a day (though some days I've written upwards of 5k), and I only need to write 1,571 a day to finish on time. Maybe I should cave and change my goal to 70k.

I'm not saying all this to brag - well, maybe a little bit. The truth is, I've had a lot of help along the way. From, you guessed it, the Internet. 

On the sidebar to your right is a short list of some of the blogs I follow. One of them, "Pretentious Title," is the blog of Rachel Aaron, a sci-fi/fantasy authoress. I hadn't read her, but a writing buddy from CampNaNo referred me to one of her posts, and suddenly, a whole new world of Internet resources opened up to me. There are blogs by writers and agents. There are vlogs (linked below is part of a vlog series by writer Kelsey Macke). There are online challenges, sprint wars, twitter accounts. Last night I discovered and participated in @FriNightWrites' #writeclub challenge, a writing challenge held every Friday night to write as much as you can in half an hour, tweet the wordcount results, take a ten minute break, and repeat - from 2 PM to 2 AM EST. I didn't stay up the whole night, but I did write more than 4k in two and a half hours, jumping ahead in my wordcount goal for the day and breaking the halfway mark around 11 PM.

I'm not a twitter person, but combine #writeclub with #PitchMAS (in which you pitch your story in 35 characters or less and agents scroll through the hashtag picking up ones that they like to make a potential offer), and I'm aaallll over it. 

This is exciting stuff. When I was a kid, trucking along like an idealistic little 1k-a-day fairy on Medusa's early stages, I had no idea any of this existed. But there's a whole community out there of publishers, agents, and writers - both professional and aspiring - who are working together to further the writing and publishing industry; and, by extension, to further the reading world. And I'm becoming a part of it. CRAZY.

Frontier, the tentative title for my work-in-progress, if far from being a complete manuscript, let alone a polished one. But I'd say I'm well on my way, and with this whole new world of online community and interaction - something that never could have existed fifty years ago - the insane, impossible goal of being published doesn't sound so impossible anymore.

I leave you with a brief vlog entry by the aforementioned Kelsey Macke, who is crazy and delightful and always has good things to say about being creative, about being a writer, and having faith in yourself to accomplish what you set out to do.