Tuesday, November 06, 2007

His Dark Materials

No amount of caffeine is keeping my head off my hand off the table, and even I am bored with the short section that I just finished writing. It's time to get some sleep!

Another successful NaNoWriMo day, all in all. My total word count is 9031 words, and according to the little spreadsheet Paul made for me, I needed to be at 8333 words to be on track. If I can keep this up, I might get a couple of days off at Thanksgiving! Or maybe just some lighter writing days to do more research and planning for the harder, later sections of the novel.

This is already the longest work of fiction I've ever written, by a hair. (I've written short stories, the first 5 or 6 chapters of a novel, and a longer pieces nonfiction/creative nonfiction/memoir, but most of my writing has definitely been in bite-sized chunks. I write a lot of beginnings before paralyzing in fear of failure. What seemed to me at one time to be great titles, great first lines, great opening paragraphs clutter my "Writing" folder.)

Moving on.

Have you read Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy? We loved it. And we're all looking forward to the movie of The Golden Compass, opening in December. By "we," I mean Paul, me, my whole family (mom, dad, two sisters, various brothers-in-law), and a couple of good friends.

I'm not sure I want my daemon to be a chimp, though. I mean, chimps are clever, and that's really good. But they're not exactly sexy animals. Maybe you can help determine if I've got the right daemon?

6 comments:

Sarahlynn said...

Well, isn't that a heck of a note! Before I was entirely awake this morning, Paul mentioned something about my daemon changing, perhaps from a mink to a linx? But now it's just gone! I wonder what that says about me.

Brian said...

I see a lynx now.

Sometimes the demon takes a long time
to show up, because the servers are handling a lot of traffic.

Camera Obscura said...

Beware the email going around about how the movie is "dangerous" and "un-Christian" and a lure to get kids to read the books which promote atheism and attack belief in God as stupid. I'm afraid I sent a rather scathing reply to the person who forwarded it to me, as I had read the trilogy and I knew she ferdarnshure hadn't.

Gah, I hate email-forwarding sheep.

Sarahlynn said...

Ah! He's definitely back. I guess I'm just like Serafina and the other witches, able to separate from my daemon for periods of time.

Camera, that is annoying. I did find the book a bit dangerous and anti-Catholic, but I think it was unquestioning belief that was attacked, and I don't think that a faith that's so easily dispatched is worth much, you know?

Tuesday night update: 11,120 words. Wahoo!

Brittany said...

I had to giggle while reading this post. I found you from the Presbyterian Bloggers site and there is a big "beware of this movie" post on there. Haven't read the books, probably won't see the movie but I appreciate the differing viewpoint!

Keep up the great writing! Fabulous name for a blog, btw.

Sarahlynn said...

Thanks, Brittany! I really enjoyed your blog too.

I think it's silly how people get so upset about atheists. Our faith should not be so easily challenged.