savethewords.org from Oxford Dictionaries

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.

If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again in conversation and written communication. Each time you use one of these words, you are keeping it alive in the English language.”

I like traboccant, murklins, and kalotypography so much I just adopted them. What words will you save today?

I am an avid dreamer. Think multiple dreams, usually with intricate details and loads of weirdness, and often remembered. Sometimes I’m an active character, other times I’m watching the dream unfold like a movie where I’m either the director and the audience.

I’ve had repeat dreams where I can control what the outcome will be based on previous knowledge, sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. I’ve had dreams that were confusing, where I didn’t know how to do something…until I later remembered the dream when it happened in real life and realized I simply hadn’t learned what I needed to know yet.

What this all means is that I’ve wanted to start a dream journal for a long time, but it’s always seemed like too big of an undertaking. I knew it had to be on the list, a written reminder with accountability. When I saw this notebook, I laughed, bought it immediately, and started my first dream journal.

#16 on the Twenty-five To-dos (Year 28) list: Start a dream journal.

My husband likes to say that my dreams revolve around three themes: water, my hometown, and school. I’ve definitely seen those come up in the first few weeks of recording, but I’m curious to see what other themes surface as time goes on. If my dream-related tweets are any indication, nerdiness also runs rampant.

I am excited and honored to announce that I have been invited to be a virtual guest speaker for Professor Martine Rife’s class at Lansing Community College, Authorship in the Digital Age. I will be talking about international/cross-cultural communication in regards to my experience as a professional writer in Japan, and I would love to share others’ thoughts as well.

If you’re a professional writer, editor, or designer who works with international/cross-cultural audiences, please take my survey. It will take about 10 minutes, and your comments on cultural differences, copyright and fair use, and authorship will be shared with the class in April. If you have any questions about the survey or additional comments you’d like to share, just let me know. Thanks!

I came across a slideshow about master calligrapher Paul Antonio this morning thanks to Twitter, and it simply captivated me.

The piece, part of The Guardian‘s Disappearing acts series, gives a brief history of calligraphy and gives insight into the tools Antonio uses (and makes), the variety of work he produces, and the complexities involved with choosing materials.

It is a fascinating look at an ancient craft, and true to the “disappearing act” title, includes the effects technological advances have had on making calligraphy nearly obsolete. But despite this, Antonio recognizes the history of adjusting the craft to the technology, and uses it himself in the form of digital scans.

Writing developed, he says, according to the technologies of the period. Brushes and reeds worked perfectly well on the rough, uneven surface of papyrus, but with the advent of much smoother vellum and parchment, quills became the tool of choice. Now, 21st-century digital technology has its uses.”

Whether you have an interest in writing, technology, letterforms, or British accents, I highly recommend you take five minutes and treat yourself to the slideshow.

I was listening to NPR tonight when I heard their report entitled “When Fair Use Isn’t Fair.” The segment looks into the legality of remixes, and cites not only The Daily Show, but a video mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.

The mashup was made by Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as a pop culture hacker. Here’s what he says about his video, “Buffy vs. Edward”:

In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century.”

This piqued my interest for several reasons. First, I recently finished watching all seven seasons of Buffy, and I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with my husband about its pro-feminism overtones. And, in the spirit of full confession, I have read all four books in the Twilight series and watched the first movie (no judging, we all have our moments of shame). So I enjoyed seeing what McIntosh did with his remix, which sharply contrasts not only the characters and gender roles in the source materials, but also the levels of writing and acting.

Second, while I can’t say I understand copyright and fair use fully, I find remixing and issues of digital authorship intriguing. In the NPR piece, McIntosh says, “Our culture is moving more and more into an audio-visual language. And so the question is: Do we get to speak in that audio-visual language or not?”

That was the question posed to the Library of Congress US Copyright Office regarding exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act last year. The proceedings have yet to be finalized, but the question of what constitutes fair use is one that needs to be revisited as technology and mediums change. As a writer who uses the digital space, I want to be creative with technology and its language. But in order to do that, I need to know the limitations. Just like Jonathan McIntosh.

If I make the clackity noise long enough every day, the ‘writing’ seems to take care of itself.
- Merlin Mann

National Novel Writing Month 2009 is finished, and I ended with a final word count of 65,194. I still have some sections to write and I expect a large chunk of what I have written to be either completely thrown out or heavily edited, but I enjoyed the writing process this time around much more.

When I participated in NaNoWriMo in 2006, I knew a few people who were writing, and I knew there were local write-ins happening, but I flew solo. I struggled to reach 50,000 words and the final novel wasn’t something I was satisfied with at all — to the point that I put it away and haven’t looked at it since.

One of the key factors in this year’s success was that I participated with people. I got active on social networks, drawing a lot of inspiration and motivation from fellow writers through Twitter and Facebook. I also organized a handful of write-ins, which not only helped me stay accountable, but also gave me the chance to make new friends. While the writing was still a solo act, it was something that I could experience with others, even if we were just silently typing away as fast as we could.

So now that November is over, what’s next? My plan is to shelve this book for a bit, let it breathe over the holidays before I go back and finish. March is National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo), which may be good inspiration for that part of the writing stage.

And the first novel, the one that I haven’t revisited since 2006? I had an “aha!” moment during a write-in this year and realized how to rewrite the ending to make it work, so I’m looking forward to tackling that as well.

Thank you to everyone who kept me motivated, from family to friends to fellow writers. You helped make this a successful NaNoWriMo, and I appreciate you putting up with me over the 30 days of madness.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, has officially kicked off.

What is NaNoWriMo? It’s a writing frenzy that takes place every November, meant to inspire people who always say they want to write a novel but never have the time. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, focusing on sheer output instead of quality.

When the Twitter buzz started up about NaNoWriMo this year, I thought back to my first (and previously my only) experience. Much to my surprise, it was three years ago that I wrote my first novel — and truth be told, I haven’t touched it since.

But I knew that I wanted to participate again, not to “win” by writing a novel, but to feed off of the excitement and inspiration from fellow writers and encourage myself to set aside time each day to write — something I should be doing already, but “get too busy”. I’m already enjoying having time specifically for writing, so I hope I can keep up the habit after November ends.

If you are also doing National Novel Writing Month or would like to track my progress, you can find me here.

Design Observer recently reprinted one of Paul Muldoon’s poems in their poetry section. It caught my eye because the poem celebrates the @ sign, which I use in my personal branding. I also love the way the words “Like a whorl of an out-of-this-world ear” trip off my tongue. Here is the poem, originally published in The New Republic.

Paul Muldoon
@

Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear that had been lent
to an oak-gall wasp by a tenth century Irish monk
who would hold out oak-gall ink against the predicament
in which he found himself…

Like the ever-unfolding trunk
of the elephant in the room that gives such a bad vibe
it vies with your old hippie girlfriend who once lent such weight
to any argument to which you feared she might subscribe,
including her insistence we abbreviate
our most promising rlshps…

Like the scrolled-down tail
of a Capuchin monkey drawing on its inner strengths
as it hammers short-sighted snail against short-sighted snail
that has nonetheless gone to extraordinary lengths…

Like the tapeworm swallowed by a hippie who was once fat
but is now kind of bummed out you’ve lost track of where she’s at.

Muldoon is a poet, a professor, and an editor. He has been called “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” by The Times Literary Supplement, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003. Muldoon is a professor at Princeton University and previously taught at Oxford University. He is also the Poetry Editor for The New Yorker. You can learn more about Muldoon’s accomplishments on his website.

It boggles my mind to think that someone would be so outraged by the written word that they file a challenge to ban it across the nation. And yet there were at least 513 reported challenges on books in 2008 according to the American Library Association. Books aren’t the only target either; magazines like National Geographic and newspapers like the New York Times have been targeted by censors as well.

The problem of censorship does not derive solely from the small anti-intellectual, ultra-moral, or ultra-patriotic groups which will always function in a society that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The present concern is rather with the frequency and force of attacks by others, often people of good will and the best intentions, some from within the teaching profession.

Source: Guideline on the Students’ Right to Read from the National Council of Teachers of English

Banned Books Week is the national celebration of the freedom to read. This year’s events will run from September 26-October 3. Though I can’t attend any community readings, I can do some celebratory reading of some of my favorite banned authors.

A Short List of Recommended Banned/Challenged Books
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (challenged in 2009)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (challenged in Howell, Michigan in 2007)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Choose your own banned reading material from the most challenged list.