The Invasion of Dorian Gray

As I sat down to my computer this morning, with coffee in hand, the name Dorian Gray popped into my head. How very odd, I thought. I really have no idea how it got there. I most certainly haven't read the book, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and if I ever saw a movie of it, it could only have been one of the old black and white's at my grandmother's house when I was quite young.

How very strange.

Of course, that led to a 45 minute foray into Wikipedia to figure out who this Dorian Gray person was which spilled into a life history of Oscar Wilde.


Photo from Wikimedia Commons

What a journey down the rabbit hole that was. I must say, I do not envy Oscar Wilde the life he lived. Dorian Gray was the only book that Wilde published, though he was a renowned poet and playwright of the Victorian era. Even still, his life seemed embroiled in conflict, the summary of which left me wondering how it felt to look back on those events before passing. It is not a life I would have chosen, though I don't bear the burden that a homosexual man from the Victorian era would have bore. Being heterosexual, I find myself mourning the pain his wife must have felt. How would it be to marry a man only to find out that he enjoyed the company of other men, so much so that he would end up forfeiting his relationships with his children. Was it noble of her to continue sending him money to fuel his life of debauchery as he made his slow and painful descent toward death? What agony the two must have shared together...

Now I find myself wondering... why this today? Where could I have possibly picked it up? Apparently I must have missed the film that came out this year. In my quest to find a connection this morning, I watched a trailer on IMDB.com but it was the first time I'd seen it. Trailer Here - it seems as though the movie came out in September.

We went and saw the new Christmas Carol movie last night, in 3d nonetheless. And here the plot thickens. Colin Firth played a part in both films. How very strange. Yet, still, it doesn't explain such an odd occurrence. In fact, I may never know why the name popped into my head as it did. As for now, there seems to be no rhyme or reason.

NaNoWriMo 2009 Update

Well, it's been a rough journey so far and I'm only eleven days in to this year's NaNoWriMo. I took a day off after a particularly long day at work and I've been trying to catch up ever since. The lesson was hard learned and I have since concluded that it is better to get something, anything, down rather than throwing in the towel for the day.

This event has also taught me a lot about who I am as a writer. My rough draft efforts are not as rough as they could be, and I often struggle with not going back to edit. Instead, I've found that by keeping a notepad near at hand, I can write down my ideas as I go along. This is particularly helpful for filling in the parts I've already written with tidbits that I've decided to include later on and saves me the trouble of going back to adjust the writing. Which would be bad with my tendency to self edit.

For example, I realized in chapter 3 that my character would have bled to death if he hadn't staunched the bleeding from the wound in his left arm back in chapter 2. The solution was simple, I wrote as if he had quickly bandaged himself and included the details in my notebook for the upcoming rewrite. It isn't just good for the minor details, I've also been able to write down notes concerning major plot points that suddenly popped into my head. Making that earlier reference is as simple as putting it down on paper and plowing forward.

Even still, my word count has been slow. I have entirely avoided flowery exposition and witty description. My chapters all hover around 4,000 words and the world is still an empty canvas. On one hand, I think it reads easier and all the content so far has been about propelling the story forward. On the other hand, the writing lacks metaphors and similes and any sort of charm. But I'm willing to deal with that, I guess.

Somewhere along the line I had to make a choice. Either November was going to be NaNoWriMo and getting to 50,000 words, regardless of where it took me in the storyline, or it was going to be about my novel. While I am still participating in NaNo, and my goal for the event is the standard 50,000 words, I actually want to have the skeleton of my book complete. And that really just boils down to moving the story forward. It's harder to get the word count, that's for sure, but I believe this is much more in the spirit of what my rough drafts will be like in the future.

It's interesting, too, just how much comes to you while you're writing. I used to think that I needed to fully expand every idea before I sat down to write, but the story has really formed around my characters and themes have interwoven with the ideas I had for my second and third books in the series. Case in point, last night my characters were discussing a particular item and what it might mean. Out of nowhere I uncovered a backstory that totally opened up the possibility of a prequel and added a lot more depth to a minor plot point. An old war suddenly had a bit more meaning, the players of the war were defined, and the realization of how it all came together rippled out through the entire structure of the storyline. This book isn't about the old war, but it explains how people feel about my main character and what he is.

This is me writing. This is me finally doing it. And the picture at the top of this post is how I feel about it.

Tools for Writers

As an aspiring writer, I have, over the years, collected several books on writing and a fair amount of links to writing tools that are available on the Internet. Since most of my readers are writers, I thought it might be helpful to share some of my finds.

If you have stumbled upon some other useful tools in your travels, please feel free to share your finds in the comments below. Beware, however, I will be filtering spam posts. If I determine that your link isn't a helpful one or if it is blatantly self-promoting in nature -- it's getting the kibosh! That's a promise. (You aren't using this blog to sell your eBook or software.)

yWriter5 is a free software program written by novelist Simon Haynes. It is designed to help organize your writing down to chapters, scenes, and characters. This software won't help write your novel for you, but it can help you keep track of what you've written. From what I've learned from playing around with it, you can even find out how much "page time" your characters have. Looking for a minor character to some into the story later on and looking for one that's been around "just enough" for the reader to be familiar with? Or thinking about deleting a character, but unsure of just how much you've written them into the story? This program will tell you how involved they are with the writing you've done so far, nothing like making an educated decision! Of course, you've got to use it properly in order to get the added benefits, and some would argue that it's more work to add on top of writing. I liked what I saw when I was playing with it though, and at the low, low price of free... well, it's worth taking a gander at.

Analyzer is a neat little utility that will scan through your document and scan for word occurrences. This is particularly helpful if you find that your writing often includes an abundance of a particular word. One that I am plagued with is "that" and, of course, "as". This is a beta program and I haven't really tested it out yet. Along those same lines, there's also a series of Utilities for Microsoft Word by Robert J. Carlson available for free as well.

If you don't have an office software suite such as Microsoft Office, you can always get OpenOffice for free. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, database, HTML editor, multimedia presentation program, and much more. I do use this on my laptops and I have had no problem whatsoever. This is a great suite for writers with a budget or not.

And last on my list, The Literary Machine - a nifty software program that helps generate writing prompts based on snippets you enter in to the database. Have a bunch of seemingly random thoughts swimming around in that creative mind of yours? Enter them in and allow the program to mix and match to create entirely new prompts from the items you enter. It goes without saying, the more you enter in, the more possibilities. In other words, this program is another way to help "connect the dots".