Packing for the Apocalypse...

In the 1960 movie version of H.G. Wells' classic, The Time Machine, gentleman/inventor George Wells (yes, the author named the main character after himself), builds a time machine and travels eons into the future. He returns to his time and takes only 3 books back to the future. When his friend David returns the next day, he asks the housekeeper which three George took, but she doesn't know.

Let's play a game. You've traveled into the future and can only take three of your books with you. In the story, mankind has warred himself back to Stone Age living- so you are starting society from scratch. Which 3 do you take? Now you can't say books that you don't actually own, that's cheating. You have to have these books in your home. I would take:

1- JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I have the trilogy in a beautiful leather-bound edition. It makes for great story telling and since the future has no television or libraries or radio, it's stories around the campfire for entertainment.

2- The New Testament. Yes, I'd leave the Old or Hebrew Testament behind because of the contradictions: it does not condemn slavery, a number of the laws are incompatible with my beliefs, like 'an eye for an eye,' and polygamy, and there are some things I can't reconcile, like the Great Flood called up by God to destroy everyone except Noah. I feel it's important to have a moral guide and the New or Christian Testament embodies how we should behave.

3- Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann D. Wyss. A family marooned on an island must survive on what is available. Talk about an interesting how-to book! Of course it works best if you're stuck on a tropical island, and if I have to be stuck anywhere, it has to be in the tropics. Unfortunately I can't find my copy, so obeying my own rules, I have to choose another book.


4- Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution by A.J. Langguth. This tells the story of the Founding Fathers and how they not only started the Revolution, but why, and how our Constitution and Declaration of Independence were created. If you're starting society over, let it be on a basis where all humanity is represented. (I'm not talking about past mistakes, I'm looking toward the future where we can get it totally right.)

Those are my 3, with an extra for the one I can't find, but would really love. Let me know your choices and why.

Char
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Catching Up--and Sprinting Ahead

I'm ahead on my NaNoWriMo word count. By the estimate on the NaNo site, I should be done by November 29th.

I want to be done sooner.

No, I'm not trying to overachieve, or hoping to say I was the first done, or gloat when others talk about the daily word struggle.

I'm antsy. I see the story and I just want it written because there are story ideas lining up, like airplanes on the tarmac, waiting for takeoff.

I don't think I'll live long enough to write all the stories from ideas that are jotted down in my notebooks, swimming in my head, or that invade my dreams. So many ideas, not enough time... Even if I lived to be 100 (and there's a very good likelihood of that since I come from a line of long-lived relatives), I still won't have enough time. Immortality, which is sadly unobtainable, would be the only way I could write down everything. Maybe.

Stuck? Hey, so was I, two days ago. How did I get past it? Did I mull it over while doing something else? No, my garden is nothing but dead stuff and that's usually where I do my mulling. Now it's just a place to be depressed until spring. I can't sit in front of the words on my laptop when I don't know what comes next. That just frustrates me and makes the writer's block seem insurmountable.

So I just skipped it. I went around the blockade, the writer's wall of doom.

There was a scene that would come later in the book so I just started writing from there. Eventually I'll have to stitch them together, but as Aragorn says in The Lord of the Rings when the companies of Middle Earth are about to face doom at Sauron's gate and their courage may fail, "Today is not that day." I'll worry about piecing it all together on a snowy cold day in January when I start serious edits. (December is off limits for editing and writing if I can get away with it. If a book deal comes through that requires revisions, well, I'll hop to it.) But for now, writing that scene has jumped started the creative pulses and the race is on to finish. And as I wrote, my head swirled with how to incorporate the new scene into the manuscript. Sometime it does come together that easily, other times, not.

The successful hurdle of this block has let me stay in the race at my own pace. I'll wait for you at the finish line--unless you beat me there first.

Keep writing, and NaNo NaNo!

Char