spotted on JMG.

Can you see how frequently I’m writing here? Answer: not very. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. With nothing going on to really write about, except resume sending-out and that can get pretty dull real quickly, well, there’s nothing to really write about.

A blogger friend I mostly keep in touch with through Twitter started mentioning the hashtag #NaNoWriMo. I clicked on it and saw that others were tagging it at as well but I couldn’t figure out what it was by their tweets. A quick google search provided the answer I was looking for.

Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month? Well it is. Look it up. It’s an online project where writers “feverishly” pound out a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That’s 1,666 words a day. The outlook on it is not to edit and not to think about it too much. Just write. They even say “it’s about quantity, not quality.” So while it’s not supposed to be stream of consciousness (although I guess it could be) the idea is to write without knowing where your characters are going, but for you to keep going with the writing.

In 2008 5% of the 119,000 who entered finished the lofty goal of 50,000 words. Seeing as how I started already a day behind (November 2) I really doubt I will finish successfully. 1,666 words a day, every day, is a lot of tappity-tapping. We’ll see how it goes. If I can finish with 20,000 words I think that would even be an accomplishment. I’ll post a downloadable pdf once it’s complete and you can read the missing plot and lack of character arcs for yourself.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

If you’d like to join the madness yourself, please link your author name to “futurejunkie” so I can see how far behind you are as well.

If you don’t already know, MTV’s The Real World has started filming here in DC. MTV has also started airing the RW Cancun so the DC chapter will probably air early next year. rumor has it they’re going to film until Thanksgiving, which would mean a solid four months of footage.

The house is at 20th & S, NW. You can’t miss it at night, it’s lit up like the daytime and during the daytime I’m sure there are camera crews everywhere. Local residents of that intersection aren’t necessarily thrilled with the media and personal interest onslaught that has taken up camp in their neighborhood. And I can’t say I really blame them, seeing as these interlopers will have no vested interest in their neighborhood and, relying on past RW chapters, will end up vomiting, pissing, fighting and all those other things 20-year-olds with starry eyes will do. The Anti Real World DC’s (new) blog is here.

Last night I was out with an out-of-town friend at Black Cat and told her about the RWDC and she wanted to go by the house. I thought it would be fun to piss off some of the cast members, as it appears to be the new fun thing to do in DC this summer. So we did.

It was late, around last call, so I was hoping some of the cast would stumble around the corner and then we could yell things at them to disrupt their filming (this is the de facto act to commit I’ve heard, as then they will have to edit out the audio of “Real World sucks!”). But the security detail in the truck across the street looked pretty relaxed so we surmised they were all already inside shooting pool or making daquiris or whatever they do. We did notice some movement in the glazed-over windows, but it looked mainly to be the crew.

We chatted with  security for a while but they weren’t budging on giving us any info. All of a sudden, there was movement the front door. Two of the cast members came out to eat their late night take-out on the front steps. So I hurried over to snap some pictures and one of the narcissist started cowering with his head down, as if he didn’t want any limelight. Um, dude, you’ve got cameras following you for the next four months. It’s a little too early in the game to be shying away from the cameras so soon. They had glowstick bracelets on, so they had been out partying somewhere that evening. Needless to say, after a few minutes of heavy sighing they packed up their styrofoam packs and went back inside.

It was a fun bit of fun but I’m really dreading the time they invade a restaurant or bar or some other venue that I’m at because I’ve heard the camera crews are pretty pushy and rude. Anything that gets the shot, right guys?

Wow so fun!

My assignment for Evolve’s parade float was to pass out beads towards the front of the three-car float. The first truck played the sound system and the second truck was the float with the constructed apartment building. The third truck a vintage truck from the 50s, nicknamed “Hank” and was a repository for more beads.

The staging area was a very vibrant area, everybody playing their music and getting in a good mood and walking around and taking pictures. It was a great community.

Once the parade started, it was on. The people screaming and yelling for beads in Dupont Circle and also on 17th Street was amazing, and the feeling of euphoria felt while passing these beads out was absolutely incredible. I couldn’t throw beads to everyone who was yelling for them but it was great to sail them to those that you could pick out of the crowd. If you didn’t scream or yell out, then you didn’t get beads from me! Being a participant in the parade was so much more fun than being an observer on the sidelines.

I tried to connect with friends along the parade route, they let me know where they’d be. Some I couldn’t find (too bizzay throwin’ beads) but some I did have a quick chance to run over and say hello to. Other friends I found along the way was a great surprise, the biggest being Joe.My.God, whom I did a blargcrawl with a couple of years ago. Joe remembered me, even knowing my last name, which was a great honor coming from only the biggest and best blogger from NYC. His slideshow of the parade is here, giving me a shoutout by name. Joe, when is the next blargcrawl in NYC?

There’s an article in this weekend’s New York Times about abandoned blogs. This happens when the author gets busy, bored or moves onto another form of press release. I’ve followed some blogs that have had a formal “Cya l8r!” entry, some have had detailed explanations for the reason they’re shutting them down and others have been simply set adrift. That’s all fine, ain’t nobadi mad at ya.

I’m waiting for this to happen in the Twitter world, too. Everybody’s all gaga over getting a Twitter account, and drooling to find out how they can make money from it. Chill, people, it’s not a gold mine. Some have taken to Twitter as an easy form of (the original) status update or quasi-press release. Others have signed up and nary posted a tweet. Or rapid-fire tweets within the first week of signing up and then nothing for months. To each their own.

Me, I’m doing both and have been doing both. I don’t see the tweet as a replacement for the blog or vice versa. A blog entry of “On the beach now. Can I get some WiFi out here please?!” doesn’t make sense, but as a tweet it does. And there’s no way that I could sum up this entry in 140 characters. But I’ll tweet a link to this post and they work in tandem.

That said, today is my three-year blogging anniversary. At this address at least. I have some archives from ten years ago when I was posting a journal on OpenDiary.com (before it was called “blogging”) and a secret Blogger site that I used for a few months in ‘05 but it’s really too dark to share any of that info.

Here are previous June 07 posts:

2008
2007
2006

Spotted on JMG.

Ooooh…I thought there wasn’t going to be a Cyclops cameo in the new Wolverine movie. Geek-gasm!

Oh good…Crazy is up next. This is what I’ve been waiting for. 

Oh jesus. 

Dang…she can sing. I hope everyone voting just remembers how friggin crazy she is…and PUNISHES her for it.

Sarah Palin “surprises” Greta VanSustren while she’s interviewing Bristol. For conservative repubs…i’ts “less than ideal”

Say what you will but the Martian Manhunter’s death in “Final Crisis” Requiem” is pretty powerful and moving.

Beau, whom I met almost two years ago during a JMG-sponsored blarg crawl, is in DC tonight. We hit it off that night 17 months ago, palling around together because neither of us knew any of the other bloggers who were participating. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch with a few emails but mainly through each others’s Twitter tweets. This is not a date, but friends getting together. Beau is happily spoken for.

I’ve take the familiar D6 over to Dupont to meet up, but I’m waiting for him to finish with his client dinner. After exiting the bus I went to the ATM to have some mad money in my pocket. First time at an ATM in months! Then to the CVS for camera batteries. Then I’m trying to think of a place to meet up and I stumble upon Urbana, which used to be called something else, and Mimi’s is now some other establishment so I’ll belly up here.

three hours later

This evening didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. I was thinking Beau and I were going to do a barhop up 17th or down P St or something but it turned out that we simply ended up staying where we were, ordering drynx at the bar, for the entire evening. I think this actually turned out to be the right thing to do, as we were able to have a fantastic conversation through the evening. We discussed the blarg crawl and how we became fast friends there, we discussed Twitter and its social associations and how we think it should never make money, the merits of blogging, Facebooking, my future and of course, New York City.

The best part about this evening was how seamless our reunion was, after all this time becoming more and more familiar by twittering. We were able to pick up, without a hitch, our conversation that we left off two years ago with minimal fill-ins. It was truly a beautiful moment that would could not have happened ten years ago.

I’m thankful for friends like Beau, near and far, with whom I have such a great connection that camaraderie is effortless. Beau, being the proper gentleman that he is, pays for all the cocktails and even though I insist on taking the D6 return he pays for my cab ride home. Thank you, sir.

After arriving home, I realize that we totally forgot to take any pictures together. Damn! While our conversation is what I will really remember from this evening I grabbed a photo of our original meeting in NYC. Here are me, some dude, Joe, Beau:

Tonight, live twitterpubcrawling with @rhagern; click me.

I’m not going to mention the name of the company I used to work for. It’s not a secret, and I’m not hiding anything, and I think I’ve mentioned it before (and only that one time) recently, but it’s just not something that needs to be put out there for search engines to find. And it’s not like I’m trying to hide anything either, because I know that several people who still work there pop into the fuju every once in a while, and that’s okay. But again, the people researching me, or the company, don’t need to be privy to my ramblings. Let’s call the company “Gee”.

There are employees at Gee that blog, many of them Facebook, some even Twitter. I follow some of their blogs, some of their Facebooks and some of their tweets on Twitter. And some of them follow mine. All cool.

I had a “sabbatical” from Gee from 2001–2003 and while I was away I still had many friends who worked there and that I stayed in constant contact with. When I returned in 2003, and now for the last five years, many of the old crew have since moved or drifted away. I become, de facto, the source for many for social updates, client updates, managerial updates, all that stuff that departed employees want to be up-to-date on. Now I’m no longer in that position. And that became clear this evening.

An ex-coworker and friend posted a tweet about how beautiful tonight’s sunset was when the sun finally cut through the wet winter clouds. I know this sunset, or at least the view of it, from the 7th floor and still during working hours as the winter brings. I also know some of the summer sunsets that happen later in the day. 

The thing that distanced me from the visceral viewpoint was the lack of the photo. And this status update was by someone who is a great photographer and frequently posting to flickr and other accounts, who even started a great idea of a Gee graffiti wall where employees could put up their own artwork. So I thought it a little odd that there was no link, no twitpic, no upload to Facebook. I almost commented on the status of the lack of a picture but then I hesitated. Not out of awkwardness of communicating with this person, but maybe I didn’t think it simply wasn’t my place anymore.

Now, hours later, I check out the Gee work blog and the picture is posted there. Bam. Now it sinks in that the distancing from Gee, where I worked for eight years, is a crack that will slowly get bigger over time. I hope to not lose the friendships, but there is a another step of removal now. I’ll have to rely on those still there to relay information onto others, and maybe that relaying road to the others will slowly come to its end. 

This transition of communication between layers has happened. Now I’ll be the one relying on my friends still there to answer my questions of hey what’s up, how is business and who are the new clients. I’m at peace with this.

I’m hoping that the phoblographer won’t be upset for me sliding that pic over to my desktop and then dropping it into my fuju style. I don’t think she will be.