Thursday, December 9, 2010

Writers' group

One good thing that is coming out of NaNoWriMo this year (there are many) is that a group of friends from my moms group have decided to start a regular, once a month, writers' group. We are all interested in keeping going, either with the story we wrote during November or with other projects, and want to use the motivation of regular meetings to do so. Having feedback and deadlines will definitely motivate me!

We're all busy moms, writing in our spare time. There are four of us now, but we'd like other moms to join us. Hopefully keeping the momentum up will give me an edge for next year's NaNo. I'd really like to 'win' sometime! And maybe I'll try my hand at Script Frenzy in April. I know the perfect place to submit a script.  Plus I need to work on our 10-minute script, hopefully expanding it into a full one-act play.

My first assignment, to complete before our January 11th inaugural meeting, is to complete a rough draft of my NaNo story. I'm close to the end, so I think that's doable. Maybe by this time next year I'll have something ready to publish (probably self-published) and we'll know what to give for Christmas presents.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Monsters on the moon

Wil has a wonderfully inventive imagination at times. (Other times he is very rigid, like getting upset when Sam colors a banana purple.) He has told us several times that monsters live on the moon; the other night he saw the telescope, which isn't set up at the moment, and got excited about looking at the monsters on the moon. I ran to grab the digital recorder to capture the moment.

Transcript:

Wil: Yeah, the monsters live on moon up in sky. So you're gonna need get the telescope so I can look at the moon very far away in the sky.

Me: How did the monsters get on the moon?

Wil: They found spaceships then flew up to the moon.

Me: What do they do up there?

Wil: They were trying find food.

Me: They were trying to find food? What kind of food?

Wil: They were trying find.... berries!

Me: Berries on the moon, wow. Are there lots of berries on the moon?

Wil: Yeah, but (can't understand what he said) on the moon. But you're gonna need get telescope for me and look at the moon.

Me: We'll have to have Daddy make the telescope work and then we can look at the moon. Do you like looking at the moon?

Wil: Yeah.

Me: Tell me more about the monsters on the moon.

Wil: Well, they were trying to find a roof, but there wasn't a roof. They need go inside the moon and see if there was a roof. But we just have roof, but not the moon. (Sam made noise... ) scary.

Me: It's scary? It's scary on the moon?

Wil: Yeah, because we might see monsters. (I think that's what he said. Sam was making a lot of noise.)

Me: Is anyone else up on the moon?

Wil: No, just the monsters.

Me: Just the monsters? Do the monsters ever leave the moon or do they just like to live there?

Wil: They like to live there.

Me: So if you see a monster do you tell them they need to go home to the moon?

Wil: Yeah... But he won't because he might get me and take me away and fly up to the moon.

Me: I don't think they're going to take you up to the moon.

Wil: But they might see me and take me up to the moon.

Then he got distracted, although he remembered to ask about the telescope again. I might just have to try my hand at a children's story. And I would love ideas for assuaging his worry about monsters taking him to the moon.