NaNo My WriMo

Contrary to what the past several content-less posts might indicate, I have not abandoned Ye Old Rib. I’ve just been a sinking deeper and deeper these past two weeks into the following sources of blog-stunting insanity:

1. The holiday season has unofficially begun and I work in e-commerce. Nuff said.

2.

No, it’s not an obscure ethnic holiday - it’s National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in literary insanity: an attempt at a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

The rewards for making it to the finish line? A shitty first draft, a year’s worth of bragging rights and a one more check on the To-Do-Before-I’m-Dead list.

Truth be told, I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, let alone write it. But I used to devour it and by age twelve had already written a respectable-sized novel, a mystery starring a teenage sleuth named Deenie. (I guess the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree).

I can certainly still get lost in a good yarn, and I’ve dabbled in creative writing off and on (some of which I’ve even liked). But these days my efforts consist of Ribby rants and while this is worthwhile and creative, I am usually not just making shit up.

So I am a little rusty on the making-shit-up stuff and correspondingly insecure about it, which is exactly why NaNoWriMo is perfect.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.¹

It is scientifically proven² that many writers never get past the would-be stage. This is because they are utter slaves to their sadistic Inner Editor. Everyone has an IE. Our IE loves to stop us at every third word or so and beat us about the head and shoulders as it cackles a litany of our inadequacies.

Eventually, even the most inspired of would-bes gets tired of the abuse and gives up. Surrender, Dorothy.

Enter NaNoWriMo, antidote.

To write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days requires the exiling of one’s IE. The writer simply does not have time to fuck around with hoity-toity revision when they have to crank out a down-n-dirty 1,666.66666 words per day.

The “low stress, high velocity” ethos of NaNoWriMo gives the writer the necessary motivation to put the IE in its place — which is to say a sound-proofed closet somewhere equipped with a stack of high school final papers, a juicy red pen, and a lot of bile. Happier than tornado in a trailer park!

Meanwhile, the would-be blossoms into writer through the transformative power of imagination, hard work, and lots of caffeine. So what if the finished product is a 50,000-word outline that needs six months of revision to be readable? Your bloodied three sentences are so much better?

Ok, now I’ll really sum up: NaNoWriMo is about not taking one’s self too seriously. And who couldn’t use a month-long exercise in that?

National Novel Writing Month does not officially start until November 1, but there’s plenty of planning and panicking to be done before that. I’ve been giving myself a crash-course how to write fiction - you know, little stuff like characters and plot development. ³ It’s been a while since I had homework every night, and it’s going to get exponentially worse before it gets better.

Which means Thanksgiving will entail horking down my meal, praying the tryptophan turkey bullet misses, and retreating from the warm circle of family to the solitude of my writing desk (best Thanksgiving ever!).

It also means that Rib posts are likely to remain a bit sporadic throughout November. However, I still plan to do my annual “Thanks Giving Month” theme, in which every post expresses my gratitude for the fabulous in life.

It also means when my revised novel hits the best-seller list, you can all say, “I read her when.” Pre-orders, anyone?

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo, writing

1. Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride. You killed my father. Prepare to die. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Shit I apparently already knew by the time I wrote my Deenie mystery. Yeah, sure, it sounded an awful lot like all those Trixie Belden books I read, but that just proves I ‘m a fast learner. [↩]

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She’s a very geeky girl…the kind you don’t bring home to mutha…

Sorry for the radio silence the past few days… The Rib has been experiencing technical difficulties, as they say.

For some reason, my feed got all fouled up. My feeds weren’t updating regularly, and then my posts stopped being delivered to my email subscribers. I think these problems are related to my possibly-botched attempt to upgrade my Feedburner plugin, but as I couldn’t get anyone from their so-called support forum to answer my question, I’m not completely sure.

In any case, I think my feeds are back on track now; however, I am not sure if my previous subscribers will continue to receive updates. So dear Readers: If you’ve lost connection to the Rib feed, I am sorry, I apologize profusely, please resubscribe, I was a fool, I love you, don’t leave me.

Maybe it was misdirected hostility, but about this time, I decided my blog’s look was horribly boring. So if you tuned into the Rib from about nine to eleven last Saturday morning, you may have noticed that it had a new face every few minutes. BlueGreenOneColumnTwoArtsyNewsprintBusyMinimalist… I pretty much tried on every outfit in my price range.

Eventually I settled on the theme you see now - it’s alright, though not my ideal. I guess I’m just going to have to learn Wordpress and Photoshop and create my own perfect theme.

(Jeez, I can’t believe I just wrote that. One of the unanticipated side-effects of blogging has been a growing persnickitiness about themes, plugins, widgets, and other geeky apparatus. Welcome to Nerdsville!)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I’ve spent so much time getting geeky with my blog that I haven’t had time to actually write for it. I’m happy to say I think I’ve gotten the feed/email issues resolved, so I should be able to get back to your regularly scheduled uppity programming.

Just in case, though…

To my valued Rib Readers out there: please let me know if anything seems amiss with the Rib. Feed not updating? Emails stop coming? Comments not working? Theme broken or just bloody annoying? Don’t suffer in silence! Email me uppityrib@yahoo.com and I’ll get to fixing it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Feedburner, Wordpress

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Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers. - Jef Raskin

I woke up Wednesday morning to find my internet connection had flown the coop. Didn’t even leave a note, just took off. I spent about an hour fiddling with hardware and software, but all it got me was the quintessential why-I-hate-computers result: “There was an error connecting to the network.”

An error. What error? Could be a short in the power cord, could be gremlins. It could just not feel like connecting today. We’ll never tell.

This mystery outage was particularly irksome because for the first time in what feels like a dog’s age, I’m inspired to write about something other than my laundry room. And I have some cool pictures to post. I don’t have time for cryptic messages about “errors.”

Thursday morning I tried another tactic: sheer force of will. Coffee in hand, I sat hunched in front of the computer and glared at it. Meditated upon it. Psychically commanded it to do my bidding. It sat smirking silently, filing its nails.

Last night as I lay in bed, the events of the rather stressful day replayed themselves in my mind, crowding out sleep. Somehow amid all that useless yammering, a still, small voice managed to get a word in edgewise. “Unplug it.”

Needless to say, this morning I humbly obeyed and everything was hunky dory in about 35 seconds. I’m taking my still small voice out to lunch in gratitude.

Photo: Bird finds a seat, 06/14/07

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“Silent gratitude isn’t very much use to anyone.” — Gertrude Stein

On June 9, 2006, Uppity Rib was born, kicking off a year of pure unadulterated uppitude, bloggystyle.

Uppity Rib may be young, but she’s got as much snap in her garter as a feisty crone. She’s been the soap box for my rants on everything from human rights to intellectual midgets to the tyranny of fools. She’s chronicled a whirl-wind European Vacation, an action figure Christmas, could-be-better home and gardens, attempted first-degree buffitude, the ingeniousness of Fucket Buckets, and occasional pit stops in Kevinsylvania.

But most of all, Uppity Rib has been, and always will be, a my little drop of water in the many waves of: “Feminism — the radical notion that women are people.”

None of it woulda happened without my blogfather Adam and blogmother Lachlan. They encouraged my baby steps, supported me as I stretched my adolescent wings, and then like all good parents, set me free when they realized they’d created a monster. (We sits in the darks and we types, don’t we, my preciousssss…..)

Of course, all good things must eventually come to an end, and when Uppity Rib finally goes offline, she’ll need an obituary.

‘What will your obituary say?’ at QuizGalaxy.co

(Thanks to Lachlan - natch! - for the link.)

Technorati Tags: obituary, birthdays

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I want one of these so bad.

One of the reasons I don’t blog and email more is because I sit in front of a computer all day at work. As much as I love to write, my ass can only handle so much sitting.

This brilliant invention would solve all my problems!

I’m sure I can convince my employer to buy it for me; it’s ergonomically correct. It’s just like the chair and footstool they provided, only bigger, uglier and louder.

Or maybe I’ll get a doctor’s note. The health of Uppity’s ass requires special consideration. In fact, with just a little creative interpretation, I’ll bet the special needs of my ass are covered under the ADA.

Of course, this work station would also take up my entire cube plus about half of the one next to me (sorry, Lachlan), but it would be worth it for all the extra emails and blogging that would get done.

Technorati Tags: treadmill work station, Mayo Clinic, fitness, Americans with Disabilities Act, obesity

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Virtual Violence: Shining light on the dark side of the internet

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about how nothing says success in the blogosphere like hate mail, and thanks to all my nicey-poo-poo readers, my blog has a way to go.

Little did I know that just a short time later, the subject of my joke would be a serious news story, with a twist: hate specifically targeted at women bloggers, a la sexual harassment, stalking, and death threats.

Well, I take it back. Take Back The Blog, that is.

This post is a contribution to the TBTB blogswarm, a day in which bloggers everywhere speak out against the escalating online violence against women.

As Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com wrote,

While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world… It’s all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web - the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.

I’m not sure who actually held those utopian ideals — at the dawn of the web, I was still fast asleep. But it seems obvious to me that anywhere human beings mix, there will be prejudice in all its ugly varieties. Where ever we go, there we are.

It’s sadly ironic that the web is, in fact, particularly attractive to a certain breed of fucked-up people. One can air their bloodiest fantasies and join gangs of other like-minded sadists in total anonymity. It’s a cowardly predator’s wet dream.

If I sound less than shocked about online assault, it’s because it happens to me every day. My job requires me to be the bearer of bad news, and certain percentage of the recipients are insane. For me, being called a “jiz-mopping cunt” or what-have-you is all in a day’s work. Unlike the aforementioned bloggers, however, it is I who has the safety and peace of mind of anonymity here. The psychos I hear from are spewing their hate at a faceless corporation; I know them, but they don’t know me.

Significantly, even though the psychos have no idea who is reading their email, their rage is almost always expressed in a highly sexualized, misogynist manner. I could be a 55-year-old man for all they know, but their email will inevitably be some version of “fuck you bitch I hope you are gang raped and your children die of aids and your cunt is cut off.”

The bloggers are being assaulted with the same savagery, only their genders and contact information happen to be common knowledge.

Thus we wake from our dream of Utopia to acknowledge that misogyny is alive and well on Earth, and the internet is far from being immune. But I’m not worried. We’ve come a long way, baby, and it’s unlikely that women will retreat now just because the old foe has a new battle ground.

Shutting up is not our default anymore. As we have for several waves now, women will continue to act uppity and call bullshit, and feminist men will join them. Like racism and homophobia, virtual assault will lose its acceptance in our society and with it, its impunity.

It will probably never disappear entirely, but the more we speak out against violence against women in cyberspace, the smaller and weaker its twisted orbit will be.

Technorati Tags: Take Back The Blog, sexual harassment, sexual assault, cyberspace, violence against women

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Saturday morning quickie

Spent a lazy Saturday morning drinking coffee and cruising my favorite blogs. Dooce has another hilarious post featuring reader hate mail.

Getting hate mail must mean you’ve really made it in the blogosphere. It’s all very nice that your stories about kids and dogs are so well-written and funny they attract legions of regular readers, but it’s their power to provoke others into apparently uncontrollable fits of jealous rage that really spells success.

And all I’ve received are a bunch of really nice comments.

Where’s MY hate mail? Doesn’t my blog rate a little enmity, too? Huh? Huh?!

It’s uppityrib@yahoo.com, bitches!

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By Popular Demand

Our annual Christmas letter went out in January, as usual. I didn’t intend to post it on la Blog but I cannot refuse the demands of my readers. (Dad, check your Paypal account.)

A Year In the Life - by Uppity & Kevin

A year has gone by and our letter is late –
But as we all know, for the good, one must wait.
All winter through summer we worked (some say slaved)
As trips and house projects need money be saved.

In June came a blog known as Uppity Rib;
No topic is safe from this young woman’s lib.
Like Gollum we sits and we types in the dark
We works on our precious, our internet mark.

A Breast Cancer 5K in summer we ran
For cures and awareness and mom in Spokane.
Our garden we planted and nurtured it well
Though how it would grow, time alone would soon tell.

At last came September: three weeks of vacation!
We packed up our bags and we left our great nation.
In Holland we landed, with windmills and dikes;
We walked Amsterdam all surrounded by bikes.
Anne Frank’s house, museums: Rembrandt & Van Gogh,
The Red Light streets tempted, but no time to go.

And then on to Deutschland - dark bier and rot wine!
We walked hand in hand on the banks of the Rhein.
Christmas stores, sausage and Night Watchmen, too,
And Neuschwanstein’s Castle, to us all brand new.

The Austrian hills were alive with the sound
Of luge rides and church bells and biergarten crowds.
Believe it or not, washing clothes feels like fun
When you hang them to dry in the Austrian sun.

So onward to Italy — pasta and cheese;
The wine poured all night and we always said “Please!”
First Venice: antiquities, glass blowing bright
A gondola ride in Italian moonlight.
In Florence we viewed Michaelangelo’s Dave,
The Duomo and bridge from the war that was saved.
Then Vatican City inside ancient Rome
The vast innerspace of St. Peter’s huge dome.
We toured the ruins and went back in time
Imagining how Rome had been in its prime.
Our last day of touring in old Italy
Was one restful day by the warm, deep blue sea.

Then Switzerland beckoned, it’s beauty perfection;
Our favoritest place, upon later reflection.
We walked its green valleys and scaled its white peaks
We could have remained there for many more weeks.

But further adventures awaited in France,
That beautiful country so full of romance.
In Beaune we learned much ‘bout the French and their wine
Then sampled a glass with cuisine that was fine.
And finally – Paris: the City of Light!
The Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel at night;
Rodin, the d’Orsay, and the grand old Versailles;
We packed it all in, then at last said good-bye.

The end of the trip found us weary but glad,
So grateful were we for the fun we had had.
The days filled with walking had made us quite slim,
But our hearts and our mem’ries were filled to the brim.

We flew to our home in Pacific Northwest
Where our own comfy bed we decided was best.
Our garden had made it, still full of big plants -
Tomatoes and carrots; no slugs, just some ants.

We resumed all the work we had planned for our house
To fix up the bathroom, evict the wee mouse.
Kevin is plugging the hole in the ground
That triggers the pump (how he curses the sound!).

And that’s all the news that is fit to be writ;
We blew our big wad on our long Europe trip.
So merry late Christmas and happy New Year -
Good luck in 07 – It’s already here!

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Merry Christmas, my precioussss

We loves Christmas, don’t we, my preciousss? Captain Kevin Sparrow and Golluppity wish every one a very merry Christmasssss……..

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Open letter to Christmas

Dear Christmas,

You know I love you, that I could never feel any other way. I pine for you all year. I sing hymns to you, dress for you, empty my wallet for you. I savor every moment of the all-too-brief time we have together before that bitch January comes and takes you away from me.

So tell me, baby: Why you treat me so bad?

My devotion to you has turned my world upside down.

Uppity Rib goes unattended for days at a time; readers come by only to hear virtual crickets chirping in the stillness.

My friends all wonder if I’ve died because their emails to me go unanswered.

I solicit everyone I know so often for donations to my Adopt-A-Family page, they suspect I actually have a crack habit.

I almost put my back out and popped a blood vessel in my eye putting up my Christmas tree.

I’ve used up so much paper making Christmas cards, the Tree Conservancy is suing.

My sweetie comes home later and later from work every night, so sick is he of the Christmas movies and holiday music that assault him there.

At the end of the day, I’m so tired from all of our activities, I fall asleep in the middle of dinner. My love for you leaves me exhausted…spent.

I wish I knew how to quit you, Christmas.

Technorati Tags: Christmas spirit, devotion, Adopt A Family, crack habit, Tree Conservancy

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