Goth House Parlour :

Have you ever noticed how many mind-bogglingly awful Christmas tunes there are out there? And that all the really terrible ones were written within the twentieth century?

Okay, I'm assuming that everyone else thinks "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" is a terrible song, if they've thought about it at all. I assume most people haven't thought about it. It's a Christmas song, you listen to Christmas songs at Christmas. So they'll play fatuous drivel like "Holly Jolly Christmas" right after depressing tearjerkers like "Do They Know it's Christmas?" without any sense of irony.

I was trying to think about what made me hate these new-style Christmas songs so much. Bright, simple, major-chord tunes are part of it. But it's attitude more than anything. Whatever you think Christmas is, sacred holiday, shared cultural tradition, annoying time of year when everybody shoves their religion down your throat, it certainly seems like it should be about something other than shopping.

Modern Christmas tunes (except for a brief creative flame during the 70s and 80s which seems to have died out) are about stuff. Getting it. Sometimes giving it. And they're about snow, which is ironic, since most of the population of the U.S. lives in the sunbelt where it never snows. Worst, they're about Santa Claus. The problem with Santa Claus, with songs cheerily assuring the listener that Santa brings toys to all the little girls and boys, is that it's a BIG FAT LIE AND WE ALL KNOW IT. Santa doesn't bring toys to poor kids, all right? Even with Toys for Tots campaigns and the Salvation Army Bellringers, and Giving Trees and all that. Santa is a promise we break every year. And not just the promise of toys. The implied promise that the most important thing going on in the kid's life on Christmas will be the toy he does or does not get. So if he just gets that toy everything will be all right. The season will be bright. Hearts will be merry and gay.

No wonder so many people kill themselves around the holidays.

(all right, to be fair, the suicide rate doesn't actually increase around the holidays. Suicides are just a lot more...poignant.)

For the record, my favorite modern Christmas song is "Fairytale of New York." Pure brilliance. And I like all the old stuff, the real carols. Especially "The Coventry Carol."

The best Christmas songs are sad.

Permalink : The best Christmas songs are sad

So, there's this thing called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it is affectionately known and printed on t-shirts). The idea behind it is, you write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I thought it was an intriguing idea (like the 24-hour comic -- I'm a sucker for challenges like that) and made sort of an attempt in 2002, but nothing ever really took off. Then this year, I woke up ridiculously early on the second of November, the morning after our Day of the Dead party. I had only had about three hours of sleep and had no idea why I was awake, but I thought the only thing to do was start writing a novel and see what happened.

What happened was, by the time other people were waking up, I had a general outline and had started writing the first scene. That did it. How could I not make a serious attempt at NaNoWriMo with such a great start?

So I wrote. I figured I had to average 1,667 words a day for thirty days. I found that this amount was pretty easy to do in two hours of writing. So, if I had managed to write every single day, it would have been pretty easy. The hard part was skipping a day. Or two days. Or three days. Suddenly, the word count is a little more difficult to do in one sitting. Plus, I really had to finish the thing on Wednesday, November 26, before leaving town for Thanksgiving.

I kept undoing my own efforts. I tried to do a minimum of editing, since it's not really in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, but I did occasionally have to read through what I'd already written to remember what I'd named people, or where the plot was going. When that happened, I couldn't resist the impulse to polish a bit, which usually meant trimming words (although occasionally it meant adding things). And at one point I realized that a good two or three thousand words were actually the outline, and felt guilty leaving it in as part of the "novel." So I took it out and had to write more words to fill the void.

On November 26 I managed to upload more than 51,000 words, and now I get to put this on my web site:

The challenge is to write at least a sketch of a whole novel -- what I did was write the first "book" of a fantasy, so it doesn't conclude the whole story, just a portion of it. My defense is that fantasies are always three or four or six or ten books, so it's part of the genre.

What did I learn? I learned that I can write conversation faster than anything else, so large portions of the book are just people talking without much attribution or any action. And I learned that a person really can live off peanut butter toast and apples for days at a time.