The Halfway Mark and Feminist Blogging

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I didn’t realize until I posted my latest numbers on the NaNoWriMo Web site that todays the halfway mark. Woo hoo! So I guess, technically, I’m not actually behind if you consider that I reached 26,000+ today. If anything, I’m just a wee bit over.

How-evah

My goal is to write 2,000 words/day, which breaks down to 60,000 words by midnight, November 30th. (NaNoWriMo only asks for about 1667 words/day to total 50,000 at the end of the month.) So I’m still about 3,000 words behind. Oh well. That means I just have to ring up 3,000 words over the next 3 days (through Sunday), and then I’ll be caught up and can relax. Sorta.

Why is this about numbers, you ask? ‘Cause if I worried too much about quality of output, I’d be writing this damn book until I qualify for Social Security.

Oh wait. Right. Never mind. Like it’s still gonna be there in 30 years.

I’m hitting another stumbling block here, albeit not something I can’t handle. As my character’s a doctor, it’s obviously in my and my potential reader’s interest to throw in some suspenseful “operating room scenes,” especially since it is a bloody war novel. But as someone who tried majoring in Nursing twice and failed miserably both times, I’m having a difficult time slogging through what few episodes I throw in there.

Fortunately, B. is in the medical field, so even though my doc’s in a completely different specialty, I can glean some info from him.

On a different note, this is a little old (November 2006), but I did come across these interesting archived videos of a panel discussion about feminism and blogging, featuring some fairly well-known feminist writers, bloggers and activists. Jessica Valenti is among the panelists and is probably the most prominent among them. Stephen Colbert fans among you may remember Valenti appearing on The Colbert Report [Go Stephen!]):

Anyhoo, this panel discussion offers some fascinating (if somewhat esoteric) insights and opinions on feminists who blog as well as the subject of women and blogging in general. The discussions frequently veer towards the academic, and I would have liked to have heard more questions from the audience, but for the most part it’s a great overview of where we are (or were, anyway, as of a year ago, although I don’t think things have changed much) in terms of welcoming more women and girls into Web 2.0.

By the way, note that the discussion is divided into two videos, each of which is at least a half hour long. If you don’t have time to watch it on your computer, a PDF transcript of the video is available. The latter may be a good option if you’re looking for something more portable, especially since the audio quality can be iffy at times on the broadcast.

MRA