Tag: current events

NaNoWriMo 2010

I’ve mentioned it before so I won’t explain it again: NaNoWriMo is here, beginning next Monday, November 1st.

Do you dare write a novel in 30 days? It’s worth trying!

I’m not doing it this year because I’m busy with several projects, one of which is, precisely, revising mi nanowrimo 2006 for publication, because -yes- the thing I poured in a rush, after long revisions, seems ready for publication. I hope. At most, I may try to write the second season of Mrs. Carrington in a month. That would be a challenge too.

but don’t let my stories distract you, focus on your own story. Improvise. Unplug the router. Turn off the TV. Those episodes of Glee and Fringe will still be there in four weeks, there’s no hurry. A sandwich will do. Type.

You’re not alone, the whole NaNoWriMo community is feeling the same and they are more then a hundred thousand people. One made the NaNoWriMo report card to help you visualize where you are and how much there’s left. Others draw funny calendars. Some buy AlphaSmarts to write anywhere, even I am considering getting one – donations accepted. It doesn’t matter how, it doesn’t matter what – the question is how much. Come on, you’ve been reading stuff like this for years now, write the damn novel once and for all.


We go purple

Why?

http://www.glaad.org/spiritday

(Español) Sebas Martín (6) Mercado

(Español) Entrevista a Sebas Martín (1)

(Español) La novela colectiva

Happy birthday, Mario

Activities will surely last for the whole of the Christmas season, but it is today that Nintendo and the world celebrate Mario 25th anniversary. That makes it a good day to start discussing writing for videogames in our workshop, a new, unknown and exciting field.

Mario is proof that you don’t need great texts or great stories to make an exciting videogame: princess kidnapped by ugly monster plus hero to the rescue are enough excuse. It’s more than others offer: the basic Pong or the classic Tetris don’t even need that much.

But what happens when our game wants to tell a story? Or when we want to tell a story through a game? (I guess it’s not the same, is it?). The answer, my friends… we’re still working on it.

Cinema was born as a Carnivàle show, and took a while to find its own language. As the technical posibilites expanded (sound, colour… and now 3D), the grammer of that language grew richer. Videogames have followed a similar process, only faster: while techonology allows high quality sounds and graphics and all kinds of control systems, interactivity in narration is stillin its infancy. Indeed it’s the most fashionable topic among professionals in the industry. There are memorable cases of great novelists hired to script games who failed miserably because they didn’t know anything about the medium they were writing for.

During the next few days we’ll start our approach to the topic.

Satoshi Kon passes away

I had prepared a different topic for today, but there are bad news. I was sad went I went to bed last night after reading of the decease of Satoshi Kon. Curiously, his appearance on the blog this week follows nicely after Alan Moore y David Lynch (he’s often compared to the latter) though I wish the circumstances were happier. Kon was taken away by a pancreatic cancer at the age of 46.

Anime fans will undoubtedly know his works, which include the script for “Magnetic Rose” (the first segment in the popular Memories) and the feature-length films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, each of them a masterpiece. To round it up, he’s also the creator of the television series “Paranoia Agent“, one of my favourite animated shows ever.

As so much Japanese fiction, his works are not as focused on telling a story as on taking the viewer on an emotional journey, but Kon was a master in taking both approaches several steps further than the rest, with simple concepts and outrageously original developments. The most repeated lines today beautifully summarize how his death will affect Japanese fiction:

It’s not that anime will never be the same with Satoshi Kon gone. It’s now much more likely that anime will always be the same.

I had the pleasure to attend his press conference at Sitges 2006 where he presented Paprika. He announced there that it would be his last movie about the subconscious and that he would open a new cycle in his career. Unfortunately now we will never know what he could have come up with. If anything, we’ll get to see a finished version of the project he was working on, The Dream Machine (second picture). The film’s characters are all robots and it’s intended for family audiences.

Today more than ever I invite you to follow the link and get your hands on some of his works. They are bound to surprise you.