Correspondance

So today's entry is going to be a little different from usual. Before everything gets lost in the shuffle of cranking out words, and arranging things for Script Frenzy, I want... No, need, to pass on a bit of correspondance that I've been having with the folks down at The Office of Letters and Light. On Feb 16th, "Tim", and intern for the director of Script Frenzy sent out a notice to all MLs asking for people to nominate someone from our region to be featured on the site in something similar to the WriMo report from the NaNoWriMo website. We just had to provide a short summary of their general awesomeness, and let it go at that.

I thought long and hard, as there are so many people in the Sudbury region that I believe are deserving of 15-minutes of fame. In the end, I chose my official unofficial co-ML, and sent this off (18 hours ago):

Hello Tim!

You asked if there was anyone whose awesomeness would be great to showcase. As much as I would love to put myself up for dibs, I'm not nearly as awesome as my unofficial Co-ML, so I'm going to tell you all about her, and what makes her awesome.

Julia Muldoon (username PiscesMuse) signed on this year to the Frenzy for the first time, still hot on the heels of Sudbury's greated NaNoWriMo to date. She's come up with a tonne of ideas for us this year, and has been spearheading the organizing of an overnight write-in at Laurentian University, similar to the outstanding one we had for NaNo which yielded 18 unique participants and saw most of us crash through the 50k word mark. With her energy, I'm certain we'll be seeing a nice chunk of participants for this year's "From Dusk Til Dawn" event. Julia has also been brainstorming Sudbury's version of a Scripter's PDA, has done a lot of the running around to get event locations and themes hammered out, and other general energetic madness. She's been doing all of this, but without being able to take the official title of Co-ML as it will be her first Frenzy.

Julia also plans on working on a musical for this year's SF. With her background in theater and love of musicals, I know it'll be a blast and that in all likelihood, we may even end up hearing a couple of songs performed!

If I could think of anyone to feature, it would definitely be Julia. She's a great candidate.

About an hour ago, I received a reply from Tim:

Hi Shawn!

That's so great! Thank you so much for taking the time out to nominate Julia, it's much appreciated. And hey, nothing wrong with self-nominating! We'd love to feature you, too!

Oh man, it does sound like Julia's doing some pretty awesome stuff up there in Sudbury, especially in such an unofficial capacity. We'll definitely do our best to tip our hats to her.

Thank you again, and, actually, if we could feature you, too, that'd be great! Do you mind sending me a little bit of info about yourself? Hope to hear from you soon.

At first, I didn't want to reply. I mean, as much as I sometimes love to blow my own horn, I don't like bragging or taking all the credit when it isn't due. But inevitably, I gave in because it was requested, and wrote the following:

Hey Tim.

I guess I could send some information about myself, though I don't feel nearly as qualified to talk about myself in as glowing terms as I can talk about everything Julia's been doing for the area. I think it's still an inspiring story, and something I have the Office of Letters and Light to truly thank for it.

I first picked up on NaNo back in 2004 (though I forgot my original password by 2005 and had to create a fresh account) as a suggestion from my poetry workshop classmates while I was in the midst of getting my degree in English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I had more or less given up on writing short stories and novels up until the event and it set me back on course.

By 2006 I had moved up to North Bay, and got involved with the much smaller NaNo group up there. At first, there were no events planned, so I proposed a handful on the group forums, and we all met up on campus at Nipissing University, where I was getting my Bachelor of Education with a focus on multimedia technology. Unfortunately, the last half of the month I was up in Timmins on my placement, so was unable to do any guiding of events.

When Script Frenzy launched in June 2007, I was all over it. I was excited, and I was alone. As much as I wanted to get something out of it, it's a lot harder to keep yourself going without a group of people checking up on you to make sure you succeed. I missed the activity, and the comraderie that I had found in Ottawa during the first years of NaNo, or in North Bay where I was helping to get things going. In 2008, I put up some flyers around Timmins, but there was little interest in writing.

By Fall 2008, I was in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. I figured it being a bit of a larger city, it had to have a good writing base. With no ML in sight for NaNo, I hastily applied just before the deadline. We had a great turnout, and for the first time beat North Bay in word count. I signed on as ML of SF in 2009, but was disappointed by the turnout. The same light advertising that I had done for my first NaNo as ML was a total flop for SF.

So for NaNo 2009, I got some advertising for both NaNo and SF out at the Northern Lights Festival, where I was sharing a booth with the Sudbury Writers Guild and the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society. As November approached, I got with a few of the previous year's veterans, and we came up with some plans. Advertisements went up, we got a cease and desist order that I had to rectify with the city, but our goal was achieved. And with the help of some of those veterans (Sylvie / sinful_cinnamon especially) and a couple of new people (chiefly Julia / PiscesMuse ), it was a huge year with overnight write-ins, launch parties, TGIO party, and a dozen write-ins at a half-dozen different locations.

The thrill of arranging and seeing these events go off were truly inspiring for me, and despite all the work involved, I loved every minute of it. It gave me a hope to get out of my dead-end job and maybe do something with my degrees. So I applied for school, again. And I got in to my program. The program? Event Management at Algonquin College in Ottawa. I loved organizing events so much, that I figure I may as well do it for a living.

Even before receiving my acceptance notice, I was looking for people that I thought could work together to keep NaNo, and Script Frenzy, going and growing. I found Sylvie for the one, as she was instrumental this past year, and I found Julia for the other. I've taken all I've learned from NaNo and SF, and I'm passing it along to them as we get the ball rolling and events organized for this year's SF. We're going all out on the advertising, getting the events organized, and ensuring we have good locations (even on April Fools).

In the end, I'm sure this year's SF will be just as fantastic as this past year's NaNo, and I hope to have the photos to prove it. If Ottawa is still vacant for an ML for next year's SF, I hope to fill that spot and give the city a heck of an event to match the ones that set me onto this trek way back in 2004.

So you see Tim, it's not me that's done anything particularly awesome, its the OLL that deserves the recognition and the spotlight. Without the OLL, I never would have figured out what to do for my future, with schools closing left and right up here, my old goal to be a teacher would remain unrealized, and I'd continue to be stuck where I was: selling electronics most people don't really need. Instead, the events headed by the OLL have given me a direction, and I'm just happy to give back as much as I'm able, when I'm able.

Send my thanks to Chris, Lindsay, and everyone else up there at the OLL. You all do a bang-up job every year, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it in my own way.

I'm going to be borrowing a part of that letter and using it as my future bio, because I think I've done a bang-up job of describing what I've been up to
the past few years, and I've done it without bragging. The letter does give my true and honest opinion of everything that's been happening over the past few years, and gives thanks where it's due. I know there are a couple of people out there that are doubtful, concerned, or just plain confused about why I chose to apply for another program, and I hope that this answers those doubts and sways people the way that I feel. Quite honestly, my greatest fear is that this last letter was probably the greatest piece of writing I've done to date.

Back on to writing, I finished up outlining Blackfoot this morning. Turns out I'm writing a novella, not a short story. It also turns out that it's a modern fantasy, as opposed to a dark fantasy. Surprises all around! Time to get off and do some writing, the opening needs to be retooled to fit the story's new structure and goals, and I hope to crank out a few thousand words before tonight's write-in.

Keep on writing!

Northern Lights Festival Boreal 2009 - In Review

I'd like to issue a hearty hello to people who are following this for the first time! Welcome to my writing blog. Many of you are probably looking for the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society (SHS) or the Sudbury Writers' Guild (SWG) websites. I've just linked to them for you, just hop on over and grab your updates about their upcoming events.

This past weekend I manned a booth at the Northern Lights Festival Boreal in Sudbury. The weather cooperated for most of the weekend, giving us a comfortable 21 C and some beautiful sunshine. I was at the booth almost all day Saturday and Sunday, only breaking for food and washroom. It was great to see and talk to so many people who share a passion for the arts and the community of Sudbury! I was thrilled to speak about all the great things coming up in the area with so many different people from so many different walks of life.

One theme seemed to be pretty common among the people whom I had opportunity to speak. They were all surprised to discover that Sudbury had a writing group, let alone two! Although the SHS is a newly formed organization, just through its eighth month, the SWG has been in existence since at least the early '90s. So why have so few people heard of these groups? I would claim it to be lack of trying, but considering both the SWG and SHS just obtained their websites recently and neither have attended many local festivals in the past, I have to go with lack of publicity. One would think that to be something to approach the Sudbury Arts Council (SAC) about, but that group has just ended a two-year hiatus and is trying to reform and reorganize after having been left in something of a shamble.

It seems the arts community in Sudbury has been running itself as a series of small, unrelated and for the most part, untalking groups. For a city like Sudbury, the arts is due to push the city into its own renaissance. The hustle and bustle of the industrialized and unionized city is subsiding because of the economic recession, and people are trying to turn their hobbies (jewelcrafting, painting, writing, acting, woodwork, etc) into a secondary income as they're forced to resort to minimum wage jobs. With new groups forming across the city to encourage these endeavours, it is my hope that we can all come together and help rejuvenate the city, becoming an artistic jewel in Northern Ontario. The Northern Lights Festival Boreal showed me that there is a huge interest in the arts in Sudbury. People just find it hard to find out what is going on across the city, and how to get involved in something that is of interest to them.

My main purpose during the festival was to push and introduce people to the SWG, the SHS, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Script Frenzy, and The Ontario Poetry Society (TOPS). All of which are active in the area. Miriam H. Harrison now stands as the current branch head of TOPS, and will be getting something happening on that front starting in the fall when she returns from a fact-finding mission out west. I am the Municipal Liaison for the Sudbury area for NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy, and successfully lead a group to completing their 50k novels last year. Representing the SWG this weekend we had their incoming president, Scott; the VP Miriam, the webmaster Andy, and members Judy and Ken. For the SHS we had Andy, Ken, Miriam, and myself.

By sharing a booth among members of different literary organizations, I really came to feel that we were doing more together than could ever be done as individual groups. Different people were interested in different aspects of our table, from the casual onlooker who spotted the ancient typewriter (and our free draw), to the writing enthusiast that wanted to know about everything. I think, come September, the SWG will find itself with an influx of fresh blood from many of the people that we spoke with at length about the group. I also fully expect a blossoming of participants in NaNoWriMo this upcoming Novemeber. I look forward to seeing what becomes of all this.

I also look forward to hearing from a lot of people about donations for the SHS' summer book sale. We'll take just about any book you wish to donate, and resell it at the book sale August 22nd, 2009 at the Market Square. The proceeds from the sale are going to be donated to a youth literacy program. If you wish to book a time to drop off the books, contact me.

One thing I know for sure, Sudbury is not a cultural void. Although it may be hard to find the group you're looking for, we're out here. Even more important, we're ready to start working together. The time to rejeuvenate the culture of Sudbury has arrived, and I can hardly wait.