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Your NaNo Peptalk: Remember, This is a Rough Draft
#NaNoOpeners The carriage thundered down the road, taking the narrow twists and curves with reckless abandon. Inside was priceless cargo
— Camryn (@CamrynDaytona) November 1, 2015
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NaNo day 1
Welcome to day one of NaNoWriMo!! Do your characters feel flat? Emotionless? Are they like puppets on strings? That’s okay! They can feel that way. This is NaNoWriMo, its…
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Your NaNo Guide: Covers are Apparently Important so Lets Make One
My NaNo book cover
If we believe NaNo’s website, (and at this point we should because they’ve suckered us into this impossible task), then making a cover for your book will make you more likely to win. I’ve made a pretty cover for my novel, now I’m going to show you how to do it too!
Its really quick, fairly painless, and doesn’t need any pricey software, I’m using a free internet site called pic…
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Your NaNo Guide: Your Novel Page
We’re over a week into NaNoWriMo, thats long enough to have a lot of information on your novel page (here’s mine!), but have you posted the information?
My Novel Page
Come on, you’ve probably written a lot, you owe yourself a brain break, pop over your page, open your novel info, and start writing!
If you want a fun story about Novel pages, I double spaced all my paragraphs last year, and someone…
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Your NaNo Guide: Pinterest
I’m Here to Tell You To Waste Time Kind of….
Pinterest is a great source for inspiration, so why not make a board for your NaNo novel? I’ve titled mine Writing – The Nutcracker and I fill it with anything that reminds me of my characters. Mine is full of nutcrackers, clips of the ballet, traditional Russian clothing, and research on 19th century ice skates. If you’re feeling extra determined you…
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Your NaNo Guide: Stay Hydrated
Short, but important
This is actually a rather ironic guide, coming from me, because I am the last person who actually stays hydrated. But that may make me the perfect person, so I can warn you away from being like me. I’m chronically dehydrated, meaning, I have a hard time drinking enough water to function. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my body, I just hate water.
But this month I’ve…
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Do any of you have tips on the naming of Punjabi Indian-American characters? Second generation.
Punjabi Indian-American Naming
Gonna need a lot more information to give a good answer. Sikh family? Hindu? Muslim? Depending on the family background, they may give a name with a traditional origin. There’s also some overlap in Hindu and Sikh names in Punjab.
I’m not Punjabi myself but one thing I’ve noticed is a tendency in Punjabi families to take names that were originally masculine and make them unisex—names like like Devinder, Maninder, or Surinder (names that end in “-inder” all come from Sanskrit names meaning “lord of” something). Also, Anglicized names or nicknames are fairly common and I’ve noticed them in higher frequency among Punjabis than Indians from other areas. I’ve known Punjabi Indian-Americans named Erica and Neil and stuff (though “Neil” and alternate spellings can also be a Sanskrit-derived name).
Other option is to have a more traditional Punjabi full name but an Anglicized nickname. Some of these can sound kind of unusual to Western ears, like Lucky or Sunny or Goldy or something, but it wouldn’t be too uncommon to have a legal name of, say, Surinder, and go by Sunny. Then of course the kid can pick their own nickname if they want a more Americanized one. There’s no really strict template that I’m aware of.
Would any Punjabi followers care to comment?
~Mod Nikhil
My November in Gifs
October 31st Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4
December 1st
(Submitted by comacine)
Rural Solarpunk
solarpunk focuses heavily on things like how urban spaces can be restructured to be green and modern and sustainable and beautiful. Suburban spaces are generally not focused on (and in a lot of ways, argued against) in favour of better green space and more efficient city planning and the elimination of the unsustainable american dream of everyone owning their own huge house with its own yard and its own car and all that jazz.
So what about rural environments? Obviously farming communities are integral to solarpunk, with greenhouses, ideal farming spaces, shaded hanging irrigation systems, round-the-year farming when feasable, and maybe even large scale community gardens, but I’m drawing a blank on what else can be done. Communal farming equipment sharing? Solar panels on greenhouses? How do we bridge the gaps between the solarpunk cities and the farming and green space created and required by these cities? Where do we draw the lines between modern environmentally friendly, efficient farming and the questionable factory farming? How can we strike the balances between efficiency and humanity?
I’d argue that the answer to all these questions is the cities. Like, I think it should be possible to live a rural lifestyle – it would be unambiguously dystopian to ban people from heading out far away from the cities, and those folks who choose that deserve the extra effort of social support necessary to extend to them basic post-industrial resources like internet access and reliable transportation.
But it’s not exactly ecological, you know? A huge part of the environmental harm done by mass farming is done in transporting the product; the answer to that is just to grow the food where the people are – in the cities. Sharing structures like those you’re alluding to suffer exponential losses in utility as the population density surrounding them decreases.
Besides, we could really afford to let a hell of a lot of populated or farmed land return to a forested state – we could really use the additional carbon sinks.
We bridge the gaps between the Solarpunk urban area and the green spaces sustaining them by putting the green spaces in the cities. Vertical farming and near-city farms cover large-scale staple production, and individuals and small groups manage their own or their collective lots however they like – building food gardens, community farms, personal projects in their own space, etc.
To me, the lines between environmentally friendly and efficient farming and questionable factory farming is obvious: it’s a matter of the harm literally done. A corn field in the middle of nowhere the size of a small city, running on fossil fuels and exploitative labor and shipping their product by truck to industrial meat producing farms to feed cattle, and a vertical corn farm in the middle of a city, the size of a city block, powered by solar and wind and owned by its laborers, selling their product on the first floor of their own building, may produce the same amount of corn, but they’re astronomically different in consequences.
The differences aren’t in any kind of easy-to-identify flags – nothing other than the harm itself will be visible exclusively in harmful farms and never apparently present in positive-impact large farms.
People should have a right to distance themselves from the urban centers – but we need to understand that as a personal choice people have the right to make for themselves, because no individual is obligated to serve the machinery of civilization, regardless of how good a job we think we’re doing of making that machinery helpful and positive. We can’t afford to think of rural living as a viable environmental solution. Rural living is, by definition, spreading out, and spreading out increases the energy cost of every act of engagement.
To be clear: It’s not okay for us to cut off those who choose distance from anything we can manage to offer them in terms of technology and participation; and it’s not okay for anyone to treat people who make that choice as bad people for doing so. It’s no individual’s job to inflict pain upon themselves to shave points off the carbon ledger; environmental solutions have to be about large-scale interventions, not shaming individuals for being inadequately green.
I know a fair number of people who would be utterly miserable if they were forced to live in a city for the rest of their life. Their happiness matters, and their experience is just as worthy of protecting as those of us who’ll be comfortable-to-ecstatic to live in carbon-negative megacities.
But distancing ourselves from dense populations is environmentally counter-productive, and on a large scale that can’t be the Solarpunk agenda. –Watson
