Brian A. Paul

As my friend Loren Says:

“Any fight is pretty much over when the other guy starts throwing his head at you.”

I caught this post over at BoingBoing regarding special rules for Canadian winners of a Starbucks sweepstakes. Essentially if you win and you’re Canadian then you also have to solve some sort of math problem. For a few minutes I went through all the screwy reasons I could think of that this might be the case and then it suddenly occurred to me that Starbucks has no plainly visible business reason for implementing this clause. Canadians aren’t any worse at math than anyone else, generally speaking, so this doesn’t look like some kind of loophole that would allow Starbucks to decline payment of the prize. That being the case I quickly came to the conclusion that something this asinine must have origins in the law. Viola, Wikipedia knows all:

“Notably, Canada and several European countries require entrants to solve a mathematical puzzle, making it a contest of skill, in order to overcome requirements that would classify sweepstakes as a form of gambling.”

In this case specifically, avoiding breaking the law seems to be the idea. Now, I entertain myself with what kind of mathematical operation might be required of the winner. 1 + 1 if they’re blatantly side-stepping the law or possibly one of these if they’re more interested in holding onto their prize. Correct if I’m wrong but I believe that in the U.S. the prize must be placed in escrow (the company offering the prize cannot keep it even if no winner is forthcoming) for the sweepstakes to be legal.

In a word, Failure. This is not surprising, it has happened every year I’ve made an attempt. It just seems like things go sideways in November and this year was no exception. Without going into gory detail we had some pretty significant family tragedy around here. Life comes at you whether you want it to or not. This just gives me that much more respect for all those people who have managed to finish a full length novel regardless of the other challenges they’ve had to overcome in the process of doing so.

The challenge of Nanowrimo is to write something that might be more clearly described as a novella. The word count target is 50,000. As a point of reference, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has a word count of 76,944. As anyone who has read the Harry Potter series can tell you, each book is a bit longer than the last. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs in a bit higher at 198,227 words.

Keep in mind that one point of Nanowrimo is to get the 50,000 words written regardless of quality, cohesive story-telling, etc. That’s a far cry from writing a polished publishable novel that someone will actually print, much less something that will sell to readers.

My congratulations go out to all Nanowrimo participants whether they achieved their goal or not. At least you put yourself out there and gave it a try. Better that than giving up before you ever started.

For those of you who do not know, ‘NaNoWriMo‘ stands for National Novel Writing Month. The month in question would be November, just two short weeks away.

In brief, the idea is to produce a 50,000 word short novella, with little consideration for quality of work, between the first and last days of November. It’s something akin to running a marathon. Just get something, anything done. You can always alter, fix, repair, and rewrite after November 30.

I first came across NaNoWriMo in 2004, signed up and failed to produce even a single paragraph. Come 2005, I gamely committed myself to writing again and once again failed. 2006, failure (but I got a whole 2 pages down.)

It’s a cool thing and a cool community. I’m impressed that this many people are publicly setting for themselves a very difficult goal. I love reading, and I love that this many people are trying so very hard to add to the body of literature in the world.

Will I give it another shot this year? I don’t know. Time is already a pretty scarce commodity these days. I’ll just have to see how things go over the next 2 weeks.

As you may or may not know, Lawrence Lessig spent 10 years dedicating his life to fighting bad copyright law. He may be the most influential ‘copyfighter’ ever.

Last June (2007) Larry announced that he was shifting his scholarship and eventually his activism away from copyright. This isn’t to say he’s abandoned the copyfight, but you could say his primary focus is shifting to the problem of ‘Corruption.’ Specifically it seems United States governmental corruption.

This morning he posted the video of the alpha version of his Corruption Lecture.

Whether you agree or disagree with the often controversial Mr. Lessig his lectures are guaranteed to give you pause, make you think and still manage to entertain. To me, that’s worth the hour or so you’ll spend listening to what he has to say.