Well talk about a fail for the month of January. It’s been a good while since I’ve posted anything here. It’s been an awfully busy start to a very busy semester for me. But I’ll jump right in.

Avatar Movie Review

I’m going to say right off I really enjoyed this movie a lot. But I felt that the plot was a direct pull from Disney’s Pocahontas. White man meets native girl, natives teach him their ways, white man and “savage” fall in love and try to bring the fighting between their people to a stop, etc. But I felt that it was a different enough twist with aliens, new planet, outer space, futuristic time period that it was well worth the watch.

I also feel that it had very strong themes on community, nature, and protecting your environment. You get emotionally invested in the storyline and want things to workout. This movie in fact reminds me a lot of the Disney movies I watched growing up as a kid and made me think of the impact those still have on me now. For example, with The Lion King, every little girl (and some boys) between the ages or 4 and 8 became obsessed with lions around the time this movie came out. We all wanted to play with Simba and Nala and Zazu, the nice African animals. We grew a sympathy for lions, and now I think my generation is more conscious and sympathetic towards African wildlife because it subconsciously reminds us of our animal friends from The Lion King, that we watched and played with as kids.

There is similar effect that the Discovery Channel has created with Shark Week on television. People love Shark Week! I hear about it non-stop when it’s airing. People talk about sharks and how awesome they are instead of how many people they bite a year. The few people who do bring up how they bite people, someone pulls out a statistic (learned on Shark Week) about how more people die of bee stings a year than who get bitten by sharks. You have a better chance of dying from a lightning strike than a shark bite.

My point is, that I see this movie getting into people’s subconscious and making them more sympathetic to environmental issues and difference among people. Who cares if you’re tall, blue, and you have a tail; we can still get along! Media effects people, our opinions, what we think, our morals and so on. This movie will impact younger generations most specifically. And from what I see, it will be a good impact. I give Avatar two thumbs up, and I will probably be buying the DVD.

<Dork Alert> P.S. - One other relationship… you know how in Pocahontas when she’s singing “Colors of the Wind” and she touches the tree and the rock right before you see the bears and the ground glowed… I wonder if Avatar took that from Pocahontas? Hehe. I always wanted to be able to do that… </dork>

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” ~What Is NaNoWriMo?

So, I love NaNoWriMo. This is my 5th year participating in the madness. I began my sophomore year of high school when a friend told me about it over the summer. I idly blew it off. But then when she started getting excited for October to start when the NaNo forums open, I decided to check it out and I was hooked. I stayed up late that night, refreshing the NaNoWriMo home page on October 1st, 2005, the first available day for new sign-ups to start that year. And every October and November since have been filled with novel writing goodness.

The first two years I completed NaNo with two sci-fi novels in a series. The third year, I tried to continue the series, but I think they ran out of steam, and I was also swamped by my senior year of high school and college applications, etc. Similar story with my freshman year of college. I was simply too busy with the new load of homework and social life I was unused to. But this year I have more free time, a lighter class load, and my own apartment to escape and write in. I’m determined to finish this year with a new slightly sci-fi/adventure novel. Catch my synopsis under Novel Info on my NaNo Profile.

This year I started my free trial of Scrivener for Macs (which is recommended for large research papers and writing projects, even if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo). And there’s a special offer in the forums that gives you 50% off the purchase price if you win and would like to buy it after NaNo! Definitely a great motivator for me this year, because I love this program already and I’ve had it a week. Also, there is an offer from CreateSpace to give you one free printed proof of your book if you reach 50k. That’s right, you can hold a copy of your book, for FREE! I’m definitely doing that as well. (Keep in mind, these offers are only for registered NaNo users who reach 50k and validate it on the website.)

This year I donated $25 to The Office of Letters and Light that runs NaNoWriMo! $5 for every year I have participated. And if you’re a NaNo Participant on Twitter, be sure to add this Twibbon to your avatar! Made by me!!