Writing in Public, Too: NaNoWriMo Day 27

Happy Thanksgiving, for all you folks in the US!
Hope the rest of you are having a grand day, too.

Thursday is usually a 16 hour work day for me, but – I got half a day off, for the holiday. I got up at a decent hour and got a thousand words in on the Raven story, which proceeds to go pretty nicely. Smooth sailing on this one so far, and already I am seeing some hints about what I can do in future episodes.

Then I decided to check out the coverage of the Macy parade in NYC, and…I got derailed for a while.

Because there wasn\’t any coverage on the internet.

Macy\’s had said they\’d cover it there. But they\’d shut off coverage. And nobody else was streaming anything to the internet at all. Which was weird. I went to twitter to find out why.

And found #stoptheparade trending on Twitter. Thousands of people were out in the NYC streets, protesting around the Ferguson case. And not a bit of it was hitting the \”official\” news at all. I was surprised. Usually the news jumps on that sort of thing, but there was a blanket over all of it. Nothing was getting out.

I\’ve got seriously mixed feelings about the whole thing.

Racism of any sort is stupid, and wrong. I\’ve had tastes of it, as a white male – ironic, and maybe rare, but true. It sucks.

At the same time, I wonder if there isn\’t something we could be doing to achieve positive impact, on a day that\’s supposed to be about being grateful for the good things in our lives. So I spent some time working on that. Both at home; and then later at work, helping other people feel just a little better about their day than they had. It\’s one nice thing about being a nurse – you have enormous opportunity to help people have a better day.

I\’m not going to chat a lot about politics here. I have mine, you have yours, and whether we agree or not is irrelevant.

So instead, I\’ll just suggest this:

Be nice to people. Play well with others. All others. Wake up each day with the goal of making the world a better place than it was yesterday, and then make that happen EVERY DAY, in small ways.

I know it\’s not just that simple.

But if everybody did that, I think the world would be a much nicer place. Which would be a good start.

Got two thousand words in today. Lost some time to thinking about bigger issues. Going to be a fun last couple of days of NaNoWriMo. 😉

Fiction words for the day: 2000      Fiction words for November: 40,000

Blog Words today: 445    Blog Words for November: 10,606