KORT Grangeville! and You’re listening to the voice of the Treasure Valley, KYME Boise. Those are (or were in the case of KYME) variants on station ID, required by the FCC to be announced every hour. They were both pivotal pieces for me. KORT was my first real job. I even spent the afternoons at KORT for the spring semester of high school as an “intern®?. Which translates to unpaid labor. KYME was a low wattage, daylight only station. When I started there the did no live people on air. It was just spin the records and play the spots.
In both of these, I learned to write, Hey! For pay!, 30 seconds spots. Where spot is the radio language for advertisement. 30 seconds in which to convince the listener to buy the something you spent 30 seconds telling them about. You really cannot say much in 30 seconds, according to Kim Day, the former KYME Program Director and long term friend of mine, you can get in 70 to 90 words, The big problem was writing a beautiful spot, with some beautiful twists to the language and then give it a whirl. Um, no you cannot give them a 45 second spot. You had to keep it to 30 so I would delete a few word here, a couple words there and try it again, Now it was down to 35 seconds. So I tried talking really fast and, nope that did not work. Rearrange some text and then, finally, it was down to 30 seconds.
My mindset was a tight, brief statement. This made coming up with 10 pages of whatever for a term paper a real bear for me. I failed miserably at that effort.
I have spent years under the delusion that I could not write much at once. You’ve seen my pages of text. They are my upper limit. Until. Until NaNoWriMo came around again. I had first heard of that event tow? four? more? years ago. Hey, I can try that. I can try that and keep notes on why stopped me. In mid-October, I signed up. I broke the news to my wife. She was and constitutes to be very supportive.
Going in I set some rules for myself. Let us do 2,000 words a day. None of this hitting 1,667 words to scrape by. I worked on what to write about. If I had problems coming up with something in the last two weeks, well tough on me. I would start with multiple topics. If I ran dry on one subject I could switch to another. There were a couple of things I wanted to describe, my scar collection for example (some people have tattoos, I have scars) on I had those lists as a pressure release valve. If I needed to get the last 2000 words it was off to one of the list items.
Today I hit the 50,000 target. Now I have another 7 days to fill it out. 50,35 words to date. I figure I have another 13,336 words to go.
MichaelRpdx :: rkmn 2021-11-22