Jessica Ralston's Blog

Well, it’s heading towards 11 p.m., and I’d say I’ve had a pretty productive day! I’m not as far along as I wanted to be by the end of Day 1, but I’ll take when I can get. I’m stopping for now, because I have other things I need to do before a midnight deadline, namely 750words and a guest blog spot elsewhere on the Interwebz.

My goal this year is 80,000 words. I don’t know if this is a psychotic death wish, wishful thinking, or what, but I’m determined to do it.

OK, off I go again!

Hope your NaNo adventures are going well!

Breakthroughs have been had, people! Breakthroughs, I tell you!

As you can see, I’ve been very busy:

Eureka!

Thanks to some advice from B, and some friends in my invaluable NaNoWriMo Google+ circle, I walked away from my plot and its problems. In the meantime, I crocheted some mittens, worked, had a birthday and caught a cold, in that order. I decided that today would be a good day to get back to my plot and try to figure out why I was having problems making everything come together. I didn’t know if I needed fresh eyes, or if I had truly gone wrong somewhere and needed to go back. Read the rest of this entry »

The sun rising over a flight of stairs at the Mutianyu Great Wall.

When I was making my west along the Great Wall a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but think of all the feet that had tread the wall hundreds of years ago, and how I was retracing their footsteps. The thought didn’t occur to me until I was in a guardhouse and had an odd experience with my camera and battery (I watch Ghost Hunters, so what?), but when I started the climb again, and I found these stairs, I realized that soldiers had climbed these stairs on the lookout for the Mongols hundreds of years before the first tourist set foot on it. It was awe inspiring, just as I think seeing the pyramids in Egypt would be, and seeing the Parthenon in Greece.

The day we climbed it we were lucky: we went early to avoid the wave of tourists (it was Chinese National Day), and the sun hadn’t burned off the fog that rested in the green valleys. When you come up over the rise of the first big hill and catch the view, it can be breathtaking. The Wall stretches literally for miles, following the ridges and dips of the mountains. It’s so…vast.

I found it interesting that a civilization would build this wall to keep people out, and for me, that rang true of present day China, in a way.

They do their best to keep news and world events out, while keeping their citizens uninformed. My mind jumps to the Chinese people being mute (no freedom of speech or freedom of the press here) and dumb (news coming in is either censored or tweaked to be more palatable to the CCP).

It makes me wonder about the quality and quantity of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I imagine they say something along the lines of, “See? This is what a democratic, capitalist society brings you. Do you really want this?” so as not to incite similar protests. This is why they block international social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Google+.

I often wonder if they know they’re being oppressed, but most of them seem pretty content to just live their lives, especially older people. I imagine younger people in the bigger cities like Beijing or Shanghai are slightly more informed than the average Chinese citizen, but they have the tech savvy to get around the blocks.

I didn’t mean for this post to turn into something slightly political, but the topic has been on my mind quite a bit recently, because my NaNo novel is about a government not unlike China, that censors websites for much the same reason as the CCP. It was originally meant to be a pretty picture to look at, but I’m not apologizing for what the post has turned into.

Pretty picture though! If you ever have the chance, go to The Great Wall, it’s beautiful. And, it’ll make you think.