vikingfjord
Oct. 17th, 2004 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7This July while my cousins from Norway were visiting (my father's sister's sons, who were born and raised in Bergen and both live in Trondheim now-- by the way, I am in no way Norwegian myself, seeing as my father's sister was born in Brooklyn and moved to Norway as an adult, where she married and has happily [in her delightfully dour, born-to-be-Nordic way] stayed ever since) one of the many places we took them was Premier Liquor, the largest liquor store in New York State. It is the size of a small city, and while most Americans I've brought there have stood dumbfounded with their eyes bulging when I brought them in, the effect was much more marked on the Norwegians, who are natives of a land full of alcoholics to whom alcohol is somewhat denied by repressive government taxation. It's so expensive to drink that Norwegians do it for punishment, not pleasure, and most of my cousins' drinking stories involved a degree of drunkenness and danger to which I have never been exposed. It was somewhat amusing to drink with them here because they just couldn't believe how cheap it was and how moderate we were. Let that be a lesson to you who like to write blue laws. But anyhow.
There is an entire aisle at Premier devoted to vodkas of varying degrees of exoticity. There are lines of vodkas in all flavors, though the Finnish Frïs is the only one with a lime flavor (the best flavor for a vodka). There are vodkas from Russia, vodkas from Estonia, vodkas from Poland made of potato, vodkas from France made from grapes-- any kind of vodka you like.
One keen-eyed cousin (I think it was Aleksander, the younger, though I forget) spotted the sole Norwegian one in the bunch, hidden on the bottom shelf, and read out its name with a hoot of laughter: "Vikingfjord!" he laughed, pointing at it. (In Bergenese Bokmal, the dialect / accent of Norwegian they speak, it sounds phonetically roughly like "Vee-king-fyoghd", which is funnier than the English version.)
"What's so funny?" I asked.
"It's terrible vodka," he said. "Norwegians don't drink it. It's made for tourists, and it's named an utterly meaningless compound word made up of the two Norwegian words you can rely on tourists to know. "
My head is full of Norse words at this point, after two or three days of reading books about the Viking Age. The above anecdote merely struck me as more amusing than any of the stuff I'm doing at the moment.
I too am feeling the frustration of the arbitrary deadlines of NaNoWriMo: I want to just start writing now, but I know that's silly. The whole exercise is meaningless unless you adhere to the deadlines: otherwise you might as well just do your thing and not sign up at a website and post wordcounts.
I'm interested because I am a highly undisciplined person, and having some sort of discipline helps me. I'm doing well at the moment by coming up with character dossiers, a vague plot summary, and a list of possible scenes I could write. Those are giving me a good idea of what to research, and thus a good handle on how much more I have to learn about.
It's quite satisfying, but only time will tell if I can achieve my goal. I want to have the novel researched and laid out so that I can actually write it, with a goal in mind, before the month is over.
There is an entire aisle at Premier devoted to vodkas of varying degrees of exoticity. There are lines of vodkas in all flavors, though the Finnish Frïs is the only one with a lime flavor (the best flavor for a vodka). There are vodkas from Russia, vodkas from Estonia, vodkas from Poland made of potato, vodkas from France made from grapes-- any kind of vodka you like.
One keen-eyed cousin (I think it was Aleksander, the younger, though I forget) spotted the sole Norwegian one in the bunch, hidden on the bottom shelf, and read out its name with a hoot of laughter: "Vikingfjord!" he laughed, pointing at it. (In Bergenese Bokmal, the dialect / accent of Norwegian they speak, it sounds phonetically roughly like "Vee-king-fyoghd", which is funnier than the English version.)
"What's so funny?" I asked.
"It's terrible vodka," he said. "Norwegians don't drink it. It's made for tourists, and it's named an utterly meaningless compound word made up of the two Norwegian words you can rely on tourists to know. "
My head is full of Norse words at this point, after two or three days of reading books about the Viking Age. The above anecdote merely struck me as more amusing than any of the stuff I'm doing at the moment.
I too am feeling the frustration of the arbitrary deadlines of NaNoWriMo: I want to just start writing now, but I know that's silly. The whole exercise is meaningless unless you adhere to the deadlines: otherwise you might as well just do your thing and not sign up at a website and post wordcounts.
I'm interested because I am a highly undisciplined person, and having some sort of discipline helps me. I'm doing well at the moment by coming up with character dossiers, a vague plot summary, and a list of possible scenes I could write. Those are giving me a good idea of what to research, and thus a good handle on how much more I have to learn about.
It's quite satisfying, but only time will tell if I can achieve my goal. I want to have the novel researched and laid out so that I can actually write it, with a goal in mind, before the month is over.
