Short Term Plans & More Details

So this is a bit of an update about how I’m planning to proceed with this blog, as well as some further details about where this whole project came from.

Right now I’m trying to get myself into a schedule where I’m publishing a section of the Uprising Deconstruction every Monday morning.  In addition to this I’m planning some cosmetic changes to this blog’s appearance, as well as putting together a more formal comment policy on the off chance that I succeed in attracting an actual following.  For the time being, if you plan on commenting, the blog is set up so that your first comment will automatically go into moderation for approval (so please be patient).  As far as content goes, please be decent and understanding to one another, and where possible cite sources for any objections you may have.

Along the way I’m planning on including additional posts about history, popular culture, and the CAF.  These other posts will not be on a fixed schedule since a lot of these posts are still in the vague idea stage and still haven’t been written yet.

That’s the other thing about this deconstruction, I…already wrote the whole thing.

I actually started this deconstruction several years ago as a kind of personal therapy.  There was a lot wrong with the book and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to systematically go through it and write it out.  The material I produced was read by a few friends and confidants, and that was about it.  A short while later, the 2015 NaNoWriMo came along and I, being as aspiring writer, decided to see if I could deconstruct the entire novel as a kind of project for that November.  When fifty thousand words proved insufficient…well things kind of got out of control then and it became my project for the next two years, followed by a completion month in Dec 2017 that got me past the finish line once and for all.  As it stands right now, I have a hundred and eighty thousand words in rough draft format covering a novel that’s just under five hundred pages in length.

This has been an experience, let me tell you.

So right now I’m not so much writing this deconstruction as much as I am editing it, including more detailed research and references, pictures, maps and diagrams.  The friends who’ve seen my work earlier are acting something like unofficial editors, and with their support I hope to get this entire project up online over the next year or so.

Thus far this has been a pretty exciting and enlightening experience, and I hope that anyone stumbling across this blog will share this experience even if they disagree with my opinions.  My ultimate goal would be to create a space that will draw people from some very different groups (Indigenous and non-Indigenous, military, civilian, activists, etc…), bring them together and hopefully promote a conversation that, at least in my experience, hasn’t happened nearly enough in this country.

So for all newcomers, welcome aboard and welcome to the conversation!  Let’s see if we can get through this thing together.

***Note: I am aware that the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write fiction.  I figure that Bland’s novel is supposed to be realistic speculative fiction that descends into unwholesome parody, so I figured a facts-based analysis would…make it fiction?  I’m going to call it one of those double-negative things and leave it at that.  Anyway, the main thing was that all the text that went into the word count was my own (I put quote references down as footnotes at the time and configured my computer not to count them) so I did in fact produce 50k words per year as required, in case any pedants were concerned.***