50,000 words and 27 days later

After being cajoled by several friends, I ventured into the world of NaNoWriMo for the first time ever this month. I just completed my 50,105-word novel in the genre of chick lit, and while it is not the world's greatest writing, it's completed--early. I highly recommend this for anyone who has ever considered writing a novel or just enjoys the pain of trying to create a plot, characters, dialogue, and additional pesky details out of nothing. Writing was a wonderful challenge and there is an incredible sense of accomplishment filling my soul right now. I only hope I feel this good when I finish my thesis next year.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

After several months of deliberation I am jumping into the blogging world. Hopefully I'll be consistent, but graduate school tends to take up more time than one realizes. I was inspired by this ad for steel washers and dryers posted by Shannon Coffey while researching for a paper on sexuality in fiction and movies in Post-War America. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique discusses advertising and the ways in which it defined the roles of women. Having just finished reading this groundbreaking tome, I wanted to find ads supporting this claim. This beaut teaches us that by using a steel washer you will have a cleaner home, fashionable dress, an incredibly cheerful child, and more time to go out because you won't be bound by housework.

Too bad my apartment doesn't have a washer-dryer hook-up because those sound quite lovely.