Homies

matociquala

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Breaking news--

Mass market paperback edition of METAtropolis. Or however you capitalize that.

davidlevine

| - All hail the Sucky First Draft

Word count: 2188 | Since last entry: 2188

After far too many weeks of research, noodling, and outlining, none of which seemed to be going anywhere, I decided to adopt a new strategy: just start writing. I'm driving cross-country in the dark with no map, no destination, and no visibility beyond the reach of my headlights. It feels weird and I can see plenty of problems in what I've written so far, which I know will have to be heavily edited when I'm done, but at least I'm putting down words and it feels good.

This is an unusual writing strategy for me, but for the moment it seems to be working. This book is not like anything else I've written because I'm already familiar with (a version of) the characters and setting and because it's structured as a collection of related short stories. I was beating myself up about the linking überplot and character arc that ties them all together, but I've given up on that for now. I'm just writing one story about these characters (not even necessarily the first story in the book), and when I'm done with that one I'll write another, and after I've written a few I bet I'll understand what bigger things are happening and I'll be able to put the stories I have into the correct order and insert the necessary bits to expose to the reader the überplot that, in some subconscious way, was there all along.

I'm putting a lot of trust in my subconscious here. This is kind of the opposite progression from what jaylake did with his New Model Process a year or two ago, but then his process and mine started off very different and I'm sure we have different lessons to learn.

Alas, the writing isn't going any faster this way -- still about 500 words a day -- but at least I'm moving.

matociquala

| - with one fist raised in anger. with one foot in the fire.

2184 words on Grail since 7 am, and I'm calling it a good day's work. If I can keep up an average rate of at least six pages a day, I will be done by early January. Which gives me time to revise the horrid steaming mess that is The White City, and then, once truepenny wraps up her current extravaganza, get pushing on A Reckoning of Men in time to have it done for the summer deadline--which leaves me some time to write The Steles of the Sky.

Oh, yeah, and there's all that Shadow Unit due between now and then.

If I seem like I'm not around much on the internets or for social obligations, that would be why.

Grail is persisting in being sort of interesting to write. Today, it pitched a fit at me and drew a line in the sand structurally, telling me (in essence) that I can't make it skip ahead in the narrative to kill some time for sub-lightspeed-travel, thank you very much, and I can just suck it up and write that part of the book. Which part of the book doesn't currently seem to have much bearing on what I thought was the main plot arc, but I am pretty sure than when my right-brain plants its feet like this, it's usually on to something, and all the left-brain can do is go along with the program and quit whining about why?

So today was nine pages of backstory I hadn't been expecting to write. But it's wordcount, and go me.

I think I've sort of learned to go with the flow and stop trying to microsteer so much. Maybe I'm actually learning to write! Stranger things have happened.

Mean things: loneliness of command, nobody wants to believe that Tristen isn't a war criminal any more, Daddy issues, privation, Balkanization, civil war, religious baggage.

Current Mood: nostalgic

catrambo

| - Recommended For Creative Folks

I wanted to point people at BOOKLIFE: STRATEGIES AND SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY WRITER. We just hosted Jeff VanderMeer while he passed through on the Finch & Booklife tour, and it's been busy enough that I haven't sat down and gone cover to cover with it yet. I have used part of it in a class already, skimmed through it, and attended one workshop and one lecture on it, though, so I feel comfortable recommending it. ;)

It's addressed not just to writers but to people with creative projects of all types. Jeff uses the term "Booklife" to describe one's existence and career path as an artist and sections include: Building Your Booklife (mapping your future, choosing platforms, managing involvement, etc); Communicating Your Booklife (networking, PR, leveraging opportunities); Balancing Things, figuring out your writing process, and appendices by a number of people on things like podcasts, press releases, book reviews, and reputation management.

There's an accompanying website for Booklife that is well worth checking out. Jeff is thorough, lucid, and has a healthy sense of humor about the absurdities of the field, so it's an entertaining as well as informative read.

In the interest of full disclosure, this was written by a friend and I even contributed the part on writing workshops. Still worth picking up!

Current Mood: busy

mkhobson

| - Bragging on daughter

We interrupt this blog for some intensive and focused bragging on my daughter, who’s been having a bang-up year so far, as evinced by the following:

1) She made honor roll this term, for the first time in her whole elementary school career.

2) She achieved a “self manager” badge, which is actually surprisingly hard to get and keep. A “self manager” badge gives the kid who earns it lots of special privileges, including an end-of-the-year party. Again, this is a goal she’s been trying for since first grade, and I’m really proud she’s finally made it.

3) She got a t-shirt made with her art on it! My daughter’s class had this design competition, to create the t-shirts that the 6th graders will wear while working with local Head Start kids. And out of many, many entries, my daughter’s design won. So her design will appear on shirts worn by almost 100 Oregon City 6th graders.

You can see her design up there to the left. I think it’s pretty dang cute. It has kind of “Precious Moments” meets “Ziggy” vibe to it, what with the big bulbous feets poking out from under the book.

As you can tell, I am a very proud momma. Today there is a ceremony for the kids who made “self-manager.” I’ll be in the front row!

Originally published at M.K. Hobson | Necrophilatelist. Please leave any comments there.

jimvanpelt

| - Thoughts on NaNoWriMo and Writing Process

The always thoughtful lmarley is teaching a writing workshops for teens next week, and she posted her thoughts about National Novel Writing Month.  She asked, "How does this exercise teach you how to 'learn and master' style and craft and pacing? If you don't revise, rewrite, edit, and examine, what improves?" 

Her questions got me thinking about the value of sprinting through a 50,000 word month:

I don't think the NaNoWriMo helps much at all with craft and pacing, but I do think there is some value in discovering voice. One of the big problems I see with wannabe writers is that they just haven't produced much, and what they do produce is overthought. Where I see this most clearly is in my creative writing classes where I have them keep 1,000-word-a-week journals. The stories they turn in can be tortured, stilted and mechanical, but their journals often have passages (sometimes very long passages) of smooth, readable, interesting and even compelling language.

I think the difference comes from their mindset and the process. When they are writing for me, they are thinking about all they know about writing and about me as a critical reader. They seize up, write slowly, and kill their voice. But when they write in their journals (especially after we've been doing them for a couple of weeks), they are writing quickly and for themselves.

NaNoWriMo puts writers more into that journal writing mindset. It's okay if it's bad. It just has to be done, and in the midst of trying to get it done, passages with real voice emerge. What they learn from the process is not only to get words on the page, but also to write from a more direct place in themselves--not the heavily filtered place where they normally wring their sentences.

The editing that comes later will be about picking out the good, adjusting the not so good, and tossing away the bad, but they can't do the editing if they don't produce something to edit first.

The cartoon is from the very funny writer and artist, Debbie Ridpath Ohi.  She has lots of other insightful writing illustrations at her site.

Current Mood: chipper

davekirtley

| - Symphony of Science

Symphony of Science is a cool site launched by John Boswell to promote science through music. Listen to the hauntingly beautiful "We Are All Connected," which uses autotuning software to create a sort of trance/rap tune out of snippets of lectures by luminaries such as Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye.

nihilistic_kid

| - What's the point of that story?

I hope my specific examples below don't come off as picking on people. (No really! Really!!)


The question in the subject header came up twice yesterday about different stories ("Guts" and "A&P") and also came up last week. I described the events of Stephen King's New Yorker story Premium Harmony to la_nausicaa and she asked what the point of that story could actually be. (That said, she liked "Guts", but then she read that one and only heard about "Premium Harmony.") She's also a school psychologist in training and said to me over email, "but it is interesting. do you have any idea how ashamed most kids are about masturbating. this totally normalizes that. it is like a public health advertisement: masturbating is normal and ok. just be careful, li'l dude," when I wondered if assigning "Guts" would just accelerate the usual gossip and rumors about a teacher's personal life that is such valuable currency to students.

And then there was the Escape Pod podcast of my novelette The Uncanny Valley and the now-traditional searching for and failing to find the point common to the listener forums for that site, and when a friend proofread my story forthcoming in Phantom (yeah yeah, it's been forthcoming for a while but this time it really really is coming out next week, so I'm told) she concluded her queries and requests for changes with, "Well, that was utterly pointless."

So, you know, I'm curious about this idea of what the point of stories should be. At first I was wondering if "What's the point of that story?" is just another way of saying, "I was grossed out!" but as we've seen stories like "A&P" are called pointless, and some people who ask after the point of Gross Story #1 like Gross Story #2 just fine. I wondered if confusion was also an issue—someone who finds a story confusing may suspect that there is a point that they just happened to miss (and that it's the story's fault). But then again "A&P" isn't confusing. It isn't even all that boring. I kinda liked it when I was first assigned it, though any drama it had has long since been sucked out of me by repeated assignments.

(Aside, I was thanked last weekend at WFC for "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" because at least one person interpreted the story as the first new thing to be said about "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in a loooong time.)

Of course, plenty of people find "A&P" boring and feel it is plotless, which also ties into the idea of confusing stories (whose plots cannot be followed) being pointless.

So sometimes a pointless story is a story that grosses out the reader, confuses the reader, or bores the reader. Each seems to be a burden. There's an expectation of enjoyment (and I presume enlightenment given the search for a "point") that is crushed somehow.

So what kind of points do stories with points have? Do people pick up a magazine or a collection and think to themselves, "Oh boy, am I gonna get a brain full of points tonight, baby!" Is a point something even sought after or only missed when it appears to be gone? Do writers sit down with a point to prove when they write a story...and don't many people object to being "preached" to? Of course, in that last case people often don't feel preached to if they already agree with the writer's point, but even that isn't universal. A libertarian acquaintance of mine told me that he can't read L. Niel Smith at all these days because the deck is so obviously stacked in favor of libertarianism that the political explorations aren't sophisticated enough for him. "I find myself arguing against my own politics!" he said, and then he described throwing a book across the room.

(That's another thing I still wonder about. I can't be bothered to dig up the link, but I did ask a few years ago if people really do that and as it turns out, people do! One day I'm going to start doing that with pizza slices I don't like. California will never be the same!)

So what do you all think? What's the point of stories? Can you think of some stories that have made good points, or that are good and pointless? Let the world know!

eugie

| - Niches, Typecasting, and Stereotypes

Just committed guest bloggery at Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days: "Niches, Typecasting, and Stereotypes". Go read, yo.

Current Mood: amused

aliettedb

| - Famous Nov 10th Birthdays

It would seem I share a birthday with Neil Gaiman and Sesame Street. (and Martin Luther, incidentally).

One step closer to fame and fortune

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

Leave a comment at original post, or comment here.

jaylake

| - [cancer] The frame of mind begins to narrow

As I know from experience, my focus tends to narrow when I close in on a major milestone in my cancer journey. This illness induces all sorts of pathologies in me which I never enjoy in the course of my normal life — anxiety, panic attacks, crying, etc. It also invokes an old, old specter of depression, which I struggled with to severe clinical extremes in my teen years and young adulthood.

Walking this morning, I found myself turning over my surgery fears. I don't actually have much of a negative reaction to the idea of the surgical procedures. In fact, they tend to fascinate me. But anesthesia... I have both a reasonable and an unreasoning fear of anesthesia. My true terror in surgery is that I simply will never wake up.

And boy did that terror dog me this morning.

Yesterday was a perfectly fine day. Day Jobbery, lunch with kenscholes, got my hair done in the afternoon while Mark Ferrari kibitzed, then dinner with Mark, then a quiet evening at home. But the whole day I was very bundled up, like Randy in A Christmas Story. I cannot afford to come down with a respiratory infection in the next week or two, not going into lung surgery, so keeping my core temperature high has become a significant priority.

And that depressed me, for reasons it took me a while to unravel. What I finally realized was that exaggerated protection from being chilled is also part of the chemo experience, at least for the chemo I'm most likely to be on. Being ridiculously bundled up was like a pre-echo of that extended state of medical fragility into which I will be entering all too soon.

The petulant part of me keeps crying that I don't want to do this, again, or ever. The stubborn part of me says fuck cancer, we will survive.

Still, the focus narrows.

jaylake

| - [travel] Reminder: Open dinner in Philadelphia on Wednesday evening

As previously noted, I am flying to Philadelphia on Wednesday, 11/11. I will be hosting an open dinner at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott at 7 pm that evening.

If my plane is delayed, I will do my best to update here, but I will also notify klingonguy, so double check his blog before setting out. RSVPs appreciated but not required.

jaylake

| - [photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.



© 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

jaylake

| - [links] Link salad follows the example of the comic-paper idol

The Dragon Page reviews Green [ Powell's | Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | Borders ] — (Thanks to brent_kellmer.)

A reader reacts to Madness of Flowers [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Jay Lake, Religion and a Benediction — Shlomi, on my cancer.

TWA Mechanics from Outer Space — Hilarious photo, ca. 1941.

Saturn After the Equinox — Another APOD image that will take your breath away.

1962 textbook, When You Marry — Check out the excerpted material on class differences in child rearing and sex. It's creepy.

SMBC on the perils of evolutionists — Heh.

Antihealthcare Reform Idiocy — Oh, wow. Money shot: "When I need health care, I pay for it out of pocket," he said, adding that he did not fear the possibility that an accident or illness would leave him with unaffordable bills. "I'm a Christian, so I'm not afraid of death," he said. Good luck with that.

?otD: How thick are you?

jaylake

| - [cancer] Visiting the patient

I'd been thinking about having some of my friends attending OryCon visit me in the hospital, but I'm told they're being extremely vigilant about visitation due to risks from H1N1 and seasonal flu. I may have trouble even getting my immediate circle of family and friends in.

So the fallback plan is to have interested folks visit Nuevo Rancho Lake on Sunday. I should be discharged from the hospital on Saturday to continue post-op recovery at home.

However, that presents several potential issues. First, we have no idea what state of mind or body I'll be in. Visitors may be impractical unless it's a tour of Jay snoring in an opiate-induced haze, for example. Second, because this is lung surgery, I'll be incredibly vulnerable to respiratory infections, including common colds, flu and pneumonia. And if someone brings me Con Crud, that would be a wretched gift indeed.

Yet at the same time, I know me. If I'm not toxically wretched, visits from my people are immensely uplifting for me.

So we're talking about face masks and contingency plans and whatnot. At the moment, it's utterly unclear. Watch this space, and the blog of calendula_witch for details as they emerge.

However, if you are interested in seeing me that OryCon Sunday, please let me know in comments here, or by email. That might help in planning.

nihilistic_kid

| - Let a million intestines be chewed through

A popular high school English teacher has been suspended after assigning his 11th-grade students a short story about masturbation by "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk. Greg Van Voorhis, 30, issued copies of "Guts" — which details three increasingly catastrophic masturbation attempts by teenagers with props including a carrot, a candle, and the water intake at the bottom of a swimming pool — to about about 100 students gearing up for the English Regents exam.

Many of the comments surrounding this news story seem to take it on faith that "Guts" is about masturbation and that of course kids masturbate, so what's the big deal? This is how you can tell who has read the story and who has not!

Of course, Guts is a story about masturbation in the same way American Psycho is about investment banking or Hogg is about the trucking industry. Yeah, the stuff's in there, but...

All that said, "Guts" is free online (see link), has been reprinted in a Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and a number of other places, so it's not like the story is otherwise locked away.

Plus, it's better than "A&P."

tchernabyelo

| - Why I don't go to RenFaires...

"There's a certain mystique about the Renaissance period for people," Broxton said. "Be it the elaborate costumes, the crafts, the turkey legs, people really seem to embrace that era and take on the persona."

***

Birds of prey including a bald eagle glared at passersby from perches on the arms of HawkQuest volunteers as bagpipes and drums played.

***

Having performed at a Renaissance faire in Houston as part of the German court, Heather Castillo on Sunday traded in her medieval costume for a flowing dress, a pair of colorful butterfly wings and a paper umbrella.

Four-year-old daughter Ivy Castillo, too, enjoyed playing dress-up for her first Renaissance ArtsFaire, donning a pink gown, glittery fairy wings and a butterfly wing painted on her cheek.

"We're butterfly fairies," Heather said, as Ivy nodded in agreement. "We're having so much fun and we love getting dressed up."

davidlevine

| - Gamera vs. Guiron with live music 11/11 - who's in?

Hey, Portland peeps! There's going to be a showing of the incredibly cheesy Japanese monster movie Gamera vs. Guiron (1969) with live music, sound effects, and dialogue. Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday November 11, 7pm, $10. Anyone wanna go with?

Click here to buy tickets!

Filmusik: Gamera vs. Guiron from Galen Huckins on Vimeo.

countesslovlace

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( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

maryrobinette

| - Do not nominate me for a Nebula this year.

While I think this is an unlikely scenario, I want to make this statement before the Nebula nominating period begins on November 15th. Because my involvement in the Nebula voting system is pretty intensive right now, I will decline any nominations of any of my fiction this year.

The system is new and I have to be able to oversee it without introducing a conflict of interest.

Comments? -- Link.