Author: Don

Bad Attitude

Wow, I’m just not feeling it on any level right now. And, I’ve already written the first draft of a story today, a flash piece for the online flash crit group I’m in, in about an hour. I remember when that would’ve been a coup. Today, (a) I’m half-berating myself because that’s just not the project I’m supposed to be working on right now and (b) now I’ve got one more thing to edit.

I know that’s the absolute wrong way to look at things right now, but there it is.

Where’s My Inner Taskmaster?

Yes, I added about another thousand words to “The one with the mask.” But, the story’s still not done, I don’t think (which obviously means the MS isn’t finished). Alas, some of the pressure is off as the group is cancelled this week. But, this is opportunity–now, there’s absolutely no fucking excuse for not having a finished quality product ASAP.

Guess I’m Really Not Alone

I’m in a café in a library at the Big Red School on the Hill, playing hookey from work. Hell, I got stories to finish.

There’s a joke in I-town, mostly among writers who know each other, that everyone here is a writer. “Everyone”–townies, professors, undergrads, grad students–is working on some novel or screenplay or somethingorother.

I’m observing a conversation between two people, an English professor and a library media specialist, and an old physics professor who kind of horned in on their conversation.

Two of the three confessed to being writers.

So That’s How It’s Done

Elizabeth Bear writes in Storytellers Unplugged: Passion and the single blogger

And that’s what makes [certain blogs] readable–compulsive, even. Because they’re committed. They’re there laying it on the line. This is what I do, and this is how I do it.

And that? Is interesting. And it’s interesting in ways that apply to fiction writing, too. Because characterization counts. I mean, let’s be honest here: Shakespeare couldn’t plot his way out of a wet paper bag. And he knew it, too, which is why he lifted stories from everywhere and anywhere, with the peculiar light-fingered pickpocket’s touch of his. But the man could write characters–people–better than just about anybody.

A good weblog is about character.

New Subs

I’m going to have a go at tracking my fiction submissions on here. I’ve appropriately decided to label this, and all future posts of this sort, masochism.

I’ve sent two flash pieces here. I was at a talk in the spring sponsored by the Saltonstall Foundation, and the editor of this journal was one of the presenters. I’d been thinking about submitting to them ever since, even after seeing this potential vision of my future in the last two panels of this page from Raketenwerfer’s America’s Top Novelist, part 2.