Category: Navel Gazing

“Get along…”

It’s just past noon, and I haven’t really started my writing day yet. I shouldn’t complain; now’s about the time I started yesterday, and I got done everything I’d planned to get done. Trouble is, I set my bar a little low during the break. It’s time to pick it up a tad, I think. Not that the time’s been completely wasted, seeing as I’ve been scouring teh Intartubes for snippets from the Daptone Records catalog.

Still though, Gunny says that it’s time to work, so that’s what I’m going to do. Time to turn off the soul (music) and put on some stuff I can work to…

No Tough Love Today

The crit group was cancelled due to inclement weather, so that sucked. Just as well, because I didn’t have anything to contribute this week aside from my usual half-baked opinions of other folks’ writing, much like the half-baked thinking I’m about to share with you now.

I’ve come across a bunch of stories lately that make me wonder what would happen if I re-typed them and submitted them to the crit group. What would they say about unclear narration, too many points of view, or just plain too many adverbs ending in -ly in a story I tried to pass off as mine? Would they have the same comments regardless of who wrote the story?

And, I’m not talking about the authors everybody loves to hate, either. I’m talking about writers whose talent I’d gladly sell a testicle to Ol’ Scratch to have. So, I’m not hatin’ on anyone.

Makes me go, “Hmm…”

Baaaaaaaa!

Normally, I’d do this on this neglected blog, but because SaltyMissJill asked so nice (“Hey! I tagged yo ass!”) on this blog, I’ll play along here–at least as far as I’d usually play along.

Here are the rules for the meme:
1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

Sorry, but I just don’t do the last two. Nothing personal–just sheer laziness.

1
I can hum along, note for note, with the horn lines of every Chicago song (with horns), from the Chicago Transit Authority album to their latest, Chicago XXX.

2
I have successfully gone black and gone back–not once, not twice, but three times.

3
I worship Cassandra Wilson.

4
The one food I’d be willing to subsist on: Chinese restaurant fried chicken wings.

5
The first concert I ever went to: Depeche-fucking-Mode.

6
I’ve played the trumpet, off and on, for almost half my life.

7
I know kung fu.

Ouch

Something I read in The American Scholar at the bookstore. I regretted not buying it until I found it online…

…certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness.

Makes me feel good to be a Jonathan Lethem fan–in sort of the way you do when you hide out during a scuffle long enough to read the writing on the wall, and then throw the last two punches for the winning side once all the hard work’s done. Well, not really. I mean, I’ve read both of Lethem’s short story collections, and I have both Gun, With Occassional Music and Motherless Brooklyn on tap.

But, I also have You Shall Know Our Velocity and McSweeney’s 14, too.

There, But for the Grace of God

My crit group is not like this, thank Christ. Now the business, from what I’ve heard, might be a different story…

(Sent by a fellow group member.)

EDIT: I’ll be damned, I thought I’ve seen this image before. Neil Gaiman posted it on his blog a few days ago in an entry I “starred” for later review in Google Reader. I found it since I’m home sick from The Diamond Mines today, and going through my horrendous backlog.

“That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang”

It took me quite a long time to achieve the level of groove I’ve got now. I’ll be happier with it when I start seeing what sort of finished stories I start to produce. But right now, I’m more interested in my daily progress.

Before the AS3K, I used to carry around two legal pads, a white one for draft when I couldn’t or wouldn’t carry my laptop around, and a yellow one for notes. Nowadays, I don’t have much need for my white pad. I do all of my drafting on the AlphaSmart, and other writing and planning in my notebook or my canary pad. So yeah, I got a new style, as the kids say. The important thing is whether or not my new process helps me produce on a daily basis, regardless of how I perceive the “quality” of the first draft.

Because right now, I really don’t know where this new piece of mine, “The one with the warlock JuCo,” is going. I honestly wonder whether there’s a story in here. I think the initial scene that inspired the story in the first place is compelling and could maybe be turned into some sort of light flash piece. But beyond that, I’m running into the “Okay, why should anyone care?” question. It’s tempting to quit, but I won’t. It’s more likely I’ll be tempted to sit and type pages and pages of notes and summaries and shit–I’ve got 9 pages of “supplementary material” that thus far has helped me write a mere 7 pages of first draft. What point, if any, does a cost-benefit analysis come into play?

Written with

Drowning in RSS

So, I’ve been writing so much that I’ve let gobs and gobs of intarwub stuff pile up in my Google Reader. I’ve tried to quit “starring” anything, at least until I got caught up. Yeah, right. I just piled shit into Google Bookmarks.

Anyway, here’s a random sampling of stuff I’ve accumulated, mostly writing related.

1
From Dar Kush (Steven Barnes) on reading.

The point is that your output will be one step down from your input. You can’t read comic books and write classics. Sorry. Here’s a joke I always tell students: ‘If you want to write comic books, read pulp fiction. If you want to write pulp fiction, read popular fiction. If you want to write popular fiction, read bestsellers. If you want to write bestsellers, read classics. And if you want to write classics..? Choose your grandparents very carefully.’

2
Steve Perry on writers workshops (part one of two)

Damon [Knight]’s personal taste is not the same as an intrinsic flaw in the piece, and you have to be able to tell the difference, else you wind up producing stories that please the workshoppers but don’t sell …

Here’s part two.

3
Another POV on critique groups from Bev Vincent.

4
Sarah Monette talks about Five Things I Know About Worldbuilding

5
Paul Jessup writes about The Newbie Writer Cycle.

Jay Lake follows up with The Early Career Writer cycle

6
There is NO….number 6.

7
From Warren’s Bad Signal mail a few weeks ago…

But I did note that apparently the Gene Hunt role in the
ill-advised American remake of LIFE ON MARS is going to
good old Colm Meaney. And god knows Meaney’s made some
crap to pay the mortgage, but he tends to elevate a thing —
or at least let some light into it — just by showing up. So I
might give the remake a look after all, even though it’s
almost guaranteed to be a train wreck…

And there you have it. Vital bits of information that, only by the grace of God, I’ve managed to survive without blogging about until today.

“They’re only words, unless they’re true”*

(*with apologies to Carl Wilson, et al.)

Jesus, this place got dusty. That’s okay, though. We’ll just sweep it all under the rug and get to bloggin’.

My bud Jill asked me re: my latest piece “Masked”…

When can I read this?

Hell, when am I going to read it?

I haven’t since I posted that last entry. “Masked” ended up being a beast of a manuscript, clocking in at 6,651 words by MSWord count. By the “usual” method, we’re talking 6,960…call it 7k (especially if I’m sending this to a pro market :)). That’s part of the reason I haven’t re-read it yet. Yes, there’s all that jazz about letting a story “cool” for a bit. But, I just don’t write 6600 words! 5500, one time (the one piece I’ve sold for actual cash). But 6600? I know I’ve gotta trim, but the last couple of times I read it, I was hard-pressed to find 1600 words worth of stuff to cut.

That’ll change, I know. I’m in a panic over nothing. I’m sure when I look at it again (not until at least Monday), I’ll be able to take the pencil and slash away. Then, I’ll bring it to ol’ writing group (if they can stomach it again–if I can stomach it again), and once it passes muster, then I may pass it around to other folks, kind of like a Camberwell Carrot.

New Old Toy

I forget if I’ve talked about wanting one of those PDA/fold-out keyboard combos, something to use as an ultraportable word processor to write on the fly a la Warren Ellis, et. al. Others have opted for something like this here device, the AlphaSmart 3000.

It’s a sturdy one-piece word processor. That’s it. No wireless or Bluetooth capability, not even Tetris–at least, not the lower-end model and certainly not on the discontinued models. And, having been loaned one for the past two days with an option to buy, it’s taken me exactly that long to fall in love with it. It’s an older, dinosaur model and not as small as a PDA, but it gives me exactly what I need!

It’s solid and light (less than two pounds). The battery life is ridiculously long. It dumps content onto my computer, into whatever program I can type into (Word, Notepad, whatever), and even works as a keyboard emulator, to boot. I typed out most of this entry (aside from some minor edits) in a coffee shop a few hours ago, and I’m right now watching it dump right into a Blogger entry box.

The implications for my writing productivity blow my mind. Plus, all the potential ways I could “lifehack” this thing–hell, it’s a listmaker and calculator, what more could a GTD geek ask for?

Of course, once I own this puppy, I have no excuse whatsoever for writing something–a “plug-in,” some flash fiction, the occasional brainstorm, some edits–every single day. Not that I’ll be using this every time, just for the times when I feel I just have to type as opposed to handwrite stuff for whatever reason.

Gone will be the days when I go, “Eh, I need to type this out; I’ll just wait until I get home.” Gone will be the days I lug around my laptop almost every damn day only to get a little bit done because I’ve dicked around on teh Intarwebs. Nope, no more excuses that don’t have to do directly with my willpower or lack thereof.