Don Pizarro's Manual of the Seven Wudan Tiger Shaolin Monkey Kung-Fu Style o' Death
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Wife has returned from her trip to Korea, the details of which can be found on her project’s website! I’m sure there’ll be more stuff once she fights off the jet lag.
…then the person down the counter from me seems to have overdosed on it.
This dude is giggling uncontrollably for no reason that I can discern. I don’t see a Bluetooth on him, he’s not reading anything, and I don’t see anything out the window we’re both facing worth ROTFL about.
And, now he’s just stopped like there was nothing.
…if I’m reading this not two weeks after discovering this person’s name via the Great American Prose Poems anthology, which is yet another book added to my goodreads list before I’ve finished the 100 other things on it.
Charles Simic Receives Poet Laureate Post, Plus $100,000 Award
By Jeffrey Burke
Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) — Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize- winning writer, will receive two major honors today. He will be named the 15th poet laureate of the U.S. by the Librarian of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall, and he will receive a $100,000 award from the American Academy of Poets.