Literary pole dancing
Filed Under Writing
Apropos of online time sinks: Robin Hobb’s thoughts on LiveJournal. And The Wall Street Journal on why attempting to disengage may be a losing battle.
Resolved
Filed Under Life, Shred of Evidence, Writing, New Year's Resolutions
A few of the things I want to do in 2008:
1. Lose weight. (10 lbs. = required, 20 lbs. = strongly desired, 30 lbs. = very nice, 30+ lbs. = unlikely without use of a tapeworm.)
2. Explore tapeworm options.
3. Continue going to the gym regularly when it’s open. (Alum pricing is very nice; academic schedule, not so much.)
4. The Samhain writing goals I didn’t meet.
5. Quicker turn-around for Shred submissions. (I should be aiming for one month and not beating myself up over three, rather than aiming for three and congratulating myself for anything faster.)
There are a bunch of others, but if I talk about them prematurely something’s liable to go wrong.
I’m off to Hogmanay tonight. See you in 2008.
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Trophies, the meaning of
Filed Under Writing
I guess it’s an end of the year LJ meme—well, no, it’s an end of the year meme, period, I just happen to’ve seen it on a few LJs—for people to post lists of stories published during the calendar year.
I used to be very tickled each time I published a story. Well, okay, I’m still tickled. But at some point I stopped caring so much about the volume. The not caring was preceded by a period when I was bummed about my lowered output (and sometimes tried to console myself with the thought that I was working on longer projects—which was often true, though most of those projects languished). Then there was a sort of curmudgeonly period, because I’d been there, done that, have the bibliography page to prove it, thank you very much, and I remember the zines from the Long Long Ago, from the Before Time….
Now? Eh. I guess this attitude shift is part and parcel of my foot-dragging when polishing or resubmitting. It’s probably wrapped up in the feeling of having reached a plateau. It’s not a bad plateau. (I can see your house from here.) But it is sort of tough to get excited by the mere idea of moving around on the plateau. (If I move a bit to the left, your house looks pretty much the same.) Getting off this plateau will involve a certain amount of time, effort, skill, luck, and so forth, making it an uncertain business and not, incidentally, entirely enjoyable for those of a slothful persuasion.
I think it’s probably a net good that I don’t care about volume. I think it’s a net negative (for me personally; the world in general is not impacted in the slightest) that I go for long stretches without producing anything (published or not, writing can take the edge off my crankiness). Still, volume’s a nice, straightforward goal, and I miss that. I’m just generally having a tough time motivating myself to finish bullet points on a to-do list. Woo fucking hoo.
See? Cranky.
Quintessence
Filed Under Writing
The other day I received an e-mail asking which stories I consider my “best” or “most quintessentially you.” That, naturally enough, got me thinking about how I think about my stories.
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Writing resolve
Filed Under Writing, New Year's Resolutions
I missed my last convenient calendar rollover a few weeks ago, but I shall not miss this one. So, the resolution that will hold me for the next couple months is:
In the month of November, address Workplan section I. Thereafter proceed to section II. The goal is (at least) three polished bits by the end of December.
(And yes, that makes sense to me. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else; you don’t have to do any work.)
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Slated for publication
“Last Words” will be appearing in The Back Alley.
It feels nice to sell something. This is one of the stories I mentioned in July, when I talked about things that had languished on my hard drive for too long. So the moral of the story, kids, is to actually submit the stories you finish.
Single tap
Filed Under Writing
I have started using a single space at the end of sentences rather than two. I feel like a little part of me has died.
The two spaces came from muscle memory, courtesy of a high school typing class. I kept the convention because it’s what you do on a typewriter, and the point of standard manuscript format is to make it look like it came out of a typewriter. On the rare occasion when two spaces were inappropriate, it was easy enough to do a find/replace.
But now, I’ve conceded that a) just about everything I do is electronic, b) standard manuscript format isn’t standard, and c) nobody really cares about that extra space. We’ll see how long it takes to retrain my fingers.
I have retained a few of my other defaults. I never drop the “s” for singular possessives, respect the serial comma, and use the four-dot ellipsis. It has less to do with Strunk and White or the CMS than it does with the ease of the find/replace. If I need to make modifications to comply with house standards, I figure it’s always better to default to the more distinctive, easily replaced option.
Ha!
Filed Under Writing
So I’ve got this story, and it’s not ready to be sent out, but it’s close enough that it’s not stupidly premature to think about markets. I’d pretty much decided where it would go, and I happened to be reading said market tonight when I started laughing my ass off. Because there was a story that had some of the same elements as mine, and featured a character with a similar name. Funny how that works out sometimes.
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Hey! I met another writing goal!
Filed Under Writing
With thanks to Jeremy, BDan, Lee, Kendra, and Joanna for their two cents. ‘Twas a minor goal, but now I’m up a dime.
Hey! I met a writing goal!
Filed Under Writing
Next up: frost damage in Hell.
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