Plant monitoring: We were looking for hawkweed and didn’t see any. On a brighter note, we returned to the spot where we’d seen one prairie thimbleweed plant so the naturalist could GPS it, and found a patch of at least nine more plants.
Filed by scriniary at 9:11 pm under Outdoors
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Finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin (abridged and read by Boyd Gaines) on the way back. It’s very favorable — I suppose it’s hard to find bad things to say about Franklin, though Isaacson gives a chapter at the end to those who tried — though I’d like to hear what John Adams had to say about their time in France together. Next time I need a tape I’ll see if the library has a bio on him.
Filed by scriniary at 5:33 pm under Books
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The Columbus Dispatch is putting serial novels up on its website.
They got a bunch of their staff to write the first chapters, then recruited writers in the community to write subsequent chapters. According to Poynter's Steve Outing, readers will vote on the best novel.
I don't quite see the point of it, but it looks like fun.
Filed by scriniary at 5:06 am under Uncategorized
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I’d secretly hoped that it would be pouring rain this morning, so that plant monitoring would be canceled. Unfortunately, it’s a lovely clear day, if hot and humid. Also unfortunately, when I got to the park after only five hours of sleep, no one was there. So I went for a walk and came home.
Saw a bird, possibly a towhee, an unidentified butterfly, an ebony jewelwing damselfly, and something else that I’ve forgotten. The trail I took went through an EFP-land forest, with widely spaced trees and little undergrowth, though parts of it had lots of ferns to hide fallen logs and rabbit holes from unsuspecting heroes. After a slippery climb up a sandy hill, the trail emerged onto sand dunes, sunny and hot while the forest had been cool and smelling of mildew. I preferred the dunes.
Filed by scriniary at 8:33 pm under Outdoors
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Over on rec.arts.sf.composition, a poster wondered whether his book is ready to publish. Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
So: What you *want* is somebody to tell you whether or not this thing you have written is publishable. What you *need* is a way of deciding for yourself whether it is time to send it out. This is how I have done it, right from the beginning: and she lists a series of questions for deciding whether something is ready or not
The four questions involve thinking about a) whether you can actually solve the problems with the book, b) how long solving the problems would take, and c) whether solving the problems would make the book better.
This is a way of thinking about editing that I found very helpful, because I know my current book has problems, but I don’t know how to fix all of them yet. Some things (emotions) will take me a lot of practice – probably a whole nother book – to learn how to do better. I could spend the time and fix this book, but it probably would take too long, and that time would be better spent rewriting the next book.
So I’ve divided up the fixes into mental categories:
1. Stuff I can safely leave un-fixed, because it’s minor and I’m not quite sure what to do about it anyway, like the occasional odd word choice.
2. Stuff that needs to be fixed and I know how to do it – that ranges from typos to the Trust Issue.
3. Stuff that I don’t know what to do about yet – a lot of that is aspects of the overall big picture. Voice, setting.
Category 2 is the biggest. Yay. Category 1 will get ignored. Category 3, well, I can practice on the next book. And then come back and fix this one again later, assuming I’ll get that chance because no one will buy it as is. And if they do buy it, then it didn’t need fixed after all.
The idea of sending something out that has problems that I can identify still gives me the creeps, though.
Filed by scriniary at 9:21 pm under Writing
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has an excellent post on conscious incompetence and the perceived suckiness of writing and plateaus et al.
Filed by scriniary at 9:04 pm under Writing
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Today we visited the Girdham Dunes, hunting for puccoon and thimbleweed. I think the links I have go to the correct varieties of each:
Plains Puccoon, or Lithospermum caroliniense (Walt. ex J.F. Gmel.) MacM.
Prairie Thimbleweed, or Anemone cylindrica
In googling, I discovered the very useful National PLANTS Database. (Ohio plants at http://plants.usda.gov:8080/plants//ThreatenedServlet?statelist=states&qryon=sciname&stateSelect=39)
Non-plant sightings:
A tree frog. A very patient tree frog: the two people with me used their camera phones.
A bluebird on the road while I was driving away. I didn’t get a good look at all, but I don’t think we have any other birds here that are that blue.
An Eastern Towhee eating the blackberries on the dunes.
Filed by scriniary at 8:01 am under Outdoors
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Carl Hiaasen, Basket Case (Abridged, and read by the author) – Listened to this on the drive down. *Hilarious*. I’d heard of Hiaasen years ago and never read any of his books. He’s a columnist for the Miami Herald and his books are set in South Florida.
This one attracted me because the protagonist writes obituaries. The newspaper politics in the book were hilarious.
Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (movie) – I enjoyed it. Zaphod is even more annoying on screen, however. I last reread the book so long ago that I don’t remember it well enough to complain about the differences. The only one that bothered me was that Marvin looked totally wrong from how I imagined him.
Kill Bill, vol. 1 – All I’d ever heard about it was that it had awesome fight scenes. I’m not a fan of fight scenes, so I didn’t bother to see it. My boyfriend taped it and made me watch it, and I was hooked pretty quickly. What it is, despite huge plot holes, is an awsome *story*, very well told. I thought the out-of-order sequence of “chapters” was a good way of making the story more interesting.
Must have sucked to see it in the theater, because it doesn’t have an ending. When it was over we went straight to Blockbuster and rented…
Kill Bill, vol. 2 – Which was also good, but I think having less of a mystery made it less interesting. Also, I was really pissed off at the resolution because
I’m supposed to believe that killer assassins who say “fuck” when the over-the-counter pregnancy test turns up positive will suddenly turn all “Oh no I can’t be an assassin any more because it’d be bad for my baaaayyyyybeeeeeee that I didn’t want anyway and could just abort or send out for adoption.” Well, fuck that. I rinse my brain of the last part of that movie. It never happened.
Grr.
Filed by scriniary at 12:32 am under Books, Movies
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What newly-published authors find out and you want to know
Wiscon Panel #42
Saturday, 10 a.m.
Panelists: John M. Scalzi [an excellent moderator], Barth Anderson, Kelly D. Link, Virginia “Ginny” G. McMorrow
[Relatively short report - I only took only two pages of notes.]
Publicity / Blogging:
One of the topics discussed was the importance of blogging and having an internet presence as a form of networking and publicity. Somehow I think that has worked better for John Scalzi than for most of the rest of us.
[But then I do this for fun and to learn about writing, and networking done for fun is probably a better kind of networking.]
One of the best forms of publicity is keeping a blog, Link said.
Scalzi added that getting your book mentioned on blogs with a large audience helps.
Anderson said the internet is great for networking. He has a blog, but said that if he has to make a choice between blogging and writing, he usually writes. [Good plan.]
Someone, I missed who, said it’s important to comment intelligently on other people’s blogs. Then, other bloggers and blog-readers will follow your link back to your own blog and/or website. That’s how commenting creates publicity for you.
Other Publicity:
Scalzi sold his books after putting them on his website, which leads to a debate on whether giving away your writing helps.
Scalzi said it’s hard to do publicity in the traditional sense, because there are so many new authors, so each gets lost in the shuffle.
Business:
One possible frustration is that new authors will get no say in things like their cover art. Scalzi says there’s a certain publisher he refuses to sell to, because their covers are embarrassing. [He wouldn't name it. Feel free to guess.]
On agents: Lots of places don’t take unagented work; the agents handle the paperwork so writers can write; and there are a lot of bad agents out there, so do your research.
And keep writing while stuff’s in submission, of course.
Filed by scriniary at 4:58 am under Writing
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