Scriniary

I am way behind on book reports, but have read lots of good things in the past couple months. I do plan to write them up.

Links

Via zanzjan, the stats behind redshirt deaths on Star Trek. The chart is excellent.

I was amused by this article on whether listening to audiobooks instead of reading is cheating. I prefer to read them, but if I listen on tape it goes on my books read list, and even though I mark them as audio, I don’t consider it cheating (at least the unabridged versions).

Life

Busy weekend: Irish festival, Simpsons movie, dinner at the Turkish restaurant.

The festival was fun, and much bigger than I’d expected. We saw a couple different bands — though considering how long we were there, it seems like we should have seen a lot more, missed all the dancing, and participated in the attempt to reclaim the world record for largest number of people doing an Irish jig at one time.

The stickers they handed out to help count people say “Guinness World’s Record Largest Irish Jig Attempt,” which sounds more like it’s for the largest number of people trying to jig. Which is pretty appropriate.

They had music workshops, but I didn’t go — wouldn’t have wanted to drag my flute around. I suppose I could have brought my whistle. One booth had really nice whistles for sale, but I refused to be tempted. (If I took up playing again, I’d get a low whistle, because the regular D whistle is too shrill. Assuming the low whistle didn’t hurt my hands like the flute does.)

The movie was better than I’d expected, especially given that I stopped watching the show years ago because it wasn’t funny anymore.

Dinner (stuffed eggplant) was great, but I’d expected that.

Writing

I have a short story to fix the ending of, only I haven’t quite decided what to do about it yet. The story was meant to do A, but as it stands, it does B up until the end, and then switches to A. It would be easy to make the ending do B, and that story would work, but it wasn’t the story I meant to write. I think I have to go back and fix the rest of the story so the whole thing does A. Not quite sure how to do that, which is why it’s still on my to-do list.

My novel is plodding along. The bad thing about having gotten one novel to submission-ready status is that now I know how long it takes, and that every day is just a tiny drop in a huge bucket. It’s quite unmotivating. I’m beginning to see the appeal of short stories.

I think, also, that the writing process I was using on this novel and the previous-currently-on-hold novel is not a great one for me, so I don’t plan to do it again.

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Back from a writer’s retreat with Merrie Haskell, Julie Winningham, and David Klecha, where we swam in the lake, played minigolf, and, yes, wrote. I wrote the story I’d developed a couple months ago (~2600 words; my short stories are short), which was exactly what I’d planned to do. Though I’d also planned that said story would not suck. I suspect putting it in a drawer and revising it later will help a lot. (At any rate, I’m not looking at it until I revise the story I got crits on a month ago. And before that, I want to work on the novel some more.)

Listened to a zillion episodes of writing podcasts in the car, mostly several I Should Be Writing, two Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, my entire backlog of the creative writing podcast from AmericanWriters.com, and two Writers Talking.

Connie Willis had a great analogy on one of the ISBW’s. You hear people complaining about how difficult it is to find time to write. Others point out that you don’t find it, you make it. Willis said you carve it out of rock.

In other news, after three years, I’ve realized that shaming myself into working by posting goals publicly does not actually work. Sitting down once a week and figuring out what I should work on in the upcoming seven days is useful, but I do that just fine without posting about it. So the goals section is going away. I know you’re all crushed. Try to get over it.

(What works is deadlines, but you don’t get deadlines until you’ve already sold things and have contracts, which means you’ve already written things, but you don’t write things without deadlines [see carving time from rock]….)

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Links

• Lolcat-style science — My favorites are Michelson (I lived in a dorm named for him, my senior year) and the minerals.
• limyaael on science fiction and fantasy hybrids — Some good points. I learned last year that dealing with reader expectations in a setting that mixes the two is really hard (and that’s why the theater book is on hold).
• Owls of North America — Because you want to know what a great horned owl sounds like. One of the kids playing nocturnal animal sound bingo last night thought the screech owl was a horse. Barred owl’s a lot easier.

Goals for the past week
Crit novel(s)
Write/revise chunks 1 & 2.

Not as much progress as I would have liked, because I put in extra time at work and lost yesterday to reading. But Part I is in much better shape than it was a week ago, so progress has been made.

Goals for the coming week
Outline and start drafting a story
Continue work on parts 1 & 2
Critting

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Adventures in food labelling

Found at the grocery store:

Ready-to-Eat peaches — First, they still have to be washed, so technically they aren’t ready to eat. Second, what would constitute non-ready-to-eat peaches? Green ones? Blossoms? A potted peach tree (just add water)?

Canned tuna — After the ingredients list (tuna, broth, water), it helpfully warns, “Contains: Fish.” Yes. I should hope so. Perhaps they want to emphasize that it’s dolphin-safe.

Garden status

We ate our grape tomato this week. It was very tasty. If we’re lucky, the green tomatoes will ripen sometime this year (then we’ll have ready-to-eat tomatoes). We also had a couple very small heads of romaine (~ 5 leaves each), which actually looks like lettuce now. Our herbs and hot peppers have not yet achieved ready-to-eat status, though the basil is ok if we only want a couple leaves at a time.

I built a thread trellis for my morning glories, as the fence boards are too wide for them to climb. I should have bought flowers that bloom at night, though. I’m unlikely to see the morning glories very often.

Harry Potter

Reread the first 6 Harry Potter books. I timed it badly and left myself with two weeks to anticipate book 7.

Book 5 has really improved since the last time I read it, or maybe remembering that I didn’t like it lowered my expectations enough that it seemed better. Or maybe it was because I’d just finished 4, which is still my least favorite because of the gaping plot hole.

We saw the movie Order of the Phoenix yesterday — it was not good. Umbridge was spot on, but so many other characters did things that were out of character (or at least not supported by anything in the movie) that it was rather frustrating, sort of like watching shorthand. At times the dialogue-heavy scenes were boring.

Orson Scott Card has an interesting essay on Snape. He has some good points, although many of his arguments depend on figuring out what Rowling was thinking as she wrote the books, which I think requires too many assumptions about how she works and how skilled an author she has been at different times.

(I’m still fence-sitting on whether Snape’s good or evil. After reading book 6 the first time, I leaned towards good; after rereading all the books, I’m leaning towards evil. From a storytelling perspective, redemption might work better. If it were me, I’d think that’s too obvious.)

Random question: Where do British wizards go to school before they’re 11? It seems they must all be home-schooled: they don’t know enough about Muggles to have gone to Muggle schools, and unless there are a lot of wizard kids who don’t go to Hogwarts, there aren’t any wizard elementary schools.

Misc.

I finally got a library card, only 10 months after moving here. I’ve been spoiled — this is the first place I’ve lived as an adult where I have to drive to the library because it’s too far to walk.

Yesterday I went shopping and got my early birthday present from my boyfriend: a slipcover for the couch. It looks much nicer than the lack-of-cover we had before. Very thoughtful of him to get that for me. :)

Links

GalaxyZoo seeks people to categorize photos of spiral and elliptical galaxies because “the human brain is far better than a computer at recognising the patterns that divide ellipticals from spirals.” After you sign up, do a tutorial, and take a test, you look at photos and determine what they are. [Links to articles about it.]

PSA: Do not listen to your MP3 player outside during a storm.

Goals for the past week
Crit. Novel. Or. Else.
Write/revise chunks 1 & 2.

So far I’m staying enough ahead on the writing to make up for taking time out to revise. I have a goal date in mind, but it’s hard to estimate how long revising will take.

Goals for the coming week
Same as last week.

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Yesterday I did my first volunteer stint at the park, which mostly consisted of more detailed training. Watered the butterfly garden, made hummingbird food and filled feeders, fed the fish and turtles and frogs, sent visitors with questions to the naturalist because I know nothing yet…. :)

One of my tomatoes is very orange, and my lettuce seems to have stopped dying. Soon I can have a very tiny homegrown salad. Quite exciting.

Links:

• llygoden has resurrected the iwrislomo community, now available for goalsetting and commiserating at your very own choice of writing pace. Because not all of us actually want to write two books a year.
• irysangel sold two books, Sex Starved and its sequel.

Goals for the past week:
Critting
Write a chapter or two

Yes, I am way behind on critting, still/again/as usual. (I have two novels, a couple chapters, and some stories, and I want to read them all. Unfortunately I don’t want to print them out or read them on screen.)

The first chunk of the current book is transcribed, and I’ve started added new scenes and revising.

Goals for the coming week:
Crit. Novel. Or. Else.
Write/revise chunks 1 & 2.

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Elizabeth Bear remarks: It’s harder to revise old text to anything like not sucking than just to write new less sucky text from scratch. It’s like the suck gets ossified in.

Thursday I had my volunteer interview at the park and learned about all the very cool things I can do. Saturday I have my first volunteer stint at the nature center (on a weekend, yikes); I also have a butterfly survey to sign up for. They’re also going to put me in touch with the people who monitor which wildflowers are blooming, which is very different than what I did before (counting populations of rare species), and will require me to actually learn my plants.

Goals for the past week:
Type up the novel synopsis.
Crit a novel.

Typed up the synopsis and checked that certain hints will be dropped early enough. I’ll worry about all the “somehow” and “somethings” later on, along with the overly complicated plot in Section 3 that may require combining two or three characters.

I’ve written (a very rough draft of) what would be the first chapter or two if I were writing in chapters, and have done some thinking on what would make a more interesting, less backstory-heavy first scene.

I have not been critting because I am rereading all the Harry Potter books instead. (All the plot problems have not fixed themselves since the last time I read them.)

Getting some nice crits for the very broken short story I posted. Fixing it will be a fun wrestle. At least they’re things like “This story does not succeed at what it’s trying to do” rather than “This story has no point.” Yay, progress!

Goals for the coming week:
Critting.
Write another chapter or so.

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Links:

• Some people in Ohio have been trying to get a video gambling game approved by claiming it’s a game of skill. (Tried to link to an article, but the newspaper’s search results page won’t let me “see more” because a rollover ad covers that button. So, no linkage for them.) Anyway, my boyfriend wrote a program to test whether a game that depends on an 83-millisecond reaction time can really be considered a game of skill. They printed his letter, but left out the link to the game: http://jeremy.smallinfinity.net/games/react/
• CNN or BBC headlines cat macro style. Creepy in many cases: you get headlines about war and murder along with photos of cute cats.

Goals for the past week:
Revise story.
Get some sort of revised synopsis for the novel to make sure the subplots all seem to hang together.
Continue novel critique.
One OWW review.

Done: Story is up on the OWW and some things have been critted. Though not the novel.

Last Sunday, I wrote a synopsis of the novel. I meant it to be 2 pages, but it’s 6 or 7, and it helped me figure out a lot of stuff. After I go over that to check for plot clues, character traits, and setting stuff that need to be inserted earlier than they now appear, I can start writing real text.

Goals for the coming week:
Type up the novel synopsis.
Crit a novel.

I have an unusually busy week planned. All good things, but not conducive to huge goals.

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Links:

• My Book Deal Ruined My Life in The New York Observer:
  

  And even before the potential post-publication humiliation, there’s deadline pressure; crippling self-doubt; diets of Entenmann’s pastries and black coffee; self-made cubicles structured with piles of books, papers and unpaid bills; night-owl tendencies; failed relationships; unanswered phone calls; weight gain; poverty; and, of course, exhaustion.

  So forget the American dream! Getting a book deal seems more like a nightmare.

  Or maybe people should have more reasonable expectations. Still, an amusing article. And what’s wrong with night-owl tendencies?

• Google Maps pedometer – Very cool: Map out a route and it tells you how long it is. It’s 1.86 miles to the bike trail from my apartment, which is just a bit too far. It would only be 1.5 miles on the more-direct route, but there’s no sidewalk and no shoulder. I’m surprised the difference in length is so small, actually.

Goals for the past week:
Revise the story and do some critting.

Ha! I did some critting. OWW, not the novel I’ve been looking forward to getting back to. (Sorry. Will get to it this week and am still enjoying it.)

Did some research for the story, fixed a few things, but didn’t do an actual revised draft.

Also got back to a novel (Seliveon’s book), reading over the outline and notes I made during the zeroth draft and making a bunch of changes to the structure. The last third or so of the book is a huge jumble and I’ve figured out how to make it more coherent. It’s back to being Sel’s story throughout now, instead of trying to cover two different people.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise story.
Get some sort of revised synopsis for the novel to make sure the subplots all seem to hang together.
Continue novel critique.
One OWW review.

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My stopwatch is dead. Where’s Sylar when you need him?

Forward Motion’s annual Dvorak challenge has started. I am going to try to get my speed and accuracy up. I type around 50-55 wpm now, with 1-2 mistakes per minute, according to the test I just took. The other day I did a telephone interview for an article and had just as much success keeping up with the conversation as I did when I took notes in qwerty, so I don’t really need to speed up, but I do make too many typos. And typing faster wouldn’t exactly hurt.

Goals for the past week:
Do some critting and finish the story.

Finished the story, didn’t do the critting. The OWW keeps sending me telltales and I keep ignoring them. That’s on my schedule for this evening, though.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise the story and do some critting.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

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My lettuce has sprouted; a few seeds of something else have also started coming up. Or maybe two something elses. (No, I didn’t label my herb container. They’ll become identifiable eventually.)

Links:

• Sci-fi writers join war on terror — The Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government’s latest top mission of combating terrorism. Weird.
• Selling Out? Says Who? —
  Selling out? Please. Find something else to hate your fellow artists for. Or, if you truly want to get over it, be as happy for your fellow artists’ success as you are for your own. Every time an artist hits it big, it kicks the starving-artist syndrome square in the nuts. If we were happy about that instead of jealous, we might stand a chance at changing the way our culture looks at art. Eventually. I hate the glorification-of-starving-artist thing.

Goals for the past week:
I meant to do some critting, and write a short story. Instead I have only a third of a short story.

Goals for the coming week:
Do some critting and finish the story.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

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