I would like everybody to know…
August 30th, 2006
that the wages of untidiness are Dante.
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | 1 Comment
Domestic Update
August 30th, 2006
An update on the boring daily life front! Aren’t you all excited?
We haven’t moved yet. That is, we’re still sleeping in Kirkland and watching TV in Kirkland and playing video games in Kirkland. The dogs and cats are in Kirkland. Some of our stuff is in Renton. We caravan more stuff over occasionally. Meanwhile, we’re painting and customizing.
Kevin has almost finished painting the library. It is brown. There will be pictures. I am taping the kitchen/nook to paint yellow. We also have paint for Kevin’s bathroom (blue) and the master bedroom (pale lilac). Kevin’s discussed painting the great room some reddish color and Raymond has mentioned green for his bedroom, but those paints have not been purchased. Kevin’s also torn out his medicine cabinet and towel rack and intends on replacing them. Raymond wants to adjust his own bathroom some. We’ve stuck things on walls with honest to goodness screws. Kevin is perusing art– he wants an old movie theme for the greatroom. We’ve purchased and assembled a large table. I’ve purchased and am waiting on the arrival of some Overstuffed Sacs.
We have phone service installed (with a new phone number). We have power and water. Supposedly we have garbage pickup but I don’t know when. We have DirecTV scheduled for an install and we’re investigating broadband. Soon I’ll be able to buy some very fine birds on plexiglass, which I’ve been promising myself for a while.
We’re renting a small moving truck on Sept 10th. We will probably be moved in by Sept 11th. But! We don’t have to be! We won’t have to Get Out until late in September. That’s the beauty of it! Muahhahaha!
So yeah. We’re taking it nice and easy.
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | 1 Comment
And also
August 29th, 2006
Because Google needs to know, I have to tell the world about the Buddha Pirates. Though they appear within a part 4 of 4, under a Chapter Three, I think they truly stand alone. ‘Midshipsmonk’ makes me cackle so much!
Though, since I’m mentioning Hitherby, I’d like to note that Sid and Max (the current leads) were once some of the least interesting characters (to me) but now have the dubious honor of being the only pair of male characters to ever inspire in me swooning over potential slash stories. So romantic!
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | No Comments
Commercial Cookie Dough Bakeoff
August 29th, 2006
On the table we have Pillsbury, Safeway and Nestle chocolate chip cookies.
The Pillsbury and Safeway are in the pre-shaped cookie flats. Both cook at 350 degrees for 10-14 minutes. I’ve set them at 11 minutes. The Pillsbury pre-formed cookies are rounds, and nicely spaced. The Safeway has a large rectangle of dough scored into cubes.
The Nestle chocolate chip cookies are in tube form. They require 375, for 8-10 minutes. I’ll cook them separately.
Each cookie is rated from 1-5 on Texture, Taste and Appearance. Between each cookie we drink milk. Kevin, the rebel, participates on stored day-old cookies and drinks Diet Coke.
Read on for the results.
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | 2 Comments
Narrating fantasy settings
August 28th, 2006
A friend doesn’t enjoy reading fantasy novels but will happily snatch up fantasy movies and fantasy comics. Why?
I think it has to do with establishing setting rules. With a non-familiar setting, pictures are worth a whole lot for establishing the basics. The sky is blue. The roads are paved. People carry guns. So many things can be established without ever drawing attention to them. But in most prose fiction, the convention is that setting details should be established through narration, and incorporated into the story itself. Show, don’t tell. This requires a lot more words than conventional modern fiction.
I admit it, I’ve bought into the vague idea that fiction set in pre-existing settings (Star Trek, Werewolf, Forgotten Realms, fanfiction) is somehow not as cool as stuff set in an original world. It isn’t as prestigous. I suppose I’ve picked up some of that idea because the quality control on some licensed stuff doesn’t seem that great; like the publishers are relying on the license to sell books rather than the stories and writing. And I suppose that’s probably true.
But now I’m wondering if there’s a confusion of motivations; if the readers aren’t embracing it just because it’s a license they’re attached to, but because with all of the setting basics pre-established, the stories are a much more enjoyable light read than ‘original fantasy’. This connects to the pleasure I’ve always felt reading stories set in comfortable well-established settings and my own interest in incorporating original mythological resonance in fiction.
Okay, so, let’s take this as true: speculative fiction’s barrier to entry is the amount of setting internalization required of the reader (which usually neccesitates lots of dense prose that is difficult to make interesting without incorporating ‘tours’).
Now, the challenge is to think of ways to present that setting information without incorporating it into the narrative. Comics and movies do it with images. Games do it with a dry presentation of the setting material that is then incorporated into RPG experiences. The trick there is getting people to read the setting material, which, in my experience, a lot of people don’t really want to do. It’s dry, it’s boring, they read the parts that relate to them (maybe) and make the GM help them figure the rest out later.
I have some ideas, though.
Categories: Writing | Tags: Writing | 3 Comments
Writing update (mopey)
August 28th, 2006
I’m in a strange place writing-wise. I could blame dog-house-move but I think I’d be working on TFN2 even so if I was enthusiastic about it.
Instead I feel stuck wondering if it’s worth going on. The depression I anticipated coming with quitting seems to be focused around feeling like I’m an insignificant ant with nothing to make me stand out from the crowd of nobodies and wannabes. My blog posts aren’t entertaining enough, my stories aren’t gripping enough, I don’t have the artistic or technical skills to make other kinds of projects stand out.
The beta reader situation is as follows: 2 readers have completed it, with minimal comments and general praise. 2 readers are very slowly slogging through it (that is, less than halfway through after a month or two). 2 readers have it but have not yet started it (as far as I know). Of the readers, one finished is my husband and one is somebody who may or may not prefer that genre, but I think enjoys close cousins of the genre. Of the sloggers, one definitely doesn’t read the genre, and one does. Of the yet-to-readers, I think both are familiar with the genre.
I think about this stuff because it matters to how I weight reactions. While my husband is an invaluable resource in improvements, he has reasons other than ‘this is a good story’ to encourage me to go on with the project. (Admittedly, probably so does everybody else involved, but less immediate day-to-day reasons.)
Originally, I was going to do the three books of the trilogy because it was going to be good practice. And I still think three practice novels is a good idea. I’m just no longer convinced a trilogy is right. I mean, if the idea just isn’t working, maybe I should put it aside and start fresh? So I have a chance to apply my studies to multiple kinds of stories?
This might just be mid-story writer sloggy-slog-slogness. No longer fresh and shiny, still lots of work. I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent book 1 out for comments and feedback. Previously trying to get midstory feedback has been a mistake… I guess I thought it would be different because it was a whole book, darn it. And I’d done some pretty crazy things in it and I /really/ wanted to know if they worked.
Mope mope. Stay tuned for something more interesting though. Well, as interesting as I can make these things.
Categories: Structure Tutorial, Writing | Tags: Writing | 5 Comments
Two Hearts, again
August 28th, 2006
Peter S. Beagle apparently won a Hugo for “Two Hearts”, the Last Unicorn sequel short story. It’s his first Hugo. I’m thrilled. It’s such a wonderful story. I think it’s still available on the web for a limited time, if you haven’t read it. Here it is. It’s an especially interesting read knowing that up until recently he was spending most of his time taking care of his very old mother.
He’s also apparently making progress on a number of other fronts related both to current writing projects and recouping royalties from The Last Unicorn movie. Yay!
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | No Comments
“What are you going to be doing?”
August 25th, 2006
asked a female coworker, one with whom I’ve always had an amiable relationship.
I’d spent a long time thinking about ways to answer that question but instead, all I said was, “Writing.”
She paused and then said, “What kind of writing? Technical writing?”
“Nope. Entertainment writing. Fiction and games. A whole different world.”
Later she admitted she was shocked by how far afield I seemed to be going. And I realized it felt good to be so straight about it. But I felt sad, too. How much sweeter would it have been to not quit until I had a published printed volume I could show my coworkers?
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | No Comments
My immune system is rebelling
August 24th, 2006
Near total collapse the last couple of days: achiness, exhaustion, lack of focus. And weird, disturbing dreams about violations of the natural order.
And this puppy is so much work. He’s losing some of his housetraining, probably inspired by our crappy housekeeping and our inability to read his cues. The cats are in total exile during the day, all the doors are kept shut, and he’s put to bed in his inescapable crib at night (and the cats freed from exile). He destroys things. He cries. He whines. He attempts to assert his independence. He begs. He gets into everything he can see. He puts the most astonishing things into his mouth. He has accidents. He gets ridiculously carsick. He can’t control his bladder very well or very long, and I have to get up at the crack of dawn to take care of him. Anytime I can’t hear or see him, I assume he’s doing something bad and half the time I’m right. The way I feel responsible for him, all solitary ‘the buck stops here’ish, is why I never want to have kids unless Kevin is also completely enthusiastic about them. I don’t ever want to feel guilty about a kid of mine waking up his father the way I feel bad about Dante climbing all over Kevin when I take him out of his crib for the last hour of the night.
Kevin and Raymond both find the loud, mobile, bumpy growl-filled dog games that fill our hall a bit overwhelming in our small space, but I never mind because I always know exactly what Dante is up to when I hear those sounds and there’s a chance he’ll take a nap afterwards.
On the bright side, he’s a practically indestructible BiteMeez for Hannah, he plays sit-and-fetch even better than she does, and he’s a surprising master of the Baby Mammal Defense System (which invokes the Cuddle the Untaught Tolerance Engine).
But oh, he’s exhausting. Switching between providing limits, guidance and discipline for a rambunctious stubborn unruly hellion to providing affection and comfort for a young animal to providing positive reinforcement for good manners is so tiring. The constant sense of need-to-monitor is tiring. It’s stuff I recall from babysitting Nathan when he was young, but at that point in my life I had a lot less going on.
The frustration is tempered some by knowing he’s supposed to grow out of much of this. I know I could lock him up a lot more than I do and minimize some of that sense of exhaustion, but I sort of think that will make some of the problems into ones that extend into adulthood– that if I don’t teach him about chewing and destroying now, and redirect that energy, it’ll be a bigger problem when he’s an adult and weighs 75 lbs instead of 20. Same with toliet training.
He has temper tantrums. I don’t know how else to describe them. Not the tears and yelling part of a child’s tantrums, but when he wants to do something he simply isn’t allowed to do, that he knows he isn’t allowed to do, and I have to physically restrain him as he squirms and whines and wriggles and tries desperately to get away and do it anyhow because dammit, who am I to say what he can and can’t do? That sure feels like a temper tantrum. And, somewhat like what I did with kids, some of the ‘who are you’ is answered by ’somebody a lot bigger and stronger than you who is patient enough to sit through your kicking and screaming’.
I don’t know if that’s entirely the ‘right’ thing to do with a dog. But it seems better than, uh, overwhelming negative reinforcement and of course there’s no appeal to reason. I guess we’ll find out.
I’m quitting my job.
August 22nd, 2006
September 15th is my last day, though I will be taking days off here and there to deal with house stuff in advance.
Today I am so sleepy.
Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: Me | 2 Comments
