Smart Advice from Smart People
For those who will find it interesting…
Nancy Kress on writing a paragraph, which proves a nice glimpse of work-process-in-action.
24/04/2009
2 Comments
Menu
Nancy Kress on writing a paragraph, which proves a nice glimpse of work-process-in-action.
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 16,645 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 2,097 Deadline: April 30th Chapter Eight is done. My plans for tomorrow have just been cancelled, so I’m thinking I may try and push for the end of the draft instead. With luck, tomorrow night’s update will involve the word “Finished” somewhere. In other writing news: Got another story ready to send out, but can’t figure out the right title for it; started making notes for the story Jason Fischer set as part of the Dancing Monkey challenge; am now just two active submissions away from getting my number-of-stories-circulating total back into double digits for the first time in 6 months.
A steady trickle of blog topics rolling in response to my offer to be a Dancing Monkey this week (though most come, as most of my comments do, through the livejournal feed). Pushes my thoughts in interesting directions, it does, with enough random writerly nonsense included to keep me going for a while. Logically they should happen in order, but I’m going to start with something relatively easy (because it’ll feed into a couple of other topics folks have suggested). To whit, Adam demanded “a public rave about the awesomeness of The Middleman.” This I can do, with bells on and a cherry on top. I can’t, apparently, do it without swearing and unleashing hate upon the world. Consider yourselves warned. My rave starts thusly: Go and watch The Middleman in whatever form that’s available, you fuckers, because the fact that they’ve only made one season of this show makes me cry. You should know before I go any further that I’m not a fan of most forms of Geek TV: I loathe Star Trek with a fiery passion; I see Stargate as the malignant legacy of an already stale genre tradition; I walked away from the new version of Battlestar Galactica three episodes in because I could see the clusterfuck of stupidity that was coming and it bored me unbelievably. And that last one still hurts, because I really liked the original mini-series they did to launch the revamped franchise. In fact, I was downright excited and my basic rule of thumb is that I.
One of those days where I changed my mind at the last minute, and thus shot myself in the foot when it came to actually having something to say about it. What needs to be said about the Sisters of Mercy apart from “sometimes you just need go get your goth on”?
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 14,548 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 1,992 Deadline: April 30th Last night I spent seven hundred words writing about cat corpses. Lots and lots of cat corpses. As expected, it was like pulling teeth. Seven chapters down, three more to go. I’m starting to hit the point where I’m getting fidgety and looking forward to being done with this draft, if only so I can go back and fix all the things that are terribly, horribly wrong during the writing of draft two. On the plus side, it’s looking like I’ll have a new short story to mail out tomorrow.
My parents read my blog. I’m still having trouble adjusting to that thought, as evidenced by the impulse to ring them when cool stuff happens since, in days gone by, they’ve remain unconnected to any of my primary methods of disseminating “check it out, cool stuff* happening” type news. These days they get to find out about it with the rest of you: Cool Thing the First: Apex Magazine has announced the line-up for their forthcoming print anthology, Descended from Darkness I’m in it, apparently. Which is pretty cool given that my story hasn’t yet made it up as a part of the magazine yet (I may show up in May, I suspect, given the trading-around of line-edits and bios we’ve been doing). The rambunctious Jason Fischer is included as well, making this the second time we’ve shared a Table of Contents. Cool Thing the Second: Interstitial Arts Foundation Call for Artists Back when the first interfictions anthology was released the IAF had an fund-raising auction featuring artwork/music/interstitial art based upon some of the stories within the anthology. Now they’re putting out a call to artists/musicians/etc to participate in a second one. Their Call for Artists page features fragments from all the stories in the Interfictions II anthology (including mine), plus the opportunity to grab a sneak peak at one of the stories. I tend to think this is the stuff of coolness, myself, but I’ve got a fairly obvious bias here. *and in difference to the fact that my parents are reading, I
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 12,556 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 2,081 Deadline: April 30th And now there is a Sixth Chapter, although it is currently the roughest chapter since the first and in possession of even more notes about what might need to be done. I predict that the future chapter six will share very little beyond the present chapter six beyond the protagonist and locations. I also have a bit of Chapter Seven sorted, in which I start making myself particularly unpopular with folks who like kittens. I’m a little demoralized by last nights stint, after so many days of letting the story run itself and things coming up okay. Still, it got done, and as long as I don’t give in to my lethargic urges tonight I think everything will sort itself out. I’ve managed seven days of this now and I’m tempted to see how far it can be pushed. Other things achieved today: two story drafts finished, in preparation for flensing and polishing over the next couple of days; reading of big thick Years Best SF anthology; reading of Candide; curry.
I sat down this morning and thought “Right, post something that has nothing to do with writing, you’re about due.” But you know what? I’m being a little writing obsessive this week. Can’t be helped; I’m in the midst of the first prolonged stretch of writing I’ve had in a long while and I’m still far to excited about that to think of something else to talk about on my own. So consider me a dancing monkey waiting for someone to crank the hurdy-gurdy (aka give me a topic and I’ll attempt to say something meaningful for your amusement. Otherwise I predict the remainder of the week will consist of me showing up with some variation of “look, I’m writing stuff, and it’s an awesome feeling” as my theme…)
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 10,475 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 1,931 Deadline: April 30th Chapter five is done. Which means I’m now settling into a comfortable rhythm of a chapter per night, more or less, with tinkering time and short-story writing occurring in the mornings. In theory, if my plan is to be trusted as a guide (it shouldn’t), I am now halfway through the novella. While I’m running lower than the anticipated wordcount at this point, I’m not too stressed about that – I’m thinking the next draft will see the story balloon out dramatically, requiring a third draft to cut things back. I am freaking out a little about the pacing of things though, since by this point in Horn there had been much death and destruction, while by this point in Claw there is only scratch marks, minor-character death, snark, and romance subplots which are not inherently doomed from the outset. I’m a little wonky on writing the last one, for many reasons, not the least of which is my general fascination with doomed romances (see my fascinationwith the Gothic novel). I think I’ve also managed to peg down a bunch of stuff about the past and future of Aster and a bunch of the other characters, complete with a rough timeline about where and when things occurred and why it ends with Aster being the kind of protagonist she is. And started writing a list of tropes to tackle, should
I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs. So today I’m giving in and being frivolously ranty about two things that have annoyed me of late. I can do angry ranting; John Lydon had it right when he talked about anger and energy. Have at it: ****** Frothing Rant One: I Am Not a Dear Reader Over the last couple of days I’ve read a bunch of stuff – essays, blog posts, comments, whatever – that choose to believe that I am a dear reader. I know this, because they address me as such, just as they address every other person that stumbles
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 8,544 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period:2,229 Deadline: April 30th I think I’m settling into a process that works for me here, although it largely involves having an early night (around 8 or so) and taking the laptop to bed in order to write until about midnight. Does a good job of getting words down, but impractical in the long run given that the majority of the world doesn’t run on writer-time and will, eventually, require me to go out. I’m slowly – slowly – starting to feel like I’ve got that deadline in my sights now, which is a long way from what I was thinking this time last week.
Living in a culture of music sampling does very strange things to your head. I cannot, for example, help but get disappointed when the opening strains of Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man *aren’t*, in fact, going to lead into Cyprus Hill’s Hits from the Bong. It used to drive me absolutely crazy the year Pulp Fiction came out and the Springfield song made a comeback. That’s nothing compared to today’s realisation, which is liable to get me lynched: The baseline for Under Pressure totally belongs to Ice, Ice, Baby in my head. Even when I’ve just spent twenty minutes listening to David Bowie beforehand and I know it’s coming, I just sit there waiting for the white-boy rap to start…
PETER’S LATEST RELEASE
RECENT POSTS