I was up until 4am this morning working on gradesheets and last-minute grading of a very leniently-graded set of creative assignments. Some of the stuff my Media English students did was really, well, as Lime put it, “Brilliant!” I wish I could post them online — I planned to do it on my class website, but I would need to get the files compressed much smaller than they are now. I’ll look into that later, and if I do, I’ll link to them from here. The variety was stunning: a silly parody of Saving Private Ryan with animal soldiers and …
Month: June 2007
Write-a-Thon, Week 2
Well, I’m off to a slow start — I got not much writing done today, but a lot of reading/research and planning. Of course, I have NO idea what’s happening next, as well as having a strong feeling I may need to skip ahead to Book III and come back to work on Book II once I have a better idea what goes on later in the story. I think the main problem is that I’m so close to the research right now that I’m having a hard time being imaginative enough. A lot of the stuff I’m writing is …
Write-A-Thon, Week 1 Complete
Well, I’ve filled my quota for week 1 of the write-a-thon. Today’s totals are as follows: McWar: 1300 words (current wordcount 7363 words, but remember I began this piece before the beginning of the write-a-thon) To the Happy Country…: 2050 words (current wordcount: 10,986 words) Daily Total: 3350 Weekly Total: 15,679 The big news is that a lot of rearrangement has happened in To the Happy Country… I realized that the prologue I was writing wouldn’t actually work as a prologue, but most of it could be rewoven into the body of Book II of the novel, so I did …
Moon Over Yodok
For those who haven’t checked out the latest Clarkesworld, David Charlton’s Moon Over Yodok is a really worthwhile story. Having recently read Kang Chul Hwan’s gluag memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, I’ve been cribbing from it in my own depiction of the the Yodok prison camp, so I can’t fault Charlton for his heavy reliance on that text. It’s a worthwhile story and is one more honest look at North Korea, which I think is important in a world where so many are happy to ignore the stories that defectors have been telling us for decades about that place. And …
W-a-T Update
I’m starting to think the daily update might get tedious, so I’m going to keep updating the one-post a week and go with that. So: Wednesday’s progress is as follows: McWar: 1,381 words To the Happy Country: 1,129 words Daily Total: 2,501 words Total words Week 1 (so far): 10,304 words The tough thing, of course, is that progress is going much better for McWar than for To the Happy Country…, but To the Happy Country… is the main project, and the first draft of McWar should be done in a day or two, so I shall have to well-and-truly …