A day of worthy things: Go read Tina Connolly’s Growing Days, which is a poem up at Strange Horizons Go check out The Grand Narrative, which is the best new(ish) blog about Korea that I’ve seen in ages. Were I not so full-steam-ahead on the writing-SF thing, this is the blog and the kind of self-directed study I’d be embarking on. I even found a great book recommendation or two on there. Equally worthy, but less fun, I now know full well I need to cut back on my writing production as all the sitting is once again having the …
Month: July 2007
“A Killing in Burma” Still Truckin’
I’m having a dreadully good time drafting “A Killing in Burma,” and while there are bits that will probably need some serious trimming later on, the process right now is a downright blast. One of the things I’m experimenting consciously with here is writing a longer story without a single consistent POV character. This is something I’ve long been interested in, but I moved away from it because I used to use it mostly as a kind of obscurantist thing, like, “What, you can’t tell which character is the focus now?” It just made my stories harder to read. The …
Wanna Turn on a Wind Musician?
Checking out The Bis Key Chronicles, a saxophonist’s blog, I ran across this post about a Bb bass sax that this guy is having built for him. I followed on to the homepage of the instrument maker who’s building it for him, custom with a low-A key, Benedikt Eppelsheim Wind Instruments, Munich, and, well, this is what I’d call porn for wind musicians. There are clips so you can hear what the instruments sound like, too. I don’t know… the Bb Tubax seems a little TOO extreme for me, but I’m suddenly thinking I might prefer a Bb bass sax …
Clarion West 2007 Write-a-thon Wrap-up
I’ve fulfilled my write-a-thon goals! (Sort of.) “A Killing in Burma”: 2,545 words Weekly Total: 15,924 words Write-a-thon Total: 95,164 words That’s right, I’ve drafted a minimum of 15,000 words per week, and beaten my overall minimum quota of 90,000 words in six weeks by 5,164 words and one full day. I did this despite one cold, one (slightly) partially collapse lung, a new and apparently persistent case of tinnitus, a smushed toe, and a brief case of what I think was food poisoning. If you’re impressed — come on, a partially collapsed lung? — go here and donate a little money. It’ll help fund more crazy …
Write-a-thon (Today, Writhe-a-thon) Countdown Continues: Thursday Update
Writhe-a-thon… it was a typo, but an accurate one considering how I felt today. I seem to have been food poisoned on Wednesday night. Something’s been messing with my system, making me feel cold when it’s hot, hot when it’s cold, making me sleep most of the day, making me feel dizzy and weak, and, of all things, making me pee a lot. (And no, it’s not diabetes.) We have a theory that it was either the food I picked up on the way home last night — Lime had a hankering for something she used to have when whe …
Write-a-thon, Week 6 Continued
I’ve decided to start a new post for each day of the four remaining days of the write-a-thon, because it’s only four days and because, hee, I’m excited. Today, especially, I have reason to be excited. I drafted one and a half scenes and I stopped at a scene break, thinking, “I know what happens next, maybe that’s a good time to stop, so I have something to start with tomorrow. (That’s what Vernor Vinge said he does, and it seems to have been working for me this week.) Anyway, I added up the words and got a nice little …
YoungRocco2 Rants
Oh good grief. A day later, I’m now, says YoungRocco2, who seems to think he knows me, a “hypocrite” (comment #56), and there’s a hundred comments in between that one and my response. Would be nice if I could thread this comment above, but whatever… YoungRocc2 wrote: Gordsellar: You’re a bit of hypocrite. In earlier posts you criticize Koreans for being too nationalistic–for being too concerned with Korean problems and not caring about other countries. Now, all of a sudden you change tacks and criticize these Korean missionaries for NOT focusing on problems at home, claiming that they should have …
Write-a-thon Week 6: An Early Start!
Well, to date I’ve been giving myself Sunday off for each week of the write-a-thon, and being sadly unproductive on Monday, at least during the last few weeks, but today, my mind was still deep into the question of geomantic warfare from where I left off last night, so I continued on today, and actually got to an ending I’m semi-confortable with… at least, it’s better than the ones I was working towards before today. “Geomantic warfare” makes it sound like a story full of exploding volcanoes and earthquakes, but that’s not what I ended up writing. In fact, I …
Week 5 — Completed!
Well, that’s five weeks down and one more to go! As of dinnertime today (which was 9pm), my writing stats for the day were: “The Broken Path”: 3600 words (by 9:00pm) Weekly Total: 13,664 words Write-a-thon Total: 77,761 words I added another chunk of writing to “The Broken Path,” in what seems to be my pattern for the story — draft ahead of where I know what is happening, until I’ve gone down the wrong plotline far enough to know where I need to go back to and fork off from there down a new plotline. Anyway, todays stats are now: “The Broken …
“Pure Korean… Technology” on Wikipedia
I took a look around Wikipedia to see whether I could find a date for the introduction of the first train in Korea — and it turns out that this article on railway service in Korea furnishes a date that unfortunately does not work for the story I’m drafting now. I need to get some chatracters from Sosa to Kyeongbuk palace as quickly as possible, and unfortunately the Incheon-Seoul line wasn’t introduced until 1899. The story’s set during a sudden surge of effort by Japanese cartographers trying to map out Korea around 1894 or 1895. In any case, that’s not …