I finally rampaged my way to the end of Professor Whitney’s Last Letter. The ending was holding out on me, but I think I’ve got one that will work, if I massage it a little. I’ll be giving it another look tomorrow to cut a few hunks of unnecessary material, and what I can improve. It’d be nice if I could get the story down to 5,000 words, but since it’s now 8,550, I’m shooting for 6,500 words. I’ve cut some of the lighter comedy and substituted in some more bizarreness and darker humor. While I’m on a roll, I’m …
Month: September 2007
Skewering Twits
I remember reading, somewhere — in a long-ago issue of Dragon Magazine back in the 80s, I think — some quip about wizards being “cute… on the end of a spear.” One of the joys in the blogosphere, for me, is watching Nick Mamatas skewer twits so we can see how cute they are on the end of his verbal spears. Example here. Object lesson? Don’t pretend you’re in a Creative Writing MFA program with a writer who is: actually good cleverer than you likely to verbally bitchslap you online (deservedly) when you inevitably become offensive … and then go …
Pipi Band and Po-keu Song
Yay! Lime got me a few of the CDs I asked her to order for me. Among them, 불가능한작전 by
Rachmaninov & Professor Whitney
Sometimes, I write in silence. It’s useful for me when I need to shut everything out and just figure out what’s going to happen next. Of course, sometimes what I really need is to get myself into an emotional space so that I can feel where the story is supposed to go. This is where I’ve found that listening to music I don’t know, on a repeating loop, is surprisingly helpful. Lime’s a big fan of Rachmaninov, or at least his piano music, but I’m not… not really. However, she loaned me a double-CD compilation of different pianists performing various …
Summer Block Kumar
I was wandering about the web this afternoon, during my lunchless lunch break, trying to relax off my morning busywork, when I found a link at Alllooksame to the blog of Summer Block Kumar, which was praised as a blog about China. Anyway, one of the first posts I came across had a cool snippet of information about music and Russian serfs, from a book that’s on my shelf but as yet unread: “Serfs were essential to the Sheremetev palaces and their arts . . . Many of these serfs were sent abroad or assigned to the court to learn …