Month: May 2013

Etudes for Writers, 3.1: If At First You Don’t

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… succeed, remind yourself of your goal, and try attack the problem in another way. This is a categorically different kind of statement than, “try, try again.” I think this because the reassessment and questioning of goals is crucial. Example: Today, my crit group met to discuss a dialog etude we’d all tried (this one) and we found that despite some individual differences, nobody felt all that good about their results. Reframing the question as, “Did I achieve my goal?” was useful as we generally all felt we’d gotten something out of it, and also began discussing other ways of …

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Writing Etude #3: You Are What You Say

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Well, the writers I live with and I tried out the last writing etude I posted, and the results were really quite interesting, but I’m going to update that post sometime with results and thoughts. When we concluded our discussion of that etude, we decided to try another one, suggested by the inimitable E.G. Cosh. She wanted to work on dialogue, and on revealing things through dialogue–especially things like character motivation and and the nature of two characters’ relationship. She suggested the twist that we work on dialogue-intensive (or dialogue-only) scenes, and write the same scene twice, with the same …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XLIX

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This entry is part 36 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in the series. After a very long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos), specifically dealing with Canto XLIX–also known as the “Seven Lakes” canto. 

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Practice Notes Shared at Evernote

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One of the things that has been surprising about moving to a new computer is being able to access social network/media services so much better than I could in the past. While my first instinct is to blog everything as a way of putting information into accessible storage, it’s not really the most efficient way to do everything. So I’ve been exploring, and one of the services I’ve found to serve a purpose I needed is Evernote. While I don’t think posting about my music practice here is a terrible idea–and I will be posting sometimes as part of my …

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About that MBC Parody Video

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A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo. Then I got busy, and stayed busy. Then I left Korea. And here we are. But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned …

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