“The Country of the Young” is now, I’d say, about 50% of the way along tobeing completely revised. I spread out all the pages in order, stacking page 1s together, page 2s, page 3s, all the way to page 33s. Then I stacked them and went through each one. That was the line edits. After that, I read over the crits, had dinner, and read the crits again, making a list of points I thought sensible or semi-sensible. There were three kinds of points: Yes, must do. This is something I should at least consider. This is something to think …
Category: WRITING
Ouch. really?
I’m revising my Clarion story The Country of the Young and the feedback from classmates is great. Not just the line-edits, which I’m halfway through, but also the general comments. I ran across a comment in one of the manuscripts, beside the following text: People always had done so, but at first it had only been a race thing: a Korean girl with any foreign man made people look a little. Beside that sentence, someone wrote, “Ouch. Really?” I think it may have been Tina C, but I’m not sure. (Tina, was it you? Would anyone remember, even?) Well, there’s …
… San Peu-ran-shi-seu-ko~~~…
UPDATE (11/09/2006): There are a number of factual errors in this post, as to the derivation of specific Korean pop-music words. Check out Charles’ comment (appended to this post) for more info. Yeah, just goes to show you that you can’t take it for granted when people explain something to you that they actually know what they’re talking about, as I was assured of the derivation of these words more than once, back in my Iksan days. Shrug. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. The title of this post, I mean. Tonight, on the way home from the grocery store, I decided to …
On Appropriation, Race, Popular Culture, and Dorky White Asiaphiles
So I happened upon this blog post at reappropriate, and it got me thinking. To be honest, I didn’t trawl my way through all the comments that followed the post, but I did read a fair number of them. I was tempted to respond with something snide about how young people are so apt to map their personal anger into statements about the entire world, couched in politics for the greater safety from criticism and negative response. But I decided that, as generalizing and as mistaken as parts of the post are (in my opinion), it’s unfair to respond in …
Writing Group in Seoul?
I couldn’t find one. And I looked, believe me. I’ve produced so much fiction that I’m leery to share it all with the one crit group I have, my Clarion West classmates. So I was thinking I could get a secondary group, a local writing group I could join maybe. Turns out, at least from googling, no such thing exists. If anyone’s interested, and cool with genre fiction, I’m interested, and cool with non-genre (whatever that means). Drop me a line. I was thinking meetings every 2-3 weeks, maybe.
Online Market and Submission Tracker
So, running Linux, I couldn’t find a proper market/submissions tracker, which is a bad thing because, really, I’d much rather be using a sensibly organized database program to be tracking my submissions than, say, a klunky Excel file or a notebook. What I found was the creation of Clarion 2004 graduate Charles Schoenfeld, The Writer’s Database: Market and Submission Tracker. I was a little dismayed to find out that the database didn’t allow users to share market information, since after all, it feels silly to have to type in market info that others have already plugged into the system, so …
Refugees & Exiles
Ooops, it seems I forgot to post about this when my sister let me know, quite a while ago. A couple of years ago, she approached me to write a short short story for the Refugees & Exiles teaching materials packet. It was apparently a program designed for teaching kids about what it’s like to be a refugee or exile. I think the long term goal was to get people aware of how life is for millions of people around the world early, so that they’ll grow up to be conscientious and aware adults who actually “get it” and feel …
Heads Are To Story Ideas As Dryers Are To Socks
I went to a wedding in Saskatoon, and at the reception afterward, this guy I didn’t know, who was the apparent date of an ex-stripper in attendance, an ex-stripper I sort-of knew from way back when — she’d been in a dramatic production that I’d been in, a stage musical, before she got into striptease, and I never got along with her, partly because I found most of her friends total freaks… wait, anyway, most of that is irrelevant to the story. (And people wonder how come I churn out novellas, and tend towards long forms… It’s all about fixating …
RevolutionSF’s Clarion, Schmarion Contest
My Clarion Workshopmate Shawn posted about RevolutionSF’s Clarion, Schmarion: A Fiction Contest. Heh.
The Sock Puppet Story
It’s a sign that I’m on the right track, how far behind I am on the Kushibora scandal. Now, you know you’ve got a community of sorts when there’s an actual “scandal” because someone’s been (supposedly) misrepresenting himself. Now, many of the people who read me these days aren’t connected to the Korean blogosphere, so I’ll give you the background you need in case you’re like me and prefer to get the beans from the first site instead of linking like mad: There is a vibrant commenting culture on the set of websites included in the “K-blogosphere”, meaning blogs that …