If you’re not into these “writer posts,” move along. I have sometimes considered putting these onto a separate hunk of blog, and separating them out from the main RSS feed as well, since I don’t think most people are interested, but I have writer friends who are, and no hordes of fans teeming in. Anyway, for now, it’s here, and people who want to read more can click through to the post…
Tag: WRITING
Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …
Back to Life…
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …
Eight Days
The title of this post has nothing to do with how long I haven’t posted here — though it may well be 8 days — but with my newest story project. I’m finally writing a story about (edit: Crown) Prince Sado, aka Sado Saeja. He’s a particularly unusual case in the Joseon Dynasty, whose story is told in more (prosaic) detail here. As far as monarchs who lose their minds, he’s quite an odd (unusual) one. I haven’t managed to do much writing in the last couple of weeks — some last-minute-emergency-hurry editing has dropped into my lap, and I …
No Maps
It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Pulling Your Feet Up
So one of the things I’m planning to do in Japan, mostly on trains, is proofread some of the writing I’ve done in the past year. I have a good stack of stories that need editing and proofing before they can be sent out, and it’s the kind of thing I’m more likely to do when I don’t have a PC with me. Since I’m leaving my laptop at home this trip — carrying it about for three weeks feels just ever so slightly too cumbersome — I will be bringing a portable hard drive (with my most recently forked …
Threes
My netfriend and fellow writer Stephanie recently wrote: I recently read in a book that stories and life happen in three acts: wake up, do some work, go to bed; you’re born, you live, you die; etc. This is what my life has been feeling like lately, like I’m just going through the motions… I really hear her. I’ve been there before myself. It’s funny… the three stages or “acts” in the drama of my life tend to be: 1. Really believe in (or wish to believe in) some model of the world: an ideology, a system, an explanation for …
It’s Not Normal For Everybody to Write Poetry
There’s a very interesting piece at Danwei about popular mockery on the Chinese Web of a “poet” named Zhao Lihua whose poems are, well… Well, some people think they’re not poetry at all. She sees them as part of an experimental stage in her past, and there’s an interesting debate about the whole topic going on around the web, but in Chinese, so I have no access to it, except via Danwei. This is really interesting to me for two reasons: 1. This stuff reminds me of a lot of Kerouac’s attempts at poetry, which I don’t hold in very …
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 …
Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating
In Laura’s post Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating, I found something quite interesting. She discussed the offensiveness to her of sneakily using others’ creative works within her own works: So I had this conversation with the Dutch about the picture I was/am working on, and I was saying how I’d already spent like 20 hours on it, and I still didn’t have the map the way I wanted it to be. Being a programmer (or whatever it is he does, exactly), he suggested I could find a map I liked and just steal it for my own …