Fannish links

  Other Stuff

Thursday, September 26, 2002

It has been raining for twenty-four solid hours, a cold sullen rain. I woke up this morning with heartburn, after a night of anxious dreams, and immediately started stressing about a whole emotional strand in the WIP that is not really working at all, and how I can make it work convincingly. I got up and made coffee and drank an Instant Breakfast to settle my stomach, turned on the computer, and the first thing I read was torch's piece on wallowing and emotional exposition. And it was one of those perfection-of-pain moments, because I realized that a thing that's been driving me crazy all along with this story is that it is, in fact, one big fat wallow, 700K of wallow.

So I had a micro-breakdown, and then drank coffee and had a smoke, out on the back deck in the cold rain, and regrouped. Because, OK. The story really is just Fraser looking back at a relationship that crashed and burned, and there's really no way you can do that without a certain amount of wallow. And Fraser is not one to do anything half-assedly; even though I don't think he wallows often, when he does, he's going to make a comprehensive job of it. Perhaps there's an inverse relationship between the reserve/reticence/stoicism with which someone like Fraser leads his external life, and his need for interior wallowing. And there's the fact that while torch seldom if ever writes first-person, I seem increasingly drawn to it, and emotional exposition of some sort is hard to avoid in first person. I rationalize, I rationalize...

There's a part of me that thinks that if I were a better writer, I could find a way to write this story more -- exteriorly? (which is not a word) -- more as just a sequence of events, scene ... scene ... scene ... and let the fracture lines in the relationship simply show, and widen, and let the whole thing come apart, without all the talking about it.

I'm not that writer, though. I don't know if it's a question of skill, or simply of choices made two years ago, when I was first putting this thing together, and which I'm now too tired to go back and remake.

And really, as torch points out, it's not a matter of all one or all the other, it's about the middle ground, the balance between stuff happening and characters reflecting on it, the right choice of what really needs to be there, vs. what is merely writerly flab and self-indulgence.

So. Stuff to keep in mind. And in the meanwhile, if I'm going to do anything today about that emotional strand that needs fixing, I'd better open up the document and get cracking, because I need to leave for work soon.

Posted @ 07:59 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Monday, September 23, 2002

. . . so . . . sleepy . . . cannot . . . keep . . . eyes . . . propped . . . open . . . . .

I think my hibernation reflex is kicking in hard--it's a raw blustery cold day out, perfect for burrowing under the blankets with a mug of hot chocolate. Instead of which, I must sit at my desk like a grown-up and produce revisions of the pre-registration worksheet. Drat.

There's some psychological principle, the name of which I cannot begin to recall at the moment, to the effect that the meaning people make of events, their reactions to them, are heavily influenced by recent or proximate experiences, even if those experiences differ significantly from the current event in question. (I would say this more clearly if I were, like, awake.) A nice concrete example of this, in any event, is what I think of as the Clothing Lag Phenomenon. I mean, here it is, 47 degrees with a gusty north wind. If this were April, and it was 47 degrees, but everyone's most recent experience was four solid months of winter, everyone would be walking around in their parkas. As it is, since everyone is still operating on residual Summer Brain-Set, everyone has on, at most, a hooded sweatshirt or light jacket, and I see lots of kids with t-shirts (saw one guy this morning in shorts, even). It really takes some time for seasonal shifts to be reflected in how people are dressing.

Having typed this out, I see it is rather less fascinatingly insightful than I thought it was. Ah well. It's almost time to go home, and I can dust off the radiators and, for the first time this fall, turn on the heat (with a sigh for all the dollars that will start flowing from my bank account into the coffers of Xcel Energy).

Posted @ 04:21 PM CST [Link]6 comments

Various oddments gleaned from a morning of clicking around:

MIT's OpenCourseWare will be making material from almost all of MIT's courses available on line, free of charge, as of Sept. 30. No degrees or certifications offered, just the chance to learn stuff. In a similar vein, arsdigita offers all the material from a year-long undergrad computer science curriculum, again for free. This is just -- cool. (via MetaFilter)

Of possible use or interest to certain writers in the audience <whistling, staring at no one in particular>, the Fetish Map attempts a graphical depiction of relationships amongst all conceivable erotic fetishes. (via BoingBoing)

I have a particular love for the bizarre overheard out-of-context conversational snippet, and In Passing collects quite a few excellent specimens. (via kottke)

And in the most current Flotsam Cove, James Lileks has assembled an entertaining mix of illustrations from the Little Big Books of days gone by (including a pretty damn funny cover from a MUNCLE book, which makes much fan art look better in comparison). This one ought to be an LJ icon or something, and for proto-slash predating Star Trek by decades, check out this and this.

Posted @ 08:07 AM CST [Link]4 comments

Sunday, September 22, 2002

New clothes for a new season -- welcome, fall. Rather half-assed new design so far, subject to further twiddling, but at least I've got some links updated/added. Earlier today I thought I'd completely FUBAR'd my Greymatter files, and was feverishly hunting around for some other blogging software to move to. I may still do so, but it's nice not to have move with one's belongings dumped out on the street, as it were.

Other visual changes -- after a year or so of dithering, and boring the snot out of everyone within earshot, I finally sucked it up and did the hair change I'd been contemplating. Because it is All About Me and I am a raving egomaniac, I have stuck up before & after shots here. The main consensus, among RL friends/family who've seen the new do, is "It makes you look so much younger!" Which is odd, because to my eye, I now look much more ... uh ... respectable, or something. Adult. Like someone who'd actually be holding down a real job, and would own a pair of pantyhose. I dunno. I rather miss the Witch of Endor look, but god knows the grey will certainly return in time, if I decide to revert.

Moving away from the oh-so-fascinating topic of me me me, there's a cool article in the NY Times about Joss Whedon and Firefly, which gives me more optimism about the show. I'll keep watching it, give it some time to develop. Does anyone know, btw, if the episode originally intended as the pilot is actually going to air, and if so, when?

Posted @ 05:23 PM CST [Link]18 comments