silver

I should probably do a promo for my own comm. Really late, but inkingitout is a writing support/encouragement comm. Minimum word count is 75,000 words.



Signups close on the 31st; you must sign up on the post and then request membership, as all check-in posts are locked to the comm's members.

I wrote two fics this year and received two. I defaulted and didn't think I'd get any, so I couldn't believe my luck. You should read my gift fics, if you're in the Old Kingdom fandom! I have two adventure/exploration fics for Lirael and the Disreputable Dog, as they go exploring in the great Clayr library: After Hours by the_antichris and Discoveries to Share by Sheeana.

I wrote A Sea Change (2,868 words) for Phantom (rosabelle) which is fork-in-the-road AU for Jehanne/Moirin, and which I think is pretty unsurprising (I felt extremely not-anon during the entire exchange). I JUST THINK THAT JEHANNE SHOULDN'T HAVE ( SPOILER ). They are so gorgeous together. Yeah. Not over it. Never over it.

I think Jehanne is really quite perceptive when it comes to people. I wonder if this is why Daniel loved her so much. I want to write something pre-Kiss about Jehanne and Daniel and Raphael, actually.

I also wrote Traveller's Lodging (620 words) for kaesa (kaesa) for Madness. I got to this point and then went "oh no but how do I keep going". I have to think of some way of reorganizing things so I can keep going!

Conclusion: more research is in order. Also as I was writing this I was researching early medieval Europe which is a very different thing and it was all...14th century! Focus on England! Oh noes!

I would like to say right now that I HATE TITLES. I shall start a Society for the Abrogation of Titles. Or Titles Anonymous, for writers suffering from the terribleness of trying to pick a title. For A Sea Change all I could think of was a pun (and I'm so sorry--but hey I used title case! It was even more pretentious before!) and as for kaesa's, I literally ran out of time and had to slap the most terribad title on. Yeah, about that...

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( 2013 writing, including one statistic! I couldn't resist. )

Cleaning out my email drafts, where I used to save stuff. I've always liked this quote for showing just how many phrases from Shakespeare's work have been silently embedded into English.

"If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare."

(Bernard Levin. From The Story of English. Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil. Viking: 1986).

The internet informs me that "but me no buts" is misattributed and should point to Susanna Centlivre, which rather deflates the quote.

Prompt: Dawn
Word count: 1050 words
Genre: realism
Warnings: none applicable

Summary: Photography is srs bsns.

( Dawn )

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( end notes )

I went back using tags on my LJ to see if I had recorded names (my physical journals are still boxed and inaccessible) and ended up reading through some of my entries. I usually avoid this. Someday I will write things and not be embarrassed to look at them again - fiction is especially bad. My old fic is still available, it even gets comments once in a blue moon, but I can't look. Even though I probably should remove some of the notes on it, and maybe see if the site has messed up my formatting - nope. I can't do it.

My journal entries of two years ago were okay, even if they were publicly posted and I usually get embarrassment squick from public entries more than anything. If I wrote about CLACSTC's flight line today, I'd probably borrow some of that phrasing.

I really miss my physical journals, actually, especially the entries I made of exceptional events (that is to say, not the entries written during say school, or routine events.) When I went to summer camp for the first time, I wrote nothing. The second time, I wrote one page about arriving, and the chaos of it all; looking back later, I was incredibly frustrated, because a lot of things happened in three weeks and I had recorded nothing. The one entry about arriving was tantalizing but there was no follow up. Time was a problem - I was doing things with the flight all day, then doing homework or working on my uniform during my off-hours, and then lights out was pretty early - but I was bitterly disappointed nothing had been properly recorded.

The third time I went to summer camp, I brought my new, nice journal and was determined to write things down. And I did. I had to sit in the bathroom (they were ensuite) most nights, because the patrolling staff could see the lights in the room, but not the lights in the bathroom, after lights-out. I would write really fast because lights-out was eleven, but we had to get up at five or five-thirty just to get ready, despite our regulated wake-up timing being six o'clock*. I do have records for those six weeks, but, as I said - they're still in boxes, and I hope they aren't mildewed yet.

I keep straying from the point. I'm not sure that journal writing is cathartic or anything for me, but it leaves a trail behind me, which is what I want. My parents made me write a journal from the age of five or six, and they're full of strange things I haven't thought about in a long time. In the beginning, when I was in French immersion they had things like "elle regarde l'oiseau" and then English printed below it, with illustrations. Other parts are repetitive and "I went swimming today" repeated on different days, because I went swimming that day and evidently couldn't think of anything else to say. They are very tame because they were read, but it's fascinating to go back and immerse myself in who-I-was. At some point I got tired of trying to find things to say and started a serialized story about my stuffed animals.

I give up. Despite wanting this to have a cohesive point, I've managed to go off on tangents anyway. *posts*

*(I see waking up at five-thirty as a blessing, because technically we were not allowed to get up before six - the boys, quartered in the barracks, weren't allowed out of their beds til six exactly - but the amount of things we had to do in the morning was ridiculous. I mean, be outside in C-4 with room tidied and bed made within 20 minutes? Scratch that, ten minutes, because we had to be early by ten minutes? Are you kidding me?

To be fair, I think they were mandated to have us sleep for seven hours minimum, but it was still ridiculous.)

I think using StoryBox is really helping! Before I was doing things in Word, which had two main disadvantages.

1) I do a lot of stuff in Word. I edit people's stuff (internet peoples' stories, mother's papers, friends' papers and random reports, etc). I write papers, and my résumé, and letters in Word. I take notes in Word. I even use it to archive poetry I've found elsewhere. I know the program really, really well.
2) Word does a lot of things; it's a pretty powerful piece of software. It handles images and text and significant amounts of formatting. For StoryBox...while it has chaptered (and even scened) mini-documents within story, wordtracking and notes and synopsis and outline pages, I don't think it even has spellcheck, not any that I've found. All the formatting tricks in Word just don't exist in this software.

This is good. How much time have I spent learning and fooling around with styles and formatting? (Answer: a lot. I have several customized 'stylesheets' for my documents).

It is a lot more intuitive than Scrivener - that, or Scrivener accustomed me to this style of software. Also, I can write the thing in one big document if I want, or I can do it in chapters, or even scenes tucked within chapters. One of the things that bothered me about Scrivener was the fact that I felt forced to split up all my writing, which isn't usually how I do it. (Of course, since I only tried Scrivener during the mad rush of November, it's possible I missed something. It felt very unintuitive to me, Scrivener.) In Word, I'd just stick in a trio of asterisks and keep going; every time I opened up a new scene in Scrivener I'd be hit in the face with another blank wall of nothingness. This is much better. And it's on free trial indefinitely, which is even better.

I know there are writers on my flist - if any of you guys are interested, the link is here: http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/. Scroll down for an explanation and download link. So far, it hasn't done anything bad to my computer or lost any words or crashed badly!

Having heard the excellent advice about overcoming writer's block, paraphrased:

Write your words in a different, unreadable font like Webdings, so you can't see what you've written. Then go back the next day and untranslate it to see where to start for the next day, and continue writing in the unreadable font to prevent your internal editor from critiquing.

...I decided to follow it.

The writing went well enough as I dashed off the next piece of my GLORIOUS TALE (subtitled: Pixie Lights). And then I, being your usual impatient fellow, decided to untranslate it without waiting the aforementioned night.

When I switched the font to Times New Roman, though, I ran into a small problem.

( Namely, this one. (Illustration, in technicolor). )

Word's inability to translate certain words seems to be random. There are parts of one word translated properly, and parts that aren't. Typoed words are translated properly in some cases and in other cases. So I switched the boxes (which is Word's way of freaking out and saying it can't render the text) back into Webdings and translated them manually.

I am getting good at reading Webdings, but next time, I think I'll just turn the colour of the font white.

Surprisingly I'm enjoying writing this essay. Even if I'm still about 700 words behind (oh, the historiography'll have lots of words and I still haven't got an intro/conclusion and I'll manage fine, wordcount is usually not a problem.) For once I understand why the essay as a form is used. It is like waging a war: not guerrilla war of now, but the two lines of armies marching upon each other, like Spartan armies of old. One may delineate one's arguments with absolute precision and backup with sources and throw them THWAP THWAP THWAP at the reader. (Or gently persuade, but I like the in-your-face better.) Fiction is a lot less explicit and it's sometimes only after the 1000+ pages that you see the themes arcing delicately over. I suppose this would be biowarfare: creeps on you without realizing. Or maybe that's just very good undercover ops.

The elevator broke so I climbed up to my 23rd floor room after dinner. And then the fire alarm went off and I, being just then at the study room, climbed down 28 floors. As devil-possessed awful as the elevators are, I am really glad they exist <3

(one poor fellow I spoke to said he'd been doing his laundry. On the basement floor. He got off the twenty-first floor.)

Earthquake happened, and it is so far out of my experience that I thought it might be people on the roof, doing construction. Or something. I just never expected to be in the midst of one, and so it was so very weird.

Haven't anything else to say, except that I'm still on track with writing (omg, \o/), and at 13,500 words.

I keep trying to read the book The Court of the Air (Stephen Hunt): it's a steampunk sci-fi, I suppose you could say, and I keep putting it down. This is because it reminds me frequently of my own book - the settings are entirely different, and the characters, too - but it has that first draft feel, and the dialogue is dead. The author dumps information on you. One of the main characters shows up in the first chapter and then is absent for the next half-dozen. It skips from what should be a horrifying act (someone just got killed in front of her, hello?) and goes to somewhere else entirely.

I find myself comparing it always to the books I've just read - in this case, The Ladies of Grace Adieu (by the incomparable Susanna Clarke, who wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) and Sherlock Holmes's last few chronicles. The distance between those two works and The Court of Air is enormous. In Clarke and Doyle's books you don't have the sound of the author's voice ringing in your head - Hunt's work feels as though I know what he's thinking as he writes it, adds a bit of dialogue-tag to round it off; in contrast, Clarke and Doyle's writing is confident, and it sounds like the narrator. Watson, as the narrator, sounds like a separate entity - even with the random intrusion of footnotes (I've got an annotated copy), it is always Watson speaking, not Doyle. I want to like it, and I like the premise very much; I can't get past the prose.

(This is sort of like reading Star Wars: Shatterpoint (Matthew Stover, he of the admired Episode III: Revenge of the Sith book adaptation; I deeply admire his ability to use new lines and punch you with the formatting of his prose), and something like Terry Brook's Episode I adaptation, which, frankly, was pretty much the movie narrated in a flat voice with a few extra scenes. (I read it, and if it hadn't when I was a week without internet and the first day I got books, it would not have been read.) The first one has vitality and movement (Shatterpoint evokes the Vietnam War, from what I understand of the conflict, very strongly). The second is just a retelling, and the movie, as much as it was criticized, was probably better.

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So deeply behind on reviews I cannot even say. And I owe denise a thousand apologies because I still haven't finished those FAQ-revisions - they're almost done, and they keep getting pushed off *blushes really badly*