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July 18th, 2008
gamerchick
 | 10:09 pm - on how being out of academia wrecked my work ethic
Things I have to do this weekend:
Get caught up on plot summaries
Write music for song
Change guitar strings
Refill prescriptions
Update finances
Clean bathroom
Fix the disaster that is my Firefly game
Things I have to do before the end of the month:
Do translations for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dayzdark's parents
Do final updates for leah_conway
Gamegrene article
Read Savage Tide module
Email tankmancr about D&D
Get my credit report
Look at house hunting website
Things I am not allowed to do until these things are completed:
Start playing Mass Effect
Resume playing Bioshock
See Wall-E
Waste time in general
If you catch me not doing one of these things when I could be, please ask me just why the hell I'm not. Seriously. Stop me before I procrastinate again.
Current Location: 55414
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_girl/okay.gif) lazy
Current Music: watching The Amazing Race
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zoethe
 | 06:45 pm - Today's sage advice
Never go to Trader Joe's when you haven't eaten all day.
...
Yeah.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/moonsis/hungry.gif) hungry
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cvillette
 | 04:44 pm - [Private] And now I have to go put my shoes on to go out again.
PTSD (6,522)
Coyote (1)
The knife is in the drawer. Damn it.
Yeah, I know. It doesn't seem like much. Hell, it isn't much.
But it's something.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/smile.gif) thankful
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jediwiker
 | 12:14 pm - Organization 90% Complete
I've touched on this briefly in the last few posts, but I thought I'd mention that what I've been doing lately is reorganizing.
For one thing, krenolds and I came back from our honeymoon to a house full of presents, boxes, wedding-prep stuff, and the like. That
We also had our luggage, laundry, and various souvenirs from Maui. That all had to be dealt with.
Then we bought a bunch of stuff with the gift certificates and cash we'd gotten as wedding gifts. Those things had to be put away.
One of the things we bought was a new desk for Keri. It took me most of a day to build it. Then I had to empty out her old desk, move that, move and move the new one in.
Then I threw away an old steamer trunk I'd had since I lived in Seattle. That meant emptying it out, throwing away the junk parts, and finding places to store the stuff I wanted to keep.
Then we bought a new bookcase to fit in the space where the steamer trunk had been. Built that, moved it into place.
Today, then, on top of my weekly job search, I spent some time moving various RPG manuals off of my desk and into the new bookcase. Then I had to reorganize my desk to fill in the newly empty spaces.
I just finished all that.
Now I get to go reorganize my painting table, and get to work on the projects that have stacked up in the last month.
For a guy with no job, my work never quite seems to be done.
JD had to all be put away.
Current Location: Area 51
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/aliens/working.gif) busy
Current Music: Eddie Izzard - The Big Bang
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theferrett
 | 02:47 pm - The Best Advice I Can Give For Clarion, Or I Think Any Competent Writing Workshop
The temptation at any writing workshop is to write well. Which means, generally, that you're leaning on your strengths - whether that's your beautiful prose, your snappy dialogue, or your fine-toothed plotting.
My advice? Fail. Fail miserably.
Take something you're not good at and write a whole piece around that. If you're a prose person, write something actiony with explosions. If you're great at characterization, write a mood piece. Take your weakest elements and write a story that wraps them all up into one bundle, doing that terrifying high-wire act of I know this isn't working, but dammit I'm going to try.
There's no better place to fail. Yeah, you'll have a critique round where you miss out on the kudos, the feeling of accomplishment as people go, "Wow, I like that about your stuff." But good workshops will tell you where you fell short, explaining what tools you were lacking to make this work... Which in turn will tell you how to turn that weakness into - well, not necessarily a strength, but something you can lean on a little heavier in future writings. Another arrow in your quiver.
Let go of your schtick. Reach for the new. Experience the growth pains as you build new muscle.
Be free.
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snarky_haiku
[rocksalt]
 | 11:16 am - Keep Scrolling if you fear my *DARK KNIGHT SPOILER*
My Dark Knight review?
Christian made his voice too low.
It sounded like shit.
A layer of cheese
On an otherwise great film.
And may I just add
Facially deformed
Killer clowns dressed as nurses.
Dark Knight FTW.
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matociquala
 | 09:10 am - A multiplicity of things while I wait for my roomies to awaken....
Five things make a post, right?
1) There's new Shadow Unit content, as is traditional for Friday mornings.
2) I'm at Readercon, and have kind of a packed schedule today. Hope to see some of you here. I'll be doing a talk about Dust today, and a reading, and so on.
3) I went climbing at the Boston Rock Gym with truepenny, cristalia, stillsostrange, and kayselkiemoon last night. (Well, Amanda and I didn't get to climb all that much, as we are the ones who can belay, but still.) Fun was had, a new gym was checked out, nobody got dropped on their head. Success all around, I'd say! There are some wonderful tricky walls there, and the ratings aren't as hard as at my home gym. There's a 5.7+ that I would love to keep working on, and a 5.7 that I'm really sad I did not get to try.
4) It's looking more and more like Roc will not be picking up any more Promethean Age books, as apparently sales of the MMPB of Blood & Iron are not what they would like (though I've seen the Bookscan numbers and they looked reasonably healthy to me; but I'm not the guy with the checkbook), and Ink & Steel is also not looking to crack any best-seller lists. So if you want copies of the Stratford Man books, now would be a good time to buy/order/pre-order them, because I cannot guarantee there will ever be a mass market paperback edition, and they may get hard to find. (Book two, as you know, will be out August 5th, and may be appearing in brick and mortar stores a little in advance of that date.)
Well, it's not like I don't have enough other work to keep me busy.... and you never know, a miracle may occur (Oprah picks up Kit and Will for the book club? Nah....) or another publisher may take over the series, though that has the potential to create mad backlist confusion.
5) I am still reading Brasyl, which is a brilliant book. And which also teaches me why we put exposition and transitions and white space in books, because this thing is dense and totally written to the "run and try to keep up" standard. ianmcdonald's "You must be as tall as this sign to ride this ride" is somewhere up there, but I am stretching to reach it, because the book is totally worth the climb. (I read some of it in the hot tub this morning.)
5.5) Yay, hot tub!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://www.elizabethbear.com/moodtheme//gleeful.jpg) bouncy
Current Music: sleeping people
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chadu
 | 07:52 am - Watchmen Trailer
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/index.html
Damned pretty. And many of the scenes in the trailer seem to be taken directly from the GN.
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drivingblind
 | 12:31 am - Mutant City Blues at GenCon
Ahoy! Mutant City Blues will be making an appearance at GenCon, quoth simonjrogers:
We'll be releasing a limited edition softcover version of Mutant City Blues (60 copies) - the GenCon 2008 Special Edition.
Read more at http://simonjrogers.livejournal.com/72361.html
Check out some actual play at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) codeindigo
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July 17th, 2008
balancingforce
 | 11:19 pm - On False Maps
Last night I spent the evening, until about 2 am, in the Cartography Lab. It's climate controlled there (versus my apartment, which is humid and about 10 degrees warmer than the outside), with faster computers and the like. I needed to do something fun relating to cartography, because I've had some frustrating days on account of some of our clients.
So, the result of my doodling is here. It was fun and converted a frustrating evening into an entertaining and creative one. I may do more of these.
I think my next effort will be a geopolitical map, shown under a few different projections. It's easy for us to look at a map and think about the information it conveys, and ignore the structure that does the conveying. I think that showing a few projections of fictional lands might be able to emphasize the nature of cartographic projections, because we're so used to seeing our own world that it's hard to tell the ways in which the map distorts it. We'll see.
I'm also interested to hear how people interpret the document above, as I've heard some unexpected and divergent results from different people. Which was partially my intention.
Current Mood: warm
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cumaeansibyl
 | 11:24 pm
The moon has a ring around it tonight. Very pretty.
Charles has been away since Monday, at a Moodle conference at Kenyon College. I think this is his third one. I hope they decide to schedule it here sometime.
So, since I didn't have to worry about disrupting anyone's life but my own this week, I:
* painted the kitchen
* painted the bathroom
* painted the ceilings in those rooms plus the hallway
* patched the hole in the bedroom ceiling
* painted some doors and trim
* sealed some grout
* bunch of other little stuff
I am so tired. And pleased -- the kitchen and bathroom were formerly a very, very pale green, much too pale and too close to seafoam for my tastes, because I suck at picking out paint colors. This became even more obvious when the new green I initially picked for the kitchen turned out way too dark, but fortunately I had some of the pale paint left over, and made do pretty well. The kitchen is now a sort of medium apple green, and the bathroom is something of a greyer, lighter version of that.
I also made cake. :)
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jediwiker
| 03:07 pm - Sweet Mother of Mercy!
Holy crap this looks good!
Watch How Faithful Watchmen Will Be.
And, apparently, it's playing on the big screen as a preview, just prior to Batman: Dark Knight.
JD
Current Location: Area 51
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/aliens/happy.gif) ecstatic
Current Music: Richard Searles - Emerald Castles
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tallantros
 | 05:43 pm - Good News
I am officially engaged to be married. I asked Megan last night and she said yes. Head over to ferret_kitty for the detailed post.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/bouncy.gif) ecstatic
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cumaeansibyl
| 05:38 pm
Jeffrey Wright, Josh Brolin possible victims of police brutality
Now last time someone fucked with Felix Leiter, Timothy Dalton went down and killed an entire South American country, so I'd be sleeping with one eye open if I were a Shreveport police officer. Look for unexplained deaths and explosions out of Louisiana for the next couple of days, as well as unusual vehicular activity and suspiciously well-dressed British "tourists."
Sheriff J.W. Pepper (ret) unavailable for comment.
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gamerchick
 | 04:34 pm - Oh my.
Watchmen trailer
Dear Zack Snyder, please do not ruin one of my top 5 books ever. Don't get me wrong, the trailer looks incredible, but I remain skeptical. Like hell Hollywood is actually going to stick to the real ending...
(link from inscrutable)
Current Location: 55101
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_girl/angry.gif) cynical
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chicago_cheap
[____mono_vision]
 | 02:18 pm
We have an fun + quick exhibition coming up soon!
On Saturday, July 19, 2008 Golden Age will be hosting:
PDF
A show of commissioned works opening simultaneously around the world.
For the PDF show, the curators, whyandwherefore. com,
..
asked each of the artists to respond to their medium,
PDFs—specifically how digital work can be infinitely and exactly
reproduced.
Each was also invited to interrogate the idea of
worldwide, collective action—connected to the simultaneous,
international openings.
With work by Fia Backström, Bozidar Brazda, Brian Clifton, Paul
Ramirez Jonas, Rachel Mason, Sean Raspet, Dexter Sinister and Jordan
Wolfson.
Venues as of July 14:
Atkinson Space, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
Bastard, Oslo, Norway
Brown Gallery, London, UK
La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain
Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA
Golden Age, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Osaka, Japan
Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA
Galleri Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon, USA
Placeholder Gallery, Newhall, CA
Showroom, Hamburg, Germany; Leipzig, Germany; Zurich, Switzerland
Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, New York City, USA
Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Y Gallery, Queens, New York City, USA
-----
GOLDEN AGE
1744 W 18TH ST.
CHICAGO, IL 60608
312.850.
2574
GOLDENAGESTORE. COM <..void(0);.
r{}>
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jediwiker
| 08:16 am - Videogame Diary: Prey
Sorry I missed my blog post yesterday; I spent the day writing and addressing thank-you notes until my eyes bled. When I could take no more, I fired up the Xbox 360 and played a game I hadn't played since before my wedding: Prey. I played until krenolds got home from work, and got very close to the end. (Then krenolds slashed her thumb open with our brand-new paring knife, and we were off to the emergency room for some stitches. But you can read all about that on her blog.)
But that meant that, when I got up this morning, I was all set to play the climax of the game. And I just finished.
Prey is a decent game. It's essentially a first-person shooter, with a couple of gimmicks (portals and gravity--often integral to puzzles) and some clever innovations (spirit-walking--again, often integral to solving puzzles--and a "keep-you-playing" respawn mechanic that more games should emulate).
Anyway, I wanted to talk about gameplay, specifically about my favorite FPS bugaboo, the boss level.
Current Location: Area 51
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Top 40 Crap on the Radio
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crowy_reads
 | 10:03 am
74. Gossamer Lois Lowry (4/5)
Littlest One and her teacher, Thin Elderly, are tiny creatures whose job it is to touch beloved objects and then piece the bits of memory and emotion therein into dreams for humans. It is a wonderful vocation, but not without its dangers: there are also the Sinisteeds, terrible creatures that plague people with nightmares. Perhaps most frightening of all, dream-givers like Littlest One and Thin Elderly can become Sinisteeds if they don't do their work carefully.
Littlest One and Thin Elderly are in charge of giving dreams to a kind old woman, a fairly simple task. But when the woman takes in John, a foster child, his anger and troubled past leave him open to torment by the Sinisteeds, and the dream-givers must find a way to counteract this.
This is a short novel, but Lowry is adept at sketching out a tantalizing and fascinating story in so few pages. Her use of launguage is lovely, and I was utterly absorbed.
75. Trick of a Tale: A Collection of Trickster Tales John and Caitlin Matthews (4/5)
This is a beautifully illustrated book of trickster folktales from all over the world. The stories are short enough to make good read-alouds, and there's also a good range of stories, from simpler ones that will appeal to the very young, to more thought-provoking stories for older children and adults. I would definitely recommend it to librarians, storytellers, or just anyone who enjoys a beautifully executed collection of tales.
76. The World of the Druids Miranda J. Green (5/5)
This is a comprehensive, copiously illustrated volume that is sufficiently academically rigorous for the well-informed layperson, but straightforward and sufficiently full of eye candy for the neophyte. Green covers what we actually know about the Druids (not a lot, really), their place in myth and legend, and the Neo-Pagan Druidic movement.
77. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories Ambrose Bierce (4/5)
This is a selection of Ambrose Bierce's short stories, taken from several collections that were published during his life.
I read this book pretty much straight through, but if I were to read it again, I would probably jump around in the collection more instead of reading it from cover to cover. The first section of the book is all Civil War stories, many of which are excellent, but reading them all in a row is a little bit tiring.
On the whole, I somewhat preferred Bierce's later works, many of which are ghost stories, wickedly funny, or both. "My Favorite Murder" and "Oil of Dog" are both so awful and so funny that one feels vaguely guilty for laughing so hard.
78. Jack of Fables, Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape Bill Willingham (4/5)
Fans of the Fables series of comics will enjoy this spin-off, which follows the adventures of Jack (you know, THAT Jack, as in "the Giant-Killer," etc.). Folks who haven't read Fables might be pretty confused, though.
79. The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath (4/5)
I hadn't read this autobiographical novel since high school, so I figured maybe it was time to re-read it. It was actually quite different from what I'd remembered; I'd forgotten that more than half of the book takes place BEFORE Esther goes to the hospital. I'd also forgotten -- or just hadn't picked up before -- how mordantly funny the book is. Esther's observations about the people around her and her reactions to them are incredibly witty, and even her description of a depressive's twisted thinking is tinged with the humor of someone looking back wryly. The book is sad and serious as well, but since I had missed the humor before, that was what I ended up concentrating on.
There was much that I found confusing the first time I read this book. Plath's description of the slow slide into depression and the incredible inertia involved is SO spot-on, but I think in some ways it would be confusing and somewhat incomprehensible to someone who doesn't have more intimate knowledge of the experience. I could be wrong, though; it may just be that it resonated much more deeply this time around than it did when I first read the book.
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theferrett
| 10:12 am - More Lessons From Clarion
Be Careful Putting The Climax Around Characters That We Don't Care About.
A couple of the stories here have ended with noble goals - characters sacrificing everything to save the poor, or rescuing their mother. But as I said in one of my critiques, "I don't care about the poor, at least not as an abstract concept. I care about your protagonist."
If you're going to set up an ending where we're rescuing someone who hasn't been on-screen until now, you have to make absolutely sure that the plot is focused on what your character is getting out of it. Nobody cares all that much about the Ark of the Covenant - they care that Indiana Jones wants it, and the reason Raiders of the Lost Ark works so damn well is because of the three scenes that set up how much Indiana values history. Even the Ark is just a Macguffin to us, we're sympathizing with Indy because we know how much it means to him to keep it safe.
The other route you can take is to build up the character who's being rescued. If you're going to have your protagonist rescuing her distant Uncle Avarax from the wilds of Borneo, you need to have flashbacks that make us like Uncle Avarax, that make him every bit as present in the narrative as your spunky girl genius lead. If we aren't all that invested in your girl genius, we have to want Uncle Avarax home and safe.
But don't fall into that middle trap, where we've been following this spunky girl genius and are rooting for her, and suddenly at the end it all becomes about this guy we've never met and really don't care about.
Perfectly Readable.
This week's instructor, Mary Anne Mohanraj, told us that in her experience as an editor she grades most submitted stories as Bs or Cs - they're readable, they're interesting enough that it's no problem getting to the end of it, and sometimes the high Bs are even publishable if she has a slot she wants filled or it's a particularly cool idea.
Some folks disagreed with my Busking On The Wrong Street Corner essay, saying, "Oh, you just think it's easy to write interesting stuff because you're an essayist." But the more I talk to editors and authors, the more I realize that what separates good writers from bad writers isn't just prose, but rather knowing the fundamental construction of stories. Where do you start? What scenes will highlight your characters the most? What's the right ending?
I'll repeat: It's not that hard to write a readable story if you work at it. Apparently, most people submitting to magazines do just that. It is hard to write a story that wins your heart. And that distinction is often not about the words, but unearthing the emotional center of a story.
What Pulls You Into The Story May Turn Out To Be The Least Interesting Bit.
A lot of the stories started out as retellings of classic faerie tales or some cool idea about technology. It's clear this is the whole reason the story lodged in the author's mind enough to be written. But when we read it for class, everyone went, "Oh my God, this character is so awesome and compelling. We love her. What's with this faerie tale crap?"
That's right; on more than a few occasions, we've responded to the "wrong" elements of the story. The author wanted to write a tale about a man whose goal in life is to take down corporations, but we went, "Whoah, this corporation angle is pretty dull. Why not just focus on the guy? He's cool, driven, a little crazy. We want more of him."
So when you're revising - and remember, I told you it your revisions could be major - often you might want to drop the entire original theme and follow your strange and lovely protagonist down an alley of his own devising. That's trickier, because if your evil elf doesn't take down corporations, then what's his story? But considering that stories are about characters, setting them free to wander loose isn't a bad idea.
Never Fear The Discovery Draft.
We're writing lots of stories where we're discovering what does or doesn't work on the fly. These stories often need lots of revision, but sometimes you need to write a whole story to figure out where the heart of it is. It feels wasteful, but don't fear the Reaper, baby.
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