[links] Link salad learns Strine, eats kangaroo steak
yuki_onna on the glamour of being a writer at an overseas con — As has oft been observed, one of the paradoxes of developing a meaningful writing career is that the issues which are problematic to the writer begin to seem ever more odd to non-writers.
Detective Storytelling — Art guru James Gurney deconstructs the narrative of a painting. As a writer, I use narrative to create pictures. I love this kind of parallax view of the creative process.
The babbling phase: ranting toddler speaks out
WWII Poster: Are You Helping? — I love this image.
The New Science of Network Archaeology — …a powerful tool that is likely to generate some interesting new insights into the process of evolution, not to mention the history of the networks.
Beck-MLK flow chart — Because Glenn Beck is the white MLK. (Via lt260.)
Top 10 Reasons for Higher Taxes on the Top 1%
?otD: What’s the Australian word for beer?
9/4/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (AussieCon 4)
Body movement: convention walking to come
Hours slept: 8.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden Elgin
Tags: Art, Conventions, Cool, Culture, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Tech
Posted: 3:53 pm Fri September 03 2010 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad has one foot on the platform, the other on the train
My semiautobiographical novelette, “Dream of the Arrow”, is up at Subterranean — A difficult story about my high school experiences, somewhat fictionalized. One of my regular readers here on LJ is a friend from those days, and is actually a character in this.
Editorial Evaluations, Moms and Pedatic Purple Prose — shadowhelm on critique. (Via lt260.)
Molybdomancy — Art haruspication guru James Gurney with a new one on me.
A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future — A Yahoo Research tool mines news archives for meaning–illuminating past, present, and even future events.
Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claims — Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution. Oooh! Oooh! Somebody call the Discovery Institute!
Dattoos: Body Art Melds DNA, Computing — Very, very strange. (Via e_bourne.)
How Fox Betrayed Petraeus — A detailed take on GOP shenanigans in the faked-up Park51 controversy, a/k/a “Ground Zero Mosque”. (Via shsilver.)
?otD: Was your mother a tailor? Did she sew your new blue jeans?
8/25/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura outline)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 244.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Pretender by C.J. Cherryh
Tags: Cool, Fiction, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, stories, Tech, Writing
Posted: 4:56 am Wed August 25 2010 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad goes creeping now through the night and the poison gas
In Their Own Words: British Novelists Collection — Historical BBC interviews with an amazing range of British writers. (Thanks to danjite.)
Period speech — Language Log on a perennial problem for authors.
Get Fuzzy on the vampires in the sewers — Hahahah.
Embracing the Holy War — An article asserting that Bush 43 kept a lid on Republican Islamophobia. For reasons of both the historical record and personal conviction, I find it difficult to credit Bush with anything worthwhile, much as I find it difficult to credit amoebic dysentery with anything worthwhile, but it’s an interesting thesis in which I reluctantly find some merit.
Obama defends “ground zero mosque” — Like Glenn Greenwald, I at first thought the president was doing the right thing. Oh well. At least he’s still not Bush. Small comfort, that, but comfort it is.
Mosque Uprising — Islam and the emerging religious threat to our Constitution. This is disgusting. Japanese Internment in WWII polled well, but that didn’t make it right, and no one but a few conservative loons looks back on that with pride. I can’t even imagine what the Republican theocrats are thinking, calling for religious suppression. It’s their own protections they’re seeking to strip by making religious freedom subject to majority consent. And this from people who pretend to revere the Constitution. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)
Obama’s Islamic-Center Stance: Why the GOP Shouldn’t Run Against It — Mark Halperin in Time on the same question.
?otD: All these hunters who are shrieking now, oh, do they speak for us?
8/16/2010
Writing time yesterday: 3.25 hours (revisions and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 242.0
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Defender by C.J. Cherryh
Tags: Funny, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Writing
Posted: 4:59 am Mon August 16 2010 | Comments(1) |
[writing] Endurance, and what comes after
The cancer journey has been so overwhelming lately that I’ve hardly posted at all about my writing progress. Some quick updatery here on that topic.
I’ve been working through Endurance revisions, with notes from casacorona, arcaedia, mcurry and others. Also, my friend K— has kindly made me a map of Copper Downs based on reading Green, Endurance and the various bits of short fiction and collating all the named streets and location. This has been a great help. Likewise, my profound thanks to for actually tracking the weapons all the way through the book — there is much losing and gaining of knives.
My process at this point is what I’ve previously compared to lacquering. That is to say, going back through the manuscript over and over in multiple careful passes dealing with specific issues on each pass. Other than two significant inserted scenes, this revision has mostly been about errors of characterization, voice and continuity, so this incrementalist approach seems to me to be working well.
I suspect I’ll be done with the draft this weekend, if not, early next week. That means it has at least a chance of squeaking through one or two more readers before being turned back in.
Pending surgery, chemo and the maybe-trip to NZ/AUS, I have several other projects that must be done. I owe a short story almost immediately to an audio market — it is in draft, but needs a bit of revision. I have a tiny bit more to do on the recent Sekrit Projekt (which will be announced Real Soon Now, btw), though the core effort on the novella is all complete. I have another Sekrit Projekt due by October, a novelette in this case. I need to finalize the draft outline of Kalimpura, and then get cracking on the first draft of the book so I can have that in place before the next round of chemotherapy melts my brain too much. I’ll be revising Kalimpura next spring when I come off this chemotherapy. Also if time permits, I’d like to revise the lost colony steampunk religious novella, “The Stars Do Not Lie”, and get it out to market. Not to mention the collaborative novels with calendula_witch and with my Dad, which have languished in the face of my medical issues and my narrowed focus. And of course, a possible trip to the South Seas, another round of cancer surgery, and the six months of the aforementioned chemotherapy.
Originally, I had planned to be working on Sunspin this fall, having written Kaiimpura this summer. Cancer is cutting my productivity down by more than half. Yes, the above list is me running way underspeed and behind schedule. I refuse to surrender my expectations of myself in this regard, even when I have to seriously compromise them in the face of disease.
I am a writer, therefore I write. Fuck cancer.
Tags: Books, Cancer, Endurance, Green, health, Kalimpura, Process, stories, Sunspin, Writing
Posted: 4:58 am Fri August 13 2010 | Comments(3) |
[links] Link salad has the roadhouse blues
Don’t forget the new caption contest [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
A reader reacts to Mainspring
Another review of Is Anybody Out There?
5 Resources to Assist Your Research (Pants Not Required) — (Thanks to lt260.)
Toad-licking chef ticketed — Oh, those whacky Midwesterners. (Thanks to garyomaha.)
Traveler to the undiscovere’d country — Roger Ebert on Christopher Hitchens, also religion and dying. Dying isn’t so bad. It’s getting sick and dying that’s the hard part.
?otD: Did you wake up this morning and get yourself a beer?
8/13/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 242.0
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Defender by C.J. Cherryh
Tags: Books, Cancer, Contests, Funny, healthcare, Links, Mainspring, Personal, Process, reviews, weird, Writing
Posted: 4:40 am Fri August 13 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad heads west once more
Michael Swanwick, on me
Southpaws: The Hops in Humanity’s Beer? — Chirality, fiction and you. Science In My Fiction on handedness.
Topic of Cancer — Christopher Hitchens on his own cancer.
Fashion plates from the 1800s
Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 — (Via .)
The Goode Mansion: 1939 — Shorpy with a haunting photo.
Mary we crown thee with blossoms today! — Roger Ebert on his childhood. As usual, a terrific read.
Sharia vs. The New Deal. — Conservative paranoia regarding liberals and Islamic banking. I have never understood the conservative notion that liberals want to promote Islamic law. That fails a common sense test that any fourth grader could see through. We don’t even want Biblical law in this country, why on earth would we want a Shariate?
?otD: On the whole, would you rather be in Philadelphia?
8/6/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.25 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: airport walking
Hours slept: 6.0 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, emotional distress)
Currently (re)reading: Inheritor by C.J. Cherryh
Tags: Cancer, Cool, Culture, healthcare, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Religion, Science
Posted: 2:18 am Fri August 06 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad returns from the coast, flies to Omaha
Jerry Gordon reviews Dark Faith at SF Signal — He liked my story.
Realms of Fantasy, October, 2010 — Look, it’s me!
John Scalzi on mid-career advice — From the department of recursive auto-linking.
Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes — Imperfections attract, or at least that must be the guiding belief behind a new digital camera described on an e-commerce site as producing “a soft, out-of-focus feel that brings back the feeling of your old Super 8mm home movies.” (Thanks to my Dad.)
Transgender(ed) — Grammatical arguments about identity and labeling.
World’s Best Preserved Crater Found Using Google Earth — This is cool.
BP’s tree fell on my lawn — Roger Ebert on corporate shielding from accountability.
?otD: Did you miss me yesterday?
7/26/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0 hours (travel day from Writers Weekend)
Body movement: Airport walking
Hours slept: 7.0 (interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: 236.0 (yikes!)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
Tags: Art, Cool, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, reviews, Science, sex, stories
Posted: 4:21 am Mon July 26 2010 | Comments(2) |
[links] Link salad spends the weekend at the Washington coast
Review: Metatropolis — Not so much with the liking of my story.
The Peter Principle, Part 2 — Fleeing from what you’re best at. Interesting.
Vintage Ad: J.F. Carey willow chair, 1910 — Apparently, they beat the world.
Query-by-Humming Musical Search Engine Launched — If a musical search engine called Tunebot is going to work, its creators will need you to sing to it. Um, yeah.
Repubs Plot Israel-Iran Apocalypse and the Collapse of the US Economy
If You Build It, Nothing Bad Will Happen — May the mosque go up near Ground Zero, and thrive in peaceful coexistence with all members of its new community.
?otD: What will you do with your weekend?
7/24/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1 hour (revision, WRPA)
Body movement: Coastal walk later
Hours slept: 6.0 (good)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
Tags: Books, Culture, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, stories, Tech
Posted: 8:13 am Sat July 24 2010 | Comments(1) |
[writing|process] Talent, ability and voice
tchernabyelo on talent and ability. He asks if there is a limit on talent and ability, and discusses the need to analyze his successful work better.
As I said recently in a slight different context, “careful craft will beat brilliant inspiration nine times out of ten. The true point is, of course, to yoke careful craft and brilliant inspiration together in a single process.”
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that I believe talent to be rather overrated. This is not sour grapes; I say this as someone who considers himself to be fairly talented at the narrative arts. But ability, taken here for discussion purposes in the sense of “craft”, is what makes for successful writing.
Be assured I am not discounting the value of talent. It is possible to dazzle with sheer brilliance, and I’m rather pleased when someone can do that to me. But even sheer brilliance must still rest on structure, plot, character, setting, and all the other impedimenta of story-telling. Those are craft.
I can’t teach you talent. You have whatever you have. Hence ‘s “box it came in” theory, which I prefer to think of as the “hand of cards”. There are ten or twelve or fourteen things that a writer needs to attain mastery of in order to tell a strong, compelling story. We all first come to the table with two or three or five of those things in our hands. Natural talent, in other words.
In my case, as a very new writer, long before I’d sold a word, or even written a comprehensible story, that was plot (though not endings), setting, and prose styling. Characters, on the other hand, were sort of people-shaped black holes for me, dialog was so clunky it hurt, my control of POV was laughable. Those things I had to learn. Craft, in other words, carefully attended to and practiced over the past two decades.
One of my personal challenges in growing as a writer has in fact been to recognize the limits of my talent, and from that where and how to apply my learned skills at craft development to those areas where I already considered myself pretty hot shit. (Ego isn’t pretty, is it?)
I may not be able to teach you talent, but I can teach you craft. Or at least someone can, if it doesn’t happen to be me. In fact, with one notable exception, I’m of the opinion that any aspect of craft can be taught, and if practiced well, mastered.
Another way of saying that is to aver that you don’t need talent to succeed at writing. You need the ability to learn good craft, you need to attain facility at that craft (if not mastery, eventually), and you need psychotic persistence. Talent sure can help, and may be a handy shortcut for some of the cards of craft, but it can also be a dead end and a trap; much as I have experienced.
The notable exception? I don’t believe I can teach you voice. Voice is one of those things that adheres to the Potter Stewart test – “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” To my current thinking, voice is the distinct quality that makes you the writer you are, delightfully unlike everyone else. It arises out of the intersection of talent, craft, and life experience, and like the sea, voice is ever changing.
You have talent in whatever measure you happen to be granted it. Craft can be taught, and will bridge the gap between talent and achievement. Voice is the intangible fusion that moves you from practiced to good; and with luck and skill, from good to great.
So to speak to tchernabyelo directly, is there a limit on talent and ability? Yes, on talent, because it’s an inherent quality independent of effort and focus. Potentially not on ability, because it’s an acquired characteristic dependent on commitment and practice. You can’t control talent, but you can control craft.
As I often say, “write more”. That is the essence of commitment and practice.
Tags: Process, Writing
Posted: 5:33 am Mon July 19 2010 | Comments(6) |
[links] Link salad is stumped by mornings, branches out
Talkback… or is it soccer? — A.M. Dellamonica with a bit more on the talking to mid-career writers discussion, plus a source attribution back to Jessica Reisman for raising the question in the first place.
Critix Redux — Art guru James Gurney on art criticism (again), which he compares to music criticism. How does this apply to literary criticism? It would seem that SF/F is to literary criticism as comics are to art criticism, but still.
SMBC on sex with nerds — Though this could be sex with writers. Binding, bondage: is there a difference?
Big Bend National Park — One of my favorite places on Earth, from orbit, natch.
Robot vs. Lobster — When a hexapod robot challenges a decapod crustacean, who wins? A million years of human evolution. Fifty thousand years of cultural development. Over two centuries of industrialization. And now, this.
?otD: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
7/18/2010
Writing time yesterday: 6.5 hours (revision, editing and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 (pretty good, look, ma, no Lorazepam!)
This morning’s weigh-in: 233.0
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 2/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
Tags: Cool, Funny, Links, Personal, Photos, Process, Science, sex, Videos, weird, Writing
Posted: 5:50 am Sun July 18 2010 | Comments(0) |
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