Thursday, June 10, 2004
Driving Too Fast w/ Ecstatic Music On
First, thanks for the welcome. In the last several days, I've done a bit of reading in your blogs and/or heard about you from Ed. It seems funny to me that I may know a little bit more about you than you know about me, so I ran through my bookmarks this morning and added a few links. They might tell you something about me.
If you've read Your Mother's Love..., then you know that Ed and I have struck a deal so that each Monday we trade a minimum of 2000 words we've written and do a read and critique. Ed gives great critique. The first piece I sent his way was a 7500-word mystery story I cranked out last fall after reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing and deciding to try out the "just sit down and write" thing. The story had been read by a few people, but they were reading, not critiquing. I got a great listing of strengths and weaknesses from Ed, and some of the problems I'd seen with the story suddenly became resolvable. I'm still working on the re-write. And I have a few other ideas for working further with the main character, her backstory, and the setting.
Next I gave Ed the start of a fantasy story - not quite 2000 words, I confess. Again, the critique was really helpful. I've added a couple hundred more words to it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out, but I've written the ending because it was bugging me yet I'm still working on the middle part - you know, where stuff actually happens.
I wrote two stories over the weekend and gave them to Ed on Monday. I consider one of them the weakest thing I've given him to read yet. The more I think about it, the less I like the piece, actually. I'd been trying to work out the backstory for the main character in the other one, and then Sunday night it just fell into place: "No, Lara... It's not the Holocaust in the background, it's The Purges from the Stalin era." So obvious it took me forever to figure out. I got Ed's critique on this one yesterday and started revising immediately. I think it's a nice, creepy little piece. I think that I can even see it in EQMM.
In exchange, I've critiqued the beginning of a first-person story (for which "go read Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor" may not have been the most useful advice), a completed story (that I'd kind of like to see re-worked, perhaps so that it stands independently - *nudge*), and another piece that was simply a joy to critique.
So after months and months of not writing much more than e-mails or cover letters for job applications, I've got re-writes and stories to complete and ideas to start. I'm still not thrilled with the way the job search has gone or the job I have taken or the Ph.D. program/dissertation, but I'm finding so much more fun in each day, just by making myself sit down and write.
- Your Mother's Love...: Well, you know Ed.
- Arlo & Janis: A cartoon you may have seen. Jimmy Johnson's been archiving his work on the web for a few weeks now.
- Rotten Tomatoes: Reviews -- Movies. Or games.
- Orisinal: Morning Sunshine: Surprisingly addictive (not to mention deceptively simple) games you can play on your browser.
- Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons (Slate): 'nuff said.
- NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive: Go browse, if you haven't already.
- Russian Feminism Resources & Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: Sort of related to that dissertation we're not talking about.
If you've read Your Mother's Love..., then you know that Ed and I have struck a deal so that each Monday we trade a minimum of 2000 words we've written and do a read and critique. Ed gives great critique. The first piece I sent his way was a 7500-word mystery story I cranked out last fall after reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing and deciding to try out the "just sit down and write" thing. The story had been read by a few people, but they were reading, not critiquing. I got a great listing of strengths and weaknesses from Ed, and some of the problems I'd seen with the story suddenly became resolvable. I'm still working on the re-write. And I have a few other ideas for working further with the main character, her backstory, and the setting.
Next I gave Ed the start of a fantasy story - not quite 2000 words, I confess. Again, the critique was really helpful. I've added a couple hundred more words to it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out, but I've written the ending because it was bugging me yet I'm still working on the middle part - you know, where stuff actually happens.
I wrote two stories over the weekend and gave them to Ed on Monday. I consider one of them the weakest thing I've given him to read yet. The more I think about it, the less I like the piece, actually. I'd been trying to work out the backstory for the main character in the other one, and then Sunday night it just fell into place: "No, Lara... It's not the Holocaust in the background, it's The Purges from the Stalin era." So obvious it took me forever to figure out. I got Ed's critique on this one yesterday and started revising immediately. I think it's a nice, creepy little piece. I think that I can even see it in EQMM.
In exchange, I've critiqued the beginning of a first-person story (for which "go read Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor" may not have been the most useful advice), a completed story (that I'd kind of like to see re-worked, perhaps so that it stands independently - *nudge*), and another piece that was simply a joy to critique.
So after months and months of not writing much more than e-mails or cover letters for job applications, I've got re-writes and stories to complete and ideas to start. I'm still not thrilled with the way the job search has gone or the job I have taken or the Ph.D. program/dissertation, but I'm finding so much more fun in each day, just by making myself sit down and write.
