Feedback

Feedback is fantabulous. I love feedback.

Today I got a nice chunk of feedback on my latest fictional endeavor. Very nice indeed. It was full of accurate, incisive indications of things that need fixing, and which will be, I think, hugely difficult to fix. Weeks of head-pounding revisions loom ahead. But! It also said the reader enjoyed the story. That makes everything twinkle with pink fairy lights.

Three or Four Problems

So, with just two weeks of distance, I'm rereading and editing. I've read the whole thing again. The last half certainly goes smoother than the first. I wonder if I'll be able to fix that. Other than that, I've fixed the easy problems, hopefully, writing a new scene in the process, and now I have three major problems left. One is a relatively simple problem of characters not behaving in a way that makes sense (failing to realize or know things they should, for the sake of a piece of dialog I wanted to have-- classic darling killing required). Two are more difficult, in that they involve things which are mentioned, but then don't get the air time they need in the story, basically a couple of themes which are shortchanged. That's going to be troublesome to fix, and it also probably means more happening, rather than less.

Can I get this done by the end of the week as planned? Stay tuned...

Deep Thoughts

All a corporation has to do to stand out, to be amazingly, startlingly, outlandishly progressive, is to say that it won't be evil. Just don't be evil. You don't have to, you know, go out of your way to be good. You can even be an irritant, or an impediment. You could be dangerously incompetent. But at least you're not evil.

Come to think of it, it's getting like that for politicians, too, isn't it? Just say you won't be evil. Instant boost in the polls.

Well, it might work if we thought we could believe any of them.

The 44,000

After much round-about writing and rewriting, I have about forty-four thousand words which seem to hang together. However, I'm still not sure exactly what's going to happen next. I can only hope this doesn't end up being another one of those sticking points.

Phoenix Landing

Cool pictures.

Looks like they made it

Phoenix appears to have made it to Mars. Yay for more Mars pictures.

Good Luck Phoenix

Phoenix Mars mission page

Eurovision 2008

Yes, I know it's over. Still, I feel a need to share.

Participants that either didn't make me cringe, or made me cringe in a good way:

Azerbaijan - Only in Europe could this happen. They get points for audacity, but honestly the lyrics are really annoying.

Finland - They rock. A bit too serious, maybe, but they rock.

Greece - Inexplicably, I found myself liking this song, as long as I didn't listen too closely.

Ukraine - Best of the ordinary. That is, compared to the crowd of boring disco-crud, this is actually pretty catchy.

You'll notice I didn't actually like the winner.

Another View on St. Petersberg

Photos. Wow.

(Via Coudal Partners)

Men!

Twice in the past few days I have come across a link to this piece, Rebecca Solnit, writing in the L.A. Times, about how (some) men love to explain things they know nothing about to women, and how this oppresses the women. Indeed, she goes on to compare her experience with having to give an overconfident ass in a Raulph Lauren Aspen lodge the smackdown with the plight of women in Islamic nations who are not allowed to testify at their rape trials, or Maria Lauterbach being butchered by her rapist.

What? ... What!?

These people, the explainers, the talk-down-upon-ers, are blowhards. They like explaining things they know nothing about to everyone, not just to women. OK, sorry. I shouldn't be declarative like that. I risk being accused of explaining something, and of arrogance, asshattery, blowhardedness, and general male-dominated hegemonic discourse.

Still, please, hasn't everyone, female or not, met someone like this? Hasn't everyone had to sit through their bluster and arrogance and contempt? It's not like only men can act that way, either. Have you never experienced a woman's whithering contempt? Her certainty in the face of all reason?

Not all women, to be sure, and not all the time. Just some women, or rather some people, some of the time. It doesn't look like a male thing from where I'm standing. She doesn't even seem to realize that linking maleness to arrogance the way she does is exactly the kind of contemptuous stereotyping that she protests later, when applied to herself:

Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.

Or, rather, when she perceives it applied to her. I doubt either of her accusers actually came out and said she was "subjective" or "dishonest" because she was female. (Though I'll admit the stereotype may have crossed their minds, because people are bad like that.) Indeed, I've seen this kind of behavior, too, and again from both sexes. People always, always remember the "facts" to their own advantage. Men do, and so do women, and so, I have no doubt, does Ms. Solnit. But heaven forbid the incidents in question not be perfectly preserved in the objective crystal clarity of her memory. There is no possibility that she might be subjective in the least, even if every other human being on earth is.

Of course, it never works to talk to anyone about that, because nobody will admit they do it themselves. "Everyone else is subjective, but not me! I know what I saw." Except when they show you the video later and point out the man in the gorilla suit.

No doubt the men in question were in the wrong, and Ms. Solnit was in the right, but to become incensed at the oppressiveness of these men questioning her version of events? Incensed to the point of making these people who had the temerity to disagree with her the poster-men of all male oppression? That seems strangely... arrogant. Isn't Ms. Solnit, now, doing the explaining? Perhaps it is people who explain things, to people, and let's just call them blowhards, whatever their sex.

Something Positive

To contrast with that negative semi-review I posted a while ago, here's something positive.

I just finished reading "In the River" by Justin Stanchfield, printed in Interzone 205. This is more like it. First of all, it's a story about people in an interesting situation, not a story wrapped around some point where you're supposed to say "aha!" as you figure out what the author has been hiding from you. Secondly, the prose flows, not trying to impress you with colorful language, fantastic sentence structure, or the author's spectacular ability to use a thesaurus. It uses evocative language that supports the reader's imagination, instead of drawing attention to itself.

There are no explanations, but you understand what is happening.

In other words, it's what a good short story should be. Even the artwork was good. My only problem with it is that it is a bit too short. The interactions between the characters are slightly abbreviated, and the story ends fairly abruptly (and, to be honest, a little predictably). But Mr. Stanchfield writes the kind of stories I like to read. I hope to read more.

On the Writing Front

I've backed up a bit. While reading and revising the other day, I came to a point where I felt everything up to that point had been at least OK, but everything after was really bothering me. I've gone further back, added a bit to a scene, and I'm now in the process of trying to derail/re-rail what happens after the problem point. What this means is that roughly four thousand words out of nearly forty five thousand are... if not completely lost, at least in serious jeopardy.

Which is not so bad. So, I'm back to 41k. But it's better, I think.

And I'm calling it a novel. So there.

Inconceivable

I am reading through my backlog of Interzone magazines during lunch. Recently I finished a story (which I will not name for reasons that will soon become apparent), and I thought, "wasn't that one of the readers' choice stories?" IZ had the results of a readers' choice poll in issue 209. I pulled the issue, and sure enough, there was the story.

I can't say I was surprised, but, I have to be honest, I thought the story was gut-thumpingly awful. It was built around a gimmick, and it was written entirely to make a point that was bland, simple, almost trite (although true, but being true isn't enough). It assumed that the reader was too dim to have appreciated the point before, while being at the same time so sensitive as to be moved by the author's treatment of it. The author basically clubbed the readers over the head with this point and nothing else and sat back, satisfied this was sufficient to make a story worth writing. It was a ode to the author's own sense of what his writing could do for the world. And I thought it was terrible. It was the kind of thing I would expect from a gifted* high school student in creative writing class, not being published in a magazine that people pay for.

This was one of the readership's favorite stories of the year.

Obviously I don't understand what people like to read. Did they like that the story was oh so clever? Did they honestly think it was insightful? I'm baffled.

* Yes, gifted. It was well enough written for what it was.

Modern Cartoonist

Modern Cartoonist by Daniel Clowes.

Don't be afraid to look at your work, get disgusted, throw it in the toilet, and start anew.

Great, I'm going to be unclogging my toilet for decades.

Found on Bookslut.

Past Favorites

Someone asked elsewhere if there is a collection of my work. ("Work"... Should be called "play", really.) There isn't a single place to see all the stuff I think is finished and maybe worth showing to people, so here's a little collection of the best stuff I have readily available. In no particular order, but as you go down it tends to get older.

(Edit: I've re-uploaded these pictures.)

And

You know what's really annoying? I can't post any of this stuff, because I don't want to ruin the impact when read in its proper place (assuming I ever finish this damn thing).

38k

Finally passed the 38 thousand word mark. It has been a long time coming, for whatever reason. I had to go back to the beginning, basically, and work through all the stuff up to this point, fixing things, to finally get to a point where I was able to go on. But today, it did go on, finally (I said that didn't I?). I'm even happy with the results, although, as usual, that is tempered by the fact that I will still have to come back and look at it again later.

Deleting is Progress

Yes it is, dammit. Thanks to your support, I did make a bit of progress last night, although that progress mostly consisted of deciding that a certain dialog could end right where it was, and another dialog was extraneous and could be deleted. So delete I did, and finally felt free to continue on.

Back to the Stuck

So, connectivity problems over the past three days with Comcast. I finally break down and schedule someone to come take a look at it... and it starts working again. (Actually, it worked for a few hours last night, so I'm still not trusting it to stay up.)

I haven't drawn much of anything for a while, but I have tried to start writing again. I promptly got stuck, and still am. Tonight, I will stare at the words I have written and wonder what to do with them for another hour or two. Wish me luck.