One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.
Category: Writing
Attention requisition notice
Here are things that are great!
Work Made For Hire is a smart, clear, unbelievably valuable blog about negotiation and freelancing. If you have ever argued a point or signed a contract, you need to be reading it.
MANual of Style debuted at a perfect time for me, as I’m finally figuring out how to dress myself like a grownup–which is exactly what the blog is about. It’s written in a series of lessons, but it’s also interesting just as a window into trend versus classic in men’s clothing.
An author named Tony Buchsbaum proposed a ratings system for books because he was startled to think his thirteen-year-old son might read the words “cock” or (yes) “manpole.” I am curious as to how Tony Buchsbaum grew up without ever being thirteen himself (perhaps his parents considered it unlucky?), but it gets better: a thirteen-year-old named Emily takes his argument and, in two comments, completely dismantles it. It’s an Ebert-on-Schneider-level takedown.
Is the writer actually thirteen? Who knows (I don’t see any reason to doubt it), but she’s certainly much more familiar with the experience of being a teenager than the people who think they need to be sheltered from scary words. Ratings systems are harmful, and teenagers aren’t the only ones restricted by them.
Want a sneak peek at Grimm, the comic Erika and I are working on? She’s been posting pencils, and they look balls-out amazing.
The dark side of self-exposure
Sumana called me out on my 2007 goal-announcement entry and asked what the follow-up was for 2010-2012. First, HOW IS IT 2010 ALREADY. Second, I thought I’d already done an update on how those goals went, but I can’t find it if I did, so here we go:
Accomplished
- Get driver’s license
Failed
- Everything else
Okay, so at 28 I have managed to just reach a 16-year-old’s level of basic competence. Right on track! I got accepted to Clarion but couldn’t afford it, and GSP gently declined my teaching application: this indicates an unsurprising trend of nonprofit programs being happier to take my money than to give me more. I stopped running not long after I posted that entry in 2007, but I struggled into reasonable shape last summer and might be able to get there again now that I own an inhaler.
So. Let’s try this again.
My goals for 2010 are to script a graphic novel and run a half-marathon.
My goals for 2011 are to write a novel and publish a computer game.
My goal for 2012 is to be out of non-student-loan debt.
He even managed to include the Secret Bonus Criterion! (dog sex)
Over on the Facebook feed, Stephen kindly took it upon himself to respond to my last post with 101 words that simultaneously satisfy all my plot-criteria:
Melinda looked down at her gun. “I had no idea this had so many bullets in it,” she yelled. “Turns out I’m pretty powerful, even though I am a woman.”
A pause for dramatic effect, then: “Now if I can just quit being so sad all the time, I can find out who had sex with all of my dogs.”
Melinda had thirty dogs.
Suddenly, her phone rang! It was her best friend who said, “I had sex with your other best friend yesterday!”
Dramatic pause. Then she (the best friend on the phone) said, “My desires are tearing us apart!!!!”
So that’s that, I guess. No more need to read stories! Thanks, other stories, you can go home now.
My sister got married!
I have to write about that, but first I have to pull some wedding pictures off the camera, which is way over there.
So instead, a quick navel-gaze: according to fan mail and a vague sense of the Ommatidia Facebook community, my writing tends to attract people who are a) very clever and gifted and b) much, much younger than me. Like, around a decade younger than me, because a lot of them are in late high school or early college.
Does this say something about the genre-trappings of the stories, the methods by which fandom propagates, or just the appeal of the format? The hoary journalistic trope to fall back on here is a bunch of rumbling about Kids These Days and Short Attention Spans and Nothing Longer than a Text Message, but I am resisting that because it’s dumb.
I suspect the reason is simpler: many of my favorite books are YA novels, because those are the best ones to read if you like stories where people do stuff and things happen. I write stories that I think I would like, and the influence of YA authors is heavy upon them. By definition, then, they appeal to young adults.
I think that is awesome. I wonder how long I can keep getting away with it?
Speaking of decades and youth, I’ve been a fan of Erika Moen’s for almost ten years now, since Scott Thigpen linked to Vera Brosgol who in turn linked to her. (Man, look at the arc of those three careers alone!) Erika just ended DAR, her autobiographical webcomic; it was sometimes explicit, always brutally honest, and very, very funny over its six-year run. I’ll miss reading it.
But I’m very excited about her new projects, in part because one of them is a graphic novel that I’m scripting! This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened! Erika broke the news first, and I’m not going to give too many more details than she did: it’s called Grimm, it’s YA, and it will probably run around six to eight “issues.” Not sure yet whether she’ll be posting a weekly page or one whole arc at a time a la Octopus Pie. Very sure that it is going to be great!
It even stopped airing in spring of this year!
Wait. Hold on. Comedy Central has a pseudo-cinema verité show about a radio program? A radio program where one of the hosts is relatively grounded and knowledgeable and the other is the wacky, grating narcissist? And then there’s a new guest every week and things go poorly? And the jokes depend heavily on bleeped cuss words? And nobody’s ever heard of it?
WHAT THE FUCK.
Skip this one, Mom
In mid-writing session:
Brendan: It’s a pretty old joke structure, but as Tina Fey has pointed out, if you get to a certain gag density people don’t notice that kind of thing. Many of the jokes in Arrested Development are groaningly old, but nobody notices because they come so thick and fast.
Brendan: … This is the part where you make a joke about coming thick and fast.
Stephen: I WOULD TOTALLY COME THICK AND FAST WITH TINA FEY
Brendan: There you go.
Stephen: BOYOYOYNG
Yes, I realize Proserpina’s name blocks several other links. What do you expect from her?
I just completed a personal obsession that’s been occupying a few minutes of my time every day for the last several months: every Anacrusis story is now tagged with the names of each character who appears in it, which means you can see a much more accurate cloud of every name I’ve ever used.
The ratio of effort to payoff on this project was not high, but at least I’ve shut up one of my own tiny nagging voices, and brought the site up to this-was-cool-in-2006 standards. It had the side effect of cleaning up all my old crappy markup code from 2003 to 2007, which should help things go smoothly when Dreamhost inevitably decides WordPress is too resource-expensive and makes me downgrade to flat text files.
My posts aren’t showing up on LJ. I don’t know why.
Which means that a bunch of you haven’t seen the last Proserpina story, or at least the last within the context of Anacrusis. (And indeed won’t see this, since the NFD feed isn’t working either.) At 65 entries over 29 months, it’s the longest continuous series I’ve written, and at 6565 words, one of my longer stories.
It needs to be longer yet–I haven’t come close to answering several of the questions posed in the very first one, much less figured out what happens to Radiane and Elijah. Also the next part is basically Proserpina Down Under, which will be difficult to write until I manage to get to Australia. But none of these things will be going in 101-word boxes.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the story so far, and that you’ll find its next incarnation an improvement.