Tag: Writing

A suggesting for writing

Why I Won’t Read Your Unpublished Work (Whatever)

For God’s sake, if you’re going to hand your work over for critique, finish the damn thing first. Even if it’s broke, you can fix it. But you can’t fix a fragment. All you can do is fiddle with it, and in fiddling avoid finishing it. I don’t encourage this; even with friends, I don’t read things that aren’t finished.

The whole post linked above is pretty amusing, as Scalzi generally is.  But this part caught my eye.  I’d never thought of that.  And it makes a lot of sense.  Not that I’ve ever finished any story I’ve started, but often asking for feedback has actually been the last thing I ever did.  I joined a Sci-Fi writers feedback web site, got some pretty positive feedback on the first chapter of something that I had started, and promptly never picked the thing up again.  It was a strange feeling.  The person who offered the feedback did what I thought was a good job.  He mentioned some good things, gave some constructive criticism, and did it in a polite, supportive manner.  Not much more you can ask for.

And still, I got that “OMG my writing is terrible” feeling.  And it’s not that my self-worth is tied up in how someone I’ve never met feels about the first draft of the first chapter of a novel I was working on.  Honestly, if he’d ripped it apart, I would have just assumed that he was incapable of understanding what I wrote, and pretty soon I would actually believe that.

Anyway, not that I want to use “I let people read it” as an excuse for why I didn’t finish any of the writing projects that I started.  But maybe I should keep stuff to myself until I’m finished.  My wife will kill me, probably.  But if I explain to her I’m doing it so I can finally finish a novel, become a bestseller, and support us both into our old age, I think she’ll understand.

I may be throwing in the towel

I’m just not enjoying Script Frenzy. The initial fun of using Celtx is wearing off, and I’m really not having a whole lot of fun.

I think part of it is that I only know two people doing it this year, and one has already quit. And I haven’t paid much attention to the forums. And I’m a little behind, and going out of town this weekend, and that will put me even further behind.

The other thing is that doing this, and doing Nanowrimo, don’t inspire me to take the next step. It was cooler when I thought, “Hey, I’ll do this in a month, and then go on to write a whole novel, or a whole screenplay”. But it seems pretty clear that isn’t happening.

Maybe I’ll take the story from this year’s Script Frenzy, which is something I’ve been kicking around for years, and make it into a novel. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I haven’t officially quit yet, but it’s sure looking that way.

805 words

It’s a little harder to rack up the word count when you’re writing a screenplay instead of a novel.  But I’ve got 805 words in my inaugural Script Frenzy effort, which is 138 more than my daily goal.  I still plan to do more writing tonight, because I expect to be busy all weekend, and I don’t want to go into Monday too far behind.

I kind of like the screenplay format.  I’m using Celtx, which I really like.  I don’t have anything to compare it to, so maybe it’s really a piece of crap, but I like it.  I’d recommend it.  It’s free, and it makes formatting a screenplay pretty easy.

I’m debating whether or not I want to share the screenplay here as I go.  Part of me wants to do it, and part of me is scared that people will read it and think that I’m crazy or something.

So I leave it to you, my loyal readers.  If I get three real, compelling reasons to post the screenplay as I write it, I’ll do it.  One reason per reader.

Teaser for Script Frenzy

The teaser site for the new project from the people who brought you National Novel Writing Month is up.  I think I’m going to try this new one.  The goal, instead of a 50,000 word novel in November, is a 20,000 word script in June.

I’ve never written a script before.  And I never got around to reading the script for Die Hard, which I’m told by someone who should know that it’s the de facto guide to writing a good script.  Or maybe a good action movie script.  Whatever.

I think it will be fun.  If you have suggestions for a movie, let me know.  If the suggestion in some way involves a duck, so much the better.

80 Years of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez turns 80

“He was born in Colombia, but all of us who speak Spanish have in him a referent of perfection and the creation of beauty,” Colombian Ambassador to Spain Noemi Sanin said in Madrid.

A referent of perfection.  If I ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is on my list of things to do, I hereby promise to to close my acceptance speech by screaming, “I am a referent of perfection!  You will all grovel at my feet!”, and then drop the microphone and walk off stage, where I will pull a flask of very expensive scotch from my pocket and proceed to get very, very drunk.

Seriously, I read 100 Years of Solitude in college, and I really liked it.  My Spanish isn’t strong enough to appreciate the original, but my translation was enjoyable.  I’m sure it loses something, so that means the original must be really, really good.

I mean, the guy is the father of magic realism.  Anyone who’s ever taken a Spanish class has probably heard their Spanish teacher gush about “realismo magico”.  This dude started all that.  That’s pretty cool.

So, go read on of his books.  I’ve only read the one, but I figure the rest are good, too.

Crowdsourcing Christmas

Futurismic: New Fiction From Jason Stoddard

He was nine when Dark Christmas came. He knew there were lots of different kinds of Santas. But when the first robotic Santa went rushing from tree to tree in his front yard like a soldier in a wargame, he knew something was wrong. When two more Santas, shiny with human sweat, appeared from the street and chased the robot down, David knew that something had changed forever.

New short science fiction on Futurismic combining “the magic of Christmas” with Web 2.0 buzzword-concept “crowdsourcing” and a little bit of the dark side of capitalism and the American Way.  It’s a nice, quick read.  I like the way the author tells the story as a father explaining Christmas to his daughter.  In fact, it’s very much like an old fairy tale before they were all Disney-fied and the dark parts taken out.

Nano is over

I just hit 50,000 words. For some reason, the text file validator at the Nano site decided to give me 2,000 extra words, but since what really matters is less than vs. more than 50,000, and I’m definitely more than 50,000, who cares?

So now I spend some time with my wife, finish getting the condo ready to sell, then maybe work on my 2003 novel. Next week. That sounds like a plan.

Edited to add: I’m disappointingly not that excited about finishing this year. Yes, it’s my fourth time out of five finishing. Yes, I know I can do it. But last year was more exciting.  Perhaps it’s because I’m now firmly convinced that I need a new challenge (Like finishing a novel instead of just starting them).

November is almost over

Only 2471 words to go.  I have no ending in mind at all.  The story has completely gone off into random plotlessness.  I don’t really like it anymore.  I had high expectations for this story, but they have not come to fruition.  But that’s fine.  I still have my 2003 novel to finish, and I really do like that one.  I might even put this year’s up here for people to read if they want to.  That’s how I first read John Scalzi and Charles Stross.   Of course, they put up PDFs of finished novels that have since been published by real publishers, while I’ll put up a rambling first draft of lofty expectations and not much else.

We’ll see.  Keep an eye out, maybe I’ll post it here.  It still needs a title.  Maybe if I post it, someone will read it and think of a title for me.