First off: I can't believe it's been a year since my fabulous south-of-the-border vacation. Next year, I have a trip planned to the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. Geez, I still land-trip like I'm on a friggin' cruise.

But 2012 is 2012 and a totally different ball game, kiddies. This is the year I kick my first-born out of the house Once and For All. Which is why I've been so scarce on the intertubes lately.

Okay, confession time: I broke down and hired a professional website designer. I was just ready to pop a blood vessel trying to do it myself. The technical aspects I'm good with: programming, getting widgets to work. Just give me the manual and I go. The content, I can pull together with a little sweat equity. But the graphic design I suck at. SUCK AT. And those do-it-yourself website design platforms do require some design savvy, no matter what they say. Unless you're prepared to live with one of their templates exactly as is.

But see, here's the thing: the technical aspects and content are interdependent with the design. You have to know what you're doing with all three, or none of them proceed very quickly.

April was mostly spent getting my print book cover finished. I doubt I'll sell many of those, they're too pricey. So May was spent getting the eBook together, and now my head is swimming with mobi's and ePub's and toc.ncx.

Don't ask, it's a Writer-slash-computer-geek Thing.

How do other people do it?

Oh, right, they're not as big of control freaks as me.

Another thing I tackled in May was moving all the writing and philosophy of pop literature entries from this LJ/DW over to WordPress to set up a "professional" blog. The design of it sucks right now, it will be better when the website designer integrates it into the main site. But if you're remotely curious, the URL (for the moment) is InfiniteDoorways.com. And it doesn't mean I'm leaving LJ/DW. I need somewhere to bitca and moan off the record.

Also, somewhere in all of this, I'm banging out the first draft of my new story. Just got done chapter 17 of 22. Go me.

And somewhere else, else, in all of this, I still have a full-time job.

And somewhere else, else, else, I still have a GF and my family and a house I'm trying to spiff up in jerky jumps and halts.

And somewhere else, else, else, else there's me and the Sleep Thing that plagues me every spring. That has its bad days. Is it June yet? Oh, it is.

I have insomnia. And it's not an occasional annoyance, or something treatable with a pat solution ("less caffeine!" "more exercise!" "Vitamin D!") nor does it have a clearly identifiable cause ("Anxiety! "Spastic bladder!" "Night sweats!"). It is an illness. For nights on end, I wake up after four-five hours, unable to fall back asleep. No matter how exhausted I am, or drowsy, or any of the other things that make you fall asleep, I don't. Because there is something actively fighting the sleep reflex. So I lie awake, exhausted, drowsy, restless, and bored.

And then I am close to useless the next day. I can't concentrate for sh!t.

I told my doctor about this when I went in to see her last month, and she set me up with a sleep study that fell through when my insurance wouldn't pay for it. They need a diagnosis of Sleep Apnea for that to happen, and this isn't sleep apnea. I don't have trouble breathing at night. Her staff told she was looking into challenging that denial, and that's the last I heard from her.

So I have been calling her office once a week to get a status on where we are with treatments. They tell me they'll look into it and call me back, then they don't. I have explained the urgency. The Sculptor's telling, "blow her off, get a new doctor." I hesitate mostly because my current doctor had some interesting suggestions, like acupuncture and hypnosis--things I haven't tried. I'd like to try those, but who knows if insurance will pay without my doctor's referral.

Someone else told me about a chronic condition she had that was treated by a naturopath. I know very little about this specialty, but I contacted a local naturopath, who said she does, indeed, treat insomnia. Then she quoted me an initial consultation fee that made me balk.

Anyone know about any of these alternative treatments and their success rate?

Ganked from Shadowkat:

Which philosopher are you? Your Result: Immanuel Kant   There are things in themselves, but they are unimportant to us. We must interpret everything through certain immutable categories, such as time and the laws of physics. All rational animals must see the world through these categories, and what they see is unrelated to the things in themselves. --This quiz was made by S. A-Lerer.
Early Wittgenstein / Positivists
Aristotle
W.v.O. Quine / Late Wittgenstein
Sartre/Camus (late existentialists)
Nietzsche
Plato (strict rationalists)
Which philosopher are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Thing the first: ( Matters of faith and religion in fiction )

Thing the second: ( World-building )

An interesting post on story-telling vs. plot

I believe a good story, plotted or plotless, rightly told, is satisfying as such and in itself. But here, with “rightly told,” is my conundrum or mystery

I am trying to create a writing blog that will contain my old LJ entries where I (1) talk about writing or story-telling or (2) books I read, but not have all the personal stuff from my LJ. I will then include a link to it in my new author platform website.

I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to do that. Exporting from LJ into an XML file is the easy part. I figured out how to do that. But the old blogger account I set up keeps crapping out on me for import.

I hesitate to create a wordpress blog if it ends up doing the same thing.

I also thought about creating a new paid LJ and or DW account and having the full content of my current LJ imported over, and then just delete the entries I don't want to be part of the writing blog. But seeing as they go back nine years, yikes. Of course, that'd be true even of XML downloads from LJ.

Any suggestions on a way to do this that will minimize the work involved? I'd like the comments to go with, so it looks like I've been blogging from that other platform for years.

ETA: I went ahead and gave WordPress a try. It imported my entire LJ and is now doing the comments. The most work I'll have to do is get rid of posts I don't want on there. That'll be a chore.

I went ahead and asked for an early LJ scrapbook migration, and lo and behold, after it was done, my moody Connor icons are still showing up, as chipper and geeky and tired as ever. The sky has not yet fallen.

I, on the other hand, am about to: spring insomnia has come as it does every year and has set in with a vengeance. I am rethinking my rethinking of the sleep study I'm supposed to go on next Thursday. My insurance company sent me a letter saying they wouldn't pay for it because I don't have a sleep apnea diagnosis. So no medical necessity? I'd say waking up after four hours every night for weeks on end and not falling back asleep is a medical problem.

I was actually happy about the insurance denial at first, because it gave me a legitimate "out" to what sounded like a creepy test. Plus, it seems to me sleeping over for one night in a strange bed would be very prone to anecdotal conclusions, depending on what kind of night you happen to have.

ETA: just now, the sleep lab called, and the appointment is cancelled. I am at my wits end with fatigue. I took a sick day yesterday after a wretched night, but couldn't nap during the day and went to bed at my normal time. And woke up 3 am. Laid there, bored and frustrated for a couple hours, and then got up. T h i s S U C K S.

After wading through over a thousand author websites, here's some stuff I've learned:

( Read more... )

Today is my 9th anniversary on Live Journal. I remember when LJ was the new thing we all drifted over to from the ATPo board, pretty much sealing the demise of its hey-day. Now it's the old thing people left for Dreamwidth or Facebook or Twitter three years ago, or for Tumblr nowadays. And I don't blame them. DW's looking pretty good these days. But if I switched, it would only be to take comments there instead of here, since I'm technically on both already.

I still prefer the journal format for my online interaction, because I am a woman of words. And more than one or two sentences per, tyvm. Which I think is true of other journalers on my flist/dwircle who are members of what shadowkat67 calls, "the online correspondence/frustrated writers club."

I am glad I have LJ and DW and Facebook to interact with my long-time friends, and my new friends.

So:

Journal entries: 3,331
Comments: Posted: 35,181 Received: 42,741
Friends: 156

This is going to be my California Year. The Sculptor and I are going to L.A. in July and San Francisco in November. And I am being extremely mental about the whole thing, because both these areas were my home at one time or another. She wants to check out the art scene in each city. I want to show off the Stomping Grounds of Old to her.

I have not posted much this month 'cause I have been swamped with my personal projects--getting my old novel out the door, working on the website to promote my writing, working on my new story... Oof, I'm tired. And, of course, it's Spring, which means Major Insomnia time for me, and that makes me More Tired.

I'm supposed to go in for one of those overnight sleep studies in May. Sounds creepy to me, sleeping in a strange bed with electrodes strapped to your head. But at least my current doctor is interested in helping me with my insomnia. The doctors back in SF just gave me a list of "behavioral changes", patted me on the head, and sent me on my way.

I have been living in a tunnel these past few weeks. Srsly, my brane scares me sometimes. I can start in on a project and get so obsessed with it, I can't concentrate on anything else, nor do I want to. Work, relationships, writing, everything that happens everyday, just sort of gets pushed to the side so it falls right off the plate.

I have been working on my writing website. I found a do-it-yourself website builder, Squarespace.com, that lets you put together a website using a similar interface to the one DW and LJ have for creating individualized journals. And they have a pretty responsive support staff if you have questions not covered in the help section.

Each of their basic templates comes with a blog page and a contact form page, which is cool.

I decided at the end of March to take a two-week break from my new story, and that also roughly coincided with my 14-day trial with Squarespace. And then me being me, I wanted to do some things with my site Squarespace doesn't have among their "widgets" and started teaching myself DHTML, CSS, and Javascript. None of which I actually want to bother learning in any depth, but I winged it by modifying scripts I've found online. Looking for something that comes close to what I want in order to minimize the modifying I have to do has been frustrating, but so far I've figured it out. I knew this computer programming lark of mine would come in handy for actual Creative Stuff.

But shit, getting a little computer script to actually work and do the Cool Thing you want it to do just brings out the Obsessive Personality in me.

Same thing with creating cool graphics in Photoshop. I have spent Entire Days of that two-week period in Photoshop creating custom Website Widgets and banners and backgrounds. And my photoshop artiste-fu is teh suxx0rs.

But I told myself I had until the 15th to Not Write, and lookie, it's the 16th. So back to the story.

One fandom activity I don't like seeing and don't enjoy doing is nit-picking plot holes. All fictional works have them, but some people relish the idea of pointing them out and castigating the writers of the fictional work. They relish complaining. Television is especially vulnerable to this because of tight writing schedules and multiple authors.

I hate nit-picking because I don't like plot holes, they ruin my enjoyment of a book/show/film considerably, and I'd just as soon spackle over them and move on rather than grouse for fun and profit. Back in the hey-day of the ATPo board, we used to spend a portion of our time "spackling" BtVS and AtS plot holes using show canon or well-accepted fanon. We'd pack the hole with speculation, likely or unlikely, and end the post with "spackle, spackle" as a tongue-in-cheek wink to other posters (especially if our hole-filler was a stretch).

I suppose most plothole-filling in fandom occurs in spackle!fic rather than "meta." And probably more convincingly as well, since fiction is a more visceral medium for making a case.

Regardless of how it's done, spackling can work surprisingly well for the fan willing to put in the ThinksTooMuch time, because ofttimes the apparently dangling plot point was, in fact, established by the writers, just weakly, or in ways that were obvious to them but not to the viewers.

I am thinking of this today because one of the worst kind of plot holes there is is weakly-developed motivation in a character-driven story.

( Regina on OUAT (spoilers to last night's episode) )


( Morgana on Merlin (spoilers to 4.13) )

Via honorh:

1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current ms.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
4. Tag 7 other authors. Like HH, I don't tag. Do it if you think it sounds fun.

Since it would be too much work to figure out what page is 77 (my chapters are in separate files), I am doing page 7. From my current untitled original fic:

The air was stagnant and thick with dust and age. They didn't have far to go before they reached the plywood barrier Gen had put up. She shoved it open with one hand and tumbled out into a brick-and-mortar chamber tall enough to stand in.

Gen scrambled up and, one by one, lit a series of dangling lanterns. Her students each emerged and gasped at air fresher than the crawlspace, but sour with mildew. They took in the stacked wood crates marked with Chinese characters and other loose items scattered on the floor.

"How'd you find this?" Sean asked.

One of the things I like about Once Upon a Time is that, so far, they are keeping Emma the empiricist and the skeptic who won't believe the stories people tell her about the reality of the "fairytale world(s)" just because they say so. ( No real OUAT spoilers, just tangential thoughts )

I have tried googling this, searching etsy.com, and looking it up on NaNoWriMo.org to no avail, but I have a lot of writers on my flist, so maybe one of you has some suggestions. I am getting ready to grab a web domain for my original fiction, and need a good web designer. One of the biggest criticisms of atpobtvs.com was the design and readability. I just threw that thing together with spit, kleenex, and html circa 1999. I figured it was all about the content, not the aesthetics. I've watched enough HGTV at this point to know that the way something looks is as important for getting people to go there as the content is, whether that's fair or rational or not.

Initially, I have no ambitions to turn this website into a writer's "platform", although that's what it will eventually become, I suppose. And I want it to be creative, not look like I'm selling widgets or posting my resume. And yes, it will include a way to buy my books. But initially, it will just be a promotional site for the book I have coming out.

The problem isn't finding web designers, it's figuring out who's reliable and good at what they do.

So my younger nephew does not have diabetes. The doctors think his excess drinking and peeing is behavioral, related to anxiety. Seven years old, and they think he's too anxious.

Welcome to the family, kid.

Ganked from superplin on PhaceBuk


http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm

"The fiction of praxis opens a space for the fantasy of pedagogical institutions."


ETA: and hee! You get hi-brow commentary on your generated sentences of abtuse academia.

"'Your painstaking examination of the fantasy of pedagogical institutions is a testimony to your diligence, if not to your perspicuity.'"

Originally posted by bremoisaho at Make it Meta

quixotic_crush gave me seven topics to expound on: books, vampires, philosophy, music, LGBTQ rights, geeks, fantasy. Warning: me and memes are unmixy things. I give them way too much thought. So I will attempt brevity.

( LJ cut for your protection )

I don't think I've ever done an introductory post before, seeing as I've known most of my flist for years and have survived internet kerfuffles, raging forest fires, and DoubleMeat Palace viewings with them. But I recently gained a few new flisties from a Merlin fandom friending meme and apparently an introductory post after that is what All the Cool Kids Do.

So if you know this stuff already, feel free to move along.

( Masquerade the Philosopher: a primer )

Well, that's enough shameless self-promotion for one day.

Fan fiction. It's not lying, it's looking at things another way....



http://www.tempe-theatre.com/theaters/gammage-auditorium/wicked.php