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

The thing about Grimm is, even though it is a bit banal and repetitive (although getting less so as it develops its mythology), it hits a lot of my story kinks, like secret identities, hidden subcultures, and family legacies. I'm liking it more and more as the season progresses.

I was thinking about my complaint the other day about Hollywood's trend of remaking current foreign films and TV shows and doing remakes of (slightly) older American films and TV shows (especially annoying when you are any age of adult and can remember the original like it was yesterday because it was).

This seemed to contradict a stray thought I had later that day in which I was remembering mourning the passing of television shows and film series I had loved (esp. Deep Space Nine, Angel, and Harry Potter) and how I comforted myself with the knowledge that "something new will come along I will love, it always does."

"New", of course, is relative. It can be argued there are no truly "new" stories to tell, but I think it depends on what you mean by "new." If stories are stripped down to their archetypal bones, then no, there probably aren't any new stories out there, but there are plenty of new ways to tell the same archetypal story. Make your Odysseus a female character in the modern day instead of a male. Pile this culture/era/sub-culture's baggage atop the archetype instead of that culture/era/sub-culture's baggage--no one will recognize the story archetype without a lot of wincing, and it becomes fresh again.

Likewise, easily recognizable tropes or characters can be made fresh again with a fresh angle to them. Set the (yet another) vampire story in the American south, or have the vampire share a flat with a werewolf and a ghost. Give your formerly-Victorian characters cell phones and sophisticated 21st-century adversaries to test their skills against.

That said, there IS such a thing as trope-fatigue. And making your "adaptations" too thinly-disguised by your "variations" to be fresh enough.

Sometimes, what I really want is to curl up and revisit the same story told the same way I remember it. Sometimes, what I really want is a story trope/archetype/kink that's deep in my bones told in a way so different from what I've heard before I don't recognize it at first. Sometimes I want a film/show that was done forty years ago, and not too well, to be given a decent (and fresh) treatment.

But I rarely want to see the same story told in just a slightly tweaked way ten years or one year after I saw it before.

1. So there's supposed to be an American remake of Sherlock Holmes? Urgh, argh, c'mon, country o' mine, you have enough culture of your own not to continually display these obvious (and immediate) attempts at success!envy. Right? Right? Far be it for me to say, "Do something American," 'cause it sounds so jingoistic. But yeah, that. Sherlock belongs to the UK, always has. And they thought of Being Human first. Deal with it.

The new contemporary UK version of Sherlock, though? Very cool.

2. Same deal with the remake of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The Sculptor begged me to go with her to the theater to see this. Instead, I gave her a three-Saturday-night marathon of the extended versions of the original Swedish films. In Swedish. With Swedes. Noomi Rapace: accept no substitutes.

3. C'mon, country: do something new. Not a big fan of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot. For one thing, it's totally AU after destroying All of Vulcan. But it lost my respect when it make Kirk a Captain straight out of the academy (which is also, btw, totally AU).

4. Why didn't any of you people tell me about the Edwardian soap opera that is Downton Abbey? Oh wait, you did. That's why I'm Netflixing it. Still on Season 1, though, so no spoilers.