Daily life: Edit, edit, edit
[In the midst of a romantic discussion with a woman:]
"'I wish there was some place we could go,' I said. I was experiencing the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up."
--Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms.
Topics in this post: my readers, Internet addiction, fanvid history, writing and editing fantasy stories, military films and shows and literature, illness, partial sightedness, transatlantic weather, writing style, leather, slash.
*** 3 February 2008
Feedback! Thank god! Three positive comments on "Death Watch" (in the Eternal Dungeon series) and two positive comments on Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. It's been ages since anyone commented on my writings. (Of course, that could have something to do with the fact that it's been ages since I released any new stories.)
I especially liked getting the letter that ended, "Keep writing, please!"
*** 4 February 2008
Ten hours online this time; I was up till four a.m. I haven't analyzed yet what went wrong.
Spreading before you the fruits of my sin, I present links to two delicious videos, courtesy of![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
morgandawn, who linked to one of them at her journal. Be sure to read the accompanying notes for both videos, especially if you know nothing about fandom history.
The first video made my breath stop when I realized what it was, because I had been sure there was no visual record left of it. It's one of the first fanvids (1980), created by the very first fanvidder. It takes the form of a Star Trek slideshow set to music. The reason that this treasure was preserved is that a copy of it was given to Gene Roddenberry.
The second video is just as interesting to me: it's a music video showing the trials that vidders went through in 1990 in order to prepare their videos. It makes me very, very glad I live in the digital age.
One thing hasn't changed in eighteen years: the women in the second video look just like the women I regularly meet at slash conventions. So much for the idea that fan works are mainly created by teeny-boppers.
Waiting in my e-mail was one of the betas for "Compassion's Keeper: Trial" (from the Life Prison series), so now I'm just waiting on the other two betas. I still have to do a bit more work on "On Guard: Promotion" and "On Guard: Searching" (in the Eternal Dungeon series) before I send those off to be betaed. Then I start work on a final swipe at the already-betaed "Whipster: Blurred Lines" (in the Michael's House series) and the already-betaed "Edgeplay in Mayhill: Negotiations" (in the Loren's Lashes series). If you're wondering why all of these works have subtitles, it's because they're novellas within novels.
Somewhere along the ways, I need to finish up rewriting "Water in the Desert" - a self-contained novella within the Loren's Lashes series - and also finish up the rewrites on "Rebirth" (the first novel in the Eternal Dungeon series) and "Blood Vow" (a novel in the Three Lands series).
Um . . . anything else in the queue? Oh, yes, I have to finish a rewrite of the already-betaed "Noble" (the first novel in the Princeling series), and once "Blood Vow" is done, I need to solicit beta reports on the next volume in that series, "Law of Vengeance." After that, there's one more novel in that series to be betaed. Thank heavens, I have no other finished novels awaiting rewrite (with a big emphasis on "finished"; I have several almost-finished novels in the Three Lands series) . . . Well, unless one counts my Darkling Plain novel "Wizard of the Sun," which has been awaiting a major rewrite forever.
Ack! I forgot about "Right or Right" and "Crossing the Cliff" in the Darkling Plain series! I still haven't sent back my reaction to a beta report of "Right or Right" from last fall - the poor beta reader must think I've fallen off a cliff.
Heaven help me. Where am I going to find the time to write, much less research and publish?
*** 5 February 2008
The weather is warmer, and so my eyes are happier, which is good, because Doug took Gallipoli out of the library for me. It's quite good so far (half an hour into the movie). The screenwriter is skilled at foreshadowing.
I finished the next two stories in the Eternal Dungeon series and sent off enquiries for beta readers. I also nudged the beta readers for my next Life Prison story.
*** 6 February 2008
The pharmaceutical industry should bottle Doug. I felt poorly today, and none of the medicine I took helped. As I was writhing on my bed, moaning (I'm afraid I'm no stoic), he curled up behind me and began talking to me about the Protestant Reformation. I was cured within minutes.
The Protestant Reformation was his choice of topic, incidentally, because that's the subject of the adult education DVD he's currently watching. I juggled his elbow today for time on the DVD player in order to watch the rest of Gallipoli. (The weather was very cooperative for my eyes - in the seventies.) It was even more stunning a film than I remembered.
When I was trying to describe afterwards to Doug the mixture of moods in the film (he's watching it also, but more slowly than me), he said, "Like China Beach?"
"Yes, exactly."
Which makes me want to watch China Beach again. I have much of the series on videotape, but I can no longer watch TV, because my eyes can't tolerate the broad eye movements that are needed for watching a big screen. I wonder whether there is any software out there that will allow me to translate my videos into an electronic format, so that I can watch the episodes - in teeny, tiny fashion - on my computer.
(My long-suffering eyes, which think I'm crazy to be watching videos in the winter, are now glaring at me.)
Just to ensure that today was completely gloomy, I started on Alistair MacLean's South by Java Head, which is one of his more bloodthirsty novels. I liked this passage:
* * *
"You and your men - do you wish to come with us? If we go aboard that ship it's highly probably that we'll be sunk within twelve hours. I must make that clear."
"I understand, sir."
"And you'll come, then?"
"Yes, sir."
"Have you asked the others?"
"No, sir." The corporal's injured tone left no doubt about his contempt for such ridiculously democratic procedures in the modern army . . .
* * *
*** 7 February 2008
I watched the last half hour of Gallipoli again. I cried again.
Later:
If Alistair MacLean uses the phrase "little yellow men" one more time, I'll scream.
On another note, MacLean is back to being incomprehensibly sailorish: "Nicolson sailed south before the storm with the jib down and the lug sail reefed until he had steerage way and just no more."
And this particular passage - set in the waters outside Singapore - made me blink:
"But there were no [trade winds] just now, not even the lightest zephyr of a breeze; it was absolutely still and airless and suffocatingly hot and the tiny movement of air from their slow passage through the water was only a mockery of coolness and worse than nothing at all. The blazing sun was falling now, slipping far to the west, but still burning hot: Nicolson had both sails stretched as awnings, the jib for the fore end and the lug-sail, its yard lashed half-way up the mast, stretched aft as far as it would go, but even beneath the shelter of these the heat was still oppressive, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees with a relative humidity of over 85 per cent."
"Oh," I said after staring at that passage for a long moment. "I guess you don't like pleasant summer days in Washington, D.C."
Everything is relative. Alistair Cooke - a Briton who became an American - had this to say on that topic, in his essay "The Summer Bachelor," from the collection Talk About America:
"When you are talking about translantic weather the simplest words are the most deceiving. I remember once picking up the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and looking up to the left-hand corner of the front page to see how the people were faring in the Manhattan midsummer. It prints the weather reports of London, Paris, and New York, and the newspaper naturally has to take on trust the language of the weather bureau of origin. It said, 'London, fair, 71 degrees, continued hot; Paris, 78, warm; New York, clear, high 83, seasonably cool.'"
As Cooke dryly goes on to point out, "New York is at the precise latitude of Corfu."
I'm just outside D.C., which is at the same latitude as . . . well, Lisbon, it looks like. At any rate, D.C. is several degrees below the latitude for Rome. A day in the eighties is a pleasant summer day here, while 85% humidity would only solicit the comment from locals, "Thank goodness the humidity has gone down."
As Cooke puts it in his essay on D.C. in Letters from America, 1946-1951: "I should tell you that, from that day to this, Washington lies securely in what the guide-books call an amphiteatre and what you and I call a swamp. And it has a damp, wheezy, Dickensian sort of winter hardly equalled by London, and a steaming tropical summer not surpassed by the basin of the Nile, or those outposts on the Persian gulf where bad vice-consuls are sent to rot."
I guess I'm one of those cheerful locals who drives the bad vice-consuls crazy by talking about how pleasant the weather is. I love Washington summer days, provided that they don't go above ninety-five (as they do a few times each year). Spring and autumn days here are fantastic - often in the low or mid-seventies, with a nice, soft breeze as accompaniment. Winter is not so great unless you like lots of cold weather and little snow, but it doesn't last long enough to get tedious.
*** 8 February 2008
"I leaned forward in the dark to kiss her and there was a sharp stinging flash. She had slapped my face hard."
Two minutes later:
"'Oh, darling,' she said. 'You will be good to me, won't you?'
"What the hell, I thought."
My thoughts exactly. Why anyone would want to keep company with a woman like that is beyond me.
My initial reaction to A Farewell to Arms - coming in the first paragraph - was that my editorial fingers were itching to rewrite sentences like this:
"The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Um, yes. This is supposed to be the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century writing styles? I'll admit that the imagery is well done, but I haven't found anything in the novel yet that would hook me. The dialogue sounds artificial, and the narrator's total emotional detachment from the events (which I gather is a Hemingway feature) doesn't appeal to me.
I've set aside the novel for now, as well as MacLean. I'm having such a tough time corralling my Muse that I've decided to finish rereading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, which is strong in the area where I'm weakest as a writer: description.
I'm feeling blah today, partly because my eyes continue to screw up my sleep pattern, partly because my apprentice is out of easy telephone reach for several days (he's at a club event for the weekend), and partly because I'm feeling isolated from the world. This is good, this is the type of mood that causes my Muse to rush in to fill my emotional vacuum, but until he does, I feel empty and cold.
*** 9 February 2008
I prepared the first part of Blood Vow for my list today, and worked a bit on editing "Compassion's Keeper: Initiation." "Compassion's Keeper" is turning out to be a bitch to edit, because I have to turn two characters' speech into Riverbend dialect. I invented the dialect myself, but I can't write in it without use of a glossary. So every sentence I have those characters speak I have to go laboriously through during a subsequent draft, replacing words.
Not that there's any hurry in getting "Initiation" done, because I still have to get the betas on the previous part of "Compassion's Keeper," "Trial."
My Muse turned very cooperative yesterday - 2600 words total - but has been sleeping in so far today. I could use a nap myself.
Later:
Oh, god, to write like Rosemary Sutcliff. To be able to alliterate like her--
"But it was a vast host, still, a spreading murk of men that engulfed half the countryside like the shadow of an advancing storm."
--or to have her imagery--
"The snailshine of the rising moon was silvering the world about us . . ."
--or to be able to write sentences with rhythm like this:
"I felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth, and the Sun and the Power of the Sun, and in the thing in the dark at the back of my head that came from my mother's world and knew the secret of the strange concentric circle that my father's world had forgotten, told me that this was not a throne but a coronation stone like the Lia Fail of the High Kings of Erin, a stone for the King to stand on at his kingmaking, and I sprang onto it and flashed up my sword to the shouting war host, and all around me a thousand weapons were tossed up in reply, and for a while and a while I knew my feet one with other feet that had been planted on that flaking stone, and other men's hearts beating in my breast, and a wild weeping exultancy swept through me and on through the human sea around me."
That sentence has twice as many ands as the sentence by Hemingway that I ridiculed earlier, but it's somehow right in a way that Hemingway's sentence wasn't.
I totted up my total work hous for the week. I felt like I hadn't accomplished much, but actually, this week wasn't much worse than last week, which was a very good week indeed. I just feel more weary because my eyes are making me exhausted. I've reached the point where I have to split the day with a long nap, because my eyes can't last more than six hours without a long break through sleeping. I wish spring were here; instead, a cold front is coming through tonight.
Still, I shouldn't complain. In past years, I'd have been in intense pain by February.
Before I forget, a note to anyone who has read this far: In addition to this blog, I have a leather blog. I don't write much about my professional life there, so I bury references to the blog at my professional Website . . . but the blog is there, in case anyone is interested in perusing it.
*** 10 February 2008
I took my weekly trip to the Web and only spent an hour online. I'm very proud of myself.
Mind you, I was helped by the fact that (1) I decided not to post any blog entries and (2) I had a terrific day with my Muse - 4200 words - so I wasn't tempted to spend more time online than I should.
I was hoping to find that some e-book editions of Rosemary Sutcliff have been published, but they haven't, alas, so that means I'll have to scan her novels into my computer. Darn it. My scanner is zippy, but my OCR software is too darned sophisticated for its own good; it keeps doing fancy things I don't want it to do.
I want to read Sutcliff because my Muse turns out to really like her. My prose has become - well, passable since I went back to reading her. My Muse is actually giving me something other than dialogue, which is a change.
I've had people ask me what form my stories take when they first come into my head. The answer is: Lots of dialogue and some really vague visuals, sort of like seeing objects in a mist. If I were writing plays, I could just transcribe what pops into my head, but a novelist needs more than that to work with. So that where reading other people's fiction comes in. If I read enough of a story that has lots and lots of description - and if the description is interesting enough that I actually read it rather than skimming over it (that's a big "if"; not many stories fall into that category) - then my Muse will grudgingly put a bit of description into my stories. Otherwise, I'm stuck with dialogue and those misty objects.
*** 11 February 2008
News roundup from my Friends pages and e-mail:
Manna Francis has a new Administration book coming out this spring, part of which is new content. Some of us have been panting for a considerable while now for new fiction in this original slash darkfic series.
maureenlycaon tells me that there is indeed a downloadable version of Wikipedia - hurrah! It's eight gigabytes heavy, but there's enough room for it on my desktop computer, if I can figure out how to transfer the files from the laptop (which is my only computer that has Internet access).
And while I'm on the topic ofmaureenlycaon, any of you who are interested in (1) biology or (2) computers should be reading her blog, because she posts the sort of meaty messages that make sci/tech geeks drool. A recent sample:
"South America was practically cut off from the rest of the planet from around the Oligocene Epoch until two or three million years ago, so a lot of unusual and striking 'alternate universe' critters evolved -- most now, sadly, extinct. Most, also sadly, don't get a whole lot of coverage in the mainstream media, possibly because they can't be put in the animal groups most people are familiar with in even the vaguest sense (as in 'primitive deer', 'ancestral whale', 'human cousin' -- you know, that sort of thing)."
For leather/BDSMfic fans who are interested, the Master/slave Conference is now taking registrations. It's August 7-10 in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside D.C. You don't have to be M/s folk yourself to attend; I first attended it in 2004 in order to do research for a novel. All genders and orientations are welcome (but if you're into leathermen, be assured there'll be plenty there). I'll be there again this year.
The keynote speaker this year is Skip Chasey, a spiritual-minded leatherman who keeps turning up in all sorts of odd places: he was one of the speakers at the Millennium March on Washington, and I have a nice little picture of him doing a Bible reading during a service at Washington Cathedral. Dressed in leather, of course. His pup has just graduated from seminary. (If that sentence doesn't make sense to you, you need to do more leather reading.)
For Mid-Atlantic slash fans, Con.txt slash convention is also taking registrations. It's scheduled for June 13-15 in Silver Spring, and I'll be there, courtesy of some very generous friends who are paying my way.
Later: Decided to go online to grap the links from my Friends pages - I'd rather do it now when I'm on an Internet high than do it next week when I'm not. So I'll post this now.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY
Fiction written and edited:
--"On Guard: Promotion" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"On Guard: Searching" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"On Guard: Execution" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Compassion's Keeper: Initiation" (Life Prison).
Fiction edited:
--"Compassion's Keeper: Trial" (Life Prison).
Fiction laid out:
--"Blood Vow" (The Three Lands).
Fiction read:
--Alistair MacLean: "Fear is the Key."
--Maureen Lycaon: "The Training of Young Men."
--Parhelion's stories for Yuletide Treasure.
--Alistair MacLean: "South by Java Head."
--Ernest Hemingway: "A Farewell to Arms."
--Rosemary Sutcliff: "Sword at Sunset."
Research literature read:
--John McCrae: "In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems" (1919).
Films watched:
--"Gallipoli."
Music bought:
--Yellowcard: "Two Weeks from Twenty."
"'I wish there was some place we could go,' I said. I was experiencing the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up."
--Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms.
Topics in this post: my readers, Internet addiction, fanvid history, writing and editing fantasy stories, military films and shows and literature, illness, partial sightedness, transatlantic weather, writing style, leather, slash.
*** 3 February 2008
Feedback! Thank god! Three positive comments on "Death Watch" (in the Eternal Dungeon series) and two positive comments on Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. It's been ages since anyone commented on my writings. (Of course, that could have something to do with the fact that it's been ages since I released any new stories.)
I especially liked getting the letter that ended, "Keep writing, please!"
*** 4 February 2008
Ten hours online this time; I was up till four a.m. I haven't analyzed yet what went wrong.
Spreading before you the fruits of my sin, I present links to two delicious videos, courtesy of
morgandawn, who linked to one of them at her journal. Be sure to read the accompanying notes for both videos, especially if you know nothing about fandom history.The first video made my breath stop when I realized what it was, because I had been sure there was no visual record left of it. It's one of the first fanvids (1980), created by the very first fanvidder. It takes the form of a Star Trek slideshow set to music. The reason that this treasure was preserved is that a copy of it was given to Gene Roddenberry.
The second video is just as interesting to me: it's a music video showing the trials that vidders went through in 1990 in order to prepare their videos. It makes me very, very glad I live in the digital age.
One thing hasn't changed in eighteen years: the women in the second video look just like the women I regularly meet at slash conventions. So much for the idea that fan works are mainly created by teeny-boppers.
Waiting in my e-mail was one of the betas for "Compassion's Keeper: Trial" (from the Life Prison series), so now I'm just waiting on the other two betas. I still have to do a bit more work on "On Guard: Promotion" and "On Guard: Searching" (in the Eternal Dungeon series) before I send those off to be betaed. Then I start work on a final swipe at the already-betaed "Whipster: Blurred Lines" (in the Michael's House series) and the already-betaed "Edgeplay in Mayhill: Negotiations" (in the Loren's Lashes series). If you're wondering why all of these works have subtitles, it's because they're novellas within novels.
Somewhere along the ways, I need to finish up rewriting "Water in the Desert" - a self-contained novella within the Loren's Lashes series - and also finish up the rewrites on "Rebirth" (the first novel in the Eternal Dungeon series) and "Blood Vow" (a novel in the Three Lands series).
Um . . . anything else in the queue? Oh, yes, I have to finish a rewrite of the already-betaed "Noble" (the first novel in the Princeling series), and once "Blood Vow" is done, I need to solicit beta reports on the next volume in that series, "Law of Vengeance." After that, there's one more novel in that series to be betaed. Thank heavens, I have no other finished novels awaiting rewrite (with a big emphasis on "finished"; I have several almost-finished novels in the Three Lands series) . . . Well, unless one counts my Darkling Plain novel "Wizard of the Sun," which has been awaiting a major rewrite forever.
Ack! I forgot about "Right or Right" and "Crossing the Cliff" in the Darkling Plain series! I still haven't sent back my reaction to a beta report of "Right or Right" from last fall - the poor beta reader must think I've fallen off a cliff.
Heaven help me. Where am I going to find the time to write, much less research and publish?
*** 5 February 2008
The weather is warmer, and so my eyes are happier, which is good, because Doug took Gallipoli out of the library for me. It's quite good so far (half an hour into the movie). The screenwriter is skilled at foreshadowing.
I finished the next two stories in the Eternal Dungeon series and sent off enquiries for beta readers. I also nudged the beta readers for my next Life Prison story.
*** 6 February 2008
The pharmaceutical industry should bottle Doug. I felt poorly today, and none of the medicine I took helped. As I was writhing on my bed, moaning (I'm afraid I'm no stoic), he curled up behind me and began talking to me about the Protestant Reformation. I was cured within minutes.
The Protestant Reformation was his choice of topic, incidentally, because that's the subject of the adult education DVD he's currently watching. I juggled his elbow today for time on the DVD player in order to watch the rest of Gallipoli. (The weather was very cooperative for my eyes - in the seventies.) It was even more stunning a film than I remembered.
When I was trying to describe afterwards to Doug the mixture of moods in the film (he's watching it also, but more slowly than me), he said, "Like China Beach?"
"Yes, exactly."
Which makes me want to watch China Beach again. I have much of the series on videotape, but I can no longer watch TV, because my eyes can't tolerate the broad eye movements that are needed for watching a big screen. I wonder whether there is any software out there that will allow me to translate my videos into an electronic format, so that I can watch the episodes - in teeny, tiny fashion - on my computer.
(My long-suffering eyes, which think I'm crazy to be watching videos in the winter, are now glaring at me.)
Just to ensure that today was completely gloomy, I started on Alistair MacLean's South by Java Head, which is one of his more bloodthirsty novels. I liked this passage:
* * *
"You and your men - do you wish to come with us? If we go aboard that ship it's highly probably that we'll be sunk within twelve hours. I must make that clear."
"I understand, sir."
"And you'll come, then?"
"Yes, sir."
"Have you asked the others?"
"No, sir." The corporal's injured tone left no doubt about his contempt for such ridiculously democratic procedures in the modern army . . .
* * *
*** 7 February 2008
I watched the last half hour of Gallipoli again. I cried again.
Later:
If Alistair MacLean uses the phrase "little yellow men" one more time, I'll scream.
On another note, MacLean is back to being incomprehensibly sailorish: "Nicolson sailed south before the storm with the jib down and the lug sail reefed until he had steerage way and just no more."
And this particular passage - set in the waters outside Singapore - made me blink:
"But there were no [trade winds] just now, not even the lightest zephyr of a breeze; it was absolutely still and airless and suffocatingly hot and the tiny movement of air from their slow passage through the water was only a mockery of coolness and worse than nothing at all. The blazing sun was falling now, slipping far to the west, but still burning hot: Nicolson had both sails stretched as awnings, the jib for the fore end and the lug-sail, its yard lashed half-way up the mast, stretched aft as far as it would go, but even beneath the shelter of these the heat was still oppressive, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees with a relative humidity of over 85 per cent."
"Oh," I said after staring at that passage for a long moment. "I guess you don't like pleasant summer days in Washington, D.C."
Everything is relative. Alistair Cooke - a Briton who became an American - had this to say on that topic, in his essay "The Summer Bachelor," from the collection Talk About America:
"When you are talking about translantic weather the simplest words are the most deceiving. I remember once picking up the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and looking up to the left-hand corner of the front page to see how the people were faring in the Manhattan midsummer. It prints the weather reports of London, Paris, and New York, and the newspaper naturally has to take on trust the language of the weather bureau of origin. It said, 'London, fair, 71 degrees, continued hot; Paris, 78, warm; New York, clear, high 83, seasonably cool.'"
As Cooke dryly goes on to point out, "New York is at the precise latitude of Corfu."
I'm just outside D.C., which is at the same latitude as . . . well, Lisbon, it looks like. At any rate, D.C. is several degrees below the latitude for Rome. A day in the eighties is a pleasant summer day here, while 85% humidity would only solicit the comment from locals, "Thank goodness the humidity has gone down."
As Cooke puts it in his essay on D.C. in Letters from America, 1946-1951: "I should tell you that, from that day to this, Washington lies securely in what the guide-books call an amphiteatre and what you and I call a swamp. And it has a damp, wheezy, Dickensian sort of winter hardly equalled by London, and a steaming tropical summer not surpassed by the basin of the Nile, or those outposts on the Persian gulf where bad vice-consuls are sent to rot."
I guess I'm one of those cheerful locals who drives the bad vice-consuls crazy by talking about how pleasant the weather is. I love Washington summer days, provided that they don't go above ninety-five (as they do a few times each year). Spring and autumn days here are fantastic - often in the low or mid-seventies, with a nice, soft breeze as accompaniment. Winter is not so great unless you like lots of cold weather and little snow, but it doesn't last long enough to get tedious.
*** 8 February 2008
"I leaned forward in the dark to kiss her and there was a sharp stinging flash. She had slapped my face hard."
Two minutes later:
"'Oh, darling,' she said. 'You will be good to me, won't you?'
"What the hell, I thought."
My thoughts exactly. Why anyone would want to keep company with a woman like that is beyond me.
My initial reaction to A Farewell to Arms - coming in the first paragraph - was that my editorial fingers were itching to rewrite sentences like this:
"The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Um, yes. This is supposed to be the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century writing styles? I'll admit that the imagery is well done, but I haven't found anything in the novel yet that would hook me. The dialogue sounds artificial, and the narrator's total emotional detachment from the events (which I gather is a Hemingway feature) doesn't appeal to me.
I've set aside the novel for now, as well as MacLean. I'm having such a tough time corralling my Muse that I've decided to finish rereading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, which is strong in the area where I'm weakest as a writer: description.
I'm feeling blah today, partly because my eyes continue to screw up my sleep pattern, partly because my apprentice is out of easy telephone reach for several days (he's at a club event for the weekend), and partly because I'm feeling isolated from the world. This is good, this is the type of mood that causes my Muse to rush in to fill my emotional vacuum, but until he does, I feel empty and cold.
*** 9 February 2008
I prepared the first part of Blood Vow for my list today, and worked a bit on editing "Compassion's Keeper: Initiation." "Compassion's Keeper" is turning out to be a bitch to edit, because I have to turn two characters' speech into Riverbend dialect. I invented the dialect myself, but I can't write in it without use of a glossary. So every sentence I have those characters speak I have to go laboriously through during a subsequent draft, replacing words.
Not that there's any hurry in getting "Initiation" done, because I still have to get the betas on the previous part of "Compassion's Keeper," "Trial."
My Muse turned very cooperative yesterday - 2600 words total - but has been sleeping in so far today. I could use a nap myself.
Later:
Oh, god, to write like Rosemary Sutcliff. To be able to alliterate like her--
"But it was a vast host, still, a spreading murk of men that engulfed half the countryside like the shadow of an advancing storm."
--or to have her imagery--
"The snailshine of the rising moon was silvering the world about us . . ."
--or to be able to write sentences with rhythm like this:
"I felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth, and the Sun and the Power of the Sun, and in the thing in the dark at the back of my head that came from my mother's world and knew the secret of the strange concentric circle that my father's world had forgotten, told me that this was not a throne but a coronation stone like the Lia Fail of the High Kings of Erin, a stone for the King to stand on at his kingmaking, and I sprang onto it and flashed up my sword to the shouting war host, and all around me a thousand weapons were tossed up in reply, and for a while and a while I knew my feet one with other feet that had been planted on that flaking stone, and other men's hearts beating in my breast, and a wild weeping exultancy swept through me and on through the human sea around me."
That sentence has twice as many ands as the sentence by Hemingway that I ridiculed earlier, but it's somehow right in a way that Hemingway's sentence wasn't.
I totted up my total work hous for the week. I felt like I hadn't accomplished much, but actually, this week wasn't much worse than last week, which was a very good week indeed. I just feel more weary because my eyes are making me exhausted. I've reached the point where I have to split the day with a long nap, because my eyes can't last more than six hours without a long break through sleeping. I wish spring were here; instead, a cold front is coming through tonight.
Still, I shouldn't complain. In past years, I'd have been in intense pain by February.
Before I forget, a note to anyone who has read this far: In addition to this blog, I have a leather blog. I don't write much about my professional life there, so I bury references to the blog at my professional Website . . . but the blog is there, in case anyone is interested in perusing it.
*** 10 February 2008
I took my weekly trip to the Web and only spent an hour online. I'm very proud of myself.
Mind you, I was helped by the fact that (1) I decided not to post any blog entries and (2) I had a terrific day with my Muse - 4200 words - so I wasn't tempted to spend more time online than I should.
I was hoping to find that some e-book editions of Rosemary Sutcliff have been published, but they haven't, alas, so that means I'll have to scan her novels into my computer. Darn it. My scanner is zippy, but my OCR software is too darned sophisticated for its own good; it keeps doing fancy things I don't want it to do.
I want to read Sutcliff because my Muse turns out to really like her. My prose has become - well, passable since I went back to reading her. My Muse is actually giving me something other than dialogue, which is a change.
I've had people ask me what form my stories take when they first come into my head. The answer is: Lots of dialogue and some really vague visuals, sort of like seeing objects in a mist. If I were writing plays, I could just transcribe what pops into my head, but a novelist needs more than that to work with. So that where reading other people's fiction comes in. If I read enough of a story that has lots and lots of description - and if the description is interesting enough that I actually read it rather than skimming over it (that's a big "if"; not many stories fall into that category) - then my Muse will grudgingly put a bit of description into my stories. Otherwise, I'm stuck with dialogue and those misty objects.
*** 11 February 2008
News roundup from my Friends pages and e-mail:
Manna Francis has a new Administration book coming out this spring, part of which is new content. Some of us have been panting for a considerable while now for new fiction in this original slash darkfic series.
maureenlycaon tells me that there is indeed a downloadable version of Wikipedia - hurrah! It's eight gigabytes heavy, but there's enough room for it on my desktop computer, if I can figure out how to transfer the files from the laptop (which is my only computer that has Internet access).And while I'm on the topic of
maureenlycaon, any of you who are interested in (1) biology or (2) computers should be reading her blog, because she posts the sort of meaty messages that make sci/tech geeks drool. A recent sample:"South America was practically cut off from the rest of the planet from around the Oligocene Epoch until two or three million years ago, so a lot of unusual and striking 'alternate universe' critters evolved -- most now, sadly, extinct. Most, also sadly, don't get a whole lot of coverage in the mainstream media, possibly because they can't be put in the animal groups most people are familiar with in even the vaguest sense (as in 'primitive deer', 'ancestral whale', 'human cousin' -- you know, that sort of thing)."
For leather/BDSMfic fans who are interested, the Master/slave Conference is now taking registrations. It's August 7-10 in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside D.C. You don't have to be M/s folk yourself to attend; I first attended it in 2004 in order to do research for a novel. All genders and orientations are welcome (but if you're into leathermen, be assured there'll be plenty there). I'll be there again this year.
The keynote speaker this year is Skip Chasey, a spiritual-minded leatherman who keeps turning up in all sorts of odd places: he was one of the speakers at the Millennium March on Washington, and I have a nice little picture of him doing a Bible reading during a service at Washington Cathedral. Dressed in leather, of course. His pup has just graduated from seminary. (If that sentence doesn't make sense to you, you need to do more leather reading.)
For Mid-Atlantic slash fans, Con.txt slash convention is also taking registrations. It's scheduled for June 13-15 in Silver Spring, and I'll be there, courtesy of some very generous friends who are paying my way.
Later: Decided to go online to grap the links from my Friends pages - I'd rather do it now when I'm on an Internet high than do it next week when I'm not. So I'll post this now.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY
Fiction written and edited:
--"On Guard: Promotion" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"On Guard: Searching" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"On Guard: Execution" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Compassion's Keeper: Initiation" (Life Prison).
Fiction edited:
--"Compassion's Keeper: Trial" (Life Prison).
Fiction laid out:
--"Blood Vow" (The Three Lands).
Fiction read:
--Alistair MacLean: "Fear is the Key."
--Maureen Lycaon: "The Training of Young Men."
--Parhelion's stories for Yuletide Treasure.
--Alistair MacLean: "South by Java Head."
--Ernest Hemingway: "A Farewell to Arms."
--Rosemary Sutcliff: "Sword at Sunset."
Research literature read:
--John McCrae: "In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems" (1919).
Films watched:
--"Gallipoli."
Music bought:
--Yellowcard: "Two Weeks from Twenty."
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