Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

More random writing links: If you’re not feeling up for NaNoWriMo, you might want to look into IWriSloMo - International *Write Something* Month. Anyone can write bad short fiction for fun.

If you’re planning to sell your NaNoNovel, consider Marion Zimmer Bradley’s answer to the eternal question, Why did my story get rejected? To improve your ailing baby, sign up at the Critters Workshop for workshop-style critical feedback.

I’ve been suffering doubts about my planned NaNoNovel, and I think I’ll be switching from the poor, neglected Right Novel to a Whole New Novel based on three or four related short story ideas. I still have trouble figuring out when an idea is too big for the short-story format - leading to rejection #1 on MZB’s list. Maybe I even have too many ideas to fit into the novel (the 50,000 word “limit” aside), but it’s always easier to cut than to pad.

Yesterday’s word count: 1000
Today’s word count: 340

The server has been down. I’m having doubts about which novel to NaNo, and I’ve also been catching up on rasfc, which led to this old NaNo critique. (My opinion: the author was clearly cat-vacuuming when she wrote it.) Here’s my missing post from yesterday:

Seema signed up for NaNoWriMo, and immediately began vacuuming the cat at the NaNoWriMo forums. Here’s a handy Guide to Literary Fiction she found there.

I think there’s a much simpler definition of literary fiction: Literary fiction is anything that doesn’t fit into a genre of genre fiction. For the purposes of this definition, Danielle Steele should be considered as a genre.

Note that I’m taking “literary” to be synonymous with “mainstream” rather than with “good.” Everyone who writes wants to write well, and there’s nothing about the setting of, say, a sci-fi novel that keeps it from being well-written - but no one counts The Left Hand of Darkness as literary fiction.

Word count: 1000

I don’t have much to say today. I’ve been writing original fic, or rather, getting distracted from writing it by the necessary research. (Jerie didn’t think it was all that necessary, but this is how I write.) I made up my own system of decimal time and hunted through some nearby stars for a nice semi-habitable solar system for my characters.

Now all I need is a plot.

Word count: 100

So it’s that time of year again, and I have exactly a week to figure out what I’m writing for NaNoWriMo. Unless the muse strikes me, this year’s novel will be the long-delayed Right Novel, for which I suffered the writer’s block that led me to write 20,000 words of the Wrong Novel, an unknown amount of the Wrong Prequel in a notebook, and 50,000 words of another Wrong Prequel for last year’s NaNoWriMo.

The Right Novel is set about 8,000 years in the future, meaning I can make up a lot more science and background than is possible with near-future sci-fi. That, in turn, means no research. Another novel I’d considered writing, the Mars Novel, would have required research, and the need for scientific accuracy is incompatible with the need for speed. (I’d really love to write a Stargate novel for NaNoWriMo, but fanfic doesn’t pay.)

Last year’s novel never went anywhere after NaNoWriMo because the conclusion was slapped together in the last week of November and never really sat right. This year I must think of a climax before I start writing, so I have something to aim for. A plot outline wouldn’t hurt, either. Then again, most of Colony wasn’t in the outline - I meant for the crew to settle down in the Delta Quadrant and instead they stole the moon.

You never can tell with characters…

I’ve been having Emacs crashes lately, though I didn’t notice the problem when I first built Emacs. According to the Emacs for MacOS X guy, this is a garbage collection problem that’s been going on for a few weeks and has now been fixed in CVS. So I updated my tree and I’m about to rebuild. Wish me luck.

I’m still busy geeking. I’ve moved on from updating the Konfabulator kitchenTimer widget for the latest Konfabulator edition to editing the game ChainShot (by MscapeSoftware) so that the scoring is more like that of the Yahoo!Game JT’s Blocks - or as Veronica calls it, PantyCat. (Don’t ask.)

Another important piece of housekeeping was retrieving my .emacs file from the old mac and getting fresh copies of my favorite Emacs modes, folding mode and html helper mode. The latter is what produces the timestamp at the bottom of the Repository page.

The new mac is still adorably cute. Though the screen is smaller than my previous 15″ PowerBook, the resolution is the same, so it feels sharper rather than more cramped. The fan has been on longer in the past few days than my old fan ran in the entirety of its four years of active duty. Maybe it needs some stylish radiator fins like a spaceship’s. (In the vacuum of space, the problem is getting rid of excess heat, not keeping it in.)

The WotF people were kind enough to email me upon my manuscript’s arrival:

This is to inform you that your manuscript has been received and entered in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of The Future Contest, quarter-ending September 30th. Please allow up to 8-10 weeks after the quarter deadline for judging to finalize.  Best wishes, Contest Administrator

An op-ed by Harold Bloom came to yesterday’s Boston Globe by way of the L.A. Times. I heard about it through a comic reading by Mike Barnacle on the radio this morning. Bloom uses the National Book Awards’ decision to award their 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King as an example of “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.” Bloom gives J.K. Rowling a sarcastic nomination for the Nobel Prize for literature.

As a fellow fiction writer [Boston joke], Barnacle was incensed. There’s plenty in the article to offend, most notably where Bloom says that “Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” Bloom, in case you don’t know, is a prominent literary critic. [See his wikipedia entry.] The real trouble with his article isn’t the legitimate criticism of King and Rowling’s weaknesses, but that Bloom makes no effort to explain what Pynchon and Roth have that trashy genre writers lack. So he comes off looking like a snob rather than a critic.

Maybe that’s beneath him, or maybe he feels that if a reader can’t distinguish between J.K. Rowling and Lewis Carroll there’s no point trying to explain. That may be true, but it only adds to the backlash against mainstream fiction from us trashy genre readers. If it were my article, I compare King to Shakespeare, another author with commercial appeal, and see whether King measures up.

Speaking of dissing, webloggers don’t get much respect, either, but Joe Clark wants every serious blogger to get their own ISSN number (International Standard Serial Number). We are all semi-daily periodicals. I took a look at the US request form, but you have to give the Library of Congress your name, address and phone number to get an ISSN. That’s almost as bad as registering a domain - I prefer my privacy, thanks.

I got email today from the folks at NaNoWriMo, warning me I’d be eaten by the database gremlins if I didn’t confirm my address for Year 5. I did nanowrimo last year, and I’m planning to nano again, so I clicked the appropriate link and re-registered myself.

At the other end of that link was a plea for funds. That’s not an unusual sight by any means, but they also mentioned their annual expenses: $35,885. Hosting costs money, but not that much money. Fortunately, they provided a PDF expense report to itemize this huge sum. Mystery solved - $29,800 of the expenses are salary for various part-time and seasonal NaNoEmployees. An additional $1,100 is for graphic design.

Maybe I’m a little too used to free stuff free, but asking for donations to pay someone’s salary seems a bit much. At the very least, they could ask for donations of graphics from artists, rather than paying over a thousand bucks for graphics that, while nice, weren’t necessary. I’m not sure why a phpBB and regional parties require such expensive staffing.

I spend a lot of time doing free stuff that benefits other fanfic readers and writers, other sci-fi writers, and other geeks, and I don’t ask for donations to pay myself a salary even though I could use one at the moment. My payment is other people’s labor on other free things from which I benefit. I used to think nanowrimo was one of those things.

Drabble count: 4 new Stargate drabbles

So I went to a wedding of an unnamed cousin at an unnamed Massachusetts college this weekend. My cousin is a graphic designer and over 40, and the setting was gorgeous, so this was far and away the most tasteful wedding I’ve ever attended. In fact, there may have been more good taste involved than in all the other weddings combined.

Weddings have an odd subculture all their own - I’ve always wondered how the chicken dance and the garter thing made it big. My cousin skipped those bits, but she didn’t manage to avoid the ceremony question. The unnamed groom is an atheist, so the officiant was a Massachusetts justice of the peace. I thought that might be an interesting change of pace, but it wasn’t.

Rhetoric is a lost art, so lost that not even the President of the United States can find it. Gone AWOL with it is the sense of ceremony. To pull off the wedding ceremony itself you need at least one of those, and usually both. For this reason, most weddings are flops long before the chicken dance. Many people don’t seem to realize that they are entirely unqualified to write a wedding ceremony. Being ordained minister, appointed justice of the peace, or even being the bride or groom does not confer the literary talent necessary to produce lines like With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

What’s far more unfortunate than not being able to write the Book of Common Prayer is not being able to tell which one makes a better ceremony: the vows in use for hundreds of years or the new vows you and Tyler wrote for your “special” occasion. I’m not saying that no one can improve upon a traditional ceremony; I’m just saying that if someone can, it’s probably not you and it’s certainly not that nice justice of the peace I heard this weekend.

I’ve also seen my share of lovely traditional ceremonies marred by heartfelt sermons at the literary level of, say, off-the-cuff remarks by the President of the United States. This is only a slight improvement over impromptu vows themselves, and it’s a much harder problem to avoid. How do you stop the officiant from sermonizing? The best you can hope to do is find a known good public speaker, and we couldn’t even find one to be President.

Word count: 1380

Festivus is a festival for the rest of us. If you’re a trashy genre writer like me and my hundred thousand fanficcing friends, you may enjoy the Wired article linked above. Here are some excerpts:

According to the Internet Movie Database, 20 of the top 25 highest-grossing films of all time come from the sci-fi, fantasy or horror genres.

“Science-fiction, fantasy and horror films are not a niche,” Meyer said. “They are as mainstream as it gets. The biggest authors in the world are genre authors. Taken together, these genres represent the biggest form of entertainment in the world, which people still don’t understand.”

In other words, Trashy genre writers rule! Who wants to make the buttons?