Sounds Like Weird
05 October 2004
The first group of one-on-ones meets at 9:00 a.m., but fortunately someome had pity for this jet-lagged Californian. I got a reprieve until Jim’s lecture on plotting at 10 a.m. While it was substantively similar to the lecture I’d heard two years before, some of the bits I understood better with the different presentation.
The first time I heard the lecture, I realized some of the problems I’d seen in the vast quantity of unpublished stories I’d read over the years. Some of those stories happened to be mine.
I couldn’t possibly begin to replicate the lecture, but it’s one of the reasons to attend Viable Paradise, especially if you’re a plot-lover.
After lunch, I had my one-on-one with Steve Gould, who pointed out that I had a superfluous scene. I’ll have to look at how to accomplish the transformation, but I can definitely conflate information in that pair of scenes. At this early stage in the novel, though, I’m not sure that I’d like to eliminate the character viewpoint that was in one version of the duplicated information.
The final official class for the day was the Colloquium, where Laura Mixon discussed a lot of points about plot.
After that, we hung out. When I went upstairs for a bit, I discovered that a large group had gone off to see the moon jellyfish, even though Tuesday had been the appointed night for that. Darn.