Something's Brewing!
15 November 2004
I can’t say what, but I did have a great bit of inspiration.
Suffice to say that it involves the mysterious disappearance of a book.
Bwaahaaahaaa.
Back to writing.
Sounds Like Weird
15 November 2004
I can’t say what, but I did have a great bit of inspiration.
Suffice to say that it involves the mysterious disappearance of a book.
Bwaahaaahaaa.
Back to writing.
14 November 2004
The cat’s lying curled up at my knee. I finally got a chance to really sleep as late as I’d wanted.
I’m feeling strangely tense, though.
05 November 2004
Jeanne died about the time I wrote the last entry. 🙁
I just didn’t know that for a few days.
30 October 2004
My friend Jeanne is in the hospital dying from liver failure. She’s been in a coma for two weeks, partly because her oxygen levels are so low. I don’t know if she made it through the night, but given how much she’s suffered, I hope she doesn’t suffer much longer.
She was on the liver transplant list for some time, but her heart had weakened so much that they took her off the list.
28 October 2004
Stuck in San Francisco this morning enroute to the World Fantasy Convention.
It’ll really be great to go to Phoenix when the weather sucks less than it did in July.
Never been to WFC before, so I’m looking forward to it.
Oh, and I should finally get to see (and hopefully sign) some copies of Turn the Other Chick.
More news when I arrive.
Man, I’m tired.
Cat update:
Scruffy ate a small bit of dry food this morning, the first non-forced food in days. He also seems a bit perkier, though still quite sluggish. Those antibiotics are working, even though it took 23 tries (not an exaggeration) to keep the pill down last night.
Best luck to Mom on pilling the cat today….
19 October 2004
You wondered when I’d post about writing, didn’t you?
I wouldn’t let you down.
1500+ words today, though not on fiction. More later on that topic.
11 October 2004
There’s something harder than average about returning to work after a week-long writer’s workshop. My mind is still thinking about ancient Egypt, robot monsters, the future of aliens in San Francisco, and Jax’s rendition of Henry V with a Texas accent (it worked!).
It’s very odd to have to suddenly focus on where in the world Tlalnepantla is and whether Mexico City is the best approximation of Tlalnepantla’s location.
11 October 2004
11 October 2004
11 October 2004
I just found Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog comments on VP.
My personal favorite is a comment about the previously-mentioned (by Your Humble Blogger) game of Thing:
As for my supposed ruthlessness, I acknowledge that I behaved wickedly in one game of Thing; but when you’re assigned the role of an evil soulless shapechanging extraterrestrial, what else are you supposed to do?
Her comments on Thing game strategy are indeed interesting.
And to her comment:
I will admit that Thinging a research scientist one night, and then next morning leading the lynch mob that killed him or her, was an awfully good way to allay suspicions about my own Thingitude.
I only have one thing to say (no pun intended): “You set me up!”
It’s all good.
09 October 2004
It’s tiring having to tell people all the time, “No, I can’t have that, it’s probably got wheat in it.” Bread they understand, pasta they sometimes do, but items such as Rice Dream (a rice milk), they’re less likely to. Nor do most people have any clue that soy sauce almost invariably contains wheat.
Friday night, I went to a restaurant and, after looking at the menu, asked if I could have lobster scampi served on potatoes. He said they only had french fries. I asked them if they cooked the fries separately from the fish and seafood they also served — they did. What else did they cook in that fryer? Only fries.
Fine, I said, I’ll take the scampi over fries.
“The chef said it wouldn’t be very good,” the waiter offered. “We could put it over pasta.”
“Look,” I said, “eating wheat causes internal bleeding and destroys my intestines. I’ll take it over fries.”
Waiter said OK, then went on to take the rest of the table’s order.
A few minutes later, he comes out, apologetic. Chef has refused to make said order because it “wouldn’t be any good.” Waiter says there’s a lot of other seafood they serve with fries, I could have some of that.
“It’s all battered in wheat. Eating wheat causes internal bleeding and destroys my intestines.” Repetition is sometimes necessary.
“Well, you could have steak tips.”
Right, at a seafood place. Not. (I’m glad I didn’t, it looked incredibly dull)
Instead, I had a shrimp appetizer after verifying that it wouldn’t contain any flour of any kind. I also ordered potato skins.
Despite the chef’s assertion about “it wouldn’t be any good,” the two of us who ordered potato skins found ours to be BLACK they were burned so badly.
Ugh.
But it took three go-arounds and about 5 minutes of interaction with the waitroid to even get that far. I’ve literally been brought to tears because I’ve been so frustrated about food (and so embarrassed by the problems food causes me).
If someone says they can’t have wheat: believe them. It doesn’t matter if they’re imagining it, chances are they’re not.
06 October 2004
Today’s group grope consisted of two shorts from Geoff. One of them I especially liked, despite the bobbles in the piece. It really had a mythic feel to it and I really liked the premise. Suffice to say it was a story that I read, thoroughly enjoyed, and only then my hindbrain went “wait a minute….”
Then the day’s lecture from Laura Mixon on The Care and Feeding of your Beast. After lunch, I had my one-on-one meeting with Laura, which was very productive. By the time I got there, I’d managed to come up with some ways to solve some of the problems I saw in the piece, so we discussed those, as well as some other issues no one had pointed out yet. Afterward, we discussed some elements of career strategy (based on a comment she’d made earlier and I wanted to follow up on).
Much of Wednesday was open for a mental break from the pressure, which was truly welcome at this point. I took a three-hour nap, then went to dinner at Lola’s, the southern seafood restaurant adjoining the Island Inn.
Afterward, I found the room too dingy (in lighting) and warm, so I went down to the class area, where I sat in front of a fan. Teresa Nielsen Hayden came in, wearing a bear mask, followed by a bunch of other people not wearing masks.
While they went on to play Thing and Mafia, I wanted to continue writing, so I didn’t join in.
I started working on a new story that Jim had encouraged me to write, as well as a different story I’d been intending to work on. When I say “started,” I mean the opening paragraph is written for each. Typically, I don’t change those much. I couldn’t find a place to be comfortable, so I moved around several times in the antechamber outside the main VP room.
06 October 2004
The morning started with a group grope: I was on the chopping block. My group consisted of Jim MacDonald, Valerie, and Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, who came all the way from Italy. She’d been out ever since Worldcon.
It was great having some people who weren’t familiar with my writing quirks read my work. One of the problems of having a writing group in Silicon Valley is the high average tech level of your typical crtique group member.
Then, the lecture on writing exposition by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
A few choice quotes:
A book is balanced only when moving.
The audience made analogies to a bicycle, an airplane, and a shark.
The words that you write are not the book the reader experiences.
If readers are nitpicking your scenery, the story is moving too slowly.
She also described a manuscript with lots of odd names, many of which contained accents. “It looked like an explosion in a Selectric factory.”
And, finally, a quote from Ken MacLeod: “History is the trade secret of science fiction.”
After lunch, I was free until the Colloquium, which focused on writing scenes of sex and violence. The primary instructors were Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Jim MacDonald. Great fun and that’s my final answer. Why should I kiss and tell? 🙂
Later, the annual VP tradition of Beer with Billy, but I’m saving that for a separate entry.
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.
05 October 2004
Sunday night, the night before the official start of Viable Paradise, there’s a large welcome dinner, a round of introductions, some idle time to chat, and then the ritual games of Mafia and/or Thing, designed to get people to remember each other.
During the idle chat phase of the evening, the knitters were discussing odd knitting.
“Have you seen the knitted uterus?” I asked.
At that very moment, an African-American couple approached the doorway. I looked over and the woman looked, well, surprised.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Church of Christ?”
“Uh…no.”
We then realized that there would be another group meeting in the same building all weekend. How fun for them. And what a great introduction to us!
After that, the Mafia games started. Alas, I needed to go to the grocery store for gluten-free food supplies, so I missed the two games, returning for the one Thing game. I prefer the Thing variant; it has significantly more interesting strategy.
During this game, Jim MacDonald was the most vocal accuser — until he turned into a Thing. Then it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, then he got quiet when he became a Thing. Then I became the most vocal accuser and, naturally, I was turned into a Thing as well. By Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who immediately sacrificed me. Of course, I wanted to yell, “You set me up!”
In retrospect, I wish I had — the humans may have won had I done so. But TNH manipulated the voting masterfully, having been the one remaining Thing at one point, building the Things back up to the majority.
Second best quote of the evening: “You just want to see Steve suck on Laura’s neck again.”
After that, I was tired, but I dutifully went upstairs to read the work I’d need to critique the following day (Valerie’s) and get to sleep.