eddyfate

Finished my last class last night. While I'm glad that school is over (as I can focus on settling some other aspects of my life and overcoming my burnout), at the same time it's a little sad. The professor said that both classes were some of the best he's had, and I really clicked with many of the other students, which is rare for me. After class, our professor recommended The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell for any serious writer to read. So I stopped by the library after class and picked it up (even though the only copy available for checkout was missing pages because SOME bastard student ripped them out). I'm going to try to tackle it in the next few weeks, at least giving it a heavy skim to see if it's going to be useful for me. However, I'm currently savoring The Maltese Falcon, and I don't want to rush my enjoyment of Hammitt's prose.

So, I'm waiting for my grades, then I'll talk to the counselor about transferring my credits from my previous schools, and then I'll figure out the second class I'm taking in the fall.

I've been having a day. Long day, tired, struggling through mild medication haze, and having to do lots of tiring work. I also have to critique four stories before class today, so I'm reading page after page of student fiction. It's frustrating, exhausting, and boring.

And then I got to one from a classmate called "The Man with the Locked and the Louisville Slugger." It's about St. Jude (THE St. Jude) being sent back to Chicago to spread the word of God. He's a Cubs fan, because he loves lost causes. The writing, along with the blending of religion and sports metaphors, was just amazing, and exactly what I needed for some reason. After reading it I flipped it over and wrote three words for my critique:

PUBLISH THIS. NOW.

Last night, after worked, I planned to finish up my story critiques (five total) and be done so I didn't have to stress before class today.

Instead, my body decided that it needed a nap and would have that fuzzy brainspace associated with pure exhaustion (even though I got my usual seven and a half hours of sleep), so I was only in the mental space to nap and finish my Robotech novel.

I will be glad to be done with school, so I can focus on being done with being sick, and then maybe, I don't know, catch up on my email or something.

(But not much content. Don't get too excited.)

This past weekend, and indeed the past couple of weeks, have been largely me working on my final story while struggling with being sick. The me being sick part isn't me feeling like death warmed over (or even death microwaved for five minutes with a stir halfway through), but rather a low-level malaise that saps the energy out of me. If the average person has X energy to use through the day, I've been waffling between .5X to .75X on any given day recently. I've switched the NyQuil reliance (which gave me deep sleep but made me groggy as hell for part of the morning) to my new medications (which returned me to my normal not-so-deep sleep but make me vaguely exhausted through most of the day).

My story ended up at a little over 4,500 words, which is 1,000-1,500 words more than either of my other two stories, and written in a tighter timeframe. I paced myself decently (especially since I was struggling with said illness), but it was still a fight. I turn in the story tonight, and after critiquing the last few stories for my other class, I'm looking forward to taking a break from a lot of things for the summer to recharge my batteries.

I'm also looking forward to working on my stack of books. We were at Sam's Club yesterday, and I found a stack of twelve hardback "children's classics" for $14.99, but the books were a selection of literary works from the nineteen and early twentieth century ranging from Black Beauty to The Jungle Book to The Secret Garden to Pride and Prejudice. As I have had an interest in or have read all of these at some point, it was a fantastic deal. Of course, I still have stacks and stacks of other books to read, but it'll be nice to read for pleasure again with a new-found appreciation of literary classics.

Over the past month I've slowly finished watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica and have started on the second season. I've also been watching the second season of Doctor Who. Both had a bit of a rocky start, but I'm really starting to get into the groove of both series now. Much fun.

I've been busting my ass on my third short story, "A Sheepish Trip in Yorkshire," for a couple of weeks now, and it just seemed like it was taking forever to write. I thought maybe it was because I was sick, but I finished my first draft yesterday, and just spent three hours typing it all into the computer. Turns out it was taking forever -- the first draft is over 4,500 words, double that of the first draft of my last story, and 1,500 more words than the final draft of that story!

So tomorrow I'll take a first stab at rewriting, and continue at it over the weekend. It won't be nicely polished by Monday, but hopefully it'll be in good enough shape to be a coherent and solid story. Considering I was only supposed to do an 8-12 page story (and this is already clocking in at 16) and the fact that my professor knows I've been pretty sick lately, and I'm hoping it won't be an issue.

My original plan was to wait until these classes were done, then use the summer to sort out my transfer and find out what classes I need for my degree before I sign up for fall classes.

And then cresida showed me this:

U65 ELit 312 Topics in English and American Literature: The Art of Detection: 19th Century Detective Fiction

Must... take... class...

Edit: Have taken class. Sooo looking forward to this.

Released "Password Protection Required" into the wild (i.e., my Fiction Writing class) last night, after making a few minor last-minute adjustments, and I've contacted some people about critiques. We'll see how it goes.

In class last night, we had another in-class writing exercise. Basically, we started off with "I want to write about..." and then tried to write with as much detail as we could about our story ideas. Since I have a third story due May 1st (as I convinced my teacher to let me do that for my Art of the Novel class), I decided to write out the rough story idea I had, which was basically a conceptual rewrite of "Just Business" to maximize what I've learned in the past three years. So I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then I volunteered to read it out loud to the class. And the class and the teacher really liked it, and all agreed that it's a great story idea... for a novel.

ARGH!

The past few classes have caused me to realize three things about my writing:

1) All of my ideas seem to be novel-length. So, my novel-length ideas are probably trilogy-length. I'm just not used to crafting short stories.

2) My default writing style is violent and dark. What this says about me I'm not quite sure yet.

3) I can't think of good titles for shit. "Bete Noire" was too obscure for my audience, and "Password Protection Required" was actually maerli's suggestion. I think I'm actually going to practice titling in future projects.

I'm taking tonight off to focus on catching up on As I Lay Dying and some email. Friday I'll start kicking around story ideas (although right now I'll default to telling some version of the infamous "Yorkshire Sheep Story"), and this weekend I have to start writing, with at least a hand-written first draft by the end of EClipse (which is not this coming weekend but the next weekend).

"Password" (formerly "Safe Word") is done after three major draft revisions. It sits at a nice, comfortable 3,500 words. If I have time at work I'll do one more readthrough to make sure I catch logic mistakes (and maybe force a couple of friends to read it over to get a fresh pair of eyes), but it should be ready to present to my class tomorrow evening.

This story was different from "Bete Noire." For one, the revising was in three pretty distinct phases -- shitty first draft and transcription, structural revision (making sure the story flows in the proper way), and style revision (making sure the story is good to read). While it took about the same time as "Bete Noire," the writing seemed to be easier this time, which is interesting because the story wasn't as fleshed out in my head. Through the entire process I thought the story was flat, wasn't going anywhere, wasn't working, but I pushed on, and after I finished this latest revision it really fell into place for me. I think the method I used this time works better, so I'll try it again for the third story I have to write by May 1st.

It's hard to say why, but I'm pretty pleased with this one. I hope it's not just the "Thank god it's done!" afterglow.

Sat down at lunch and cranked out the final few pages of the story I'm tentatively titling "Safe Word." It's an utterly terrible draft estimated at about 2750 words, but in expansion and revision I expect to be able to hit my target of 3000-5000 words.

As mentioned previously, this story was entirely written by hand. While I don't think I would want to tackle a large-scale project like a novel using this method, it had a few unique advantages. Not only was hand-writing far more portable than doing a draft on the computer, but it was very inconvenient to do major revision that way, so I was forced to just keep writing, and creating that "shitty first draft" that writing advice often recommends. I'm hoping that the mental separation between hand-written draft and revised computer draft will make it easier for me to spot errors and make serious changes before they get too polished and I'm loathe to part with them. I plan to type it up tonight and then let it rest for a day or two before I start working on revisions.

Friday: Homework, mostly, and hanging out with greebotrill.

Saturday: Catching up on my writing [1]. The story went in a bit of a weird direction, but I'm following along to see what happens. Right now I'm not entirely sure how to end it, but I'll probably use my lunch today to just take a stab at tying it together, so I can spend tonight and tomorrow typing it up and trying for a second draft. Also watched The Godfather until very late, which was interrupted by a short visit with good friends while greebotrill stayed home to bake very good homemade bread and cookies.

Sunday: Took off from homework and email. Watched garchangel play Kingdom Hearts 2 for a while, and read a little bit of my Robotech novel. naamaire came over, and we watched a lot of wrestling and ate a lot of very good homemade food. Also had a very positive phone call with a good friend, which put some things in perspective (in a very good way). Got to bed way, way too late.

Today: Exhausted and have a slight stomach cramp (probably from so much rich but very yummy food). Reminding myself to try and avoid Monday classes in future.

This Week: Busy. Class, IRC scene/story, class, UWA/Exalted, Requiem, Changeling, and then some free time.

---

Footnote 1: Continued to hand-write this weekend. At one point I got frustrated and wanted to make major changes to the story, but the prospect of rewriting it all gave me pause, and I decided to just keep going, which is what I am supposed to do anyhow.

I dislike Hemingway. I've always disliked Hemingway. It's just something that is, like gravity and smelly gamers. I don't know why, but I've just never liked the man's writing style. So I cringed when I was assigned to read The Sun Also Rises, and have been dreading it for a week or so.

And here I am enjoying it.

Just plowed through about 60 pages, no sweat, and looking forward to more. It's not awesome (because, hey, I like to know who is fucking talking every now and then, and apparently Ernest was bitten by the word "said" as a small child and therefore has some pathological hatred of it), but it's been one of the easier books to read in my course thus far. Maybe it's because I just finished Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which is like Ulysses with half the page count.

First, the good.

* School is going well, but I'm glad for the break coming up. All it really means for me is that I don't have class for a week, but I'm hoping to catch up on a 200-page novel, five short stories, three stories to critique, a four to six page paper, and a draft of my second story (3,000-5,000 words) in that time.

* If you like wrestling or e-wrestling, try friending uwa_live. It's an RSS feed from the UWAlive yahoogroup, which is the UWA's "in character" list. We're ready to run our first show tonight, and the players are already doing an incredible job building interest (or "heat" in wrestling terms) for the matches. We even have a magazine column writer!

* Continuing the thread of "ways to beef up your LJ friends list," if you're a writer I suggest little_details. It's a help community specifically for writers looking for information for their stories that they can't find on Google. I've only just started skimming it, but it looks to be very active and potentially very useful.

Next, the bad.

* garchangel is pretty ill today. He wasn't feeling well last night, and it's worse today.

* greebotrill's grandfather (my grandfather-in-law) is also feeling ill, as in "terminal kidney failure" ill. Her grandmother is trying to sort things out so that she can continue to have an income and a house after he passes on, but between the stress of him being in the hospital and the stress of sorting out her life, it's really difficult right now.

* A couple of other friends are having to deal with back-to-back funerals this week, and another friend is stupidly swamped and stressed out.

Me? I'm okay. Struggling to come to terms with my moodiness, mostly, and trying to focus on school and working out right now (although fun hobbies like the UWA add a bright note to me day).

Past weekend I was feeling antisocial. Went to Friday Requiem game and Saturday Forsaken game, and was fairly blase at both (although the latter I attribute more toward trying to play a brand-new character in a game I know very little about, but I did get some good RP out of it overall and the starting plot is fairly interesting). Outside of that, was minimally social with people outside my house. I finished my homework, read a little of my ubar-cool annotated Sherlock Holmes book, but mostly ran errands and poked around with TV and online fan films (1).

My workout on Sunday marked my second full week of working out. I didn't increase my exercise repetitions, but I did add crunches and pushups, and I'm going to try to do them before or after my treadmill on Tuesday and Thursday as well. I am much less sore than I was last week (hardly sore at all, in fact), so I plan to slowly increase the reps on the various exercises until I'm up to the level of greebotrill and garchangel, and then maybe starting to add weight. I don't feel any improvement, but that's okay because I feel better for doing it, and I can feel that I'm starting to hit the point where it's a habit.

My Palm freaked out on me Sunday (or, more actively, the SD card did), but I uninstalled some applications that were just taking up space and managed to salvage just about everything else before reformatting the Palm and the card, so it's fine now.

UWA is building up nicely. There's still a handful of people who haven't submitted their characters yet, but there are a few players who are really enthusiastic about it, and I have a nice system in place that will help build continuity and structure without me having to keep too much information in my head. If all goes well, I won't spend more than half an hour a week on average running it.

Footnote 1: For example -

Friday Night Smackdown on TiVo: Entertaining. Was surprised to see Super Crazy and Randy Orton put on a good match, and was really into the Undertaker and Kurt Angle match until the end.

Jarhead: Surprisingly good movie. Not awesome, but a philosophical military movie that kept me interested and made me think (and also made me hate Thin Red Line that much more).

Starship Exeter: Fan-made series set in the original Star Trek continuity, complete with cheezy 60s miniskirts and sound effects. The production quality, however, is incredible -- it looks just like the original series. There's only two episodes online (as they come out at the rate of about one a year), but it's well worth watching. There are a few other Star Trek fan series I'm checking out as a result.

Emailed my professor, and we've traded a few back and forth now. Long story short was that he specifically stated now that he does not want his biases to skew my artistic vision, but that he wants the logic and characterization to be rock solid before mythical, fantastic elements get woven in. So if he's willing to work past his biases, so am I. My decisions and course haven't changed much over the past few days, but I feel more comfortable in working with him.

So I talked to my professor last night during the break in our class. ( Read more... )

My previous post about me being pleased about having "Bete Noire" torn to shreds might have been a bit premature.

I read through the written comments by the class yesterday. Most were really positive, and a number of them actually said they liked the story. (One said that he hoped he wasn't being preached at, which made me laugh.) A few students weren't fans of the story, but that's to be expected. The balance of enjoyment and critiques was pretty solid.

Then I got to my professor's comments, and I realized why he was being so apologetic in class. He hand-wrote four pages blasting my choice of content. He said that Anne Rice and Stephen King already have done the genre, so I should strike out and try something new, and by "new" he means "without fantasy". His vision of the story was for the main characters to have a conversation, and that's it. I've read some very entertaining stories that were just relating an entertaining or engrossing conversation, but I can't even conceive of writing that (or at least, not for this story). Even thinking about writing it bores me to tears. However, he wants me to go "beyond" genre fiction, because I'm capable of "more." He admits that my talent is good, and I can't argue with most of his style and technique criticism -- that's why I'm in the class to begin with. But this exaltation to "literary" stories baffles me. I talked to greebotrill and garchangel about it, but I think this comment by naamaire sums it up:

You have way too much talent to try something truly "literary". I think you should write for people to read and enjoy-- period. Literature is nothing more than than good pulp fiction that is more than fifty years old. People who set out to write something literary usually end up teaching creative writing courses because they can't make ends meet with their writing.

Long day at work, and long night at school. Lots of bits swirling around my head for "Bete Noire" tomorrow (and many thanks to those who have offered criticism), as well as a couple of ideas I've jotted down which might be the germ of a second story. Requiem and other Cam crap going on that I could really care less about, although the local Forsaken LARP (and VST) has some serious potential, and the rest of my pack will be at Eclipse. I'm growing more introverted again, preferring to dive into books rather than go through the effort of being social. That's positive, though, because if I wanted to be social, I probably wouldn't have much option except for being stuck in books. :)

* Took a vacation day yesterday to try to get on top of crap. Somewhat succeeded, but professor changed his mind on something which throws off my timeframe. Luckily I have a nearly free weekend to catch up in.

* I have a bad habit: I don't let people know I'm busy until I'm really busy. The downside of this is that when I say "Hey, I'm busy," some assume this means "Hey, I'm actually not busy and want you to bombard me with inane crap" instead of what I'm really saying, which is "Hey, I'm so stressed out that I can see time, so maybe you can lay off for a bit plzkthx."

* Got my SD card for my Palm (512MB) and garchangel let me borrow a set of oversized earbud headphones that actually fit in my ears, so now I'm able to enjoy my audiobook versions of Sherlock Holmes and my radio episodes of The Shadow while driving around or running errands. Not able to actually use it as a flash drive, but I am able to sync Excel sheets and Word docs, so it's not a complete wash.

* Seriously considering scrapping some of my more stressful gaming so I can preserve my sanity.

* Haven't written a fucking word on any of my RPG projects for weeks. I feel guilty, even though the only deadlines I'm breaking are my own (as I scrapped some of the ones that I had committed to others).

I have been working steadily at work, like the rockstar I am. I have, however, been slacking on homework a bit, like the rockstar I am. Tonight is Fiction Writing class (which does not detail the rockstar that I am). Tomorrow I plan to spend some time catching up on homework and taking first stabs at edits on my story, like the rockstar that I am, before I play Greco-Exalted.

...

Wait, I screwed that up. Like the rockstar I am.

I should update, huh?

Most of my life has been school, of course. Class takes up two of my weekday nights completely, so I have to cram homework into the remaining nights. Now that I've gotten through a glut of planned events and over the hump on heavy schoolwork loads, I was able to actually do a couple of things for mindless entertainment, such as watch Doom (a surprisingly entertaining movie) and order the Royal Rumble PPV (which was average for a PPV in my opinion, and therefore superior to most PPVs in recent memory). However, non-homework writing has been put completely on hold, and even some homework writing has been slower and more frustrating than I had anticipated. Add to this a glut of Requiem crap, and my time has been at a much higher premium than before.

Which, of course, is the perfect time for my Palm PDA to crap out. It has been locking up at random times. I tried restarting it and redownloading the data, but it continued. It's intermittant (for example, right now it's behaving), but I anticipate that it's going to just keel over on me soon. So, after a talk with the housemates about finances, it was decided that I could try to find a cheap PDA to replace the one I have. I tried to shoot for something under $100, so I hit eBay and Pricewatch. I inadvertantly hit a good one - a Zire 31. It's a couple of years old, and I believe it's no longer produced, but it actually have everything I need. It's compatable with the version of Palm Desktop I have, so I can just sync it right up with the existing data I have. It's color, which I don't need, but is nice to have. It's got an interface I've been used to for four years now, but it has Graffiti 2, which I'll have to relearn. It's also an MP3 player and has a memory card expansion slot. Two of the things on my eventual "to get" list were a flash drive and an MP3 player, but since the Zire has just a USB cable instead of a cradle (which in theory will fit in my map case), I can put a nice memory card into the PDA and have it do all three for me, carrying music, audio books, and writing files with me whereever I go. So, while it was somewhat annoying an inconvenient to get a new Palm right now, it might actually turn out to be the perfect machine for me.