Skip to main content

Joiner

Finally after probably a year of saying I was going to, I joined the Online Writers Workshop. I've got two goals here.

1. I've read on a whole bunch of different blogs that writing crits is what really improved people's ability to review their own work.

2. I need to learn to receive feedback. I can sense myself doing that thing that I do, so I won't be too thin-skinned about stuff. I've been not looking at the stuff that I sent to VP (which is really hard, actually) and just trying to make the rest of the work more closely resemble the synopsis I wrote.

The boy made us see the latest Harry Potter movie last night. It really brought home for me how much book 6 was only really there to set things up for book 7.

On Sunday, we went to the local McNally Robinson. I went around looking for books by my future instructors. They had five different Scalzi books, and three Bear books. In fact, on the YA Feature wall (the theme was summer reads for older teens, maybe even boys (!) I believe), there was a stack of "Zoe's Tale", which I thought was nice. If they hadn't been trying to close shop around us, I might have bought something.

Popular posts from this blog

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.
Read more

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...
Read more

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...
Read more