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Showing posts from September, 2014

Laughter, the best medicine

My doctor's office routinely leaves me sitting for an hour in the reception before they even put me in one of those little special rooms. So me and maybe 15 other people all sat there, bored because phones just aren't interesting enough. Another person came in, and the receptionist asked for her health card and then asked why she was there to see the doctor today. "I'm sick!" the woman yelled. We all repressed our laughter. Eventually I got taken into my grim little private room, and the receptionist asked why I was there, and I told her, and said "it won't take that long," with great confidence. "Oh, you know how it is around here," the receptionist said. And she left me in my chair with nothing but posters to read, and shut the door. But I could plainly hear her through the wall say "I wish I was dead." Not the sort of thing the Reader's Digest page would post, is it?

In process -- August 2014

First Draft “ Limering ”. Around 81,000 words. I am ready for this to be done. Editing The first day of “Editing Something Else Month” went to hell when I spent an hour looking for the printout of the story I wanted to read. “As light as a bird”. (short story) What I had wasn’t really a draft as much as a pile of notes typed up in chronological order. I knew this before I started to read it. But I didn’t realize that the last three pages were missing about five scenes. On the second day of working on this story, I added almost 5 pages of content, and that wasn’t even at the end. I’d started with just shy of 4300 words, and the second draft ballooned up to 7181 (jesus! I went back to check for writing this, and I didn’t realize it had swelled so much. I thought like 6200 or something). That was the plot revision draft. Then I started doing the scenes draft. So, back in 2010 or thereabouts Karl Schroeder was the Writer-in-residence at the Merrill Collection of Toront

What I read -- August 2014

“Heir to the Empire” by Timothy Zahn. This is book one of the Thawn trilogy, apparently. There are a bunch of these Star Wars books lying around the house. People say he’s like god’s gift to the Star Wars extended universe, so I thought I’d give one a try. Wow. I haven’t read many tie-in books lately, and I was always more of a Star Trek person than a Star Wars one, but wow. He really caught the quirks and nuances of Star Wars. I could really hear Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher delivering this dialog, and I loved how he used the various catch phrases. Though I felt like he didn’t know much about being a pregnant woman, especially after reading that Elizabeth Bear book last month.   “Make a Scene” by Jordan Rosenfeld. I bought this last year with my Ride for Heart gift certificate, and finally read it so I could do the next draft of WWS. I’d read maybe five chapters and then decided to check out the Amazon reviews, just out of curiosity. The 1-star reviews are