gement | Entries tagged with book

For those of you who are familiar with The Artist's Way, I don't have to explain Reading Deprivation Week. For the rest of y'all, the idea is to cut out your biggest mind-blanking-time-frittering-filling-yourself-with-the-unimportant activity for a week to find out what ELSE is going on in your brain. Which is, the author theorizes for the majority of people who read books on increasing one's creativite output, reading.

I have previously given up watching tv or playing computer solitaire games (including all other minigames of the Pop Cap/Big Fish varieties (Hi,

tithonium and

niac! Hi,

spaced!)). I have even given up email and LJ for a week.

So these days I consider it a triumph that I'm checking LJ and email within a week, the only other reading I do is the comics page of the paper while I wait for my toast to pop at work, I'm not addicted to any chat interfaces or online games, I'm having trouble getting around to watching seasons of Doctor Who and Torchwood that were HANDED to me as a gift, and I only play minigames when my internet is down and I'm hoping it will come back up in a minute to check my wiki.

What am I doing? I'm thinking about my book. All the time. I mean all the time. I'm checking for new comments again on my wiki, or re-reading my own work obsessively, or I'm replaying scenes in my head. To the exclusion of doing else with my bus ride time or most of my other down cycles.

This is clearly not the best use of my creative time, as I'm not even making up much new stuff these days. Or months, in fact. I would like to be spending that energy viciously editing, or voraciously reading period source material and books on how to write descriptions that don't suck.

Or possibly doing my laundry. That situation's getting a bit urgent. More on that next post.

So how do I do Reading Deprivation Week when what I'm mindlessly reading is my own creative output and taking the book away doesn't help because I have it memorized?

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: The moon's too bright, the chain's too tight, the beast won't go to sleep...

Okay, this is really silly, but I've written one utterly gruesome story that, until yesterday, only the supremely unsquickable

meowse had read. (I told

passionandsoul and perhaps a couple others the premise, though.) I only gave myself permission to put it down on paper because I'd seen

passionandsoul write something just as scary. But I still didn't feel entirely settled about it. Proud of it personally, but not sure what anyone else would think.

I have been cringing internally, waiting for my other readers to hit that story and say something like, "That was... different. Not my kink, and I'm afraid it weakens the rest with its overdramatic gruesomeness. Aside from these two lines of dialogue that might be good somewhere else, it should really go. Also, EW AND YOU SHOULD BE LOCKED UP AND I WILL HAVE NIGHTMARES AND EW!"

Yesterday, I got a comment on it. And it did not say that. And I am happy.

Current Mood: creative

Seven copies of my work handed out last night, and I have to put an electronic copy up on the (extremely protected) Yahoogroup fileshare for anyone who's coming next month but didn't come this month.

SO nervous. Too late to do anything about it. I'm on the hot seat at the May meeting. *jitter*

Given that they only meet once a month, I feel extraordinarily honored to get into the action immediately. The group coordinator actually apologized to me that we wouldn't have time to critique it last night, as someone else had already submitted work in advance. (I was boggled; the website made it clear that you couldn't get more than 3 pages critiqued unless you submitted it in advance, which seemed sensible to me, but apparently it's flexible.)

We sat for two hours talking about six poems, a couple of which were quite powerful. I learned a lot from watching the author react, both how to accept critique gracefully and certain mannerisms that I want to avoid. (She mostly modeled the former, but she was understandably nervous in many of the ways that I will certainly be nervous, leading to a bit of impulsive interrupting and disclaiming.)

When it's my turn, I'll probably make one big fluttering nervous disclaimer along the lines of, "I'm pretty confident about dialogue, but I have no formal training in how to make the surrounding words fit together, so I appreciate that they'll probably all have to be chopped around," before they start in on me. Then I can sit quietly and mightily resist the urge to say things like, "Oh, that, I know that part's weak, I'll change it right away!"

And it's a month away. Maybe I'll have gotten the disclaimer out of my system by then.

My impressions of the group: very welcoming, gentle but thorough critiquing, tasty pie. The group leader is cheerfully gregarious, which is part of the welcoming atmosphere.

My only complaint on that front is that it's a little difficult to get a word in edgewise, so I think there might be better group flow if she chose to wait until others had rung in before giving her critiques. Also, when we were supposed to be carefully reading and marking poems with our shiny red pens, she kept talking even after she rebuked herself. I recognize this as something I might well do if I were running the group, and I would find it difficult to correct in myself, so I'm certainly not spiting her for it.

The group currently meets once a month, but several of us asked why it wasn't more frequent, and the answer seems to be "tradition, which can be changed given sufficient interest." So that might be nifty.

Current Mood: bouncy

I am going to the No Safewords Writers' Group tonight, armed with several manuscript-format copies of an 18-page short story. Which I will hand to people. People with pens, and opinions.

I decided to start with something from the middle of my writing, which stands alone, doesn't require excessive explanation, and is one of the stronger candidates for selling to a magazine if the novel doesn't survive or this scene is cut from it. It's a story that I am confident is sexy and solidly written, with no weird pronoun contortions or point-of-view shifts.

When I see how I react to people's critiques on this fairly safe territory, then we can start talking about The Goddamn Quest (which I continue to be convinced should Just Go, but I don't know how to get rid of it without shaking the foundation of the rest).

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

Current Mood: nervous

The mind is not always sensible. All true fear is, at its heart, the fear of death. May I show you something? -- Aldo, which is to say, me.[1]

Clarification: The following is not intended as a slight to my wonderful current readers. If anything, I am attempting to take an undue and unreciprocated burden off them so they can just enjoy reading it and talk to me about themes.

I need to find a critique group. I am not sure what that will look like. It might be a fan-based group that specializes in naughty slash. It might be a romance writer's group. The basic requirements are:

1) Has members who have experience with fixing and smoothing dumb persistent writing problems and can suggest fixes. (Specifically, won't just give me a thumbs up, but won't just tell me "it's wrong. Fix it somehow.")
2) Will not lynch me for writing the kink and the gay sex.
3) Will not lynch me for writing something that is not commercially publishable or doesn't necessarily fit into a tidy genre box or isn't perfectly historically accurate.
4) Will not lynch me for not having previous experience with critiquing the work of others.
5) Will not lynch me.

I'd prefer a group that meets at least occasionally in person in the Seattle area, and I'd very much like a group with at least one biomale in it who can call me on girls-writing-boys problems, but those are negotiable points.

Does anyone have any suggestions on either specific groups or places to look for groups? I've had a suggestion for Hugo House and for the No Safewords group, and I wondered if anyone had experience with either to tell me if I will get what I need in either place.

[1] For those of you who have read the relevant passage, I would pay a great deal for that kind of life coaching. A very great deal.

Current Music: Frozen Man (damn you, Vixy and Tony! Waughhhh!)

Since I last posted, just 15 days shy of a year ago today, I have taken a number of exciting and fulfilling classes, graduated from library school with a perfect attendance record, done an internship with a non-profit that promotes the humanities in everyday life, written most of a dirty novel, gotten a second boyfriend who is meeting a lot of my visceral needs, and become gainfully employed in my chosen profession. (No, I'm not working in a library, but I'm doing data cleaning in a company that provides support services for libraries.)

I feel awkwardly like everything I do is unfinished. I still haven't looked straight-on at my grade report for my last quarter of grad school, I left some very large loose ends at the non-profit internship, I gave test decks of cards for my math game to teachers but then haven't checked back in with them.

I'm managing to stay focused on the writing, but I'm getting to the point where I need to do much more aggressive editing, and I think I need to define a victory condition. "I can rest on my laurels if I..."

At the moment, I think the victory condition may be:
1) Learn enough about how things get published to find out if all or part of my work is commercially publishable.
1a) If it is, make at least three serious attempts to get all or part of it commercially published.
2) If it is not, or if I get tired of rejection slips, self-publish online in a respectable format on a server that I pay for or otherwise control.

For those of you who already have logins to my writing wiki, hey! Come say hi! And if you've been browsing without telling me, comment, you bastards! For those of you who don't yet have logins, if you're interested in giving substantive feedback on some 1780's very gay vampire smut, give a holler. (Edit: 1780's, not 1880's. Pre-Rev Europe, not Victoriana.)

Special thanks to

maribou and

memegarden, the first two winners of the "Actually leaving comments in the wiki" award, to

capnexposition and

hesperide for feeding me and talking about my work in person, and

meowse for reading every single word of my work out loud to me and very patiently not reading ahead.

Regarding staying focused on my writing, it looks suspiciously like the pattern when I am obsessed with any other piece of media. It's just harder because I can't talk about it with very many people, because a lot of people know from Xander and Willow, but not a lot of people can appreciate a conversation about Aldo, because they haven't met him. But just so you know, I'm a little obsessed, and my postings may reflect that. Brace yourselves.

I may still be sporadic. I'm dealing with serious social anxiety and not checking email often. I could use some help staying in touch. Phone calls help.

Current Mood: timid
Current Location: work