The Distaff Blog
Karen never does anything halfway. When she decided to raise chameleons, we bought sixteen Ficus trees so each adult could have his or her own tree. I imagine she used to spend hours misting the chameleons, hand-feeding them, cleaning up their poops.
Nowadays, she has tarantulas, forty of them, and she fusses with them as though they were AKC-pedigreed poodles. I’m quite sure I’d get more attention around here if I had four extra appendages, but then, she’d probably go and sprout fangs.
She has become a news junky, too. She used to be an Arachnopets junky (a bbs for spider people), but I guess that got boring after a while. Now she spends hours a day surfing the net, hopping political blogs and other news sites.
I’ve been after her for weeks to start her own blog. As you might imagine from an intelligent person who spends hours a day, seven days a week at the same thing, she has become a fairly sharp analyst. Why blog? Why the hell not?
So here’s an open invitation: come check out Chelicera, Karen’s political blog. No pretty window dressing — Karen’s into the Zen minimalist thing.
(Note added later: all the Chelicera posts have been moved here, to Balls and Walnuts.)
D.
Interesting Times, Indeed
I’ve been lurking at HuffingtonPost.com since they have all the latest info on the Karl Rove/Valerie Plame case and tonight, as I obsessively surfed through news sites, this came up. It appears that Rove may really have screwed up, i.e. Bush’s brain had a cerebral infarct. Everyone was sure that he was just too damned smart to get caught; personally, I thought he had ordered someone else to do the dirty deed, like Scooter Libby, for example. Recently, however, I noticed a crack in the White House stone wall.
If nothing else, most Washington pundits will admit that the Bush Administration has excellent discipline on keeping the party propaganda line consistent. When talking to the media, everyone, up and down the hierarchy, uses the same language to describe the same subjects like good little apparatchiks. This isn’t by accident; it’s Karl Rove’s trademark. (Well, that and incredibly sleazy smear campaigns.) So, a few weeks ago, it was surprising to see Dick Cheney spout off that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes while Donald Rumsfeld said it could last for more than a decade. Was Karl Rove sweating over the Plame investigation and blew off the Bush Administration propaganda synchronization?
I can see the finish line, and is it ever depressing
I don’t often indulge in one of those writers-writing-about-their-writing posts, and I promise I’ll try not to overdo it, but I have to kvetch.
If you had asked me a few moments ago how long I’d been working on my novel, I’d have told you, “Three years.” But I just checked. I wrote the first version of the outline on 4/27/03, and I finished the earliest version of Chapter One in June, 2003. I’ve only been at this two years! It just seems like three.
Here’s the first paragraph from that very first outline:
Poor Judy Miller
I can thank Ishbadiddle for the link to this great LA Times piece by Rosa Brooks, which has a fine discussion on the ethically appropriate application of journalist privilege:
The Judy Miller Media Hug-fest
Honestly. When you see right wing slugs waving the banner for the First Amendment, that’s when you know you’re living in The Poseidon Adventure.
D.
Gastronomy Domine III
High time we got back to food. For you relative newbies, I’ve previously discussed the Ultimate Coffee Experience (including Vietnamese Iced Coffee and Indonesian Crappucino) and the Joy of Liver. Today, let’s visit the food that tastes you back.
Beef tongue.
Suffer the children
In her July 6 post, Demented Michelle* told the story of a dickwad psychiatrist who told her she didn’t have sufficient life experience to be a writer (she was a teenager at the time). This jogged my memory the way a swift kick will turn over a Suzuki Samurai. Here’s my tale.
Summer after 6th grade, I decided to write a novel.
Brazil
Since I’m not quite as big a jerk as I make out sometimes, I’m not going to bother tagging this one for Technorati. It’s not like I have anything original to say about the London bombings, nor useful, nor insightful.
Instead, I’ll give you one trite thought, and one remembrance.
The trite thought: as the Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times. Lucky us.
The remembrance: my thoughts keep returning to the movie Brazil. With its depictions of urban terrorism and government oppression, Brazil seems more prophetic than ever — perhaps even more than 1984.
And I’m wondering if there’s any way out of this mess. Seems we’re only managing to dig a deeper hole — and we’re all in this hole, every single one of us.
D.
Gauging emotional impact.
Here are a few related questions for the writers in the crowd:
How do you know if your story works at an emotional level?
Rephrased: how do you know they’ll laugh when you want ’em to laugh, cry when you want ’em to cry?
And how do you know you’re not traipsing off into the land of literary autism? Maybe you know that place: you look at what you’ve written; your inner voice says “YES!”, but your readers all say, “Uhhhh . . . ”
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now — ever since I got into the latter third of my novel, and more frequently as I close in on the ending. Thinking my way through the epilogue today, I made myself cry. Since this happened while driving, you might argue it wasn’t a good thing. But I was tickled.
It’s not the first time I made myself cry. Trouble is, I get into moods where it doesn’t take much to set me off. An old Barney Miller episode might do it for me. Since the stuff I write ultimately comes from my innards, it stands to reason it should have some emotional impact for me.
I suppose that at a bare minimum, my writing should make me feel the ‘correct’ way. If it doesn’t work for me, why should it work for anyone else? After that, I would hope it works for my handful of readers. The fact that my writing made a certain someone cry recently does, I admit, cheer my heart.
It would be nice to have a few dozen readers vet the manuscript before farming it to the publishers, but I know that’s not going to happen. So I guess I’ll have to cross my fingers, knock on wood, and send it out, hoping that at least one publisher will see this book the same way I do. What else can I do?
D.
Review of Lenox Avenue, #7
My review of Lenox Avenue, #7, is up at Tangent Online.
Lenox Avenue is a bimonthly speculative fiction/art zine that pays top dollar — 5 cents a word, up to $100. Max word count = 6000. Here’s what they’re looking for:
Quirky, edgy, stylish, odd
Exploration of cultural myths/traditions not well-represented in spec-fic
Magic realism, slipstream, new weird, all welcome
Stories in which the characters are immersed in the culture and events, not necessarily outsiders encountering it for the first time
Here’s a link to their guidelines.
Based on Issue #7, they have a smart editorial staff with a good eye for talent. Check ’em out!
D.
Deader is Better
Hellraiser VII: Deader
