Job hunting, ficathon, editing

Still no word on the job; I called them this afternoon, and they're going to start calling the short list back for second interviews tomorrow. *sigh!*

Meanwhile, I've been over my ficathon stuff, again. The soap opera is complete, sing jubilant hosanas, and Thing One and Thing Two are being refined. Total word count for the three is a smidgin over 9K words. (Not even close to being a record, but an accomplishment nonetheless.) Now, I just need to get my ass to work on "Flying Towards Destiny", and that Joolsfic I've been mulling over.

Today, majolika dedicated an entry to me, for reasons I find enormously amusing. It's here, http://majolika.livejournal.com/56977.html, as is my response.

And speaking of books (which is what that post is about, if you haven't checked it out yet), I remember back in high school, checking out all the how-to books on fiction writing that they had on the shelves (a half dozen volumes or so, which I read and reread throughout my tenure there). I inhaled advice on character creation and plot construction...and was skeptical when they talked about editing. At the time, I thought I wrote pretty well. Edit? Me? Obviously they are lesser writers than I! *eyeroll* What little 'deathless prose' which has survived the intervening decades belies that; most of it is perfectly dreadful.

Back then, I had no idea how to rewrite something---or even why to rewrite it. I couldn't recognize when a passage didn't work, much less understand how to fix it. Mind you, this was in the 1970s, long before the internet offered betas lurking a quick mouse-click away. I've only been online for 2-3 years...I learned the hard way. Even with all that against me, though, I kept writing. Along came computers, and this was a Good Thing. Little by little, I discovered I could greatly improve my prose with a bit of judicious cut and paste. I found out that those long-ago how-to authors had been telling the truth.

By golly, they were right! You can spot mistakes better when you put something aside for a while! Likewise, there are times when you can tell something isn't working, when you've made things over-complicated for yourself. I do this. Often. But at least now I can see the problem spots, and I can fix them. And ironically, you can see mistakes in other people's writing more clearly than you can see your own, but that's what betas are for....

Job hunting, ficathon, editing

Still no word on the job; I called them this afternoon, and they're going to start calling the short list back for second interviews tomorrow. *sigh!*

Meanwhile, I've been over my ficathon stuff, again. The soap opera is complete, sing jubilant hosanas, and Thing One and Thing Two are being refined. Total word count for the three is a smidgin over 9K words. (Not even close to being a record, but an accomplishment nonetheless.) Now, I just need to get my ass to work on "Flying Towards Destiny", and that Joolsfic I've been mulling over.

Today, majolika dedicated an entry to me, for reasons I find enormously amusing. It's here, http://majolika.livejournal.com/56977.html, as is my response.

And speaking of books (which is what that post is about, if you haven't checked it out yet), I remember back in high school, checking out all the how-to books on fiction writing that they had on the shelves (a half dozen volumes or so, which I read and reread throughout my tenure there). I inhaled advice on character creation and plot construction...and was skeptical when they talked about editing. At the time, I thought I wrote pretty well. Edit? Me? Obviously they are lesser writers than I! *eyeroll* What little 'deathless prose' which has survived the intervening decades belies that; most of it is perfectly dreadful.

Back then, I had no idea how to rewrite something---or even why to rewrite it. I couldn't recognize when a passage didn't work, much less understand how to fix it. Mind you, this was in the 1970s, long before the internet offered betas lurking a quick mouse-click away. I've only been online for 2-3 years...I learned the hard way. Even with all that against me, though, I kept writing. Along came computers, and this was a Good Thing. Little by little, I discovered I could greatly improve my prose with a bit of judicious cut and paste. I found out that those long-ago how-to authors had been telling the truth.

By golly, they were right! You can spot mistakes better when you put something aside for a while! Likewise, there are times when you can tell something isn't working, when you've made things over-complicated for yourself. I do this. Often. But at least now I can see the problem spots, and I can fix them. And ironically, you can see mistakes in other people's writing more clearly than you can see your own, but that's what betas are for....