The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’m a little irritated by the negativity that transpired, however briefly, in this space. So, in the interests of at least pushing it down the page and thus starting its inevitable march toward mostly-forgotten enshrinement in the archives, here is a pieing in reverse.
Orange Photography Slow Motion Photo Booth Pie in your face edition 🙂 from Orange Photography on Vimeo.
Sorry, folks, but since a certain very special someone has apparently decided that I just have to hear his thoughts on how the moon landing was faked, I have again disabled anonymous comments. There are lots of places online where crackpottery of all sorts may be discussed — the faking of the moon landing, Holocaust denial, global warming denialism, anti-vaccination, why the aliens built the pyramids, and so forth. This is not one of them.
Thank you.
It’s time for links!
:: Still, if nothing else, this serves as a valuable object lesson: when you read this (well, if you can get through the entirety of it; it’s a joyless slog, all self-congratulation and abuse of no doubt multiple thesauri), you can take solace in the fact that this is a man who is, in fact, a professional writer, and who is living proof that a writing career has much more to do with work ethic than it does innate talent. (Ohhhh, boy. Good old John C. Wright, spouting the long-winded crazy, as always. I can’t push my way through that…I much prefer Wright’s short-form crazy. And don’t forget that according to him, by 2059 homosexuality will again be considered a form of mental illness!)
:: If you want to see how people’s fears and hopes for the world have changed over time, pick up a range of Star Trek novels. (Huh. I stopped reading tie-in novels years ago, although there are a few I wouldn’t mind checking out at some point….)
:: Of course, no one is their right mind in this home-baking house of perfectionism would spend good money on such a thing as a frozen banana cream pie. (Well, frozen pies do have their uses…of which they already discovered the finest!)
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Check out this period photo:
Guess what! It’s not a period photo — it’s staged, using models. Check it out!
:: I really wish Breaking Bad was my cup of tea, judging by the assurances I’ve seen of how well-written it is. Guy Gavriel Kay weighs in with this fascinating essay:
Breaking Bad has been, correctly, I think, widely cited as a writers’ show. It is held up by many as a television series that can serve as an example to novelists of an engaging, deeply layered story arc. But, for me, for this piece, one moment is what caught me.
In that last episode, Walter White has returned home, heading towards a violent closure, and has (somehow) slipped unseen into his wife’s new home. They have a last conversation. As Walter begins his final words of explanation, his wife interrupts to demand, “Don’t tell me again you did it all for us!” which has been his litany. But this time he replies, in essence, “No. I did it for me. I enjoyed it. I was good at it. I felt alive.”
Having just read the New Yorker piece, I had to grin. It was just too perfect. Who was the lord of emperors here? The gifted, award-winning actor playing the drug kingpin Heisenberg, or the writer who wrote the words the actor was caused to speak—and thereby settled that debate about motivation, forever.
If Breaking Bad, for all its skillful acting and often superb (and witty) visual perspectives, is truly a show about the writing, that exchange seals it. Gilligan [creator and head writer Vince Gilligan] defined his emperor, explicitly and out of Heisenberg’s own mouth.
:: I won’t embed the video here because…well, it’s really gross. But if you like a good gross-out once in a while, especially those created by Mother Nature, this is a really good gross-out. Here’s the scenario: a dead whale washes up on shore. The carcass has to be disposed of. But…it’s bloating on the inside, and that pressure has to be relieved before they can move the dead thing…only sometimes the relief of that pressure is more violent than you might want, especially if you’re the guy whose job it is to jab the dead beast in the belly with a pointy stick. Ewwwwwww!
More next week!
With that, I am officially signing off from this year’s National Novel Writing Month. Eighty-seven thousand words in one month? Wow. That was quite the crunch. Now, quite a bit of it was easier than it may sound since I went back and started rewriting Lighthouse Boy from the ground up, albeit with the already-existing eight chapters to guide me. But still, that’s quite probably the most writing I’ve done in a single month. It’s almost double my previous best month, May 2014, when I did 44K words. And I got GhostCop‘s first draft done, so I can’t forget that!
Rest for the weary? No such thing. I’ll probably scale back my daily quota on Lighthouse Boy to 1250 words a day, so as to give me time to start the other writing project I set for December 1: the first editing pass through Princesses In SPACE!!!: The First Of Many Sequels. I’ve already been thinking a lot about this, and I have some ideas that I know I’ll need to execute, in addition to simply cleaning up some very rough spots in the writing. The work never stops! My goal remains to have Princesses II in the hands of beta-readers no later than kickoff of the Super Bowl. And then, the day after the Super Bowl? I start the first editing pass though on GhostCop!
Now, I have no real sense for how long Lighthouse Boy is going to be right now. I’m thinking I might well go for broke on this one, since I intend it to be a single-volume tale. My upper target for both Princesses books (and likely all of them to come) was 180K in first draft, but for Lighthouse Boy, I’m thinking of setting 240K as my upper limit (depending on where the story takes me, of course). Yes, these are long-ish books. But they’re the books I want to write, and I will roll the dice accordingly.
As for publishing, well…there is no news to report on that at all. Rejections continue to dribble in, and queries continue going out. But if and when I do decide to self-publish, I know two things: It will likely be toward the end of next year, and Princesses I will be first out of the gate. My commitment remains that this is not a “practice book”, and that this story will get out there, one way or another.
As ever, onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
