Tag: Sentential Links

It’s time for…LINKAGE!!!

:: You probably judge me, condemn me from your ivory tower, safe from addictive substance. But you are only an accident, a painful illness, an injury away from being in my shoes. I did not choose this, I really had no choice.

:: Sometimes I forget that writing is a living, breathing thing; that the story (or the poem, etc.) not only transforms you and feeds you, but is transformed and fed because of you. Erin Bow in her interview with the Quill & Quire last month said that she thinks she writes what she will ultimately end up needing. And I wonder if there’s truth in that for every writer.

:: Lots of people put up big, ugly walls and we get that they’re cries for help so everyone rallies and tries to tear it down, but if you put up a wall and pant something pretty on it, nobody is going to ask what’s behind that wall and that’s the true danger of charisma. (That’s actually the whole post.)

:: Curse your memory. Curse the timing of lightning. Curse the notepad, which always parts ways with the pen you were certain you put it next to. Curse writing. Who invented it, anyway? It’s their fault you’re even in this mess.

:: Bottom line, none of us are the same. Thank God. Life would be so boring. That’s why it’s important for you to never give up on your piece of art until you’ve gone as deep as you can go. That’s where the story lies and where you will find your true voice.

:: I am so many pieces of these songs. They are moments in my life. They somehow fill these aching holes – the holes that I am learning will never truly be filled – well, they temporarily plug them with their verses, and choruses. Their bridges bridge the gap between broken and whole. For a few moments, I can feel free.

:: Lou Scheimer, the man who founded Filmation Studios, died a few days ago at the age of 84. Mark Evanier has a very nice post about him. I just had to mark it here and say a little thank you for contributing to a childhood that relished in fantasy and the imagination, and delighted at such things as lion men, monkey sidekicks, and ghostbusting gorillas.

:: Uncle Merlin called in from the Cape this morning to report he’s having woodpecker trouble. Judging by his description, a female downy has punched a hole in the eave of his house. He wanted to know how to drive her away.

More next week!!!

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Linkage….

:: I’m wondering what others do to get inspired and keep themselves from getting distracted? It is definitely something I am still trying to do. (I try to incorporate distraction into my routine, inasmuch as I even have a routine. I should probably get a routine. Hmmmm….This is a brand new blog, by the way. I met this fellow on Instagram. Check him out!)

:: So reading fantasy novels is perhaps a second best to being able to distract myself with my own stories, but at least it lets me go to sleep without focusing on the ugly stuff happening in the world.

:: I suppose I don’t have a great emotional attachment to it. If I found a much better one I might give this one up. Maybe. A thing doesn’t have to be very good or very special to make one happy.

:: All female Doctor Who companions have been held under intense scrutiny since the show returned in 2005, and while the narrative of critique often starts out with “let’s look at how the showrunner/scriptwriters have screwed up in portraying female characters” somehow it often seems to come down to burying those female characters under criticism and complaints while the Doctor and male companions get away largely unscathed.

:: If I’m a curmudgeon about Gravity, it’s because it turned out not to be the movie I wanted to see. I wanted an Apollo 13 about a problem the space industry is seriously worried about right now. I want a movie of Downbelow Station and The Forever War and The Stars My Destination. I want a movie about living and working in space that’s actually about living and working in space. If I squint real hard, I can turn Gravity into that movie. But it’s not, quite, and that made me just a little bit sad.

:: Getting upset, brooding and/or feeling despair over things you cannot possible change prevent you from changing what you can, and moving forward, and enjoying your writing life. So: let it go. Accept that there will always be things about Publishing that you can’t change, and that will stop them from depressing you and getting between you and the page. (Oh, so, so hard! Letting go the frustration of my currently unending sea of rejection is the hardest of things for me to do. I read an article a few weeks ago about self-publishing in which the writer indicated that “You won’t get rich doing this”, which…well hey, I’m not rich now, so what of that? But then he said, “You can’t even live off it, really.” And then he named the figure that he makes per month…and it’s more than I’m making now, by a comfortable margin. Hmmmmm….)

:: Why conjure an illusion when you can spend a quarter on a cheap prank? “And I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your dumb Asgardian God of Thunder!”

:: My wife was baking muffins and was out of baking soda and wanted to know what she could use instead. I have no idea, and in fact, have confused baking soda with baking powder. I do know, once upon a time, I used one instead of the other in making pancakes, took one bite of the bitter batter concoction and threw them out.

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Linkage!

:: The Goddess wears her cloak of flowers, the earth is lush, fresh and fertile.

In my patch of the world, green and yellow dominate the landscape. Fields of golden-yellow canola sit side by side with green crops of wheat. It’s a wonderful time to slowly drive the back-roads, just taking the time to admire the vista. (One of my Instagram friends.)

:: What was the Alliance, er, network, thinking? (John Kenneth Muir is blogging his way through Firefly…as well as lots of other good stuff. Gotta remember to read him more often.)

:: A long time ago when I asked a friend, the late Leo Wilson, maitre d’ from P. J. Clarke’s and a character out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse, what it was about Neary’s he liked so much (Neary’s is a legendary pub in midtown Manhattan), he craned his neck, jutted out his jaw, tugged and pulled at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield (all a part of his repertoire when searching for THE word), then said with a sniff and a huff, “It’s positively civilized!”

:: When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young. (This turns out to be a repost from some months ago, but ignore that.)

:: The schedule prompts the Siren to go public with one of her deepest, most tenaciously held opinions:

Laver’s Law applies to cinema. (I am, in all honesty, not entirely sure I understand this post.)

:: No matter how many Star Wars books I’ve flipped through, I’m always coming across new-to-me behind the scenes photos. They seem to come from a never-ending fountain that bubbles with memories from the galaxy far, far away. Archives are wonderful like that. I can’t think of a treasure chest I’d like to explore more. I hope the making of the new sequel trilogy is documented to the very last detail so that 30 years from now we’ll still be seeing images we haven’t seen before.

:: And the cover copy… Sheesh! This Superman KNOWS he’s 50 years old, his powers are “supernatural” in origin, and look! He’s losing the drug war! Whatever happened to fact-checking?!

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Links….

:: It is an icky story. And I can’t help wonder if 30 black and/or Hispanic kids had broken into someone’s house if there would be as much “kids will be kids” reaction among some.

:: Will bringing it all back somehow allow me to let go of the past? (This is quite a question. I do not know. This blog belongs to one of my favorite Instagrammers, by the way. Instagram is a lot of fun!)

:: The phrase “Where’s my jet pack?” has become an American idiom of late. It reflects the disappointment in the mid-century Utopian promises of technology. Walt Disney was among the top perpetrators of the hype. His forays into documentaries and comic books featured glowing predictions for scientific progress which seem overly optimistic from the vantage point of 2013. (Have you ever ‘ridden’ the Carousel of Progress at Disneyworld? There’s perhaps no better illustration of this philosophy in action than that attraction.)

That being said, a bit of blind faith in the wonders of technology is a healthy thing. As we stand and watch NASA defunded and a super-collider shut down, we lose a little hope. We lose a little enthusiasm for what tomorrow brings.

:: But you wanna talk about something that looks good on a resume? Emmy winner is right up there with “former Prince of Liechtenstein.”

:: Can I sit on a manuscript for a month before I hack at it? Well, no. But I can wait a few days, and that my friends, is pretty darn amazing. (I’m waiting three months. And it’s killing me.)

:: Books- A journey disguised as a small paper filled with wonderful words. A time capsule. A portal of wonderment.

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Linkage, for them what like links….

:: I have a reasonably large vocabulary, I suppose. Some words, particularly newer ones, apparently elude me, however. Twerking and selfie have been added to the Oxford Dictionary of English recently, and I had been largely oblivious to both terms. (I am still unclear as to what exactly ‘twerking’ is. And no, I am not requesting an explanation.)

:: I need to constantly remind myself that there is no reason anyone should have any idea what I am talking about. My life includes farriers, horse carts, cheese making and medieval archery. It’s about fiddles and cider brewing and I make a living talking about it all on the internet.

:: One of the hidden gem moments of the Avengers had to be the conversation between Agent Coulson and Captain America when they first meet face to face. (I’d forgotten that moment. I really need to see that movie again….)

:: There are three topics that one is not supposed to talk about in the wardroom: sex, politics, and religion. We’ve had recent threads about both sex and politics, so it’s time for religion. To that end, here we go.

:: Whatever the case, both those poor souls look like they would be seriously cheered up by a little kid walking in there and cramming more potato chips into his mouth than anyone would’ve though humanly possible.

:: I wish I had more of the analytical, explaining talent. Then I could maybe really communicate to people this feeling, or even explain it better to myself. I know we all experience this kind of thing from time to time, and I’m glad. I think it’s one of those things that truly connect us as souls, that truly gives us friendship. But I’m still working on being a good teacher and explainer and analyzer of all these things, rather than just a student and sponge of awesomeness. We’re all just doing our best to add to the awesome, right?

Maybe you don’t see this feeling as spiritually or important as I do, and that’s okay. But it’s like the TARDIS says. We humans, we’re bigger on the inside.

:: My true self is my baggy overalls self. It’s imperfect. It’s in process. But it’s beloved by God apart from appearance or accomplishment or titles. (Overalls as metaphor for ultimate acceptance? Works for me!)

:: This attitude is nothing new, obviously. There’s a strong belief among the Beltway pundit class—even among a lot of liberals—that a true commander-in-chief is someone who is always and everywhere ready to go to war without doubt and without misgivings. Even if the war is wrong, you need to keep up a steely facade.

I sometimes wonder how it is that so few people seem to recognize just how insane this is. Even speaking as someone who thinks Obama handled Syria pretty poorly, I don’t have the slightest problem with the fact that he was obviously conflicted about it. He should be conflicted about it. This isn’t self-defense. We’re not defending democracy. We’re not responding to any danger to Americans. It’s a close call. And it would be something like our eighth—or tenth, or twelfth, depending on how you count—overseas military action in the past two decades. What kind of person doesn’t look at a record like this and at least consider the possibility that a full-bore bloody shirt campaign by the president might not be in order yet again? (I can’t stand the constant drum-beating for war. I find it unbelievably depressing, each and every time it happens. I am more and more convinced that it is simply chest-beating at a national level. I, for one, would be very happy to never, ever, ever hear again the foreign policy thoughts of Senator John “I love war!” McCain.)

More next week!

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Linkage!

:: I write because I love it. I create the best art I possibly can because I’m passionate about it. I obsess over word choice and plotlines and character development because I won’t give you anything less than my best. And I share my work with you – for free – because I’ve seen how quickly a person’s dreams can be shattered. I would rather give you my art, without asking for anything in return, than come to the end of my life with unrealized dreams. I just can’t wait any longer. (I saw this post linked on Twitter today, and it really hit me. I’m not desperate to have a paid career writing, although that is my dream and my goal. But, like I indicated last week, I also deeply love and believe in the stories I am creating, so much so that my real dream is to be read. I’m not sure I’ll give it away for free, but who knows — if I can’t publish, and if for some reason I can’t self-publish, then I’ll just give it to the world. Worse things have been done.)

:: For now, I just need to… well, I was going to say get through the next day and a half. But I really don’t want to just get through them. I want to experience them. (SamuraiFrog continues his brave struggles with anxiety. I really think that people writing and blogging about these things can only help…even if it’s to help others who don’t suffer be more empathetic. Nothing’s worse than the “Stiff upper lip, just choose to be happy!” crowd.)

:: Nothing is more fun than the all-true, guaranteed to be correct information features on the inside covers of crime comics.

:: It’s nuts when you think about it. We very briefly had a neverending rainbow of home cinema, the largest film selection available to any generation ever, period, end of story, and we’re regressing from that. How depressing is that?

:: A.C. Crispin will be missed for her vigilant devotion to sticking up for writers, her wonderful candor, her thoughtful and exciting writing, and most of all, for giving the fans of various fictional worlds sweet and unforgettable gifts.

Thanks, Ann Crispin. You’ll be missed. (I hope the fact that Crispin was probably best known for her media tie-in work won’t hold back her reputation in the future. She really was a terrific storyteller, and she could find things in established universes that were so good, so true, that it’s hard not to consider her additions ‘canon’. She will be missed.)

More next week.

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It’s that time again….

:: Clearly Someone Didn’t Want The Saxophone To Be Invented (Wow. Just…wow.)

:: In my career, I’ve been on the other side numerous times. I’ve been the one reading and judging. I always write nice rejection letters, even if the script sucks eggs. I feel that good, bad, or indifferent, the person (or team) went to the effort of writing a script and the least I could do is let them down easy.

Plus, who’s to say I’m always right? I’m not. Along the way, I’ve rejected a few great people who went on to long and successful careers. When a writer friend of mine was story editor on ARCHIE BUNKER’S PLACE he rejected a script by the Coen Brothers. It happens to all of us.

So when you get rejected – and we all do – take heart. You never know who’s going to turn out to be an A-lister. (You know, no matter how many pieces like this I read, my reaction to a new rejection is always the same. It’s a mixture of “Oh who the HELL am I kidding I’m an untalented WRETCH who should apologize to all these people for inflicting my work upon them!” and “I will etch your names on a wall of granite, such that they will remain for all time a testament to the FOOLISHNESS of turning ME away! ONE DAY I WILL FEAST UPON YOUR SOULS AND THOSE OF YOUR NEXT SEVEN GENERATIONS!!!!”. Luckily, these two feelings pass pretty quickly, and then I’m onto the much more reasonable and practical “OK, who’s next?”.)

:: I believe that to read like a writer, the best way is to read a piece of literature as if you were going to teach it. (Interesting approach. I tend to read like a fellow storyteller.)

:: As a Doctor Who fan, one of the most frustrating things is the inability to watch a complete run of the series. 106 episodes of the series – one-in-eight of the total number – are missing from the BBC archives.

:: I was just wondering… Is there any kind of protocol for ending a texting conversation? (I wonder about this myself. It’s kind of like discussions on blog comment threads, which inevitably just kind of peter out as the post drops down the front page. It reminds me of something someone said back in the hey-day of political blogging: If you touch off a controversy and invite lots of traffic and bile on something you write, just keep posting. The post in question will drop farther and farther down until it vanishes into the Archives, and it’ll be forgotten. Not quite about text messaging, but conversations in texts just seem to stop, don’t they?)

:: Don’t you people get it? There’s only one way out of autumn. No matter how nice it seems, it always dumps you right in front of that spooky shed out back where you must sit inside on the dirt with your knees pressed against your chin while blowing into your hands for three months. Watching your breath quickly appear and disappear like memories of basking on the beach under golden light the summer before. (Old post, but the author linked it on Twitter yesterday. He’s a fine writer, which is a shame because he’s SO SO SO wrong! I adore Fall and Winter! Come, cool weather and snow! Huzzah!!! Check out his site, by the way. Lots of interesting and well-written stuff there.)

:: When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

More next week!

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Linkage….

:: I wish I knew then what I know now – that nothing can be fixed without first looking at what’s broken.

:: I was reading some old ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ last night, and it suddenly struck me what has always seemed strange about Conan as a fantasy character (and Hyboria as a fantasy world, for that matter). Conan was riding in on some adventure or other, getting ready to fight some slithery monster, and I suddenly realized–he has no elven friends. No dwarven friends either, for that matter.

:: Pick your favorite liquor—the one that makes you loose and happy, not upchucking into a clothes dryer. Get comfortable. Light a candle. Have two drinks. Slide down in your chair. And then gently place your fingertips on the hot, slick… buttons of your keyboard. If you’ve never written a sex scene before, you’re probably going to be either terrified or embarrassed, and both of those emotions are a lot easier to swallow when mixed with vodka. (Yipes! I’m not sure I’ll ever write about the actual Act of Teh Sex. There really are areas where I’m a prude, I think! Those Princesses won’t be having any Space Sex any time soon, I can tell you that. I’ll send to a Space Nunnery first! via, by the way.)

:: So why not make ALL your shirts out of the same material as the pants, Doc Savage??? Those pants never rip but the shirts last all of ten seconds. Is it ego, Doc Savage?

:: Personal Top 10 Kaiju lists are things that need documenting. (How did I miss the boat on this? By spending too much time writing, that’s how. Stupid writing.)

:: It’s from that last line that I’d like to suggest that while it’s perhaps accurate to apply “professional writer” only to those who make a living as writers, the material realities of the writing life make such a determination numerically meaningless.

:: The NSA has always had a problem with the open internet. Now a convergence of interests with large corporations is offering them the tools to destroy it.

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:: “My Saturday morning writer’s advice for writers: try not to get hung up on writers’ advice for writers.” (I couldn’t agree more.)

:: That is why I always tell authors and writers to physically draw their action scenes. (But then, this is also pretty useful, in terms of a specific technique. I don’t totally do this, but I tend to slow down a lot when I’m writing action, because I have to keep track of it all in my mind. I think I’ll start doing this!)

:: Brains are interesting. Fascinating, in fact. Sometimes I think I should have been either a neuroscientist or a psychiatrist but, with the former I might have to dissect actual brains and with the latter I would have to deal with annoying, messed up people all the time, which is not one of my talents. (You see why I never decided what I want to be when I grow up?) (Dissecting? I’m there!)

:: Note that his bed is asbestos. In another panel, we see his bedspread, carpet and wallpaper are asbestos, and his furniture has been chemically treated to be fireproof. So, clearly, Johnny Storm has some pretty bad cancer.

:: We as writers are especially susceptible to anxiety because what we function through, how we move through life, is made up of our feelings and parading our vulnerabilities before the world. In a world that increasingly advises us to Harden Up and Be Tough, and where vulnerability is seen as weakness to be preyed upon and exploited, being a writer is like throwing oneself to the lions. (“You need a thick skin!” we’re always told. I don’t have one. Sorry, never have. What I do have is pigheaded determination. Oh yes, that I’ve got. Tons of, actually.)

:: I freely admit to being charmed by the little drama in today’s Family Circus. (Heavens, this is awesome!)

More next week! And I start posting answers to Ask Me Anything! questions later today, but go ahead and still ask if you want!

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Just a few, so as to feel like I actually got something accomplished….

:: Is it so much to ask that your summer series actually be over by Labor Day? (Sadly…yes, it is. Since new seasons don’t start until late September, that means that wrapping summer stuff up by Labor Day would mean networks have to fill three weeks with not much at all, when they’d much rather have their summer stuff amping up, hopefully increasing viewership and keeping eyes glued to ads for the new shows soon the debut or return. It’s maddening, but that’s the way it is.)

:: Also, he implies but doesn’t out and out say that I’m nuts if I think Harry Potter is a better fantasy series than A Song of Fire and Ice. (The ‘he’ is Lance Mannion’s son, who is frankly nuts if he doesn’t think that Harry Potter is superior to A Song of Ice and Fire, which I’ve made clear many times — including Lance’s own comments — that GRRM’s series is really an enormous mess whose success is due to the impressive nature of its scale (the vastness of the story and the details involved really are extremely impressive) and what I’m increasingly taking as our culture’s current fascination with stories of Awful People At Work And Play.)

:: Rodriquez is the sole custodian of his talent, and he is being reviled for the choices he has made about how to use that talent. I don’t imagine he could be held in lower regard, by just about anyone, but really what is he guilty of? It seems to me that he has been trying to take the maximum advantage of his already substantial abilities, and isn’t that what we expect from athletes? Hell, isn’t that what we expect from everyone? (This will be a placeholder until I address performance-enhancing drugs as part of Ask Me Anything. There’s a lot in Bill’s post that I agree with, though.)

:: Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things Ms. Morton describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. (This is not a criticism of John Scalzi by any means, but I am noticing that the more I beat my head against the wall of publishing, the less inclined I am to read the advice of those who have made it already. That could just be my innate pigheadedness, but there’s a line that Captain Picard has in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’ve always liked: “If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for what we really are.”)

:: It’s now 13 years since my dad died, and he’s still in my dreams. (That’s where he really has to be, innit?)

More next week! And if you haven’t already, Ask Me Anything!. Seriously, folks, do you wanna see me beg?

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