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Sleightly Random

Shannon Leight's blog


It's a sickness.
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I just finished revising a particularly tricky bit of the novel (it's been taunting me for the better part of three months), so I rewarded myself with a little stroll through the internet.  As it so often does, my stroll took in Miss Snark's blog.  Yeah, I know, it's almost ten years old at this point, but a lot of it is still both educational and entertaining.  Besides, reading through ancient internet scuffles that I've never heard of is a nice reminder of how fast things blow over.

It's also a nice reminder of how permanent the internet is, whatever we like to think to the contrary.  No matter how obscure the dust-up, Google and the Wayback Machine have managed to find me enough details to be titillating (a word that always makes my inner twelve-year-old giggle).  No bloviating goes unrecorded, no idiocy passes without being enshrined in the wonderfulness that is the cache.

Today's example was no exception, though it proved more recalcitrant than most: some young idiot...errr, intern...at McAdams/Cage made some poorly thought-out comments on his blog, which someone then linked to in the comment trail on a post about agently nastiness.  My curiosity was piqued by the, well, pique on display in the comments, so off I went.  It took a good bit of searching, and I only ever found references to the posts.  Even the Wayback Machine has failed me this time.  I get only a coy glimpse through a GalleyCat article, without ever getting to see the whole thing.  I blew the better part of thirty minutes trying various searches on various sites, with no luck.

At which point I realized that I'd just spent the better part of thirty minutes combing the internet for something that would almost certainly piss me off if I found it.  What?  Why?  I don't have enough stress in my life?  Truly, a deadly combination of rubbernecking and "I've been challenged, I will find it!"

So yes.  Off to find something a little more productive to do with my time.  Like revise the remaining third of my novel, or write that short story that's been floating in my head, or work on the other novel.  Or, hell, fold some laundry, do the dishes, or just go to bed at a decent hour.  The possibilities are endless!  And probably a lot better for my blood pressure.


The importance of individuality
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Seen on a bumper sticker this morning: "I express my individuality through mass-produced bumper stickers."  It made me laugh, because I had one of those cars when I was a teenager (you know, the kind that's held together by its bumper stickers).  I could always find my car in the parking lot!  Of course, I can always find my car in the parking lot now, but that's because I just keep clicking the lock button on the remote until I hear the horn.  Not nearly as much fun, for me or the other people around me.
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Inspire me.
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Sometimes I just read something that...hmmm.  I don't want to say it makes my hair stand on end, because that's a bit of a cliche.  Let's say, something that grabs me at the base of my skull and squeezes, that shouts "YES!" right in my ear.  Yeah, I know, there's medication for that.

Anyway, often it's just one or two sentences that does this to me.  I have one such taped to my desk, right above my monitor: "Many people will tell you that you can't write.  Let no one say that you don't." Another runs through my head at regular intervals: "'I don't have time' is a value statement."

Tonight I was blog-surfing, instead of writing or doing any of the work I brought home, in direction contravention of #1 and #2 above, I know.  Which just goes to show, inspirational quotes alone are not enough.  Sitll, they are something, and tonight's was, "You are not a goddamn beggar at the banquet of publishing."  Courtesy of the inimitable Ms. Reid.  Something I must remember, when I start looking for agents, because I think it would be far too easy for me to fall into the trap she's talking/ranting about.  Any agent who will take me is a good agent!

But not.

Must remember.


Procrastination
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It's funny how many times I can run through the same pattern and still not recognize I'm on the path until it's too late.  I've been putting off the filing for (literally) years, letting it stack up in odd corners and trying to avoid making eye contact with it.  And eventually, it became too much, even for me.  Tonight, I shredded the last bit of crap, and I've come to the realization that, if you wait long enough, most stuff can just get thrown away.  Of course, you'll never find it when you need it while you wait for it to become obsolete...

And you know what?  It just wasn't that bad.  I queued up a bunch of podcasts and just kept working at it.  Why couldn't I have done this at any time in the last *cough cough* years?

It did provide a nice little stroll down memory lane.  Tele-file.  I had forgotten that, at one point, tele-file was the big thing the IRS was pushing: "Get your refund faster!  It's so easy, just call this number!"  Also amusing to note that I was filing my taxes online back in 2002.  I hadn't realized I'd been able to do it for 10+ years.


(And look, my enter key finally works again!  Only took LJ...what?  A year?  And I see that problem has just been replaced with a different one, where I now type faster than LJ can keep up.  Hunt-and-peck speed is the best it's managing.  Joy.)
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And done.
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Whew!  November was exactly as much of a wreck at work as I thought it would be.  More so, even.  But I stuck with it, and I actually managed to finish.  Not just the 50,000 words to win NaNoWriMo, but actually finished the novel.  It's short (way short), and I've got some issues to fix, but that makes two novels finished this year.  In thirteen months, I've written two complete novels, and I'm feeling pretty good right now.  Sometimes, it really is just knowing you can do it.

Which applies to more than just finishing novels.  My writing speed shot up this month, mostly because I blasted through a barrier I hadn't even realized I'd made for myself.  Six pages per hour was fast to me.  How can anyone write faster than that?  Sure there are a few, but there are also people who can run a mile in four minutes.  It's not exactly something the average person should strive for.  THen I did my first NaNo sprint, where you just write as fast as you can for ten minutes, and did almost two pages.  That comes out to a little under eleven pages an hour.  Compare that to my previous record of seven and a half.  It wasn't a fluke, either, and it wasn't just during sprints.  My top ten writing speeds were all during NaNo; I have to go all the way out to the top thirty before I find a writing session prior to November.

Weird to realize what a limit I was putting on myself.  I type plenty fast, so why did I think I couldn't consistently write more than seven pages in an hour?

All in all, despite the stress, a damn fine month.  There were a couple of places where I really did want to give up.  The end of last week was a close call, after too many crises had gotten between me and writing.  I was 7,850 words behind on Friday, with less than ten days to go.  And now I'm done.

Whew!


NaNoWriMo
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Yup, I got hooked.  Not entirely sure how, because November is crazy enough without trying to write 1700 words per day, even as fast as I type.  Today was classic November, in which I arrived at work at 7:30am, ate both breakfast and lunch with one hand on the keyboard, struggled through crises with varying degrees of success, and when I left the office into a rainstorm at 7pm (and me without my raincoat), all I could think as I looked at the rain was, "It figures."  If it had been sleeting, I think I would only have been mildly surprised.  It was that sort of day, and I have twenty-nine more of them to go.

That said, I'm at least off to a good start with NaNoWriMo: 1700 done tonight since I got home from work, and I may do a little more later.  Tomorrow I'll try to knock out 3000 or so, to get a leg up on next week.  I'll need all the extra legs I can get.  Gotta see if I can figure out how to put one of those tracker thingies on here.


Good thing I type fast.
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I've had days that were "all writing, all the time" before, but I can't recall ever having a day quite like today.  I began with a formal memo to senior management recommending some big changes to corporate structure, moved on to a report for the Securities and Exchange Commission, kept going with three pages of typed (single-spaced) notes for a two hour meeting (taken during the meeting), continued with a crit for my writers' group, and finished up with a few pages on one of my stories.  I have worked all the writing muscles today, that's for sure.  I even managed to change gears smoothly, which I'm disproportionately pleased with.  It's the little victories.  And now I'm going to find something anything to do that doesn't involve a keyboard.
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Ugh.
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A kerfluffle that mostly escaped my notice, as I've been head-down in revisions this week: apparently there's porn on the internet!  Who knew?  And (gasp!) some of it's pretty nasty stuff.  And (double gasp!) Amazon and Kobo and other self-pub services aren't reading every book posted on their sites to ensure compliance with the terms of service.  Shocking!

(Hang on, I have to put my head between my knees after all that hyperventilating.  Okay, good now.)

Seriously, people?  Why is any part of this a surprise?  Yes, I agree that some of those books have gone so far over the line that I can't even see them from where I'm standing.  Moral event horizon?  What moral event horizon?  And I say that as someone who reads porn with a plot, though I doubt I'll ever write any.  My mother would be reading it, and I can't express how much of a buzzkill that thought is, when my fingers are poised on the keyboard.  So...no.

Back to the point.  I'm willing to bet most people aren't actually surprised by the presence of creepy things on the internet, but the tone of some of the articles does make me think I need to offer the writer some pearls to clutch.  Honestly, normally this would just be vaguely amusing for the ten or so minutes it took me to get bored and wander off.  Except for one tiny little thing: the name of the author used as an example in this article.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, I love the obvious effort at journalistic objectivity in the headline of the article.  It's not marked as an editorial as far as I can see, though god knows I usually fail my Spot checks.

(Why yes, I did spend way too much time on TV Tropes today.  How did you know?)


Logic
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I'm less than 10,000 words from finishing the first round of revisions on the current novel WIP, and I already know most of those need to be cut.  In the initial draft, there was much aimless wandering while I tried to think how to wrap everything up.  Let's call it halfway through revising the second-to-last chapter.  A couple more hours, and I'm done, at least with this draft.

So seeing as I'm so close to done, what did I do with my afternoon?  Did I plant my ass in the chair and work on those last bits?  No, of course not.  I sat on the front porch and read.  Not even something for my writers' group, not even something new.  I'm re-reading The Birth of the Firebringer, which I loved as a kid and recently found in electronic format.  And of course I had to finish it instead of revising my novel.  I dunno, maybe they changed the ending when I wasn't looking.  Yeah, right.

Which has reminded me strongly of Mr. Earbrass: "Though TUH is within less than a chapter of completion, Mr. Earbrass has felt it his cultural and civic duty, and a source of possible edification, to attend a performance at Lying-in-the-Way of Prawne's The Nephew's Tragedy."  Yup.  Definitely my cultural and civic duty to read on the front porch.  Won't someone please think of the children!  Or something like that.


Why it's good to be a grown-up...
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...it means I can have two bowls of Lucky Charms for dinner, if I want.  Pretty much nutritionally bankrupt, but tasty in a sugar-shock kind of way.  Eating two bowls of Lucky Charms while crusing down the home stretch on Novel Revision Round 1?  Even better.

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