When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure...

--Warren Ellis

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
                 --Philo of Alexandria

“Your voice is more important than your fear."

347 / 400 (86.8%)

That's actually only about 2500 new words, but I took all the chunks of the old novel that I'm saving for re-use and stapled them in. I expect they will get much shorter when they are rewritten, as they badly badly need to be. Because they are ass, that's why. And because that thing where my brain tries to have six conversation in parallel was really prevalent in early drafts of this book. It all made perfect sense to me at the time it was written, but I look at it now and think, "Wow, this is random."

Also, when you actually put transitions and scene changes and all that stuff in a book, it makes it a heck of a lot longer.

I have in fact trained myself to be more linear. Hacking my own brain for your entertainment since ~2001.

Also, I got to write the scene where the sort-of-but-not-really-fallen-angel kisses the catslavegirl today. There was a lot of entertainment for my cat in this, as I kept poking at her face trying to figure out the structure of her mouth. Also, somewhere, Cordwainer Smith is just spinning. Or possibly laughing his ass off, one of the two.

Which leads me to a meditation of one of the worst pieces of writing advice I have ever recieved: the venerable and nonsensical, "don't write down anything your point of view character isn't currently noticing."

I suspect that's probably a good third of what's wrong with AtWS: The Original Narrative. Because I didn't. I stuck tightly to Muire's stream of consciousness, and to the action. Which meant there was almost no setting, no worldbuilding--except by incluing--no setting--except for whatever furniture was currently in use--and in general, king of a herky-jerky thing where the reader was adrift in this character's head and only aware of whatever she was focused on.

The first Jenny book has some of this problem too, but by the time I wrote that, enough of my first readers had complained often enough that I was starting to fix it, at least slightly.

Now, what does work is filtering the narrative through the character's perceptions so the reader sees what's important to that character. The murderer notices the knife on the counter; the hungry man notices the open box of Bugles. But part of building richness into a narrative is that incidental stuff, even if a real person would only notice it subconsciously. The texture of cloth, the movement of the air, an itch on an earlobe. It's immersion, grounding, and it matters.

Remember: just because people tell you something about writing, doesn't mean it's useful or true.

That of course goes for everything I say, too.

This morning, while I was sitting in my chair by the window writing, what I charitably presume to have been a very young sparrow got tangled in a spiderweb on my windowledge.

It appeared to be eating something--I presume either the spider, the egg case, or an insect husk, and in the process, sort of fluttered all over the windowledge and then clung to the screen for a while and got spiderweb all over itself and in general acted like it had no clue that I, and the Presumptuous Cat, were sitting a mere ten inches away.

The PC was eminently interested, too, but I got ahold of her before she could go through the screen and fall two stories, in pursuit of the daft thing.

Ever notice how much government resembles ten year old boys with secret clubhouse passwords?

Yeah, me too.

I just found a notebook with a bunch of pithy quotes I wrote down about fifteen years ago, for a purpose no longer relevant. If you like that sort of stuff, well, I'm putting the ones I want to remember here, for my own future reference. (There's a few I mean to use in Chill, for one thing.)

( here are some )

Copycatted via scarlettina, but worth quoting:

Some writing advice by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on the subject of short stories, from Bagombo Snuff Box:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.*

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

sclerotic_rings, you will be missed. *loff*

Send postcards, son.

Progress notes for 14 June 2006:

"War Stories"

New Words:  2507
Total Words: (actual / ms) 2970
Pages: 14
Deadline: none
Reason for stopping: bed. An hour ago.
Stimulants:  lagavulin 16 
Exercise:   bah, what's that?
Mail: via coalescent, The Agony Column just gave me the Best Review Ever for TCTYR and B&I.
Mean Things: Where do I start? the head-shaving and the dying, I think.
Darling du jour:  Goddamned terrorists. Bunch of fucking cowards. Any asshole can die for his country.
The scary shit is living for it.
Tyop du jour:

the moist, warm, tender skin of her name 

the whole word's blowing up.

Books in progress: Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate;
Interesting tidbits: 

"Love is a perky little elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun."
-- Soren Kierkegaard?

the_monkey_king quotes Agatha Christie:

I changed from an amateur to a professional… which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well.
 
Good night.

The storyteller's intelligence is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true; mischievousness and childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies); a marked tendency toward excessive eating, drinking, chattering and a weird fascination with dirty jokes; a strange mixture of playfulness and embarrassing earnestness; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.

--John Gardner

58,821 / 100,000 (58.8%)

271 / 400 (67.8%)

Stimulants:  assam
Exercise:  Gym with ashacat, 90 minutes: weights, elliptical, rowing
Mail: I've been Thogged! What's really crushing to my poor underdeveloped ego is that I know there are far worse sentences in that book.

I find them every time I do a reading.

This is, alas, the reason why my draft manuscripts are spotted with highlighted text that when hovered, reveals comments such as "This is the worst paragraph in the history of paragraphs. Fix it."

It doesn't help.

Also, SF Signal feels metz-a-metz about Worldwired. 

Today's words Word don't know: doozy
Mean Things: Jean just saw the black helicopters
Books in progress: Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate; Jay Lake, The Trial of Flowers
Other writing-related work: slushed, critted a chapter
Interesting tidbits: The Bride of Absolute Write: the reconstruction is under way.
The glamour!:Cut a bit of protein and some keratin off my left index finger while chopping lemon balm. Fortunately, I was using a just-honed Henckels knife, so it doesn't hurt a bit, but it was pretty gruesome for a few moments there.