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Anybody interested in joining a behind the scenes critique group, please PM Ed :smiley:

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The good morning, good night thread

Started by Ed, October 22, 2007, 03:49:05 AM

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Geoff_N

Ironically, I've been looking for something like that, so I might be getting one too. Especially while on long public transport journeys and stayring overnight on my bike rides. Thanks Del!

Ed

Sounds like a good little gadget to have, Del :afro:

I keep thinking about writing, but never get around to doing it. I'm sure one day the mood will strike and I will be away again. At least I hope so. I haven't really written properly since I stopped smoking and got better, more engaging, work. I think my best writing came from a mix of abject boredom, under-stimulation and insomnia. Seriously.  :scratch:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

fnord33

I know what you mean. I was about twice as productive when I was miserable and chain smoking. Living a healthy, happy life is probably the worst thing we can do for our writing. At least we're not rock stars though. Then we'd have to do heroin and or Coke to get good results.   ;)
Life is an entanglement of lies to hide it's basic mechanisms. - William Burroughs

Ed

Yeah, same here. When you stop and think about it, there are quite a few famous writers who led torrid and/or often quite miserable lives. Poe, Virginia Wolf, Hemingway, Carver are the first that spring to mind. Same with musicians. I remember Eminem answering the question of why he hadn't done anything lately with a comment about being happy leaving him with nothing to complain about, so he didn't have anything to say, no inspiration.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Rev. Austin

Hello all! I've been offline, but now I'm not! WOOP!

As you were ;)
facebook.com/waynegoodchildishaunted
Stay in touch! I don't mean that in a pervy way.

Ed

Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

I was five minutes from dying of hypothermia today. Two hours in Chester Cathedral for my wife's Masters conferment. Besides hooting and applauding for the less than a minute she received her award I mainly went to film graduates tripping over their gowns, woman wearing very high heels and not used to them. Didn't happen. A grand gothic cathedral but as cold as hell. I clapped all the grads just to get warmer.

I had to call into my bank to see a savings adviser. He made the mistake of asking if I enjoyed taking it easy being a retired teacher. So I sold him a copy of ARIA: Left Luggage. Hah.

elay2433

Got this anxious feeling that I sort of love and sort of can't stand. It's an anxiety that I haven't felt in a long time. Not since I subbed my last story, which is going back about a year or more now.

Threw my hat into the Clarion West ring. Clarion West is one of a few premier workshops that run here in the States. This year three of the six instructors are people I'd love to learn from: Neil Gaiman, Ellen Datlow and Joe Hill. The other three instructors have similarly impressive resumes, but I'm not familiar with their work.

This thing is like crit group on steroids. It's a six week live-in study. One week under each instructor. They only accept 18 participants. It's $30-$40 to apply, depending on how early you sub your application, so that helps keep the application number from becoming ridiculously high. Still, I've seen speculated that there are anywhere from 200 to 2000 applicants. And it's $3,600 tuition.

I can't afford it, not without plunging back into the debt I just climbed out of. But of course I don't have to unless the fates smile upon me.

I think that's why I was okay giving it a shot. I'm poisoned with hope, but I'll be relieved to receive a rejection.

Sent in the first 25 pages of a novella and a synopsis. Stuff I wrote with no box. First stuff I wrote in a long time that I really loved, so I have that going for me.

I'm expecting a rejection, but whichever way it goes, I want to get back on the ball. Gonna get to work on a story for April crit group. Trouble with my stories lately is that they never finish up anywhere near the typical short-story word count.

How's the flow for everyone else lately?

marc_chagall

Good luck with that, whichever way it goes. The fact that you've applied in the first place shows terrific guts.

I'm busy still writing my mother's biography. Have done 25000 words in three weeks, which aint bad, but still a long way to go. I intend to enter it for a biography competition at the end of this month, so I need to get at least the first bit polished to submit, plus have a good idea of the scope of the whole thing. Main problem: getting information out of my mother. She's not on the internet. We're both slightly deaf on the phone. To visit her is best part of a six hundred mile round trip so I can't pop round for coffee every so often. She sends me spidery handwritten notes which I decode and try to turn into something readable. The basic story is dramatic and scary and strong; it's the details that are hard to get, and of course I can't make them up. I'm so used to making stuff up, it feels very weird not to be able to let my imagination wander free. Thank god for the internet! She mentions places or people and I can look them up and get information at the click of a mouse. Couldn't had done it at all pre-internet, not without a massive budget to enable me to go to the places mentioned (mostly Slovakia, a bit of Czech Republic, Austria and Belarus).

desertwomble

Good luck Elay and Delph with your writing projects.

On a more modest note, I'm trying to build up stories with less of a body count (or preferably a zero body count) to submit to the 'womag' and popular magazine markets.

As you can imagine, this is a tall order.

DW :cheesy:
http://chaucers-uncle.weebly.com/

www.paulfreeman.weebly.com
 
Read my most recent winning Global Short Story Competition entry:
http://www.inscribemedia.co.uk/assets/october-ebook.pdf

Ed

Good luck Elay, whichever way it goes. Fantastic experience if you make it through the selection process, worth every penny I would have thought :afro:

Delph -- all sounds very exciting and interesting. My mother's biography would be very tame in comparison, and all I would need to retrace her steps would be a weekend rail pass :grin:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Ed

Quote from: desertwomble on March 16, 2013, 05:41:49 AM
Good luck Elay and Delph with your writing projects.

On a more modest note, I'm trying to build up stories with less of a body count (or preferably a zero body count) to submit to the 'womag' and popular magazine markets.

As you can imagine, this is a tall order.

DW :cheesy:

Yes, I think all stories benefit from the sudden death of at least one character. Perhaps that's why I missed out on that screen writer gig for Barney the purple dinosaur backalong.... :scratch:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

delboy

As Ed said, good luck everyone with their projects!

For me, it's all about thrillers at the moment. The last few shorts I've written have been intentionally written in a rapid-pace style and I'm now working my way through a large pile of modern thrillers (and a larger pile of old ones, which are far better  ::) ). Writing a fair bit, too, but it's mostly practice.

Regards
Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Geoff_N

My writing has slipped in wordage lately cos of family life and proofreader / other project stuff.
As a member of the BSFA I am entitled to vote for the winning novel and short story award of 2012. Trouble is I don't like any of the six shorts at all. I wouldn't have encouraged Rob Blevins to include them in any of our anthos or mags. They ranged from over long rambling repetitive waffling to hackneyed info dumping nonesense. All of them would have been slaughtered in our CD crit group. What's happening to today's magazine decision makers? 

Geoff_N

One of the stories on the short list is Ian Sales 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains'. Hard SF where in an alternative Earth the cold war still reigns. The Earth has a wipeout with a nuclear war stranding a group of US astronauts on the Moon. But they have a device, which if works, can move them to a parallel universe (if I've interpreted it correctly) and thus get back to a non-nuked Earth. I won't spoil the ending in case any you can get hold of a copy. Ian Sales is a good writer, his style reminds me of Del's Silver. Another, Immersion, by the literary SF writer, Aliette de Bodard, is an interesting take on the virtual world where we can live as avatars. Trouble is the topic is done to death eg in Snow Crash by Neal Stephensen way back in 1992.
I've yet to read one more. China Mieville's Three Moments of an Explosion.