Melancholy Mondays

No time for tomfoolery

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:34:43 GMT

I've decided to stop feeling sorry for myself, to stop regretting going to college. I'm manning up with my bad self. I'm taking back the joy I used to have in writing. I'm going back to where I told a story because I had a story to tell. I wanted to hear it, so I wrote it. The simple of joy of creating, without the internal pressure of who's going to read it, of worrying over getting published, not worrying whether I suck or not.

I've decided the best way to do this is just to write. Get all the awkwardness over and done with so I can start writing again. I seriously, seriously want to get paid for writing fabulous books, but before I can do that, I have to actually write something fabulous. And before I can write fabulously, I have to give myself permission to write really, really badly. Or, in Annie Lamott's word, write a shitty first draft:

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. (from Bird by Bird)

I have a hard time doing anything without deadlines. Not that I meet deadlines, but having them forces me to get something, anything done. And under pressure, sometimes I produce diamonds. Tiny, infinitesimal diamonds, but still diamonds. I am going to start off small, and build.

My goal for this week is going to be 7k. That's not a lot. I mean, during NaNoWriMo, I'd write more than that in five days. But since this isn't NaNoWriMo and I can't write that intensely all the time (as well as the fact that I haven't been writing for awhile and I need to get back into the swing of things), I think seven k is a good place to start. If it's too easy, I can make next week's goal higher. If it's too hard, well, I'll keep it at 7k. We'll see how much I can push myself.

I'm off to work on an outline. Fun fun fun.

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Put me out of my misery

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:55:38 GMT

I'm in a really bad writing place... And I don't know how to get out of it. I need to, and fast. I have two stories left for my final workshop (my first one completely bombed), and I have to get something written like, now, if I want to graduate with honors.

Somebody shoot me in the head. One shot to the brain. Bullet in the brain pan. That's all I'm asking.

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Writer's block

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:00:08 GMT

For last hour and a half I've been trying to work on my HanWriMo story. This is the first HanWriMo I've actually participated in--or rather, will have participated in, once I post something officially on TTR. I had a story all outlined. It's the last in a trilogy I started years ago. I've had it outlined for ages, I just never wrote it. I figured I could milk it for at least 15K, so it was ideal for this year's HanWriMo. Apparently not, in the past hour and a half, I've written approximately 600 words. And I'm not proud of any of them. I reread the first chapter and went, uuugggh. No wonder no one reviews my stories. They're pretty awful. Well-constructed gramatically speaking, but the content is so innane. I'm sick of it.

My count is 1057. Only 14K to go. Maybe I'll slog through just because. I hate doing that, though. As much as I value raw material, it's not worth much unless it's shaped into a cohesive story. I'll probably post my word count here, and see if I can't finish the story before the deadline. That's the only way I'll post it to TTR. Lame, I know, but whoever said I was cool? :D

I feel so neurotic right now.

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Big Read's top 100

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:34:25 GMT

Stolen from a LJ not worth reading. (Irony is fun.)

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4~~) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.~~
5) Books I’ve tried to read, at some point, are labeled with an asterisk. It takes a bit to get me to abandon a book, but it happens.

Anything unmarked I either haven’t heard much about, or feel indifferently towards.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I haven’t read all of it yet. Or, there are some bits I’m pretty sure I’ve read and just don’t remember. Covering all bases here :D)
~~7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~~
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I have read Zamyatin’s We, which is what inspired 1984. If we’re giving out E’s for Effort.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Eight Cousins was better.)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (This is kind of a lie… there are some of his plays I plan on avoiding. But I’ll read most of them. Eventually.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
~~19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger~~ (Avoiding this one like the plague. Although I will be seeing the movie, hooray for Eric Bana!)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I enjoyed Mill on the Floss, I’ve heard this is better.)
~~21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell~~ (Never, never and never.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I should… but I’m afeared.)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
~~27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky~~ (Demons has ruined me forever.)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
~~38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres~~
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding *
~~50 Atonement - Ian McEwan~~
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
~~68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding~~
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
~~70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville~~ *
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray *
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens *
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
~~83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker~~
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
~~91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad~~
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Honestly, this sounds like an ego-stroking, “rah rah rah, aren’t we so smart” sort of meme, but since reading is sort of my life, I thought I’d give it a go. Of course, I’ve only read about a quarter, so maybe I’ve epic failed college and life :P

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Excuse me whilst I have a strange interlude.

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:18:03 GMT

Disregard please.

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Writing blog. Or something.

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:53:50 GMT

I was thinking of making this my writing blog. I know I have a poetry blog, but I don't have a place to talk about writing, to bitch about my lack of skill and writer's block, and what not. Story updates, eventually, if I can find someone who cares.

I don't know, I feel so emo when I post my poetry online. And I'm concerned about copyright issues, or problems if by some miracle I get published. I don't know.

Thoughts?

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