Going to play at the open mic at El Portillos this Monday, if work doesn’t interfere. I think I’ll try and make that a regular thing for the summer – again, so far as work allows.
Also, videos of my performance on May 30th may be forthcoming. No promises yet, but we’ll see…
So I’ve been busily chasing my tail on the latest project – a novelette-length project which I think could turn out really well if I could actually make it, you know, go somewhere. But fear not: ranting about a project that nobody except me has any reason to care about is not the point of this post. Well, exactly.
A friend asked the other day what my starting point was – do I springboard from plot or character (or something else on a list that could stretch for miles)?
To which I can only give the enlightening answer of, “umm, whatever works”.
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And I feel like we’ve done this before…
Yes, my fellow forum players are once again clamouring for a Plot. A Plot to end all Plots, or at least–not coincidentally–the world.
I remain absolutely baffled. And a little annoyed.
But! It has lead to the coining of a new term:
The Apocolypse Phenomenon: The belief that all conflict must rise from world-ending, apocolyptic events; disaster and mayhem are considered a matter of course.
You know, I swear I had a much cooler definition at last night at 2am, while I was trying to fall asleep. Oh well.
So, the Saturday show went fairly well! I think I would definitely do a show that long again, if given the opportunity. As long as I had more than a week’s notice to fill two hours anyway. (Yes, I knew I would be playing more than a week in advance; I did not know that I would be playing for that long.) It certainly was a learning experience. There are a few things that I would do differently next time.
By the way, for anyone who saw the previous “testing” post on livejournal and is wondering what that’s about, I just installed a plugin called Journalpress that lets you automatically export wordpress posts to blogs using the LJ server. It was completely painless to install, and will make my life easier.
If anyone who happens to be reading this is local to Vernon BC, I’ll be playing from 10:00am – 12:00pm at the Rec Center, for the Vernon environmental fair.
Two hours is a pretty long time! It means that I get a nice long playlist, though, and even though I haven’t decided all what I’m playing yet, I’ve got some fun stuff lined up: A few Barenaked Ladies tunes, several Jonathan Coulton songs (I went for his more general stuff; so if you’re not into songs about zombies and giant squids this shouldn’t scare you away), a couple jazz tunes, a couple country tunes. I have some of my own songs on the list as well, three of which are from my album-in-progress, Accidentals.
The Vernon Second Wind Concert Band, along with the Vernon Secondary School band, is also doing an outdoor concert the evening of Wednesday, June 3rd. Show starts at 7pm.
Both these events are free, so if you’re local you should come check us out! More detail about these events after the cut.
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Just determined.
A snippet of real life dialogue for you…
Me: I’m nearly finished with the novel. Five scenes, maybe as many as seven, but no more.
Friend: That’s great! You’ll have it done in no time.
(pause)
Friend: Do sleep, though.
Hmm. We’ll have to see what happens to this “blurb about what I’m reading” thing now that I’m no longer required to do it for class. In the meantime…
Black Powder War – Hooray for Naomi Novik books. They’re so easy to read. I’m happy to work for what I’m reading, but it’s nice to read something light and fun sometimes, too.
I’d heard a couple things about this book beforehand, or to be more accurate, I’d heard those things more generally about some of the middle books in the series. Someone mentioned to me that after Laurence and Temeraire go to China in book two the series settles into an easy “go to far away places, see how dragons live there” sort of pattern for a few books. I didn’t feel that for BPW (though we’ll see about the next couple books. This book’s focus was completely different so far as I’m concerned.
The nasty cliff-hangers that were also mentioned, though… Uh, yeah. I can see that.
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Well, I’m glad that’s over and done with.
Over the last couple days I’ve been elbow-deep in HTML and CSS – basically re-coding the backbone of the entire layout. No, it doesn’t look that different, but the site should display correctly in IE7 and widescreen monitors now. Hooray for improvement. (There might be a few more tweaks to the site design in the next little while, but nothing major.) The changes I made are also a more correct way of doing things, coding-wise, which is always a plus.
Besides, I got to experience the joy of floating div layers for the first time. No, I’m actually not being facetious – they took me a while to get the hang of, but I really like working with them. The next time I design a webpage (because it’s something I do so often) those will definitely be the layout base. But onto more interesting updates:
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Well, maybe not so wonderful.
On the off chance that anyone visits in the next couple of hours, you’ll probably see some strange stuff happening to the website. I’m attempting to clean up the code a bit, so bear with me. Thanks 
Please note: All the pages are working correctly except the home page (figures). Please feel free to peruse the rest of the website. Links below:
About
Audio
Current
Excerpts
Thanks for your patience.
(Or maybe three or four…)
Near the beginning of the year we were asked to pick the one word that best described our works. Not a sentence, not a phrase: a single word.
At the time, I was convinced that this was an impossible task. How was I supposed to pick one word that accurately summed up even my 325 page (and counting) novel, let alone that and everything else? But an exercise is an exercise, so I bucked up and ultimately settled on “ghosts” as my one word. Not just things that go bump in the night (though I am a fantasy writer, so I guess I could go there) but echoes, memories, nostalgia… At the time I made some flip remark about how this one word didn’t inform all of my work by a long shot, but at least it was a theme I had worked with recently.
The more closely I considered my old works, however, and the more I expanded on my newer ones, the more I realized that my “not by a long shot” remark was completely off-base. Now that I’ve had two terms to chew on it, I’m hard-pressed to think of a piece of mine that doesn’t involve ghosts in some way, shape or form.
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Yes, the long-awaited (and even longer to write, jeez) book 3. Oh, and various smallish website updates. Just a couple of things switched around, expanded upon, phrased a little better, and I added a project to the project page.
So about that book three. First off, this particular essay – if you want to call it an essay – is quite long. Much longer than the other ones I’ve been posting. (I am doing these as assignments, after all; the parameters of this one were different.) And I’ll say it again, this is not intended as a book review. This particular not-review is an analysis of various technical and structural aspects of this novel and how they work.
And yes, there will be spoilers. Don’t worry about giving me any flac for it; I’ve caught some already.
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Still haven’t forgotten about “book 3″. It’s coming…
Next up on the not-review chopping block: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
I know, I know. I’m behind the times. Better late than never.
There are definitely good things to be said about this book. The writing is plain, but vivid and concise. It’s engaging and entertaining. There’s themes worth unpacking. (Which I’m not going to do.) Some things bugged me, however. (’Ware some spoilers.)
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I didn’t skip book number three. I just haven’t written about it yet. I’m writing about it for a slightly different assignment and will just crosspost that here instead of writing something new, because I’m lazy.
The next two reviews – err, the things that I said are not reviews – are going to be a bit long. Because I’m, um, lazy?
Bob Defendi’s Death by Cliché (produced by Carolyn Larson) is an interesting book for two reasons. The first is that it’s an interesting book. The second is that it’s a serialized audiobook.
I don’t think this book is dependent on its audio format. But I do think it adds some things.
Sound effects! Shiny shiny shiny shiny No, really. At worst, they’re funny. At best, they’re effective.
Defendi is a wonderful performer. Gushing about Defendi’s amazing voice isn’t that from a technical persective, though, so I won’t. Well, much.
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Been a while, hey? I guess I should do some website-y stuff sometime. I’ve got a few updates I’d like to do to the website over the reading break, and might even write another blog or two while I’m off.
So, those fifty books I said I’d read this year? I’ll probably get tired of keeping track before very long, but in the meantime, I’m supposed to write a short dealy on what I’ve been reading every week for class anyway, so I’ll crosspost. Are you ready to be subjected to my reading tastes? No? Awesome.
Please note: These are NOT intended to be book reviews. They’re very quickly written impressions of the books I’ve read that are intended to make my life easier when annotated bibliography time rolls around, and hopefully still be kind of fun. That said, here goes.
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So I’ve done a few things to the website lately. Fairly small things mostly, like messing around with the navigation bar (I think this arrangement makes a lot more sense). I’ve also been adding things here and there. There’s some stuff on the Excerpts and Currently pages now, and you’ll notice an mp3 player in the sidebar.
That’s right, I finally got around to adding some music. Not much, mind you, but even a little bit seems better than no content at all. The one you’ll see in the sidebar is a quick sample of a song I wrote a couple of years ago. The other is a full audio file calling itself “Slush Monkey”. It’s, ahem, a slightly less professional recording than the other, but it’s fun. You can find the recordings and a bit about them on the Audio page.
In other news, Apple is dropping DRM from iTunes store products.
Good.
Authors tend towards thinking of themselves as striving towards realism in their work, which implies that on some level they’re out to mirror reality. I know, no brainer, right? Except that’s not actually what a storyteller does.
Simply mirroring real life in all its glory doesn’t create real-seeming fiction. In fact, it has the opposite effect. How’s that for counter-intuitive?
We hold fiction to different standards than we do real life (astoundingly enough), and realism in one context means something different than realism in the other. In life, you can have occurences that are random or that don’t tie into a general theme or story arc. People can change in ways that don’t make sense, without reason. Things happen in real life that we would never believe in fiction. Why? It’s a question of different expectations, I think.
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So, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. The only one I’ve ever kept was one from several years ago, where I resolved not to make any more New Year’s resolutions. Keep that in mind as you read: what you see here are not New Year’s resolutions.
No, really, they aren’t. Now, I didn’t spend much time on the NaNoWriMo forums, but after the event itself was over I did check out a couple of the threads. One was a thread called “Big, Fun, and Scary” or something similar in which the posters talked about what they were going to do with all that free time now that NaNo was over.
I had some fun skimming over some of the other goals that were posted, so I posted my own. This was back in mid-December, by the way. (See? Not New Year’s.) Figured I might as well cross-post the list here…
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I ended up partying it up* with some of my high school teachers this weekend. Is that weird?
I should probably warn you: I’m not going anywhere in particular with this. Just ranting.
Christmas music just starts so damn early. I used to think that this was a peculiarity of playing in bands but these days that’s definitely not the case. Christmas starts moment Hallowe’en is over, if it has the decency to wait that long. (I don’t really have a problem with Christmas, I guess. During the latter half of December. Where it belongs.)
So, we’re hearing Christmas music too early, for too long, without much variety. But I have a different problem with Christmas music lately. It’s awful.
Even some of the “classics” kind of get to me now, though that may be just because I’m so jaded over the rest of it. Frosty the Snowman is kind of insipid, when you think about it. Santa Claus is Coming to Town? Here comes Santa Claus? Blatant odes to materialism. But they’re still fun songs that have been done well in the past. There are good songs that have been done well in the past. The new stuff, though…
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Around about November 1st I did something foolish and let a friend talk me into signing up for NaNoWriMo.
Okay, he didn’t have to talk very hard. I’d been thinking about doing it for myself, just to see what kind of volume I could put out. I didn’t think I would actually be able to do it, but I could WriMo my current novel, see how far I could up the word count. I wasn’t planning on actually joining the site and I didn’t actually think I would clock in at 50,000. But when my friend asked if I was going to sign up – why not?
The first week I hardly had time to write at all. I was busy with school assignments due right now, and scrambling to get ready for a trip to Las Vegas (during which I saw Michael Chabon give a speech and an absolutely amazing peformance by Criss Angel and Cirque de Soleil). By the end of the first week I had just under a thousand words. Weeks two and three weren’t much better. The scant time I had for my novel was spent as much time re-outlining and filling plot holes as writing actual prose.
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There’s a boatload of writing advice out there, some of it good, some of it bad. “Write what you know”, I’ve always thought, are words to live by – well, write by – and yet a surprising number of people seem to chafe against it, saying it’s ridiculous or nonsensical. “What does that even mean?” “I’ve never been to Mt. Fuji, but my book is set there” and, my favorite complaint, “But I write fantasy!”
Oookay. Let’s think for a minute about what this expression actually means. Or, maybe it would be better to think about what it doesn’t mean.
I’m pretty sure “write what you know” doesn’t mean that you should only write about the novel that all those nasty agents and editors rejected, or your crappy dayjob, or how all the other kids in school were mean to you.
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So, I run a forum-based role-playing game. Geek alarms going off? Sorry. This actually is about writing, though, even if it’s more particular to some forms than others. Something’s been cropping up on my forum that I find kind of interesting, but of late it’s also starting to get under my skin. (Please try to forgive or at least ignore the odd expletive that may crop up. I may be too tired to properly restrain myself.)
The set-up for play on this forum is actually fairly individualistic. People are free to have their characters come and go as they please within the game’s parameters and to build their own plots and relationships by interacting with other characters. We don’t have unified, over-arching plotlines. Necessarily.
We get by fine without them, in fact. Except I seem to be the only one who thinks so. Everyone else is clamouring for one. And – what really gets me – is that the prerequisite for “unified, overarching plotline” is apparently a major calamity.
I just don’t get this fixation with disaster.
A friend of mine pointed out that conflict drives plot. Without conflict, storytelling in any form becomes uninteresting. It’s the obvious answer. But do me a favour, if you would.
Open up your dictionary of choice. Flip to where it lists “conflict”. Look for the words “calamity”, “disaster”, “catastrophe”, or “apocolypse”, possibly modified by the words “world-ending”.
No, I don’t see them either.
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Framenkomon – I barely managed to drag myself out of bed to catch these guys, and exerted the effort mostly because I’d promised their sax/flute player, who happened to by my grade twelve biology teacher, that I’d watch their performance. I was glad I did, though. Much the same as the previous day’s opener, not rollicking performers, but definitely nice music. The first time I’ve ever heard “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” played on a flute, and probably the last.
Flora Ware – This young woman sang a mixture of classic jazz hits and original tunes. Good band, decent stage presence, though she tended to disappear when she wasn’t actually singing or addressing the audience. She certainly had a pleasant voice, though she was a bit off-key in places. Never by very much, but enough, and often enough, to be noticeable.
This band was also living proof that the musical community is a small, small, world. Yet another stand-up bass player who’s no longer with our swing band showed up to play for Flora, and with another two bands that day besides. Birney’s got to be one of the best bass players I’ve ever heard. Anyway, rambling aside, overall I did enjoy Flora’s sound.
The Blues Brothers Too – Don’t let the suits, ties, and bowler hats fool you – these guys are defintely goofs. I suppose you have to expect this from a pair of guys who pull up to a concert in a police car, sirens wailing.
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