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All the world’s your stage: the performativity of online presence
My freshman year of college, I discovered MUSHing, specifically Elendor, the Tolkien-based MUSH. Besides being a hole for creativity (well, who needs to write anything original when you’re in a world as detailed as that one…) it was my first real exposure to an online community. And it’s there that I discovered the vast difference between real and perceived personalities in virtual space. I called it a MUSHPersona. There were people, for instance, whom I knew in real life as relatively mild-mannered bookworms, who online became sarcastic, self-important, jerks. Shyguys turn into relentless flirts. Housewives turn into vixens. And I’ve found, especially with the birth of social media and the…
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Sitting on the curb of the empty parking lot of the store where they let me play the organ…
Central North Carolina wants to be the coast of Britain. Good lord, it has not stopped raining since I landed in RDU last Wednesday. Coupled with the fact that my husband Michael has been away on business all weekend, and my two-year-old has not been outdoors at all since Friday… yes, excitement all around. Writing has been not exactly scarce, but a little scattered. Since I left a week and a half ago, I managed around 10,000 words, which isn’t bad. I’m not precisely sure where the words came from, but I know what Scrivener says, and I have a tendency to believe it rather than my own feelings of…
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Let’s give her something to write about…
There are likely a series of posts I could do stemming from my trip this past week to the West Coast, but I’m finding I just don’t have the distance I need yet. Still having trouble sleeping, mostly due to the time change, and feeling generally spent. The short rundown is that I spent a week visiting two relatives who are both fighting cancer… as you might well imagine, this has left me a bit dazed, to say the least. In the mean time, my focus is on writing, not the blog, for the moment. I’ve got to get my groove back before I start pondering long posts again. And…
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Tweeting in the Writing World
For years I had the hardest time writing. It wasn’t that I didn’t have ideas, or inspiration, or even time. As many point out, novel writing isn’t something you have to be unemployed or financed to do. A little bit, every day, adds up very quickly. I started a blog when I finished the first draft of my novel with the assumption that if I had some method of accountability other than myself, I would produce more work. I started podcasting the drafts, asking for feedback from listeners. And it sort of helped. But not really. I was still dawdling editing my draft, still extremely undisciplined and totally erratic. I…
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A post above the skies
From yesterday: I’m somewhere high above the earth, writing a blog post, on my way to Santa Ana/Orange County airport to visit my little sister. You may have heard me mention in other posts, but she is currently undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After spending four days with her, I’m going to be visiting my great aunt in San Francisco, who’s also been diagnosed with cancer. It’s a bittersweet “vacation”–I found it very difficult to leave my two and a half year old this morning. But as usual, he seemed more besotted with my mom than worried about his Mommy going on a trip across the country. Someday he will…
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Reading writers of influence: the importance of reading and writing
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. – Stephen King, On Writing I read Stephen King’s On Writing sometime around 2003 or so, before my husband and I were married. I was working at Starbucks, and getting ready to enter my MA program after having been wait listed for an MFA. At the time, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life; I had relocated 800 miles south, was living in an old, drafty, flea-infested one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling Victorian, and I was adrift on the sea, as it were. I had about five…
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Up there.
There is a new banner up there. Yes, I tweaked the last one. I fell in love with this NASA shot of the Witch Head Nebula (I don’t think she looks like a witch, but hey… that’s just me). You’ll likely see some more, um, changes in the next few days. I like this format a whole lot better than the last, which was a little to “generic blog” for me. But when there’s tinkering there’s likely to be dust–so excuse the look of the place if it looks a little weird for a while.
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On a hobbity note.
Two days ago I clicked on one of agent Colleen Lindsay’s blog posts, mentioning opinions on Tolkien. I read, and ended up entrenched in a rather heated debate stemming from an essay by Richard K. Morgan. After two really long posts, and kind of working myself up about this, I came to a few conclusions. If you’ve read either of my blogs, you know I often cite Tolkien as an influence–lots of fantasy writers do that. It’s a common link for a lot of us, and I find that I climg more to the texts since the movies (not that I don’t love the movies). So, in a nutshell, here’s…
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Just to clear something up re: self-publishing
Okay, so the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a great deal about “self-publishing” and its definitions. Publishing has been radically altered because of the Internet, and so have the concepts of rights ownership and creative property. From the getgo, when I started The Aldersgate Cycle Blog, the idea was that I wanted to invite people into my creative process with no strings attached. Yes, technically podcasting my chapters is self-publishing, but it’s not the end-product. I don’t plan on going through Lulu or any of print-on-demand publishers at this space in time because, frankly, I haven’t even tried to get the book published. From the beginning I have referred…
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The white space: what we don’t write
Writers are always told: write what you know. It’s as cliche was “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Unfortunately this leads to lots of fledgling writers composing short stories about twenty-somethings disillusioned with life, breakups, and college. At least, that’s the bulk of what I wrote in my undergraduate writing classes (and what most folks wrote)–for the most part, they were drivel. The thing is, you can take the adage to mean more than one thing. It’s not just writing about what you know, as in what your life is about, but also what kind of reading you do, what worlds you know. Hence, these days I write fantasy,…
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Writing to reach you
I’ve been in a writing zone lately. Every day, writing. In the car, in the house, upstairs and downstairs. It doesn’t seem to matter. As I’ve mentioned over at the Aldersgate Cycle blog, I’ve been so busy that blog writing isn’t really a possibility (except um, obviously right now). I realized I’ve clocked about 70K in the last month and three days. Which is impressive. But what really got me is that I’ve written 35K in the last ten days. Though I’m typically very, um, unpredictable when it comes to writing, I have little in the way of explanation for this one. To my knowledge no one has spiked my…
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Living with a writer.
I sometimes wonder what it’s like dealing with me. I mean, being a writer and immersing yourself in imaginary and weird worlds (and sometimes… universes, omniverses, and fractalverses) is by no stretch a “normal” thing to do. My kid, sure, he’s two, and he probably thinks what I do is normal. But how do I explain to him what’s going on in my head? So, in a nod to my husband for putting up with me, here’s some things you might notice if you live with a writer: Incoherent mumbling. This is usually reserved for writers in the process of thinking a novel out. You may hear quips of dialogues,…
