What To Do When....

I was going to do a big, long NaNoWriMo post but instead I got stuck on a chapter and came out with this. I thought I'd share:

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That was the result of banging my head against my keyboard several times and represents the total sum creative output of about the last three days.

(I also wish to, apropos of nothing, commend Google for making the "Complain to Google" button so obvious and yet so natural within the post editor, as if I could simply complain to Google simply for something to do, or I could send this post to them as a metaphorical statement on the Blogger platform.)

This was mostly an exercise in getting my hands moving. Look! You can do it too!

It's Not Perfect, and That's OK

I just finished re-reading The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy this evening and, as with any book, the second read made me think about a lot of things. I always catch more of the little tricks, naturally. More importantly, my standards for authors are higher now, by virtue of my exposure to publishing and the "what it takes" of writing, than they were six or seven years ago when I first read it.

The important thing is how much it still worked. I still fundamentally enjoyed the book, I still nearly cried at the end and I still loved the writing and the slow build and release of tension, the battle construction, and so many other parts of the story and the style of its telling.

How To Make Bad Writing Good Writing in a Good Way (Or: A Rant About the Editing Process)

Rant time. I did mention there might be a few of those. And while we're on awkward openings, I'm falling into the habit of sub-titling my posts. I shall valiantly attempt to stop this from happening as soon as possible.

But it does segue nicely (uh oh) into a topic that's been bouncing around my head only slightly longer than guilt about not posting more frequently:

It's kind of fun--and it can make you sound way more intelligent than you actually are--to talk at length about the editing process like it's some kind of magic bullet. Like you can go from jot notes to polished product with a five (try 250) step plan. Partly it's been banging around in my head because I've spent a large part of my summer in the vicinty of another writer going through this process and all its assorted deadline angst, and partly it was motivated by a question posed to me about what to do with a really bad piece of writing.