Possibly the last actual #VPXV post?
Oct. 21st, 2011 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanate[[first 3 paragraphs from yesterday afternoon]]
They're replacing the center beam under the house today, and the process of banging bits of temporary wall into place, and then cutting out the old beam is a touch nerve-wracking.grauwulf is home this afternoon for his first grad-school final, as it needs some sort of weird proctoring web-cam set-up that takes a lot of bandwidth & a 3-hour time-block, and I continue to find it odd that at any given moment I'm slightly less frazzled by the various construction noises. It's just that I've been around for a great deal more moments of them. At any rate, he's taken over my sewing room for the duration of the test, while I sit downstairs and try not to flinch every time they start pounding more bits into or out of place.
I've written around 2.5k since this whole construction thing started, and half of that was the homework assignment for VP. All last week I had bits of mental activity sinking into my muscles in the form of physical tension and making various bits of my legs sore (admittedly, part of that could have been the chairs) but it wasn't until I got back home that I realized I hadn't been clenching my jaw all week-- which I only noticed because I started again, of course. A lot of the other VP students went through various periods of transformative misery over the course of the workshop; I got the miserable out of the way on the drive up and didn't look back.
A lot of the lecture material covered stuff I'd already seen somewhere or another in the last decade or two (yes, there were digressions back to Literature Arts in junior high school or before) which is good review, and there was new stuff in there, but on the whole it started off mildly disappointing. I mentioned this to Patrick in my one-on-one on Tuesday afternoon, and he said that they try to pitch the content towards the mid-level, and I should ask questions if I wanted more in depth. Which is all very well, of course, but if I knew what it was I needed to know, I could have gone off and found it by now. (I did not say this... and it's possibly my own fault for reading all and sundry advice to writers on the internet & expecting new stuff anyway.)
As it turns out, what I needed to know was Steve Brust's theory of cool stuff (The secret of writing is that it's all about the cool stuff.) followed by most of the rest of his lecture and a bunch of conversational snippets throughout the week. Ok, to back up slightly. Point one: according toaanna_t, Steve Brust looks like a hard-drinking, hard-smoking cross between Hemmingway and a pirate. Only then he opens his mouth and half the time what comes out of it is positively gleeful. (see also: Railroad Bill) Point two: I was that sort of kid who turned around and tried to write a story for all the things they told us "couldn't be done" because I'm contrary like that, and whose response to having to read Beowulf for the second time in as many years was to write a terribly long and quite silly parody. In fact, I think I still have the twelve of fifteen pages of handwritten notebook paper somewhere in a filing cabinet.
VP was very much one of those rare contexts where you can say whatever it is you thing of and people don't look at you blankly about it. One of the ongoing metaphors for the week was the division of self and/or writing into two sides: muse/beast vs inner editor, dinosaurs vs sodomy or boyfriend vs roller derby [one of those is backwards of the other], and so forth. I have traces of writer vs reader brain going on, but if I'm going to assign myself multiple personalities it would have to be the ragamuffin vs some slightly depressive chick who's good at making pretty things. The ragamuffin tends to use up stuff and bang it up a bit, so the other me fields all the responsible things and then has a tendency to forget that it's ok to have fun. So I end up doing things like getting all caught up in worrying about total plot coherence in the first draft of something particularly silly or convincing myself I can't just refer to something as being magic in a world that clearly has magic. Obviously, this is taking things too far.
So, listening to a lecture from someone who talks about collecting themes and plot devices like a bunch of toys and pulling them out to see what can be done with this trope, with all the joy of a kid getting presents, was very much what I needed. It brought back some of the way I used to think about writing before I'd quite figured out it was work, too. Of course writing is work (so's everything), but it's the sort of work it's silly to do if you aren't somewhere along the line having a lot of fun with it. And, you know, getting to put in a whole bunch of cool stuff. We do this for the love (which I remembered), and even love gets kind of old if you can't be silly with it sometimes. File that under useful life lessons, and carry on.
Also of interest: I spent a long time avoiding fandom ("all about StarTrek & I don't watch TV") and knowing real authors because I didn't want to end up ruining things I liked if I didn't like the author. I have a vague idea that this had to do with reading an early "about the author" blurb about Robin McKinley and being offended by her choice in writing music... In any case, I'm mostly over that bit, but it had not previously occurred to me that it might work the other way around. After the story about why he wrote Agyar, however, I kind of want to go read it again, and that copy of Freedom and Necessity thatheuchera got me years ago is sitting on the coffee table taunting me while I do revisions instead.
They're replacing the center beam under the house today, and the process of banging bits of temporary wall into place, and then cutting out the old beam is a touch nerve-wracking.
grauwulf is home this afternoon for his first grad-school final, as it needs some sort of weird proctoring web-cam set-up that takes a lot of bandwidth & a 3-hour time-block, and I continue to find it odd that at any given moment I'm slightly less frazzled by the various construction noises. It's just that I've been around for a great deal more moments of them. At any rate, he's taken over my sewing room for the duration of the test, while I sit downstairs and try not to flinch every time they start pounding more bits into or out of place. I've written around 2.5k since this whole construction thing started, and half of that was the homework assignment for VP. All last week I had bits of mental activity sinking into my muscles in the form of physical tension and making various bits of my legs sore (admittedly, part of that could have been the chairs) but it wasn't until I got back home that I realized I hadn't been clenching my jaw all week-- which I only noticed because I started again, of course. A lot of the other VP students went through various periods of transformative misery over the course of the workshop; I got the miserable out of the way on the drive up and didn't look back.
A lot of the lecture material covered stuff I'd already seen somewhere or another in the last decade or two (yes, there were digressions back to Literature Arts in junior high school or before) which is good review, and there was new stuff in there, but on the whole it started off mildly disappointing. I mentioned this to Patrick in my one-on-one on Tuesday afternoon, and he said that they try to pitch the content towards the mid-level, and I should ask questions if I wanted more in depth. Which is all very well, of course, but if I knew what it was I needed to know, I could have gone off and found it by now. (I did not say this... and it's possibly my own fault for reading all and sundry advice to writers on the internet & expecting new stuff anyway.)
As it turns out, what I needed to know was Steve Brust's theory of cool stuff (The secret of writing is that it's all about the cool stuff.) followed by most of the rest of his lecture and a bunch of conversational snippets throughout the week. Ok, to back up slightly. Point one: according to
aanna_t, Steve Brust looks like a hard-drinking, hard-smoking cross between Hemmingway and a pirate. Only then he opens his mouth and half the time what comes out of it is positively gleeful. (see also: Railroad Bill) Point two: I was that sort of kid who turned around and tried to write a story for all the things they told us "couldn't be done" because I'm contrary like that, and whose response to having to read Beowulf for the second time in as many years was to write a terribly long and quite silly parody. In fact, I think I still have the twelve of fifteen pages of handwritten notebook paper somewhere in a filing cabinet. VP was very much one of those rare contexts where you can say whatever it is you thing of and people don't look at you blankly about it. One of the ongoing metaphors for the week was the division of self and/or writing into two sides: muse/beast vs inner editor, dinosaurs vs sodomy or boyfriend vs roller derby [one of those is backwards of the other], and so forth. I have traces of writer vs reader brain going on, but if I'm going to assign myself multiple personalities it would have to be the ragamuffin vs some slightly depressive chick who's good at making pretty things. The ragamuffin tends to use up stuff and bang it up a bit, so the other me fields all the responsible things and then has a tendency to forget that it's ok to have fun. So I end up doing things like getting all caught up in worrying about total plot coherence in the first draft of something particularly silly or convincing myself I can't just refer to something as being magic in a world that clearly has magic. Obviously, this is taking things too far.
So, listening to a lecture from someone who talks about collecting themes and plot devices like a bunch of toys and pulling them out to see what can be done with this trope, with all the joy of a kid getting presents, was very much what I needed. It brought back some of the way I used to think about writing before I'd quite figured out it was work, too. Of course writing is work (so's everything), but it's the sort of work it's silly to do if you aren't somewhere along the line having a lot of fun with it. And, you know, getting to put in a whole bunch of cool stuff. We do this for the love (which I remembered), and even love gets kind of old if you can't be silly with it sometimes. File that under useful life lessons, and carry on.
Also of interest: I spent a long time avoiding fandom ("all about StarTrek & I don't watch TV") and knowing real authors because I didn't want to end up ruining things I liked if I didn't like the author. I have a vague idea that this had to do with reading an early "about the author" blurb about Robin McKinley and being offended by her choice in writing music... In any case, I'm mostly over that bit, but it had not previously occurred to me that it might work the other way around. After the story about why he wrote Agyar, however, I kind of want to go read it again, and that copy of Freedom and Necessity that
heuchera got me years ago is sitting on the coffee table taunting me while I do revisions instead.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-10-22 05:49 pm (UTC)You will love F&N. Really.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-22 06:07 pm (UTC)(Also I've now read other stuff by Emma Bull, which was all pretty good, so that helps too.)