Writing Bug

I’m more and more tempted to write some fic­tion again. It’s been years since I did that. I’m good with char­ac­ters and envi­ron­ment, but not so good with plot. I don’t like to write about neg­a­tive things, or nasty peo­ple, which is rather prob­lem­atic when you need to have conflict.

I know part of it is read­ing books and think­ing, “Damn, I could do bet­ter than that.” But to be real­is­tic, any­body who has fin­ished a book is doing bet­ter than I actu­ally have done.

One thing that’s really get­ting to me is the num­ber of anti-​​fat state­ments that get thrown in to so many sto­ries. They have noth­ing to do with the story – they just hap­pen because of the authors’ prej­u­dice. Describ­ing a minor char­ac­ter as fat is a cheap short­cut, because most read­ers will assume the per­son is lazy, sloppy, and not ter­ri­bly intel­li­gent (or a hyper­fo­cused geek with no social skills if he is smart).

I know that start­ing out with a “mes­sage” is a crappy way to write fic­tion, though. Mes­sages are bet­ter expressed in essays, not stories.

Still, I have this itch. Bah.

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Happy Mother’s Day!

I’ve cer­tainly had a sweet one :-)

Michelle Sagara wrote a won­der­ful post today about how moth­er­ing is like writing.

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Laptop Research & Shopping

Sam and I spent most of our date time look­ing at lap­tops. Yes, we’re finally replac­ing the one that died last sum­mer. Yay!

I find it eas­ier to put what I find online in con­text after hav­ing actu­ally played with a bunch of machines tonight, so I’ll be doing a lot of research online.

Any­body have any strong rec­om­men­da­tions or good/​bad expe­ri­ences to share? Knowl­edge of any places that give “edu­ca­tional dis­counts” that aren’t just “steer your stu­dents to us and we’ll give you a lit­tle lower price on your own machines” deals? Sure expe­ri­ence exor­cis­ing Vista from a “Vista-​​compatible” PC? Please speak up!
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What do you want to read or hear?

I recorded some more pieces, but need to wait for Sam to “pro­duce” them (clean them up and add appro­pri­ate music). One of them isn’t some­thing I would have cho­sen myself, but Todd, who cre­ated Live Read­ings, asked to hear oth­ers read it. It turned out bet­ter than I thought it would. And it was fun to do some­thing that I wouldn’t have chosen.

So it’s request time! What would you like me to record, or write about?
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Semester Is Past the Half-​​way Point!

And so far, I’ve only lost one point in my Project Man­age­ment class, none in the other class. That was due to a stu­pid mou­s­ing error — bad hands! Oh well, if that’s all my hands cost me this semes­ter, I’ll be happy.

The career course required us to do “long-​​term career plan­ning” this week. I don’t know how use­ful their idea of career plan­ning is, to be hon­est, in today’s econ­omy. There aren’t many peo­ple who can count on mov­ing up steadily in one path, due to the fact that the econ­omy changes so much more quickly than it did 30 to 50 years ago. Do I feel san­guine about mak­ing pre­dic­tions as to where I’ll be, pro­fes­sion­ally, in 30 years? Um, no. For one thing, I’ll be 71 years old then! For another, I’ll be happy just to get back to work, period!

Today’s Thing-​​a-​​Day time was spent col­or­ing. It was nice.

I have a happy Sam­bear danc­ing in front of me, because he just posted Chap­ter 17 of Heart of the Hunter. He already hit his word tar­get for the novel, but hap­pily, he isn’t stop­ping ’til the plot is wrapped up.

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