Writing & Networking
I've been meaning to update for a while, but like the rest of my writing - it keeps getting stuck on the draft stage. So, here goes.
First, the most exciting news -
For the past few years I've been beta'ing Mums-the-Word's White Collar fics, which gave me the greatest privilege of reading her fics ahead of everybody else. Her stories always draw me in, even when it's not a genre I'm particularly fond of, and I think it was a real loss to the white collar community when she hung up her fanficcing pen.
She recently branched out into original fiction and published her first book. I highly recommend anything she writes.
*
I signed up to an intensive 5-hour writing workshop. We were supposed to do hands-on work on our current stories, but I wasn't about to share my fanfic WIP with anybody in the group (just giving the backstory seemed daunting), so instead I took a vague idea I had for an original story. Which meant I wasn't really doing any hands-on anything, because my idea was really too vague for that stage.
The workshop emphasized three things in writing a story (in descending order of importance):
- heart - find the one sentence summary that makes you excited about the story
- drive - the character's struggles
- skeleton - the basic genres
I came back home and tried to find the heart of my current WIP. It's a White Collar story about Neal getting into trouble (what else), and thinking about it, I realized that Peter was missing from most of it. So I changed the focus from Neal to Peter&Neal. This led to a couple of intensive weeks of (re-)writing. But then, once I got all the new scenes plotted out, my drive petered out again. I either didn't find the heart of the story, or I'm just not in a writing mood.
*
I ran across the following comic:
It was a serialized comic in which the artist and his pen teach kids about the art of cartooning. I do love artists doing meta. In any case, this was a story in which the comics were being destroyed by a scary shadowy figure, and the final reveal is that it's the artist himself, who had trouble adjusting to using new technology.
Or, as he says here: "It's always like that. Usually the comics artist's greatest enemy is himself, with all his doubts and insecurities."
I added it to my 'inspiration wall' (which is currently not really inspiring me to do anything, with all my doubts and insecurities)
*
I was watching a show about ancient archaeology and they were discussing the Greek influence on the Phoenician communities about the 5th or so centuries BCE, when lo and behold, this pops up on the screen.
It sort of reminded me of the 'Tomb of the Diver' frescoes I used for one of my recent fics. And that's because it is. The show credited it as "diners", which seems to be the file name they found online.
Turns out you can learn something by writing.
*
Still thinking about my social network idea. I got all excited for a while, but then lost my drive. Now I'm slowly regaining it.
I talked to a family member who knows much more about such things than I do.
FM: So you want to start a startup?
Me: Um... no. I want to make a social network.
FM: *rolls eyes*
So I got a crash course on startupping, and I'm not sure I'm up to it. I find it difficult to explain to people why Facebook isn't good enough and I don't know anybody in RL who uses Tumblr or LiveJournal. I also don't know many fans I can ask about such things. This doesn't bode well for my social network.
I also started looking into what is required to make such a thing. Apparently a LOT has changed since I last wrote a website more than a decade ago (hand coding HTML with a bit of PHP). There's a lot of open source code that does most of the work. So I'm still tinkering with it, and meanwhile learning about the new methodologies and technologies.
Also, now that I realize how ridiculously easy it is to set up basic data-driven sites, there's a few other websites I want to set up.
First, the most exciting news -
For the past few years I've been beta'ing Mums-the-Word's White Collar fics, which gave me the greatest privilege of reading her fics ahead of everybody else. Her stories always draw me in, even when it's not a genre I'm particularly fond of, and I think it was a real loss to the white collar community when she hung up her fanficcing pen.
She recently branched out into original fiction and published her first book. I highly recommend anything she writes.
*
I signed up to an intensive 5-hour writing workshop. We were supposed to do hands-on work on our current stories, but I wasn't about to share my fanfic WIP with anybody in the group (just giving the backstory seemed daunting), so instead I took a vague idea I had for an original story. Which meant I wasn't really doing any hands-on anything, because my idea was really too vague for that stage.
The workshop emphasized three things in writing a story (in descending order of importance):
- heart - find the one sentence summary that makes you excited about the story
- drive - the character's struggles
- skeleton - the basic genres
I came back home and tried to find the heart of my current WIP. It's a White Collar story about Neal getting into trouble (what else), and thinking about it, I realized that Peter was missing from most of it. So I changed the focus from Neal to Peter&Neal. This led to a couple of intensive weeks of (re-)writing. But then, once I got all the new scenes plotted out, my drive petered out again. I either didn't find the heart of the story, or I'm just not in a writing mood.
*
I ran across the following comic:
It was a serialized comic in which the artist and his pen teach kids about the art of cartooning. I do love artists doing meta. In any case, this was a story in which the comics were being destroyed by a scary shadowy figure, and the final reveal is that it's the artist himself, who had trouble adjusting to using new technology.
Or, as he says here: "It's always like that. Usually the comics artist's greatest enemy is himself, with all his doubts and insecurities."
I added it to my 'inspiration wall' (which is currently not really inspiring me to do anything, with all my doubts and insecurities)
*
I was watching a show about ancient archaeology and they were discussing the Greek influence on the Phoenician communities about the 5th or so centuries BCE, when lo and behold, this pops up on the screen.
It sort of reminded me of the 'Tomb of the Diver' frescoes I used for one of my recent fics. And that's because it is. The show credited it as "diners", which seems to be the file name they found online.
Turns out you can learn something by writing.
*
Still thinking about my social network idea. I got all excited for a while, but then lost my drive. Now I'm slowly regaining it.
I talked to a family member who knows much more about such things than I do.
FM: So you want to start a startup?
Me: Um... no. I want to make a social network.
FM: *rolls eyes*
So I got a crash course on startupping, and I'm not sure I'm up to it. I find it difficult to explain to people why Facebook isn't good enough and I don't know anybody in RL who uses Tumblr or LiveJournal. I also don't know many fans I can ask about such things. This doesn't bode well for my social network.
I also started looking into what is required to make such a thing. Apparently a LOT has changed since I last wrote a website more than a decade ago (hand coding HTML with a bit of PHP). There's a lot of open source code that does most of the work. So I'm still tinkering with it, and meanwhile learning about the new methodologies and technologies.
Also, now that I realize how ridiculously easy it is to set up basic data-driven sites, there's a few other websites I want to set up.