Nebulized
The 2006 Nebula Award ballot has finally been made public. Good year!
Yay, Barzak! Yay, Jeff Ford and Ellen Kushner and Mary Rickert and RICK BOWES and everybody!
Oh Woe: Time & Sanctions
So, usually I hate maxims and wise little sayings, etcetera ad infinitum, but I make an exception for Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project because I often find myself nodding my head at her posts. The other day, she posted a list of the secrets she’d learned in adulthood that changed her life once she figured them out. One in particular stuck out to me, since I was in a fit of multi-day procrastination:
What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.
I decided I was going for force myself to put this into practice. The three things that offer the most instant rewards when I do them every day, but which I have the hardest time actually being consistent about are: 1) WRITING, 2) eating and drinking sensibly, and 3) exercising. Pretty basic stuff, right?
Since the spreadsheet for a novel doesn’t actually appeal to me, I made a Word document with some tables in it — because I want some sort of spreadsheet, even if not one specifically for my book. I put the quote from Gretchen at the top and made a table with numbered entries for 1, 2, and 3 with Yes or No check boxes for each. Each day, I have to honestly assess whether I did all three of these things. If the answer is NO, then I don’t get to watch any TV the next day, not even if it’s a Veronica Mars day or an Office day or whatever. (Two days a week, I am allowed to take off from any one of these things without sanction but must still do two of them.)
(More after the cut.)
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Oh Woe: Time & Sanctions Read More »
Heroes Yammer
And tonight we have:
Company Man. Matt Parkman and Ted Sprague arrive in Texas in search of answers and take HRG and his family hostage. More is revealed about Mr. Bennet, the agency for which he works, and how he found Claire.
And the West Coast Avengers take center stage…
p.s. I’m really behind on email, but intend to catch up _before_ AWP.
Literary Devices of the Mind
Researchers can’t find any examples of repressed memory in literary works going back further than 200 years:
In an unusual study, a group of psychiatrists and literary scholars, led by Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School, recently argued that the psychiatric disorder known as dissociative amnesia (often called repressed memory) is a "culture-bound syndrome" — a creation of Western culture sometime in the 19th century.
Pope pointed out that Shakespeare, Homer and other pre-19th-century writers show numerous characters suffering from other psychiatric disorders: the disjointed thinking that we call schizophrenia, or the persistent sadness that marks depression. Because art draws its inspiration from life, Pope said, this shows that those disorders have been around forever.
Literary Devices of the Mind Read More »
Movie of the Year?
West Bank Story — I so want to see this based on that clip.
Pssst. We’re all over here. I’m not sure why I’m still up.
Movie of the Year? Read More »
Sunday Hangovers
- Gavin reports that a stage production of Kelly’s brilliant short story "The Girl Detective" has just opened in NYC, and Richard Larson reports back that it’s very, very good. This is another of those times I wished we lived in the City.
- Betsy at Fusenumber8 says that Laini Taylor’s Faeries of Dreamdark – Blackbringer is the children’s fantasy novel to read this year. (I say it’s Flora Segunda, but I’ve added this one to the list.)
- Midori Snyder has a great entry on Ukiyo-e flash animation, complete with a topical scrotum reference.
- Chris McLaren has an excellent poem: "Horse Girls" by Tammy Armstrong.
- Joe Schrieber on trade paperbacks, hardcovers, and staying alive as a writer. (I, for my own part, am way more likely to buy a TPB, especially if the book’s by a writer I haven’t read before — the cost is a factor, but I also just prefer the portability, without the sacrifice to print size a mass market makes. But I like mass markets too.) Anyway: buy Joe’s books. The first one was a fun, dark pageturner and the next one sounds even better.
- I’m near blind after an afternoon of revision that felt almost like starting over; time to uncork a bottle and await the pre-shows. Dress therapy!
Norton Ballot!
Charles Coleman Finlay posts the final Andre Norton Award (for YA SFF) Ballot for this year:
MAGIC OR MADNESSS – Justine Larbalestier, Razorbill (Penguin Young Readers Group), 2005
MIDNIGHTERS #2: TOUCHING DARKNESS – Scott Westerfeld, (Eos) 2005
PEEPS – Scott Westerfeld, Razorbill (Penguin Young Readers Group), 2005
The jury is empowered to add up to three additional books to the ballot, which is voted on by the members of SFWA in conjunction with the Nebula Awards. This year, the three novels we added to the ballot are:
DEVILISH – Maureen Johnson, Razorbill (Penguin Young Readers Group), 2006
THE KING OF ATTOLIA – Megan Whalen Turner, Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins), 2006
LIFE AS WE KNEW IT – Susan Beth Pfeffer (Harcourt), 2006
This is a fantastic crop of nominees. The only one of these I haven’t read is Devilish, and it’s currently sitting in my stack. There’s a further statement from the jury at the link above. Yay for the Norton Jury on a job well done! (And YAY Scott and Justine: Cage match!*)
I’ve seen the final Nebula ballot, but am not sure it’s public — I’ll post it here once I’ve seen it elsewhere. This year’s ballot is one of the best in terms of gender balance that I can remember AND it’s full of fabulous stuff.
*Justine would so win in a cage match. For serious.
Clues of Revision
Ben had a great post the other day about becoming reticent about posting about the writing process before things are done or sold–and about how BORING not talking about it can become. He says:
Like, you know how you don’t, traditionally, tell people about the first trimester of a pregnancy? So that if you’re going to miscarry, you can miscarry in peace?
But not talking about trouble and dismay, dead ends and trashed story beginnings and terror, makes this blog, frankly, duller.
And, well, yeah, I agree. (Um, not that Ben’s blog is dull, because it’s not, but that his point is right on: The possibility of failure is exciting. Always, in life and in fiction.) And I’d intended at one point to move those sorts of posts over to the teeny LJ, but I just feel differently about that space than I do about this one. This is my blog, that’s just an annex. It seems weird to exile my posts about writing, and I never really managed to make such posts over there anyway. (It should be solely for friendslocking and commenting and possibly metrics and whining, I’ve decided. Basically, what it is now.)
I was also thinking about this in trying to decide how going through the MFA program was going to change Shaken & Stirred* (or if it would). And how can it not? I’m writing a lot more, and I’m thinking about writing a huge amount more (both my own and other people’s), so it follows that I’d be posting about how fucking hard it is and what I’m learning more than occasionally. I think this place would get dreary pretty fast, otherwise. Also, it seems like MFA programs in general come in for a lot of casual slamming and my experience so far has been nothing but amazing. So I want to inject some honesty about my own impressions into that sea of carping.
That said, posting about work-in-progress and the Process still feels dangerous, for the reasons Ben describes, but screw it. My lone New Year’s resolution was to stop second-guessing. Feel free to skip these write porn posts if you like; I won’t be offended. Sometimes I think a writer’s process is only interesting to that writer, but then I remember that I actually find other people’s processes endlessly fascinating.
Which brings me to the real topic of this post, or at least the second one:
Revision. (Clicky below to follow.)
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Pretty Tape
Excellent clear tape art (via Karen and Cat Rambo, practically simultaneously).
In unrelated news, I moved all my RSS feed subs over to Google Reader yesterday, as part of an ongoing effort to have Google control every aspect of my life. (It just feels less creepy if I pretend it’s intentional.) Bloglines has been superbuggy lately and not catching updates so quickly. Anyway, after a brief adjustment period, I’m really liking the Reader interface — especially the ability to read all the new messages in one column, using the space bar to travel between entries. Sweet.