Catching up (various bookish thoughts)
(from this morning)
Oh my. I haven't read LJ in... 4 or 5 days? And it's not like I've been out of town or doing anything terribly important. I opened my Friends page this morning and began reading and commenting somewhat haphazardly. I'll do a proper, reverse-chronological read this evening.
Since I last posted here, I've been doing very little writing of any kind save for a half-assed revision of a short story I drafted in 2005. I think that was Thursday night? It was late. Thoughts of you'll never know if you're any good if you don't submit anything hit me with so much unnatural force, it was like someone -- Adam, possibly, who is always after me with various versions of the italicized thought -- had voodoo-dolled it into my head. But for me, submitting my work is not as simple as plucking a piece from my hard drive and sending it to a literary magazine. It's not that I'm being demure and self-conscious about my writing; rather, the problem is that I never finished anything for so long. And I suppose that was a form of extreme self-consciousness: "If I don't finish anything, I won't have anything to submit!" So I have assorted short-story beginnings and first drafts sitting around. I'm almost certain the short story I'm working on isn't good enough to be published anywhere. It's been nearly two years since I wrote the first draft, so I can look at it pretty objectively. I can see that it's not particularly fresh or lyrical. And yet, I still want to see it all printed and properly formatted and sent out with a SASE, if only because I want actual, tangible editorial confirmation that my writing still needs lots and lots of work.
As for the novel, I promised myself a 3-week break before beginning Draft 3. So that means I start again with page one, Chapter One this coming Sunday. Party!
I've been catching up on my reading -- Harry Potter, specifically. I am part of a very small club in the Harry Potter reading universe. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a club of one. Let's call it the "I Started Reading Harry Potter 6 In The Summer of 2005 But Got Pulled Away By John Updike's Villages" Club. I didn't return to the book until this summer, then put it aside yet again to read some books that were on 14-day loan from the library. Finally, finally, after Adam warned me of bumper sticker spoilers he was was seeing for Harry Potter 7, I went back and finished book 6, then moved on to book 7 this week.
Talking to people about not having finished Harry Potter is a lot like talking to people about not having been to Las Vegas. People who've never left the country will crow with "you've never been to VEGAS?" incredulity the same way people who read two books a year will flip out that you didn't read Deathly Hallows during the week of its release.
(Last night around 11:30, I finally found out what the Deathly Hallows were! Only 300 pages to go.)
--
The Decatur Book Festival happened over the weekend. Because Saturday was spent trying to make myself less hopeless at ballet, I spent all of Sunday afternoon at the festival. Here's what I saw:
Robert Olen Butler. Yes, he of the squick-inducing e-mail from earlier this summer! I'm searching for something, anything I noticed about him that I could snark about, but, really, all I've got is that he was a bit too self-deprecating. "If we have a question-and-answer session after I read, I only ask that none of you circulate my answers via e-mail." Smirk, smirk. Anyway, he read short-shorts about people being beheaded (from his book Severance: Stories, in which each of the stories is exactly 240 words long -- because that, he calculated, was the number of words a freshly severed head could think and process before expiring), and about George and Laura Bush's thoughts while they were having sex.
Chuck Klosterman. Adam joined me for this one. The Paste magazine interviewer's questions allowed Chuck Klosterman to talk himself in circles, usually ending his Faulkner-length sentences with, "That didn't really answer your question, did it?" He's like the guy who drinks three cups of coffee and then comes to 8 am Intro to Philosophy full of... ideas. There was not much time for audience questions after that, but the ones that got asked were really amusing. Lots of bangs, Threadless shirts, Tarzhay ballet flats, and Urban Outfitters babydoll dresses in the audience for this one.
Melissa Fay Greene spoke at the Presbyterian church and surely made everyone there a believer in her words and her work. Her most recent book is There Is No Me Without You, a (true) story of an Ethiopian widow who started an orphanage. Greene herself has adopted a number of children, and her talk was a wonderfully sweet and sad and funny meditation on travel and tragedy and motherhood.
Holly Black. Well, I poked my head in while she was talking about Valiant. It was 4:30 and I really, really needed to get some lunch / early dinner at that point.
A troubadour! I missed most of his performance, though. He went on break just as I was sitting down on the steps of a gazebo to eat my veggie wrap. He sat a few steps behind me with his and plucked through the opening notes of the Decemberists' "Summersong."
A critique group of super-Suuuuthern ladies, all of whom sold their novels within the same year. Lots of good advice on novel revision and developing an ear for your own and others' work. It was sponsored by the Atlanta Writers Club, which I joined earlier this year, so some of the usual suspects were there -- including this one woman who makes every guest speaker's presentation her own personal Q&A time. True to form, her hand shot up while the first author was still describing how their critique group had formed. "Excuse me, sorry," she said, continuing to wave her hand around in the too-conditioned air of the old courthouse. "What was the name of that book you mentioned? Bird By what? What on earth is that?" Oh jeez. The club officer who usually shuts her up was sitting right behind her, but as we were not at an official meeting, probably didn't feel right about admonishing her. I wish she would have, though.
What I missed:
Rick Riordan
Roy Blount, Jr.
Charles Frazier
Kinky Friedman
The booth selling various well-known literary journals for $2, which marked them down to FREE by the end of Sunday. How did I miss this booth? I just read about it on somebody's blahwg. Sob. Well, maybe it, and I, will be around next year.
Oh my. I haven't read LJ in... 4 or 5 days? And it's not like I've been out of town or doing anything terribly important. I opened my Friends page this morning and began reading and commenting somewhat haphazardly. I'll do a proper, reverse-chronological read this evening.
Since I last posted here, I've been doing very little writing of any kind save for a half-assed revision of a short story I drafted in 2005. I think that was Thursday night? It was late. Thoughts of you'll never know if you're any good if you don't submit anything hit me with so much unnatural force, it was like someone -- Adam, possibly, who is always after me with various versions of the italicized thought -- had voodoo-dolled it into my head. But for me, submitting my work is not as simple as plucking a piece from my hard drive and sending it to a literary magazine. It's not that I'm being demure and self-conscious about my writing; rather, the problem is that I never finished anything for so long. And I suppose that was a form of extreme self-consciousness: "If I don't finish anything, I won't have anything to submit!" So I have assorted short-story beginnings and first drafts sitting around. I'm almost certain the short story I'm working on isn't good enough to be published anywhere. It's been nearly two years since I wrote the first draft, so I can look at it pretty objectively. I can see that it's not particularly fresh or lyrical. And yet, I still want to see it all printed and properly formatted and sent out with a SASE, if only because I want actual, tangible editorial confirmation that my writing still needs lots and lots of work.
As for the novel, I promised myself a 3-week break before beginning Draft 3. So that means I start again with page one, Chapter One this coming Sunday. Party!
I've been catching up on my reading -- Harry Potter, specifically. I am part of a very small club in the Harry Potter reading universe. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a club of one. Let's call it the "I Started Reading Harry Potter 6 In The Summer of 2005 But Got Pulled Away By John Updike's Villages" Club. I didn't return to the book until this summer, then put it aside yet again to read some books that were on 14-day loan from the library. Finally, finally, after Adam warned me of bumper sticker spoilers he was was seeing for Harry Potter 7, I went back and finished book 6, then moved on to book 7 this week.
Talking to people about not having finished Harry Potter is a lot like talking to people about not having been to Las Vegas. People who've never left the country will crow with "you've never been to VEGAS?" incredulity the same way people who read two books a year will flip out that you didn't read Deathly Hallows during the week of its release.
(Last night around 11:30, I finally found out what the Deathly Hallows were! Only 300 pages to go.)
--
The Decatur Book Festival happened over the weekend. Because Saturday was spent trying to make myself less hopeless at ballet, I spent all of Sunday afternoon at the festival. Here's what I saw:
Robert Olen Butler. Yes, he of the squick-inducing e-mail from earlier this summer! I'm searching for something, anything I noticed about him that I could snark about, but, really, all I've got is that he was a bit too self-deprecating. "If we have a question-and-answer session after I read, I only ask that none of you circulate my answers via e-mail." Smirk, smirk. Anyway, he read short-shorts about people being beheaded (from his book Severance: Stories, in which each of the stories is exactly 240 words long -- because that, he calculated, was the number of words a freshly severed head could think and process before expiring), and about George and Laura Bush's thoughts while they were having sex.
Chuck Klosterman. Adam joined me for this one. The Paste magazine interviewer's questions allowed Chuck Klosterman to talk himself in circles, usually ending his Faulkner-length sentences with, "That didn't really answer your question, did it?" He's like the guy who drinks three cups of coffee and then comes to 8 am Intro to Philosophy full of... ideas. There was not much time for audience questions after that, but the ones that got asked were really amusing. Lots of bangs, Threadless shirts, Tarzhay ballet flats, and Urban Outfitters babydoll dresses in the audience for this one.
Melissa Fay Greene spoke at the Presbyterian church and surely made everyone there a believer in her words and her work. Her most recent book is There Is No Me Without You, a (true) story of an Ethiopian widow who started an orphanage. Greene herself has adopted a number of children, and her talk was a wonderfully sweet and sad and funny meditation on travel and tragedy and motherhood.
Holly Black. Well, I poked my head in while she was talking about Valiant. It was 4:30 and I really, really needed to get some lunch / early dinner at that point.
A troubadour! I missed most of his performance, though. He went on break just as I was sitting down on the steps of a gazebo to eat my veggie wrap. He sat a few steps behind me with his and plucked through the opening notes of the Decemberists' "Summersong."
A critique group of super-Suuuuthern ladies, all of whom sold their novels within the same year. Lots of good advice on novel revision and developing an ear for your own and others' work. It was sponsored by the Atlanta Writers Club, which I joined earlier this year, so some of the usual suspects were there -- including this one woman who makes every guest speaker's presentation her own personal Q&A time. True to form, her hand shot up while the first author was still describing how their critique group had formed. "Excuse me, sorry," she said, continuing to wave her hand around in the too-conditioned air of the old courthouse. "What was the name of that book you mentioned? Bird By what? What on earth is that?" Oh jeez. The club officer who usually shuts her up was sitting right behind her, but as we were not at an official meeting, probably didn't feel right about admonishing her. I wish she would have, though.
What I missed:
Rick Riordan
Roy Blount, Jr.
Charles Frazier
Kinky Friedman
The booth selling various well-known literary journals for $2, which marked them down to FREE by the end of Sunday. How did I miss this booth? I just read about it on somebody's blahwg. Sob. Well, maybe it, and I, will be around next year.