Goodbye, Blue Monday!
Reading Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard at the moment. I’m enjoying dipping into it. The man has a stunning grasp of language, and the plot is incredibly complex and dense. Probably not for every reader. But a must read for anybody who enjoys ‘literary’ fiction as well as your zap gun adventure stuff. Me? I like a bit of everything.
I’m floundering on the writing front,. Maybe I was putting too much forethought into things. And, well, what might have been a decent story wound down and died in my arms. Godspeed, story. I’ve given myself permission to write whatever I wish in my notebook for the rest of the month, and hopefully something will trigger future stories. Maybe I’ll even trawl up a flash gem. I might even publish something here on the blog.
Also, on other fronts, I’m too low key to get involved in any flame wars. I hope I will remain that way too when my career picks up speed. I certainly don’t think the internet is a suitable place to discuss important issues. There is a nasty side that comes out of a surprisingly large section people when they get behind a keyboard. A mob mentality can brew and the normal aspects of face to face conversation such as sarcasm and context are lost in the melee as people wade in. The careers of writers much more succesful than me are thrown to the lions.
Having said that, two recent rejection letters have flagged up something in one of my stories that could be interpreted as ‘culturally insensitive.’ Both editors were very polite about pointing it out. Having thought about it, I’ve changed the part of the story. The plot remains the same, the story is exactly same. But I guess that I’m slightly more culturally aware than I was before. Still the same person, with the same view of the world, and the same vision of a multicultural future, but with a slightly deeper understanding of how I might go about getting this across in my stories.
Plus, it’s always nice to get feedback in rejection letters, especially from the big markets.
Take it easy, people of the internet
Graham
I’m floundering on the writing front,. Maybe I was putting too much forethought into things. And, well, what might have been a decent story wound down and died in my arms. Godspeed, story. I’ve given myself permission to write whatever I wish in my notebook for the rest of the month, and hopefully something will trigger future stories. Maybe I’ll even trawl up a flash gem. I might even publish something here on the blog.
Also, on other fronts, I’m too low key to get involved in any flame wars. I hope I will remain that way too when my career picks up speed. I certainly don’t think the internet is a suitable place to discuss important issues. There is a nasty side that comes out of a surprisingly large section people when they get behind a keyboard. A mob mentality can brew and the normal aspects of face to face conversation such as sarcasm and context are lost in the melee as people wade in. The careers of writers much more succesful than me are thrown to the lions.
Having said that, two recent rejection letters have flagged up something in one of my stories that could be interpreted as ‘culturally insensitive.’ Both editors were very polite about pointing it out. Having thought about it, I’ve changed the part of the story. The plot remains the same, the story is exactly same. But I guess that I’m slightly more culturally aware than I was before. Still the same person, with the same view of the world, and the same vision of a multicultural future, but with a slightly deeper understanding of how I might go about getting this across in my stories.
Plus, it’s always nice to get feedback in rejection letters, especially from the big markets.
Take it easy, people of the internet
Graham