Same thing I'm always full of.
1. I have been tagging lj entries a little at a time, in between typing revisions and writing new stuff and, y'know, the rest of my life. I find it a little daunting but gave myself full permission to be obscure when I need to. Which was a relief.
2. I have a theory now. I begin to think that many of the most useful conversations among working writers come when you can say, "How do you do such-and-such?" and you have a set of working writers who are clear that this question is not the same as, "How does one do such-and-such?" And then they can say, "Oh, I always X," or, "Usually I Y but this one time I Z and that was okay too." And then someone else says, "Really, Z? That almost never works for me, but what I like to think of is Q."
3. The revisions I am typing: they are pretty okay, I think. I am currently convinced that writing a book is like making lace: it's a whole thing when you're done, but you're almost certainly going to have a million holes in it, and you can only hope they're pretty. And work for them to be pretty. And not just pretty but in such a pattern that the reader can say, "Oh, of course, it's a shawl!" or, "How lovely, some gloves!" rather than, "It's...um...it's definitely...I like how you used a lot of thread here."
4. I have just finished watching S1 of Bones and boy howdy is that a Mary Sue. Fun Mary Sue. But uff da, the bit with her parents. Also, I am pretty damned sick of shows putting their thumb on the scales regarding their rationalist atheist characters to either force the rationalist atheist to admit that there are More Things In Heaven And Wherever or else show them as irrational for not doing so. Booth was raised Catholic, and the show does not demand that he detail how Catholicism, as a worldview, is not comprehensively successful in addressing his life situations, even though it almost certainly does have spots of being suboptimal. Nor do I want it to--I just don't want it to focus that way on Bones, either. It is okay to have characters with differing worldviews and not go out of your way, as a show, to undermine any of them, particularly if they're all fairly amiable and willing to accept new data.
5. Bones has given us a Geeky Little Brother character again. Are there no Geeky Little Sisters? Really? Or is it just that that social dynamic isn't particularly stable with our social mores? (That is, a younger adult geek woman is still likely to be parsed as potentially romantically interesting.) I would kind of like to see the Geeky Little Sister. Also, I suspect part of why we have a Geeky Little Brother is that Bones is a large enough presence that just adding Angela in makes it feel to the writers as though they have A Whole Mess Of Womens already. I may be wrong about this; we'll see. But it sort of makes me want to Take Action. And then I remember that this thing I'm revising features an older woman mentoring a younger woman as a pretty substantial character relationship. So okay then. Action Begun, at least.
2. I have a theory now. I begin to think that many of the most useful conversations among working writers come when you can say, "How do you do such-and-such?" and you have a set of working writers who are clear that this question is not the same as, "How does one do such-and-such?" And then they can say, "Oh, I always X," or, "Usually I Y but this one time I Z and that was okay too." And then someone else says, "Really, Z? That almost never works for me, but what I like to think of is Q."
3. The revisions I am typing: they are pretty okay, I think. I am currently convinced that writing a book is like making lace: it's a whole thing when you're done, but you're almost certainly going to have a million holes in it, and you can only hope they're pretty. And work for them to be pretty. And not just pretty but in such a pattern that the reader can say, "Oh, of course, it's a shawl!" or, "How lovely, some gloves!" rather than, "It's...um...it's definitely...I like how you used a lot of thread here."
4. I have just finished watching S1 of Bones and boy howdy is that a Mary Sue. Fun Mary Sue. But uff da, the bit with her parents. Also, I am pretty damned sick of shows putting their thumb on the scales regarding their rationalist atheist characters to either force the rationalist atheist to admit that there are More Things In Heaven And Wherever or else show them as irrational for not doing so. Booth was raised Catholic, and the show does not demand that he detail how Catholicism, as a worldview, is not comprehensively successful in addressing his life situations, even though it almost certainly does have spots of being suboptimal. Nor do I want it to--I just don't want it to focus that way on Bones, either. It is okay to have characters with differing worldviews and not go out of your way, as a show, to undermine any of them, particularly if they're all fairly amiable and willing to accept new data.
5. Bones has given us a Geeky Little Brother character again. Are there no Geeky Little Sisters? Really? Or is it just that that social dynamic isn't particularly stable with our social mores? (That is, a younger adult geek woman is still likely to be parsed as potentially romantically interesting.) I would kind of like to see the Geeky Little Sister. Also, I suspect part of why we have a Geeky Little Brother is that Bones is a large enough presence that just adding Angela in makes it feel to the writers as though they have A Whole Mess Of Womens already. I may be wrong about this; we'll see. But it sort of makes me want to Take Action. And then I remember that this thing I'm revising features an older woman mentoring a younger woman as a pretty substantial character relationship. So okay then. Action Begun, at least.