Writing for a Living

[lilmissnever]

The trouble with writing for a living is that I rarely have the time to write for fun. For the past month, my life has gone sadly undocumented, and as the number of things I have not written about (SXSW, the Stormkern show, the Hubba Hubba Revue's Goth show, last week's aerial act, protecting activists from pro-Syrian-government malware) piles up,

Comments

[cris]

Let it go? At some point that really is all that you can do. If one were to go into my mind and transcribe all of the unfinished drafts of bike adventures, dinners, shenanigans, and epiphanies encountered at 37,000 ft; I am sure that it would fill at least one recycling bin. And that's not even getting into the deeply personal and filterable stuff, of which there are reams. Yet, mulling these things over, polishing them, leaving them unfinished, that occupies cycles in the brain that could be focused on something else.

So, yeah, for me , I let it go. Also, I give myself deadlines. One week from inspiration to posting. If I can't finish it by then, the draft goes into Dropbox or the moleskine or somewhere semi-permanent. I let it go and I give myself permission to work on something else. Basically, it's a virtual recycling bin. Maybe, I'll come back to that after a month if I find an appropriate reason for recalling it. If that reason never comes up? Oh well. Life is interesting enough that we won't starve for ideas.

[lilmissnever]

I had a terrible stretch where everything that I wanted to write about was very personal and not fit for public discussion. I still wish I had written some of it down, I even wish I had managed to solicit the sympathy and advice of my Fake Internet People, but there are reasons why I don't write anything here that I wouldn't be willing to tell a stranger at a cocktail party. Sometimes that means leaving some things unwritten.

It's hard to let it go, but it's also the only way to move on and produce more work.

[voxsjournal]

Aww. I've been waiting for your post on SxSW.

Not that I have room to talk. I only post vidoes now, though I did write what I thought to be a rather good review of "The Hunger Games" (in short, don't let Ross direct another one, the studio should be throwing diamonds at Jennifer Lawrence for saving that movie, and for god's sake, combine scenes from the book, they don't all need to be separate in the film, yeesh) and was deeply involved in the discussions following the "Pretty Little Liars" finale (in short, TV writers need to be smarter than the audience and show runners need to not talk about plot on Twitter, srsly).

Pop culture--pretending to be more deeply invested in it than we are just to avoid the horrors of real life.

[lilmissnever]

I have not yet seen "The Hunger Games," mostly because I never got around to reading the books. I have heard them recommended by people whose opinions I trust, so I might venture into a theater for the movie. It's been a very long time since I've gone to see a movie. I think that the last thing I saw in a theater was "Urbanized," the Gary Hustwit documentary, which I saw in New York.

I have not been watching "Pretty Little Liars," but I did see the premiere of "Mad Men," which I recall you are not a fan of. I will also watch the second season of "Game of Thrones," even though I know it isn't very good. I went through the trouble of reading thousands of pages of descriptions of meals and heraldry. This is my dubious reward.

[voxsjournal]

The first book is much fun, quite entertaining and by far the strongest of the three, but the next two are serviceable. The story was much more political than I was expecting, and fairly subversive at that.

PLL is awful, and I've decided to just accept that the plotting/writing is beyond ridiculous. I wasn't expecting greatness, but I thought it would at least mostly make sense, but that's far too high a bar for this show. I've not seen "Game of Thrones" nor read any of the books, but that's precisely what DVDs are for. If I remember, I'll pick it up at some point.

I can't recall if I told you about Ready Player One or not. Such a fun book, though you might be a bit young for it, since much of the fun resides in recognizing all the Eighties references. Still, if you're looking for a good time, give Ernest Cline a try.

And did I tell you about The Instructions? It's about a ten-year-old Jewish lad who may or may not be the messiah. It's by Adam Levin, who seems to be one of those McSweeney people who I don't understand and

[lilmissnever]

J read Ready Player One a couple of weeks ago and really liked it. He is somewhat older than I am, so he might be better equipped to get all of the jokes about the eighties. I will also take a look at The Instructions. I go through periods where I read a lot for pleasure, followed by periods when everything I read is work-related. I think I am in a work phase, but in a couple of weeks I will be leaving the country to go sit on a beach, and I think I would like to read things that have nothing to do with digital civil liberties at that time.

Italics never go out of fashion. They are timeless.

[thewronghands]

Sometimes that happens. I generally chalk it up to living rather than being my own faithful Watson chronicler, and move on. Imperfection exists; there are gaps in the data stream. (And I've been meaning to read the full "The Consent of the Networked"; I read the article but I suspect it's insufficient to the book.)

[lilmissnever]

The quality of the writing leaves something to be desired, but if you'd like some insight into the kind of work I am doing these days, The Consent of the Networked is a good place to start.

[thewronghands]

Like that "Constitution 3.0" book that I recently read, nothing in the article was amazingly new to me, but yeah, I think the book would get more in depth.

(And here I was thinking that I should discuss Syria with you instead. Heh.)

[lilmissnever]

If you want to talk about pro-Syrian-government hackers, I'm your girl. Have you seen the work I've been doing? I'm very excited about it.

In other geek news, you might want to take a look at James Grimmelmann's analysis of what went wrong with HavenCo. It is a fine, fine thing.