Jasper was excited for all of thirty seconds, and then was very
much more, "Yeah, no. Why is this fun? We're done here."
The sirens are going nuts here. I hope it's just the snow...
Friday 18 January 2013
Allow Me To Play You The Song of My People
The sirens are going nuts here. I hope it's just the snow...
Wednesday 16 January 2013
The Art of Procrastination
It's bad when I'm seriously considering housework over writing.
This is what editing does to me.
Don't get me wrong, I can do it. I'm disciplined enough these days that I can come home after a full day's paying-work, open the laptop, and, ignoring all objections, sit and bloody well hash out a few thousand words. And then I can take a day or so away from them, come back, read them over, and fix the bits that don't work. I can do this even when my inner 2-year-old is moaning and whining and stomping her feet because she doesn't wanna. But for some reason, editing to someone else's notes is just... terrifying.
Why this should be, I'm not entirely clear. The two readers I'm working with at the moment are fantastic: generous, intelligent, knowledgeable, and very clear, and they've given up hours of their life to do me what amounts to the biggest favour I've ever asked. They've actually reinforced my self-belief in a lot of ways, because they've been kind enough to be very positive about the book. Maybe it's because, in order to write, one has to believe that one's work is, essentially, transmitting itself fully-formed to its readership and suggestions for improvement knock that one right out of the water. It's not that I think my novel is perfect - far from it; I can't read over a sentence of the damn thing without wanting to pull it to pieces - it's more that the natural instinct of a writer is to secretly suspect that everything they create is crap, and a beta-read that's doing its job is going to gently encourage that part of the writerly psyche to throw a party.
Or maybe it's just me. I don't know, I'm blatantly procrastinating here so that I don't have to do my edits. Or my laundry.
This is what editing does to me.
Don't get me wrong, I can do it. I'm disciplined enough these days that I can come home after a full day's paying-work, open the laptop, and, ignoring all objections, sit and bloody well hash out a few thousand words. And then I can take a day or so away from them, come back, read them over, and fix the bits that don't work. I can do this even when my inner 2-year-old is moaning and whining and stomping her feet because she doesn't wanna. But for some reason, editing to someone else's notes is just... terrifying.
Why this should be, I'm not entirely clear. The two readers I'm working with at the moment are fantastic: generous, intelligent, knowledgeable, and very clear, and they've given up hours of their life to do me what amounts to the biggest favour I've ever asked. They've actually reinforced my self-belief in a lot of ways, because they've been kind enough to be very positive about the book. Maybe it's because, in order to write, one has to believe that one's work is, essentially, transmitting itself fully-formed to its readership and suggestions for improvement knock that one right out of the water. It's not that I think my novel is perfect - far from it; I can't read over a sentence of the damn thing without wanting to pull it to pieces - it's more that the natural instinct of a writer is to secretly suspect that everything they create is crap, and a beta-read that's doing its job is going to gently encourage that part of the writerly psyche to throw a party.
Or maybe it's just me. I don't know, I'm blatantly procrastinating here so that I don't have to do my edits. Or my laundry.
Saturday 12 January 2013
One Does Not Simply Get An Article Pitch Accepted
So, I've been trying to pitch an article (no shit - that's what the title says!) to an online humour magazine, of which I am a regular and enthusiastic consumer. I'm pretty sure that no-one goes into something like this without secretly imagining that the editor will read their pitch and be dazzled into paroxysms of joy by the quality of this new, undiscovered gem of writing brilliance, but, delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, I didn't exactly expect that it would be easy. Plus, I know from experience that these things are always much harder the first time out than they are on the second or third. But, dear God, what a first time out it was. I think, by mid-week, I was already slightly deranged by sleep deprivation (full-time job, home, work on pitch, go to bed at 1am, and then, because the restless spirit of that goddamn paperclip that used to be the scourge of MS Word has apparently taken up residence inside my skull since being justifiably murdered by Microsoft, my brain would immediately flip into a two-hour cycle of, "It looks like you're trying to sleep! Would you like me to (a) endlessly recycle the past four hours on a three-second loop of crazy, or (b) Shut the fuck up and die? And option B is a lie.)
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