I'm away right now. Not doing normal things, like working and writing and e-mailing and whatnot. Really, I shouldn't even be blogging. But I had a thought yesterday, and writing it down will help me remember it better. So I'm going to do it here where I can share it with you.
Watching sunsets is important.
For me, anyway.
I used to do it a lot. Like, whenever I could. And I've had a lot of great ideas while doing it. Somehow over the past few years, I've been doing less and less of it. Yesterday was the first time in recent memory that I sat down and watched a sunset. I had nothing else to do during that time. No one to talk to. No task that needed to be completed. It was just me and the world, reenacting a human ritual I suspect is an ancient as anything that could even remotely be called humanity.
And I felt more at peace and connected with the world than I have in some time.
So, sunsets. Stop and enjoy them. Even SANDMAN's Lucifer got something out of it. You will too.
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Friday, July 25, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Memorial Day
Here in the United States, today is a day to stop and think about the people who have died in the name of and wearing the uniform of the country. For some people, it's very easy to forget that. It's easy to think it's a day off, or a day for seeing family, or a day to get all that yardwork done. It can be all those things too.
But first and foremost it's a day to remember, and to honor, and to respect. I say this as someone who has a troubled relationship to this country's history and the things people have done in its name. My reading tends to include a lot of articles designed to remind us of all the horrible things the U.S. government and its armed forces have done.
Despite that, I find it superlatively important to remember that "the government" and "the army" are and always have been made up of individual human beings with thoughts, dreams, personal lives, struggles, strengths, weaknesses, failings, successes, and the right to be treated with dignity and respect until they, personally, lose that through their own actions. Soldiers, in particular, are people whose lives are forever changed by something larger than they are---ideally the collective will of their society, but sometimes the collective will of a small part of it instead. They are never the same when they come back as they were when they left. And when they die during or because of their service, the loss of all the potential their lives held is a tragedy as deep as any other.
So stop. Remember. Mourn.
It is more important than other things you have scheduled today.
But first and foremost it's a day to remember, and to honor, and to respect. I say this as someone who has a troubled relationship to this country's history and the things people have done in its name. My reading tends to include a lot of articles designed to remind us of all the horrible things the U.S. government and its armed forces have done.
Despite that, I find it superlatively important to remember that "the government" and "the army" are and always have been made up of individual human beings with thoughts, dreams, personal lives, struggles, strengths, weaknesses, failings, successes, and the right to be treated with dignity and respect until they, personally, lose that through their own actions. Soldiers, in particular, are people whose lives are forever changed by something larger than they are---ideally the collective will of their society, but sometimes the collective will of a small part of it instead. They are never the same when they come back as they were when they left. And when they die during or because of their service, the loss of all the potential their lives held is a tragedy as deep as any other.
So stop. Remember. Mourn.
It is more important than other things you have scheduled today.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Easter Eggs
When I was a kid, I used to hunt for Easter eggs a lot.
Not just the plastic kind my parents used to stuff with jelly beans and chocolate (though I did that too, and loved it). I hunted for the kind that video game developers left in their games. I hunted for them in books too, though I didn't know to call them that at the time.
The term "Easter egg" in that context refers to a little prize or extra feature hidden in a book or game (or other form of media). Wikipedia's got a pretty good definition going. The hunt for Easter eggs in games with vibrant communities tends to be a pretty exhaustive affair, with players combing the game en masse and compiling lists for others. People do it in books too.
Soulwoven has a few. Not a ton, but they're in there. I won't spoil them all, but I'll give you one to start out with in case you're a dedicated egg hunter. Turn to page 341 (about halfway through Chapter 47 for those of you with the e-book). Read this poem, which I did while writing the book. Ta-da!
More interesting ones have to do with hints at what's coming in the next book. Once you've read Exile, come back and have a look at Chapter 24. It's stacked with 'em.
Y'know, it occurs to me that with the advent of e-books, we could be doing a lot more in terms of Easter eggs with the application of a little clever HTML. In fact, someone cleverer than me probably already is.
Hmm. Food for the mysterious machine in my brain that crunches ideas and turns them into books. Wonder what I can do with it.
Anyway, happy spring! And if you celebrate Easter, either with church or with bunnies and jelly beans, I hope you enjoy it. A month from now, which you wouldn't know from the displays in my grocery store.
Not just the plastic kind my parents used to stuff with jelly beans and chocolate (though I did that too, and loved it). I hunted for the kind that video game developers left in their games. I hunted for them in books too, though I didn't know to call them that at the time.
The term "Easter egg" in that context refers to a little prize or extra feature hidden in a book or game (or other form of media). Wikipedia's got a pretty good definition going. The hunt for Easter eggs in games with vibrant communities tends to be a pretty exhaustive affair, with players combing the game en masse and compiling lists for others. People do it in books too.
Soulwoven has a few. Not a ton, but they're in there. I won't spoil them all, but I'll give you one to start out with in case you're a dedicated egg hunter. Turn to page 341 (about halfway through Chapter 47 for those of you with the e-book). Read this poem, which I did while writing the book. Ta-da!
More interesting ones have to do with hints at what's coming in the next book. Once you've read Exile, come back and have a look at Chapter 24. It's stacked with 'em.
Y'know, it occurs to me that with the advent of e-books, we could be doing a lot more in terms of Easter eggs with the application of a little clever HTML. In fact, someone cleverer than me probably already is.
Hmm. Food for the mysterious machine in my brain that crunches ideas and turns them into books. Wonder what I can do with it.
Anyway, happy spring! And if you celebrate Easter, either with church or with bunnies and jelly beans, I hope you enjoy it. A month from now, which you wouldn't know from the displays in my grocery store.
Friday, November 1, 2013
All Hallows Write Wrap-up
Well, All Hallows Write 2013 is done, and I've had a few hours of sleep and am ready to start processing the experience a bit.
First off, it was really everything I hoped it would be. It was fun to have the pressure of an insane deadline and an ambitious project and to try to pull it off. And it feels immensely satisfying to have conceived this thing and brought it to life. I do think I'll try it again next year, though with some tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to people with jobs and lives and families. I missed out on a pretty fun holiday, and I don't want to do that every year.
The story itself...well, to be honest, I can't really evaluate it right now. I suppose I'll leave that up to you.It's here and will go up on Wattpad tomorrow. It was extremely ambitious to try to write in 13 hours, and I'm pretty amazed that I finished it. I got in two revision passes, which means that I'm pretty happy with the bones of the story (the plot details, the characterizations, etc.), but I'm also fairly certain that the language isn't as polished as I'd like.
Maybe more importantly, it showed me how little I really know about the horror genre. I'm wearing my influences baldly on my sleeves in the story. I'm not really breaking any new ground. I wanted it to be fun in the way that a haunted house can be fun, and I wanted it to make you think in the way that my favorite horror stories always do. I have no idea whether my use of the conventions I played with was trite or cliche, because I don't read enough horror to make that judgment.
It was good for several things, though. One, it scratched my itch to do something difficult that I'd never tried before, and that's not an itch I get to scratch all that much anymore now that I've put my adventuring days behind me in order to write seriously. Two, it stretched my mind. I got a chance to try out a new kind of story, a new kind of narrative, a new kind of suspense and atmosphere and tension, and that will probably seep into my other work in places where it's appropriate. Three, it showed me what I'm capable of when I have the time to work on a project properly.
Writing is a funny career, because in order to succeed at it without starving to death or getting very lucky, you must become so good at it that you can make a living working part-time before you jump into full-time. A lot of people never really do write full-time, because if you can make a living doing it part-time...why not relax and take your time and enjoy life? You (probably) suffered for years to get there.
I can't wait until I can do this full-time. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder whether the next project will be the one that lets me get there.
Anyway, if you enjoyed the story, let me know, and if you didn't, let me know that too. I really have no idea whether it's any good, and I'd appreciate the feedback.
Oh, and you can buy Three Dances here if you want more stories (sometimes every bit as weird, but not nearly so horrific) from me.
First off, it was really everything I hoped it would be. It was fun to have the pressure of an insane deadline and an ambitious project and to try to pull it off. And it feels immensely satisfying to have conceived this thing and brought it to life. I do think I'll try it again next year, though with some tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to people with jobs and lives and families. I missed out on a pretty fun holiday, and I don't want to do that every year.
The story itself...well, to be honest, I can't really evaluate it right now. I suppose I'll leave that up to you.
Maybe more importantly, it showed me how little I really know about the horror genre. I'm wearing my influences baldly on my sleeves in the story. I'm not really breaking any new ground. I wanted it to be fun in the way that a haunted house can be fun, and I wanted it to make you think in the way that my favorite horror stories always do. I have no idea whether my use of the conventions I played with was trite or cliche, because I don't read enough horror to make that judgment.
It was good for several things, though. One, it scratched my itch to do something difficult that I'd never tried before, and that's not an itch I get to scratch all that much anymore now that I've put my adventuring days behind me in order to write seriously. Two, it stretched my mind. I got a chance to try out a new kind of story, a new kind of narrative, a new kind of suspense and atmosphere and tension, and that will probably seep into my other work in places where it's appropriate. Three, it showed me what I'm capable of when I have the time to work on a project properly.
Writing is a funny career, because in order to succeed at it without starving to death or getting very lucky, you must become so good at it that you can make a living working part-time before you jump into full-time. A lot of people never really do write full-time, because if you can make a living doing it part-time...why not relax and take your time and enjoy life? You (probably) suffered for years to get there.
I can't wait until I can do this full-time. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder whether the next project will be the one that lets me get there.
Anyway, if you enjoyed the story, let me know, and if you didn't, let me know that too. I really have no idea whether it's any good, and I'd appreciate the feedback.
Oh, and you can buy Three Dances here if you want more stories (sometimes every bit as weird, but not nearly so horrific) from me.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
All Hallows Write Tonight!
Quick blog post for today, with the promise of a larger coming tomorrow.
Tonight I'm going to stay up all night and write a scary story. Because it's Halloween, and because that's the kind of thing that sounds like fun to me.
So tomorrow, there will be a brand new, hot-off-the-laptop scary story up on this blog for you to read. Hopefully it will be good. I have a plan for it, but according to the rules I made up for All Hallows Write, I can't put that plan on paper until sunset tonight, and that means I can't quite see how all the pieces are going to fit together yet.
And of course, these things always change in the writing anyway.
Why do this? Why have the rules? Why not break them?
For the same reason poets write haiku and sonnets and villanelles and sestinas. Sometimes having rules makes you more creative.
Anyway, it's going to be fun. If you're a Twitterer, you can follow the action starting at sunset (6:45 EST where I am) at the hashtag #AllHallowsWrite. If you're a Facebooker, you can watch my Facebook page, where my updates will stream automatically.
Hope you'll join in for a few hours and come back tomorrow to see what I've done. The plan is...ambitious.
But I have two energy drinks and am anticipating a surplus of Halloween candy to fuel me.
What could possibly go wrong?
Tonight I'm going to stay up all night and write a scary story. Because it's Halloween, and because that's the kind of thing that sounds like fun to me.
So tomorrow, there will be a brand new, hot-off-the-laptop scary story up on this blog for you to read. Hopefully it will be good. I have a plan for it, but according to the rules I made up for All Hallows Write, I can't put that plan on paper until sunset tonight, and that means I can't quite see how all the pieces are going to fit together yet.
And of course, these things always change in the writing anyway.
Why do this? Why have the rules? Why not break them?
For the same reason poets write haiku and sonnets and villanelles and sestinas. Sometimes having rules makes you more creative.
Anyway, it's going to be fun. If you're a Twitterer, you can follow the action starting at sunset (6:45 EST where I am) at the hashtag #AllHallowsWrite. If you're a Facebooker, you can watch my Facebook page, where my updates will stream automatically.
Hope you'll join in for a few hours and come back tomorrow to see what I've done. The plan is...ambitious.
But I have two energy drinks and am anticipating a surplus of Halloween candy to fuel me.
What could possibly go wrong?
Thursday, February 14, 2013
News for the Week of 2.14.13: Valentine's Day is Cruel, Upcoming Critique Session, and Wispy Hints of Secret Projects
Hello, Dear Friends and Readers!
Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope this February 14th
finds you well. It’s always a strange time of year to me, when a segment of the
population that’s happy and in love celebrates, and everyone else either fakes
it or, well…doesn’t. Next year I think I’ll try to write something for it,
because it sucks when a day seems designed just to point out a thing you
don’t have, and stories are good at riposting those types of days.
For me, anyway.
Anyhoo, another week has flown by! The interminable wait for
copy edits on Three Dances lingers on, but in other news, I’ve finally hiked up
my skirts and thrown on my galoshes and waded into revisions on book two of
Soulwoven. The first chapter was a doozy. The second chapter was much easier.
And I think I’m getting back into the swing of that world again, which makes me
happy and causes me to feel more like a writer and less like an impostor, all
of which are good things.
Soulwoven itself is in a bit of a doldrums, reading wise. I
am of two minds about whether to try to stir up more interest in it on Wattpad
or just to keep writing and trust that its readers will find their way to it
over time, one way or another. There is one more Wattpad project I’d like to do
in conjunction with it, but I’m not sure it quite has the audience to support
it yet.
Also! I’m going to do another first-page critique session on
Wattpad this Saturday morning, at 1:00 p.m. EST. It will run for about an hour
or so. I’ll give the first two spots to my followers this time around, so if
you’re interested, follow me on Wattpad, send a message to my inbox and let me know.
In the meantime, I’ve written an outline for Nadya and
continue to make tweaks to it. It’s very close to going into line edits, which
means it’s very close to going out on submission, which is very exciting.
Anyway, a fine day to all of you. I am thinking of you and wishing
you warm happy moments. I trust that they will come to you sometime, no matter
who or where you are.
-Jeff
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