Sarah should not be allowed to go through her old books of horrible poetry from highschool in search of random rhyming couplets for a new poem or three. Why should I not be allowed to do that? Because it makes me nostalgic. And a little sad.  I've lost touch with so many people that I never thought I'd lose touch with. I don't think I talk to anyone on a regular basis except for Bob. And even that's not as regular as it should be. Even so - during my search of the 15 year old books of awful awful poetry, I did find some lyrics I once wrote for a guy who was awesome on the guitar. I still remembered the melodies and everything. Funny what sticks with you. Bringing this full circle now - I looked him up on facebook and actually found him. He looks exactly the same as he did then if his user pic is any indication. I can remember spending 12 hours on the phone with him once - much to my poor mother's dismay. At one point - I considered him my best friend. But, that was before my whole world imploded and I pushed away just about everyone who had known my mom. 

So - now I'm all retrospective and sad and that is why I should not be allowed to go through old papers.

Tags: blogging my weird, odd

And this time - I know for certain I'm not alone...

I am a huge, giant, costume wearing, screaming at the screen, and dancing in the aisle fan of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I love everything about it. I think it's perfect just the way it is. It's fun, it's campy, it's got par-tici-pation. 

Why? Why am I telling you this? Because MTV plans to cash in on the string of remakes going around the imaginationless studios that keep rehashing old - but good - ideas instead of coming to the screen with something new. MTV plans to remake the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can see it now... they'll get one of the jonas brothers to play the doctor - everybody now - that is NOT right. (granted, I'll give you that I could honest to goodness see someone like Dave Navarro but MTV won't do that - they'll give you bubblegum where you want hard candy...)

If you've never seen it, and like campy stuff, find someone who knows the responses - find a theater with a midnight showing - and watch it. See Tim Curry be just about the strangest character ever to grace a screen. And completely OWN it. If you have seen it and hated it - you went with the wrong people. If you've seen it and LOVED it - sign the petition. Maybe it won't do any good but, one never knows. 

Can't anyone just leave well enough alone and quit messing with the classics? 

Save The Lips
 

Tags: blogging my weird, rocky horror picture show
Current Mood: annoyed

This doubt creature....  That and sometimes I make the mistake of you know - actually reading the other stuff that's in the books & magazines that come to the house... There are times when I *know* a story or poem of mine is good enough to be where ever it is.  There are other times where I'm pretty certain I got in for being the most outrageous or just the best maybe (basically, the best of the stack that gets put aside in question but is not a definate yes). Over the last two months, I've gotten several contributor copies that I'm reading... Peeks & Valleys - I happen to really like that poem (even my decidedly anti-poetry father liked it *and no he doesn't sugar-coat just because I'm his daughter though sometimes I really wish he would*). Cup of Comfort for cat lovers - I'm pretty sure I was a maybe. I've not finished Ruins Met or Flashing Swords summer ed. yet - though I now hold copies of both! My essay in the sigurd journal - I love that one for a whole different reason but I'll never know if it was actually any good or if it was just so --- motherless daughter sadness with strength --- that it dragged itself out of the maybe pile. And tomorrow, I'll feel differently and be back to my usual arrogant perfect self :P:P:P (I REALLY wish there was a sarcasm font).  Maybe it's the string of recent rejections - either from really big markets that I honestly stand zero chance of ever getting into or from smaller markets that took the time to praise me before telling me where it went to crap... Maybe it's the lack of decent sleep or the struggle to find decent stuff for Wolverine to eat because I know he's not eating all the stuff he should be right now but it's not like I can hold his mouth open and shove it in there! I'm wondering a bit if I can make veggie leather like I can make fruit leather... maybe then. Maybe next month things will settle out and I can get back to normal stuff like critting and chatting and being human. Right now, I have to finish three LP book trailers, and there's this story that's stratching at my brain to be let out so I've been doing that when I can't get to the comp... so what there's little to no clean laundry in the house :P at least I'm writing. And trying to remember that even if my tales were strong maybes - they weren't no's. So I can't completely suck.

Tags: blogging my weird, publication, rejection, writing
Current Mood: weird

 Did you ever have one of those days where you'll latch on to a particular topic and just can't let it go - and it turns into a philosophical debate in your own head leading to ever deeper thoughts? The past 48 hours have been like that for me. 

I dislike the idea of fate, of destiny. I loathe the notion that everything we do, everything we go through, has been laid out for us since the dawn of time. To me, it cheapens everything I've accomplished, everything I've survived. It negates any sense of accomplishment I might feel from my milestones. To think that my achievements and my torments were all in place before my birth, before my mother's birth, before the dawn of humanity as we know it - it upsets me. That would mean that all the progress I've made with my anxiety - had nothing to do with me but with the path laid out for me by fate/destiny/godbywhatevername. Doesn't that take something away from it? Every step of progress I make is negated by the idea that choice means nothing - that every choice I've made, I've made because that is how it is supposed to be and not because I have acheived anything. 

Perhaps I just don't want to believe that there is some entity somewhere that's laid the world out and given some people such a hard go - for what? to acheive what end? Perhaps I want to believe that my successes are mine alone (or with a little help from my friends and family) and not thanks to some Huge Thing Beyond My Comprehension. Perhaps I want to believe that my torments lie on the shoulders of my tormentors and not on that same HTBMC. I want to believe that the choices I make --- matter.

Tags: blogging my weird
Current Mood: contemplative

I am learning - as I do this whole critique thing - that I make a very poor reader of fantasy. Logic sets in too hard, too deep in a rut and I'm thrown completely out of a story I might otherwise enjoy. It's starting to get on my own nerves - let alone the poor writers for whom I am critting. I see certain words and they drive me bats. Human. That's the biggest of them. I see human, I immediate place the story on Earth or on a planet colonized by Earth. Because I cannot see how the etymological evolution of an alien language would evolve to call a species, however similar to our own, by the same name. I realize it's anal and probably petty but I also can't seem to get past it. But, the word people doesn't bother me. Perhaps because, translated, most tribes call themselves - The People. Perhaps it's the translation idea - that fiction we read here is really nothing more than a translation, that if we were to be on said planet, it certainly wouldn't be english we were hearing (or whatever language it's translated into from there) and I could see People being translated that way but for some reason, not human. Human is different and I'm not sure why. Another is the use of the word earth for alien dirt when being spoken by a native of said alien planet who has never heard of earth. Why would that word be there. Soil, loam, dirt, mud, sand - those all work for me but calling dirt - earth - just doesn't. I can't find the logic of the word choice. Part of me is pretty sure this is JUST me. That I'm just THAT weird to have stupid stuff like that stick in my craw. But a smaller part of me wonders if I'm so far off base. But it does explain why I don't read much non-earth-centered fantasy. Goblins, witches, ghouls, demons, orcs, dragons, fairies - I can suspend my disbelief for all of those. So why not humans? why do these things bother me?

Tags: blogging my weird, crits, writing
Current Mood: confused

It's about that time again. I thought of something very strange today - I don't know why I didn't see it before, but I didn't. It turns out that I have been taking all the things that scare the hell out of me and writing them into stories as good things. Very strange. I am scared to death of Spiders so, what do I do, I take a perfectly good hero and give him that name. Now, I couldn't imagine changing it. Scorpions give me the creeps so, what do I do? I make them mechanical and make them good things to have as friends. There are others too but those are the ones that really stood out to me today - I was thinking about a few stories of mine that are currently under consideration somewhere and I realized this. It's very odd.

Do you do that? Find yourself taking those things that inspire great fear in you and making them not only harmless but beneficial??

Tags: blogging my weird

 I may waver on my favorite of the 'current' movies but there are three movies that stay with me, are stuck with me, and are never going away. Someday, I want my words to have that effect on just one person. If just one person reads something of mine and clutches it to their hearts like I have with certain books and movies - I'll be just about the happiest writer in the whole world. 




Enough of Sarah's oddness for today :P What I'm getting at I think is that I want someone to react to my work the way I reacted to Speaker for the Dead or Braveheart or Bridge to Terebithia. I want to write something that sticks. Don't we all....

Tags: blogging my weird, flying the geek flag

I don't know why but I kind of enjoy revealing my quirks. So, I've decided to post these on a semi-regular basis... how long that will last, I'm not sure yet. 

Part of my writing process is the submission process. I'm very anal now about how I keep track of submissions, markets, response times. I have three spreadsheets I use almost daily. One for the current year, one for last year, and my overall tracking thing. Before I instituted these sheets, I sent the exact same poetry submission to the same market twice in 8 months. You would think this wouldn't be difficult but, given the amount of poetry I write and that is in the market-process at any given time, the fact that all three poems were the same (and the fact that the poor editor noticed) is miraculous. Determined never to allow this to happen again - I made spreadsheets. I can count just by opening the titles spreadsheets exactly how many times a poem or short story has been rejected. I tend to pull poems from the submission process completely when they hit 15 rejections. Someday, when I'm blocked, I'll go back and look at them but they're not a priority. I haven't actually had many poems hit that mark. I think in total, there are four that have. But some are getting close. Fiction is a little different. I've only had one story rejected more than ten times (so far) and that one - it wasn't finished but I was too new at this, too determined not to have a monster onmy hands that I didn't see it. Said story no can't be called a short story. It's 20,000 words long now but,at least it's finished. I revise and rewrite a lot, maybe more than I should. I've killed stories but, not because they've been rejected too many times, but because they were really bad. (trust me, they were. even the ideas were bad :P)

So, dear readers who happen to be writers - when do you pull a story or poem from the submission  process? I leave out novels on purpose here as that's a very different kind of process.

~S 

Tags: blogging my weird, the process, writing
Current Mood: curious

I am often informed by my fellow writerly types that I'm a rather odd duck. I work my way and it's logical for me. My schedule is getting more and more hectic now with Wolverine walking and playing and generally being more kid than baby but I keep managing. 

Under normal circumstances, I have a backlog of stories that are near ready for the submission process. Seeing as I probably write 20-30 short stories a year and of those, maybe 12 will be worth submitting, not having any is weird. Right now, I have nothing. Comes up because a new member just signed up for my crit group and I was considering what to repost. I have one short story and a novel. That's it. I've learned posting poetry does me no good as I keep finding homes for said poems before anyone gets around to them. so It's just one short story and one of my novels. I have other things in the pipeline sort of. but nothing really. Most of those things aren't done enough for critting and I'm not really inclined to work on them. But, i'm learning something about my process. I *need* to have seven or eight things going at once, at least if I'm not pounding my head against a deadline.  If I don't, I get lazy, unfocused, and miss stupid mistakes in my plotting and characterisation. I work better when I'm stretched. I work even better when I'm lacking sleep but not caffeine. I excel when I'm pressed for time. When I have just one thing I'm working on - I get lazy and stupid. And that's where I am right now. I don't like this place. 

It makes me very curious though - am I the only one that works better this way? when I have ten different things going and, rather than strolling along, watching the words form themselves, I have to devote myself to my progress, pour more of myself into each project to make it decent. I can't plan a project because then I won't want to write it (as recently happened with a bog-witch idea that was decent and perhaps when I ditch the plans I can revisit). I can't just sit down and focus on one thing as I'll screw it up - make it overly complicated or miss stupid inconsistencies in favor of word-trickery. The less I think about something, the better it turns out.

Am I the only one like that? I often wonder.... 

Tags: blogging my weird, writing
Current Mood: weird