Showing posts with label rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rants. Show all posts

Thursday, November 3, 2022

#NaNoWriMo Shell Shock

So yesterday, Day 2, of my unofficial NaNoWriMo participation, my brain went into full revolt, cannons booming, bombs falling, satellites shooting lasers, the Death Star revving up on the horizon, and sent my words into full retreat. The result was a pathetic 163 words and a cussing fit.

On Day 1 I was so excited and knocked out 1214 words of my goal of 20k. After that, I'm pretty sure my brain got to looking at the structure of the schedule I had handed it and decided to give me the finger. Now words are quivering in the darkest corner of the void stunned by shell shock.

Takes me a bit to adjust to any sort of change, and I assume this is no different. Hoping my brain gets over itself and we can make some headway. Before it's too late to catch up.

It's not like you've never written on a tight schedule, Brain! Stop acting like a melon loaded with dynamite and do what I know you can do!





Wednesday, August 31, 2016

When Words Fail...

Project: Fury of the Falcon



That moment when you realize you should have written down the amazing, natural-sounding, perfectly-flowing dialog you thought of weeks ago. Because now you have arrived at that very scene, fingers poised over the keys, and you have no idea what to write.

I know better than that! I know to scramble for the nearest scrap of paper and sketch out at least some of the dialog that surfaced in that brief moment of clarity and genius.

Now it will likely take me the rest of the week to piece together something that sounds crappy and stilted in the end. Ugh. Writers, commiserate! Readers, I really need some comfort food.


Something like this will do...


Sunday, May 22, 2016

Progress Diary: When Laptops Go Haywire

Entry #3

I am ahead of schedule. Hurray for me!

Week one: completed drafts of chapter 1 and half of chapter 2. Quota: one chapter per week. Diagnosis: success.

I might have nearly finished two chapters this week, but my computer was abducted by aliens and reforged into a new version of itself, which put it out of commission for most of Friday's writing period.

Alien abduction, not cool
Wait, literally aliens? No, not literally, but it was invaded and taken over by the un-American, freedom-of-choice-stealing Windows 10 update. I didn't see it coming. I had been ignoring those "Update now?" windows for so many months that when the window changed and told me (apparently) that the update would happen that night, I didn't notice it or read it and x'd out of it instead of clicking the option to postpone. So here I am, home alone, without my computer-guru husband within 800 miles of me, and this stupid process kicks me out of Guild Wars 2 near midnight and takes over my computer and changes it utterly and forever, without my permission. MY COMPUTER! MINE. MY WORKZONE. Not yours, you evil devs and the eviler people giving you orders.

Yeah. Pissed.

Worst of all, some setting that came with Windows 7 was moved over to the new OS instead of being reset properly. This caused my beloved laptop to lock up any time I tried anything. Yeah, I couldn't even SAVE MY EFFING NOVEL DOC without my laptop going haywire and locking up. What do I have to do? Reboot it. Again. Like 7 times. But did that fix it? No! I LOST CONTENT!!!

Fortunately for the Windows devs, I lost all of two sentences. If I had lost more than that? Oh, yeah, I was going to mail 100 rabid monkeys to Windows HQ and have them set loose on the tyrants who fucked up my baby.

But, like I said, lucky for them. I was (sorta) able to reconstruct those two lost sentences THE NEXT DAY after my husband worked a miracle. He's doing training in Ohio, right? When he learns of this situation, that he must know has me in a panicked state of banshee-shrieking madness, he spends his evening (when he's already exhausted) downloading this software that allows him to access my laptop from half the country away. After a couple hours of poking around, he found the screwed up setting, fixed it, and voila! Miracle. Laptop back to normal. NO THANKS TO DEV TYRANTS IN SEATTLE WHO DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY WORK OR ME AS A PERSON WHO CAN'T FIX THIS STUFF HERSELF. (and now, thanks to them, every time I turn CAPS on or off, there's a stupid/pointless window that pops up and tells me that  CAPS is on or off. No shit?!)

Point being, goal for next week:

* complete chapter 2
* start chapter 3
* slander Windows' name forever
* drink less because my husband is awesome and I don't have to be shrieking like a banshee from hell.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Twitter Blues

Feeling: disgruntled.

Word of the day: Solicit
\sə-ˈli-sət\
1. to ask for (something, such as money or help) from people, companies, etc.
2. to ask (a person or group) for money, help, etc.
3. to offer to have sex with (someone) in return for money

The Rant: So I decided to make an effort by actually tweeting more regularly. Not ads and self-promos, but more personal stuff. Stuff that proves I'm a person and not an automated marketing machine.

While embarking on that journey, I decided to visit my "followers" page and return the favor by following many of them back. A couple hours later, I check my email inbox and what do I see? Several new direct messages from other Tweeters. Cool, I think, people want to engage. *glower* Yeah. Right. Every single one of the messages were solicitations to join a website or a sells pitch for someone's brilliant book.

So I'm disgruntled because it seems that "follow" is a synonym for "solicit." Join me, buy me, promote me. You followed me, you must want me and my product. Here, have some. *open mouth, insert spoon* Ugh.

I have a paper hidden away with all my website log-in info on it (really, really hidden away). There are 68 lines of accounts. Just me, one human being with 68+ usernames/passwords/etc (and I'm sure in some people's books, that's relatively few, which only strengthens my argument). I'm not interested in adding to that list. More than likely I will decline any invitations to join more websites sent by tweet. And I have review policies, posted right here on my blog, so I will certainly decline any invitations to review someone's book sent by tweet.

It was all so impersonal and ... gross-feeling. Does any tweeter care about other tweeters as people? Or are all other tweeters means to an end? Why am I tweeting, for that matter? To gain an audience. There, I admitted it. It certainly isn't because I have nothing better to do with my time. No, it's to persuade one or two readers to take a chance on my books. One or two, out of the hundreds of followers (one day I hope to say "thousands"). The last thing I will do to them is shove solicitations down their throats the instant they click "follow." Does this make me 'better'? Certainly not. But I'll draw the line somewhere, thanks.

*parting shudder*


Sunday, October 14, 2012

Comments on Gardens of the Moon

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It's not really proper to do a review on a book I didn't finish, but I worked too hard for too long to leave it alone. So I won't file this under my reviews, but merely voice my reaction in informal fashion.

Some people are sure to throw rotten eggs my way when I say that I could not finish Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon. More than once I heard, "If you can finish the first book, the rest are great." Red flag. But I had already bought the thing before I heard this general reaction, so I gave it a try. This book looked like my kind of book: a huge, well-developed world, dense with characters and details and subplots revolving around a big overarching quest. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of book Gardens of the Moon is. Unfortunately, though I have read to the halfway point, I cannot explain what any of those subplots are. I do not know. Seriously.

The problem with this novel is "withholding." There is so much going on, and some of the characters even know what is going on, but the reader is not told what that "thing" is. Some of this "thing" I was able to puzzle out. I think. And I'm not a stupid person. I like puzzles and mysteries in the books I read. I like to have to work for some of the content. That's part of what makes the reading experience so fun, involving, and rewarding. Gardens of the Moon, however, goes a step too far and doesn't let me know enough of what's happening among all the different factions vying for power and survival. Really, it's okay if the reader is told what someone hopes to accomplish; it gives the reader something to hope for, too. Then let the reader see how the characters' hopes are dashed. That creates reader sympathy and evokes big reactions in the human heart.

This also brings up the fact that halfway through the novel I felt little emotional attachment to any of these characters. The characters I liked best are in the book the least, up to this point. I thought, finally, I can get attached to someone, then they vanished again for umpteen pages. At the halfway point, I still haven't found them again. Where did they go? What are they doing? I don't know. I knew this novel and I were not going to work out, when at the middle climatic point where one of the main characters apparently dies, I felt no emotional reaction whatsoever. Eh? Shouldn't I be astonished and boohooing and pleasantly angry or something?

There's only so many times I can say to a book, "Okay, I'll give you another chance. It will surely all click into place today." But nobody's telling nobody nothing and I can't get involved when I don't know what I'm supposed to be hoping for. So when I picked up the book today to try to press on to the finish line, I literally groaned when I saw that after struggling along this hard, an equal amount of the book still awaited (?!?). Grimacing, I asked myself, "What is the point?" Shelve it. Swallow the disappointment. Move on.

If this were an official review, I would give Gardens of the Moon three magic wands. Dock one for massive, frustrating withholding. Dock a second for lack of character-reader involvement.

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So now I'm torn. In the queue is some self-pubbed material I need to read and review, along with what I'm sure is a great short by Milo James Fowler. Also, is a beat up copy of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth that a friend gave me, and The Help, which movie I loved.

What to choose first?
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Friday, June 1, 2012

Novel vs. Novella: A Question of Time

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So Blood of the Falcon has been out for a month or nearly and checking the Kindle sells daily has resulted in my overwhelming astonishment. The actual numbers are not the point; the point is that a novel so fat that it has to be broken into two volumes keeps selling steadily, when a skinny, convenient, fast read like Mists of Blackfen Bog stagnates at tiny numbers. In comparison, I've marketed Falcons far less than Mists and the novel's sells keep rising.

Now, I have discussed this question with a writing friend and we cannot come to a satisfying reason why, in our fast-paced culture in which people with shortening attention spans are expecting quick results, that short stories and novellas would be largely ignored while novels, that take up so much more time, energy and devotion to reach the end, would continue to sell like hot cakes. The best I can come up with is that readers who are following this trend are those bookworms who prefer long-term commitment to a character and a situation rather than a one-night stand with a briefer story. Any other theories out there?

From a writer's standpoint, then, considering all the numbers, is it more worth my own time and energy writing full-length novels rather than novellas? Novellas are hard to sell, few markets exist that accept them. Yet fewer publishers take chances on unknown novelists. So the results will most likely end up in a self-publishing venture.Which leads me back around to while novels sell better, I can have more novellas out on the market in far less time, but if few are buying them (aka reading them), why bother? As you can see, I'm torn. Any opinions or encouragement or personal experience to share?
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Scribd Disappoints...

Well, I have officially lost my patience with Scribd. So here' s a review:

The site is unbelievably slow and tedious when loading every single page and function. Even those that ought to be fresh in the memory b/c I was just there. Clicking the back arrow, at the least, should load the last page almost instantly, but this is not the case. I'm not sure if this is a common, everyday occurrence, or if Scribd is experiencing prolonged trouble, but since joining earlier this week, I have experienced the issue every time I've tried to navigate the site. As a result, I actually uploaded the same document twice. Oops! But even though I have decided to delete them both, they still show up in my uploads thingy in the sidebar. What's that about? I've deleted these docs. They are no longer available. Why show them there? I don't get it, nor do I like it.

The rest of the layout is pleasing to the eye, the functions easy to find. But only bother with this place if you've got time to waste, or a book in hand to read while you wait for the pages to load. As a result, I seriously doubt I'll have much to do with the site in the future. Which is sad to say, b/c I fully expected it to be a good venue to promote and sell copies of "Mists" and my upcoming novels. Not so sure it's worth the hassle after all.

You see, I was supposed to write today, but it's almost 3 pm and I just gave up the struggle at Scribd and not a new word has been written. Did I waste my time? I feel like the day is wasted, but I guess it depends on your perspective. Wait while pages load to be able to sell copies there in the long run, or find a site that functions as it should and sell them there instead. Hmmm...

Edit: A new day, a new dose of patience, and I figured out how to make a properly sized PDF and uploaded it to Scribd. While the site is still slow, everything went remarkably well. "Mists" is now available HERE for $1.25. So it's still a better deal to go through Smashwords and use the coupon code below.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

A New Pet Peeve

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Something is driving me bonkers lately, though I'm trying really hard to go with the flow and not let the ... issue ... get under my skin. So I'll vent about it here instead of sending notes to the people I would love to yell at.

I was taught that if you make a commitment to do something, you carry through.
Come hell or high water, you get the job done. You communicate with the people you have committed to and let them know if there are unavoidable problems that are delaying progress. You don't leave them to freak out, wondering if you've fallen off the planet or high-tailed it for the far country because you just don't want to participate in the task any longer.

Can anyone say "irresponsible"? Don't people understand how little things like this reflect on one's character? How in the future people will be less likely to trust them with other activities and responsibilities? I do not understand this neglect. IF YOU VOLUNTEER FOR A PARTICULAR JOB (I can't stress that enough), doesn't it make sense to uphold your end? In the least, tell me why you can't finish the task on time, or not at all, so I can find someone to take up the slack! It's not difficult. It's just a small mouthful of pride one must swallow to do this. Take it with sugar. It will go down easier. I'll even provide the sugar!

Now, I've vented. On with prettier things, like springtime and stories and fluffy kitties begging to come into the house to be in my company. Well, the kitties just want food, but they lie well and they're cute, so I'll let them get away with it. Back to the novels!
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