Dear Sport and Health: Um, no
I went to Sport and Health yesterday, cuz work has a discount deal with them and with Golds. Sport'n'Health is right in the complex, so it'd be muy convenient. I figured they'd be a bit pricey, but also figured maybe the work deal would make it do-able.
The nice gym salespeople told me the deal was actually quite amazing: sixty bucks a month and only fifty dollars down! I immediately started putting on my coat. But wait! Maybe they could offer me NO money down, so it'd just be sixty a month! Still, no. Not so much.
In other news, I got many fine books about writing for Christmas. They were all recommended by The Rejecter, (www.rejecter.blogspot.com) an agent's assistant who writes romance novels and has been through the dreaded creative writing MFA. Of her recs, I got The First Five Pages, A Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, Immediate Fiction, and a book on writing sci fi by Orscon Scott Card.
Immediate Fiction is good but a little self-helpy - lots of phrases in bold so that you too can be a better writer. The First Five Pages, on the other hand, is amazing. It goes through all the reasons agents/publishers will reject a manuscript, and then offers exercises to help the writer fix said problems. For example, second on the list is Too Many Adjectives, so the exercise is to look at something you've written and take out all the adjectives and make a list of them, and then read what you've written sans adjectives. Then you look at the adjectives and decide which are cliches, and see if you can find better ones. Then you put back a third of the adjectives and see how that goes. It's good stuff, I tell ya.
So my plan is to churn out a couple of stories, using some of the prompts in Immediate Fiction, and then try some exercises from The First Five Pages to revise them. It's going slowly. I can write for about an hour, and that's including various little procrastination techniques and internal whining. It's easier for me to write a story in twenty minutes in the writing group using prompts than to sit by myself with hours ahead of me and no prompt, which I think comes down to expectations. In writing group I have none, and by myself I think I should be coming up with something good.
I haven't read the Orson Scott Card book yet. I'm leaving him to last for a couple of reasons: 1. he has gotten worse with age, and 2. I have a feeling the basic elements will be the same, because the basic elements are always the same. It's amazing how much writing stuff is like theater stuff. Someone has to want something, and it has to be a matter of life and death, and they have to face an obstacle and then take action to combat the obstacle. No big mac moments, show don't tell, every character you create is you, even if it isn't.
I also spent some time writing up a critique of a first chapter for the group on Wednesday. I found it quite challenging and am not sure I'll be able to do it for the other pieces up for crit. But, I do feel an obligation - all of the folks up for crit this week gave me comments when I was up, so I reckon I gotta.
The nice gym salespeople told me the deal was actually quite amazing: sixty bucks a month and only fifty dollars down! I immediately started putting on my coat. But wait! Maybe they could offer me NO money down, so it'd just be sixty a month! Still, no. Not so much.
In other news, I got many fine books about writing for Christmas. They were all recommended by The Rejecter, (www.rejecter.blogspot.com) an agent's assistant who writes romance novels and has been through the dreaded creative writing MFA. Of her recs, I got The First Five Pages, A Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, Immediate Fiction, and a book on writing sci fi by Orscon Scott Card.
Immediate Fiction is good but a little self-helpy - lots of phrases in bold so that you too can be a better writer. The First Five Pages, on the other hand, is amazing. It goes through all the reasons agents/publishers will reject a manuscript, and then offers exercises to help the writer fix said problems. For example, second on the list is Too Many Adjectives, so the exercise is to look at something you've written and take out all the adjectives and make a list of them, and then read what you've written sans adjectives. Then you look at the adjectives and decide which are cliches, and see if you can find better ones. Then you put back a third of the adjectives and see how that goes. It's good stuff, I tell ya.
So my plan is to churn out a couple of stories, using some of the prompts in Immediate Fiction, and then try some exercises from The First Five Pages to revise them. It's going slowly. I can write for about an hour, and that's including various little procrastination techniques and internal whining. It's easier for me to write a story in twenty minutes in the writing group using prompts than to sit by myself with hours ahead of me and no prompt, which I think comes down to expectations. In writing group I have none, and by myself I think I should be coming up with something good.
I haven't read the Orson Scott Card book yet. I'm leaving him to last for a couple of reasons: 1. he has gotten worse with age, and 2. I have a feeling the basic elements will be the same, because the basic elements are always the same. It's amazing how much writing stuff is like theater stuff. Someone has to want something, and it has to be a matter of life and death, and they have to face an obstacle and then take action to combat the obstacle. No big mac moments, show don't tell, every character you create is you, even if it isn't.
I also spent some time writing up a critique of a first chapter for the group on Wednesday. I found it quite challenging and am not sure I'll be able to do it for the other pieces up for crit. But, I do feel an obligation - all of the folks up for crit this week gave me comments when I was up, so I reckon I gotta.
posted by walkinhomefromthethriftstore at 5:46 AM
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