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#ScribesAndMakers 26. Do you abandon creative projects? If so, how do you determine when to abandon them?
i'll scrap a project if its flaws are too central to be solved. sometimes, you have to learn when to let go. but most scrapped projects end up being resorbed, and nourishing future, better projects.
i used to be one of those people who argued for the value of anger, but the ragebait era has convinced me to do a 180 on this
our clinic does not have cancellation fees btw. but when i see how much clinic time gets wasted every time there's a bit of snow or rain and everyone cancels, i see why other clinics do it
now that i actually work in a clinic, i completely understand why clinics have cancellation fees, and i regret ever complaining about it
@dkieffer @fruitcakesareyum @ApostateEnglishman @benroyce @crow it takes a massive sense of entitlement to demand that everyone in the world alter their behaviour just for you, and your inability to cope. people are not entitled to free therapy from strangers.*
these discussions always generate nasty replies from people who try to use emotional blackmail to force everyone else to give them what they want. e.g. 'do this so i don't end up in the psych ward' maybe you have bigger problems that controlling my posts won't solve.
*this is leaving aside the fact that avoidance is not even good for mental health in the long run
@benroyce @crow i think there is a significant and unjustified shifting of blame going on when people say that normal posts have 'caused' panic attacks, nightmares, and so on.
non-extreme posts are not the primary cause of mental health tailspins. a picture of a sandwich does not 'cause' someone to spiral into an eating disorder relapse. if something so innocuous sets that person off, they were already on the brink, and it's unfair to blame the sandwich poster for severe mental health issues that were actually caused by something else.
#ScribesAndMakers 22. Create a poll giving a line from a book you wrote, along with lines from two other books. Ask people to choose which was from yours.
it was a challenge to find single lines that were memorable, and that didn't refer too specifically to characters who would give the game away. but i think this is my favourite poll game so far.
1. Notions and scruples were like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
2. Even as her body faded to a shade, her eyes had come alive in the approaching dark, and these flickered energetically in the firelight, to hint at sparks of electricity stirring just behind them.
3. What was there was as dry as the grass with which she wove her hats and baskets; tense as a willow branch curved with the weight of snow.
#WritersCoffeeClub 20. How has a setting surprised you?
the past always surprises, the more you look into it. lots of things—like forks, mason jars, curtains, large mirrors, church pews, and washboards—turn out to be comparatively recent inventions. injustice is also always worse than you'd imagine. i had to soften a lot of things to keep the story from being weighed down by how horrible everything was.
another, simpler motif is that of the spiral. something spiral-shaped, or a spiral motion etc. is almost always present at pivotal moments in the book. i was thinking vaguely of sacred geometry; the significance is basically that the spiral is a signature of the universe.
(i did a ctrl+F on the word 'spiral' and this motif occurs exactly 13 times in the book. this is a coincidence but it pleases me to see such a fatal number.)
#WordWeavers 20. What tropes are in your current project?
there's enough fiction in the world that everything you can come up with is already a trope. i couldn't list them all, so i will pick one or two to explore.
light and dark motif: this is one of those age old tropes. the epigraph at the beginning of the book is a few lines from Gerard Manley-Hopkins' poem, 'Pied Beauty.' i also have a Virginia Woolf quote banging around in my brain, about the 'variegated' (contradictory) nature of humanity. in this context dappled things, variegated things, etc. represent both moral ambiguity and the variety of Creation; Lucifer's mix of 'light' and 'dark' attributes is, like in all beings, the signature of the God that made them. this is a subtle way of reminding us that Lucifer is God's creation too. so you see many scenes where light and darkness occur concurrently, and certain character pairings deliberately contrast light with darkness also.
#ScribesAndMakers 19. Our featured creator is an avid gamer. Does gaming affect your creativity?
the hours i spent playing Skyrim have probably made it into my work somewhere. i also worked on a Mass Effect fanfic many years ago, that i ultimately scrapped due to development problems. it was a deep dive into the psychology of one of those green Asari clones that the player kills during the Thorian battle. (it never sat right with me that you wipe out what are basically enslaved children without a second thought.) the story had a strong beginning and ending, but not enough plot for the middle chapters. oh well...like my other failed ideas, it was resorbed, and then came out later as something better.
@matthras it's too bad more places don't have either hearing loops (for use with telecoils), or the new successor, Auracast. i do not have first-hand experience with these systems but i know many people find them beneficial, especially if background noise is a struggle. you basically get the benefit of a remote microphone but on a broadcast scale.
#WritersCoffeeClub 18. How balanced are your finished works? What do you do to achieve that balance?
maybe it would help to understand this question if i imagine what an unbalanced work looks like.
an unbalanced book would have some element out of harmony with the whole. maybe there is excessive description or dialogue. or one of the acts is disproportionately long compared to the others.
these are the sorts of things that ought to be picked up in an editing pass. you achieve 'balance' by carefully reading and re-reading your work, and fixing every flaw you turn up in the process.
the work bathroom just had one of the light tubes replaced. so now the light is half cool white and half warm white, which is oddly unsettling
(photography rule: never mix different whites. it doesn't look good)
getting sent home at noon. which i am ok with tbh
make that six
(will we get sent home?)
bit of rain on the roads, five appointments cancelled (why did i bother commuting)
someone really hated the new Wuthering Heights movie
'Our modern literacy crisis has found a new figurehead in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. It’s Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic for a culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it.
'With its title stylised in quotation marks, and a director’s statement that it’s intended to capture her experience of reading the book aged 14, it uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable. Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.'
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s performances are almost pushed to the border of pantomime, while Fennell’s provocations seem to define the poor as sexual deviants and the rich as clueless prudes
The Independent (www.independent.co.uk)
i do respect the choice to write a litfic that features exactly nobody from academia or adjacent to the publishing industry, though. nice to see literary fiction featuring people with real, shitty jobs and problems for once
book club adventures...this month's book is a bleak foray into poverty and substance abuse. articles about the book say that the author (who is Vietnamese-American) deliberately chose not to write a 'model minority' narrative about rising above your shitty circumstances by your bootstraps. which is a commendable vision.
but the unfortunate effect of that is that nobody in the book really grows or changes, and there isn't much plot to advance in a story where everyone stays the same. i'm about three quarters into the book, so maybe there's still time for things to get more engaging. but right now i just kind of feel depressed every time i pick it up.
