Category Archives: Writing

Writing

29 Friday Jul 2011

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Apparently I write extremely good cancer updates. I do not think that is a skill to which one should aspire.

Is that all I want to say about that? Maybe. But my dad told me yesterday that I should save my letters because maybe in ten years or so I’d want to write a book, and my reaction was almost revulsion. I do want to write a book — I want to write lots of books. Fun books. Happy-ever-after ending books. Cheerful, silly, quirky, romantic books. Not books about dying.

And then my aunt said in an email that I should save my emails because they’d be helpful to someone else going through this. That…well, that I would want to do, if I knew how. This is really hard and if I could find something that made it better, yeah, that’d be good. But really, I’m not sure people head to the bookstores to find books about trying to figure out how to say good-bye. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’m a compulsive reader and it never even occurred to me. It’d be a good skill to have, though.

Yesterday, Mom entered “terminal restlessness.” Apparently she actually even punched a nurse, which I just find really hard to imagine. When I was with her, she steadily tried to stand, trying to get up and move around. She’s so frail now that that’s impossible, but she really wanted it. I kept telling her that her spirit wanted to move, not her body, and that her body wasn’t up for it, and she would calm back down. Once she said, frantically, “Let me go, let me go,” and I said, “You can go whenever you want, Mom, but you can’t bring your body with you, you have to let it go,” and she sort of nodded and then dozed off again. But then the nurse’s aide came in and hung out in the room and I was too inhibited to be my weirdly spiritual self, which was probably sort of a pity. Still, the general skills I learned from having a toddler — acknowledge the feeling, re-state the rule — worked just fine.

I’ll spend the night at the hospice again tomorrow. Really, I’m happier when I’m there, so that’s okay. Although in funnier writing news, every time I come home I write an extremely short, M-rated, Eureka story. I don’t even intend to, my fingers just type it out on their own. One of them I had to read ten times after I was done because a) it’s awesome and b) I wrote it??? It doesn’t sound like me, and I don’t even remember thinking up some of the lines. I think it just wrote itself. It’s really good, though (or at least I think so!)

Seth Godin’s Improved Orwell

27 Monday Jun 2011

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I read Seth Godin’s revised Orwellian writing rules in my feed this morning and thought, I want to save this forever, how can I do that? Yeah, it was before coffee. But these are awesome. (I would have cut more from #3, though — what’s the point of those “out”s?

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. You don’t need cliches.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Avoid long words.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Write in the now.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. When in doubt, say it clearly.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Better to be interesting than to follow these rules.

Plenty Well Enough

18 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in Randomness, Writing

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Sometimes a phrase just strikes me as mysterious and this is the one for today: plenty well enough. It’s got to be colloquial, right? Like “anyways” and “anymore” and “down cellar”? But from what region?

The line I was using was “I know him plenty well enough” and after I wrote it, I wondered — southern? New England? Rural upstate New York? Unfortunately, google hasn’t helped me out. I might be the first person to have written this question on the internet, which actually would be kind of cool. I like the idea of wondering something that no one else has wondered. But that still leaves me wondering.

Writing fan fiction

17 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Fanfiction

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Or maybe this post is really about publishing fan fiction? I should write about writing fan fiction, too, and maybe I will at some point, but this post is really about publishing it, and maybe about publishing in general. Ever since I got obsessed with Eureka last fall, I’ve been writing and posting stories at Fanfiction.net, along with thousands of other people.

Not thousands of people for Eureka, alas — the most popular fandoms (<–ooh, look, new vocabulary) are Supernatural, Glee, Harry Potter, Twilight. (Momentary digression, Supernatural? I think I saw that show once. But it turns out that its fan-community is obsessed. They’ve written something like 49,000 stories about their beloved show. I have wondered if they’re cheating and writing a lot of one-shot super-short stories just to get their numbers up, but I haven’t wondered enough to read a lot of them and find out.)

And back to my point. I’ve written 9 real stories, ie long stories, and a couple of shorts that are just scenes. It has been really fun. The writing has been amazing — more on that later,  probably — but the posting has been scarily validating.

Wow, do I have an external locus of validation problem or what? Getting a nice review can make me happy for hours. It’s the best drug ever. In the abstract, I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t need other people’s approval to enjoy writing. And I don’t really — the writing part is fun no matter what. But the approval is so satisfying. Knowing that someone enjoyed what I wrote makes the writing even better. And it isn’t that it makes me feel like a better person or that it is validating in the sense that it changes my self-image, but there’s something about knowing that I made someone laugh or squeee (<–also new vocab, but I’m pretty sure it’s an onomatopoeia) that just brings me joy. It makes me want to write more and more and more. I could use the joy.

(Endoscopy for mom today; colonoscopy on Tuesday. Liver cancer and pancreatic cancer are words that are being bandied about. I like those words even less than suspicious nodule.)

Still thinking

12 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in House, Personal, Writing

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Last night I was thinking that I should just write. Every day. 500 words. Nothing exorbitant, nothing structured, just start some stories and write while I was moved by them, then stop writing when the movement stopped. I started imagining one–a woman pulls a veil more firmly over her face as she moves through a crowded street, the heavy cloth of her covering stirring itchy prickles of sweat. But the feeling on the back of her neck? That isn’t sweat. She’s being watched and she knows it, and then I was off and running. I don’t know whether I fell asleep or it just turned into half dream, half awake plotting, but she was smuggling birth control pills, and what an odd thing for my imagination to conjure up. This morning it feels like it was more of a dream, just because it was so vivid and quirky, but it definitely started as something I was writing.

We’re going to be late to school if I don’t start the morning momentum going, but it’s so cold. I’m trying to remember how to enjoy cold, how to breathe deeply of the fresh air and walk briskly to stay warm, but this morning, I’d rather just stay in bed and skip the day.
I’m thinking about tackling a major project, too–moving my desk into the bedroom. I like the front-room office, except for two things: there are too many distractions, ranging from all my books and the television in sight to the laundry room door always reminding me of the need to tackle that never-ending chore, plus the clutter I create out there is driving me crazy. And I have to stay wireless there and my connection is being so erratic–my frustration level is high. If I move the desk into the bedroom, I can actually plug in to the modem, which might resolve some of my problems. But today I have loads of work. And I guess it’s time to get going.

Tenterhooks

06 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Randomness, Writing

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Wikipedia is the thing that’s changing the world. All knowledge, available the moment you want it.

A true story–two years ago, I was buying R a computer for Christmas. I didn’t know when it would arrive exactly and so the day before the holiday, I warned him that “Santa” might not deliver. He told me to check the internet and find out, and when I told him that such a thing was not possible, he went to his grandmother. She took the invoice number from me, and used it to find the tracking number and then the tracking number to find out exactly where his computer was and then that his present would be there before the end of the day. It blew my mind. But not his–he knew, with a faith unbroken by experience, that all knowledge was available to us, if we just knew the way to look for it.

Directly quoted:

Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth was woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. A fuller (also called a tucker or walker) cleaned the woolen cloth in a fulling mill, and then had to dry it carefully or the wool would shrink. To prevent this shrinkage, the fuller would place the wet cloth on a large wooden frame, a “tenter”, and leave it to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin “tendere”, to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth’s edges (selvages) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size.[1] At one time it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see tenter-fields full of these frames.

By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase “on tenterhooks” came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter.

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