Wednesday Magic District: Point and laugh

Well, the brilliant idea of “compose half a post before work, then finish it as soon as you get home!” got torpedoed by overtime tonight, so today’s Magic District post is up far too late.  Bah.  I do, however, manage to mention the Nakatomi Protocol and “On Fairy-Stories” within a few paragraphs of each other, so that’s something.

Some news to come, but it’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning, because right now I can manage about three words at a time before shutting down.  It’s like my brain is a faulty laptop…no, better stay away from that analogy.

Wednesday Magic District: Force of habit

First of all, go read this.  Okay?  Apparently this author has been camping out IN MY BRAIN because that’s the thought process that’s been going on when it comes to sales.  I don’t know how Spiral Hunt is doing.  I assume it’s all right, because angry mobs haven’t come chasing after me with pitchforks and torches.  Saundra Mitchell seems to have the right idea about how to think of this, though — she wrote a book, she got an agent, and her book’s on the shelves.  That’s pretty damn cool.  Occasionally I have to step back from the Amazonomancy and the revisions and remind myself that yes, this is really, really awesome.  I make stuff up!  And then people read it!  Woo!

Also, she’s got the best blog title ever.  Wish I’d thought of it first.

For today’s Magic District — which has absolutely nothing to do with that, unless you want to put both in the broader category of “writer neuroses” — I contribute to the stereotype of the Weird Writer, confess that coffee doesn’t have to be coffee, and try to make sense of habits that make no sense.

Wednesday Magic District: The long dark night of the revision

There will always be those times when writing becomes a chore and you can’t see a way out of the dilemma you’ve written yourself into.  And neither can your characters, because you’ve written them all as implausible idiots.  And what’s with that setting? Internal consistency has gone out the window, has it?  And we’re not even getting into the plot problems…

Yeah.  Always that point where the entire work feels like a waste of time.  Hell, I hit that point a couple of weeks ago and I’m fully expecting to have a recurrence before I finish this draft.  But I have to keep on writing.  It’s too bound up in my belief in who I am.  I am a writer, therefore I write even when I’m convinced it’s terrible.

So that’s what today’s Magic District is about: writing even when it doesn’t seem worth it, and getting through the bad patches.  Because it will be worth it when it’s done.  You just have to get there.

Wednesday (evening) Magic District: Dilettante

My trusty online dictionary (It’s on the Internet!  It must be true!) says that the word dilettante is originally Italian, “person loving the arts,” from dilettare, “to delight.”  That’s a nice etymology, which makes me feel a little better about the word even though the real meaning is “someone who’s interested in a subject but not necessarily knowledgeable or committed to it.”  So today’s disjointed, scrambled, late Magic District post covers part of what I like about skipping from genre to genre, both as a writer and a reader.

And now, back to slogging through the revision.  I can make this work, I know it, I’ll just have to add pirates keep writing.