Diatryma @849 - Well, the story is done insofar as I'm not embarrassed to show it in public, but critique is always valuable. I haven't written many short stories (I get very few short ideas) and I'd like to get better at the form.
(The fundraising project I'm doing is just a post-a-day thing, anecdotes and the like, about the subjects our fundraiser is about. The short story is a one-off effort to get me three posts that I can queue up while I go to Renfest this weekend. Very casual. I'm hesitant to post the link here, because I don't want to give the impression that I'm asking y'all for money or indeed anything other than ideas on venues.)
Probably, but I'm effectively donating this story to charity :) That's probably why I can't think of venues offhand that aren't fanfic, though.
This might be a good place for this question - I'm posting, among other things, a short story on my blog in an effort to raise money. But I'd also like to get eyeballs/feedback on the story itself, and it has occurred to me that I have no idea where to go to post something like that.
Possibly relevant: Not fanfic, scifi/horror/zombies, I am otherwise unpublished for any rational value of published, and I'm willing to repost the story without the fundraising come-ons once it's all up.
Does anyone here know a good place to start?
Relevant to this discussion - an Ask Metafilter question about bullying among ten-year-old girls.
(I'm still formulating an actual response to this thread. I keep turning up interesting new mental artifacts, like the fact that I literally didn't remember half a year of daily schoolyard brawls until I started to type that I never got into physical altercations as a kid.)
I study karate at a school that does a lot of self-defense and anti-bullying teaching, for both kids and adults, and the shorthand we use for the decision-making process is "Think, Yell, Run, Fight, Tell" - "fight" is pretty far down the list, but the order definitely precludes just taking it until you can find someone to appeal to.
David Eddings was one of the pillars of my youthful library. I go back to the Belgariad every few years - it's pure comfort food. Sorry to hear of his passing.
This is the second H1N1 death in the US that I've seen report of - the first was a child just back from a trip to Mexico.
Agreed about World's Best, but it is also World's Priciest - Swheat Scoop is an economical second choice, in my experience.
CHip@87 - it's not a question of "right" or "wrong", it's a question of "will this cause predictable outrage?" In my experience, it certainly will. Outrage is not good for my particular business - perhaps the agents in question have a different view, but I doubt it. I suspect they simply didn't anticipate the outrage.
The point Ursula was making, that it's no more right that writers post correspondence they've received, but tends to cause less outrage, also matches my experience. That's all I was saying.
As I said above, I actually don't really care about the ethical questions. #queryfail fails my drama test, and therefore is not something I think is a sensible business move. If it didn't fail the drama test, then I'd have to think about the ethical issues.
Xopher #85, my solution, when I realized I was writing the wrong book, was to switch viewpoint characters and move from third to first-person perspective. It seems to be working.
You know, it's sort of disturbing how jaded I have become. I'm an online community manager - I moderate, create content, run events, that sort of thing. And I've found that when looking at this kind of internet dramastorm, I have a weirdly skewed set of priorities. I look at this, and rather than think "this is kind of a skeevy idea and raises ethical issues around expectations of confidentiality" I think "this will incite a substantial percentage of the "aspiring novelists" group to complain loudly and publicly about this kind of behavior. Is the expected return worth the drama?"
I really, genuinely don't care about the ethical issues - or, at least, I care about them after making the potential-drama calculation. And I begin to think that should bother me.
I have to concur with Ursula here - I am in a position where I routinely correspond with customers. It would be a tremendous breach of trust (and a huge source of drama) were I to post even remotely identifiable snippets of my customers' correspondence publicly - however, it is a basic assumption of my profession that everything I say to a customer, in any context, in any medium, is likely to end up on the internet fifteen seconds after it's sent. That's just the way it works, and we build our corporate communications policies around that assumption.
Wacky-yet-awesome things for your keyring, part MLXVII: Emergency Tracheotomy kit.
Abi #499 - Hmm, interesting thought. But usually my eyes aren't 100% closed - I generally end up looking massively stoned, rather than actually asleep. A good artist might be able to work something out, though...
#497 Carie S, similarly, I've got the Fastest Blink Reflex in the West. Only a small handful of pictures have been taken where I've been foiled - in my entire adult life. (They are, of course, all posted on Facebook.)
This community will probably appreciate this one better than anyone...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeivnFBeYTY&feature=related
Maddow on... zombies.
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| 2007 | 35 |
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