The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by katster:

DanR @ #55:

I suppose the answer to that depends on where you are on the writing curve. I seem to recall Scalzi saying something along the lines of needing to write approximately a million words of prose before you're going to approach somewhat good.

NaNoWriMo is insanity, and most of what is produced during the month will assuredly be Not Good, but it's a start. And I'm surprised, going back to prior years, that there's some stuff that's salvageable -- perhaps even good -- in those drafts. Nine thousand words of good might be pushing it, especially with early attempts, but it's entirely possible you could do that.

The point about 'embracing the suck' is to give yourself permission to write something that might not be clean and shiny prose on the first try. I know I have problems with that. I found that if I give myself permission to suck, though, then (1) the bad parts aren't making me wince quite so hard and then giving up in frustration and (2) I might actually write some of that clean coherent tangible story.

Also, there's something to be said about the whole point of stopping the 'someday, I'm going to write a novel' bit and actually sitting down and writing it, even if it's within the framework of this crazy challenge.

NaNoWriMo isn't going to work for everybody. I understand that. For some folks, it seems like an utter waste of time and I can respect that opinion. However, it works for me, if for no other reason than it gets my brain past the thoughts of 'it all sucks, i'm such a talentless hack, nobody will ever read this self-indulgent elephant dung' and into actually writing.

Perhaps if I can't get past that idea that it's going to be bad, then I shouldn't be writing. But if writing's a learned skill, then the first attempts are going to be bad. Nobody becomes a concert pianist overnight, right?

So in answer to your question, I suppose I've just spent several paragraphs saying 'it depends'.

So, not only am I doing NaNoWriMo, but I'm an ML, which means I'm the one that gets to herd the various collection of writers within a geographical region by organizing things like write-ins.

It's a lot of fun, actually.

But it leads me to my number one tip that I give my Wrimos every year -- the old-timers recite it with me: "Embrace the suck."

Basically, no matter what you're writing, you're going to have days (or heck, a whole entire month) where you're going to think that you're writing pure unadulterated grade-A crap. In short, you are going to suck. This is okay; instead of fighting the suck, embrace it. Give yourself permission to suck. It's amazing how freeing this can be.

November's my favorite month of the year, just for the camaraderie of knowing there's thousands of other people around the world doing what you're doing -- which is writing, perhaps sucking hard, and still having a good time.

And I have 4158 today. Woohoo. Only 45,842 left. ;)

-kat

I know I'm only mostly a lurker around these here parts, but if anyone's got a spare, I'd love to have one.

-kat

Yeah, 128.32.*.* is UC Berkeley's net block. nslookup says that IP is ... sis13.berkeley.edu. Hmmm, I suspect that's probably a campus computer lab, as I think SIS is Student Informational Services.

Although checking sis.berkeley.edu gives me all the student ways to check grades/class schedules/enrollment status, which means that it's either one of their workers, or one of the computers used to access SIS in places like the Sproul foyer aren't locked down as tightly as they should be.

It might be worth sending a complaint to Info Services and Technology (ist.berkeley.edu) to see what you can find.

-kat, former Berkeley student

It's not a simile, but a modern riff on a piece of conventional wisdom:

"The traffic always moves faster in the other lane."

Mashell @ 49:

Yeah, actually the Internet in general and Twitter in specific. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of Twitter despite the fact that I'm an active participant on the site, but I love seeing the experiments.

My focus is general science fiction fandom, somewhat tying into the "how do we save (and grow) worldcon", but I'd not mind hearing from folks in other fandoms. Fandom as it's defined on the internet strikes me as fascinating -- things like Harry Potter fandom, these ultra-specific things as opposed to the general umbrella. (Of course part of me wonders how to get them from the specific to the general, but that might be out of scope.)

In general, I'm mainly looking for thoughts on the subject. The way I approach things like this is to ask a bunch of people what they think, and then mix liberally with my own thoughts. Thus, I tend to be somewhat vague about the question in order to get answers without biasing them.

But, yes, I think any discussion of the next five years is going to have to involve the Internet. So much has changed just since 2003-2004, and I don't see the innovation slowing down anytime soon.

(As why five years? Fifth anniversary, of course.)

-kat

Howdy, everyone.

I mostly lurk around these parts, because you're all so awesome, and well, I'm only me, and a bit shy to boot. But an APA I belong to will celebrate five years with the next distribution, and the members of the APA have all been asked to muse on what fandom might be like in five years.

I'm still sort of a newbie at this fandom thing, so I figured I'd ask around to people who have more experience than I do. I've got a few ideas, but I always like hearing more.

I made a post on the subject to my own blog, but I'd love to hear your thoughts in any medium -- well, except maybe interpretive dance.

Thanks in advance for any help and I apologize if this is out of place.

-kat

Those are beautiful. I particularly like the one you've chose to place here, but all the notes are nifty.

Actually, you make me wish that I could draw.

-kat

Huh. In the story I'm working on, one of the major characters is a Latina. I didn't think there was anything special about it.

OTOH, I'm from California, and the story's set there, so if one of the characters wasn't Hispanic, it probably would have looked a little weird.

-kat

Also, I should add to Claude's report one other factor that wasn't accounted for as to why heat deaths are up in this state. I grew up in the far north end of the Central Valley, which is a small town called Redding. (I currently am around the Sacramento area.)

Anyway, in Redding, we get a few days of temps above 110, and spend the summer weeks on end with the afternoon temps above 100. It's no big deal.

The thing that happened this time that made it different? Not only were mid-valley cities like Sacramento hitting 110+ (which is unusual, it's really the extreme ends of the valley -- Redding and Bakersfield -- that hit those temps), but the dewpoint, instead of plummetting into the 20s and 30s, hung right around the 60 degree mark. And while all the Southerners might be laughing and saying "That's still nothing", we're not used to anything resembling the humidity that we had.

In Redding, at least, the dry heat means that swamp coolers are a valid means of cooling. But swamp coolers work by pushing chilled water vapor into the air, thus increasing the humidity in the air. Of course, this doesn't work on already humid days. I don't know about the rest of the valley, but that's just another datapoint to consider. Especially since high humidity along with high heat will lead to hyperthermia.

Just a few thoughts from here.

Happy birthday, Teresa! Hope it's a good one, and may there be many more to come.

-kat

I've been rather impressed at what closing all but the last ten days or so of posts has done. Between that and changing the comments link so it isn't mt-comment.cgi anymore, I haven't seen a spam for days. This is, as you can imagine, is nice, especially since I'm the one doing all the spam deletions.

Of course, I'm still on MT 2.64 because I don't have the money to upgrade to the newer version. Mebbe when I'm no longer a student, I'll do that, since people seem to like MT3.

Zed: I'm going to keep your list of tips around so that if I have to do more than renaming the comment script, I've got a URL handy with tips for implementing them.

-kat

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