I've been watching the news about Katrina for the last two or three days and I have not been able to get that hurricane risk article from last year out of my mind. I've never even been to the city, and the idea of it being drowned is devastating. I find there's a part of me surprisingly sympathetic to those who won't leave.
Man, I hope I'll still have a chance to see the part of New Orleans that makes it Nawlins. :/
-Catie
TexAnne, I didn't know Narnia was allegory until I was in college and read it on Usenet. I was stunned. You're not alone. :)
-Catie
Joel said: I took a class in "Creative Nonfiction" once.
I did too. The professor and I didn't get on at all. :)
Mary Kay: unfortunately, they don't hold cons in Alaska, and getting out to them is prohibitively expensive. But I keep going back and looking at that outfit anyway and thinking, "*Sometimes* I get to go places where I could wear it!"
Jill--my mom's a fantastic seamstress. I'm thinking I should email the seller and see if they could tell me if there's enough seam to be able to let the bodice out some, but even if that's not possible, I bet you're right and I could find something local that'd go well enough to allow me to wear the rest of the ensemble.
*beam* Thanks for suggestions. :)
ask eBay to keep a watch on these guys for you
*falls over* Their aqua/butterscotch sari set is ... *wow*. Gorgeous. I want it. Except it would not in a million years fit in the bust, and even if it did I don't know where the heck I'd wear it. But wow, *gorgeous*. Thanks for the link!
'Far more interesting, to me, were dreams in comic book or printed page format'
I've had partial comic book ones, like they would start comic book, then zoom in on the page and transform to live action.
I have had complete ElfQuest comic book dreams with each panel being black and white and still (normally I dream in color with full action) and have woken up and sometimes gone for days trying to find that new issue of ElfQuest before finally realizing that the issue was a dream. I'm always very disappointed. :)
-Catie
Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm are one person. :)
Caroline wrote:
She didn't flee, although she always opposed Hitler; it must have seemed like just another power-hungry politician next door, but something they could live through, until he started taking over everything.
That's one of the bits I'm struggling with: at what point do I choose to cut and run? Is it possible to see a national point of no return, from this close? I don't particularly want to leave the country of my birth. On the other hand, I don't much want to watch it turn into this America that I think shouldn't be, from within, either.
Making Light is one of the webpages I find myself hunching forward to read. I like the contrast, but a bigger typeface would be nice. (My IE view->text size->larger doesn't change ML's font size, presumably because it's specified in your css.)
Y'know, I read WHAT WOULD BUFFY DO? a few months ago, 'cause I couldn't resist the title. I wasn't looking for spiritual guidance, but I've got to say, somebody who was could do a whole lot worse than Buffy as a moral guide.
*howls at Xopher and Will*
the shoe store owner who stood in his doorway, handing out free running shoes to Wall Street women who’d otherwise have had to walk out of the zone in heels.
I hadn't heard that story. What an incredibly decent human being.
-Catie
You're not alone, Xopher.
*snickers at MV*
-Catie
Graydon, Stefan--
I think you're both right. The thing to do is to win the mid-term elections; the problem with that is the people must be angry, and it seems that there may not be enough of us who are angry. Revolution in any form is sponsored by the downtrodden, not the fat and happy, and I'm afraid Americans in general are too fat and happy. I honestly thought this election was going to be revolutionary. The idea that Bush took the popular vote (however it was achieved; I can't speak to how much disenfranchisment there may have been) is something that I can barely wrap my mind around.
On one hand, I cannot recognize this as my country. On the other, dammit, it *is* my country, and while I've been threatening to leave if Bush is reinstalled, this morning I find that I don't want to leave. I want the sons of bitches who have taken over my country out of power.
I don't accept these results, either. As far as I'm concerned, Bush got in on an incumbency that wasn't his. What I *don't* know is what the hell to do about it at this point.
I didn't look at my ballot number this morning (around 8:30) when I voted (it never even occurred to me that they were numbered), but there was a small line of people waiting to vote, and more people at the polling place than I've ever seen. Everyone was cheerful. The people running the show kept looking a little startled at how many people there were, but they were sure happy about it.
As I stood in line to put my ballots into the shooping machine (we color in ovals on our ballots, SAT-like, and then they get sucked out of the ballot-binder things by a machine which may or may not tally the votes, but it does go 'shoop!', which is very satisfying), the man in the booth beside me, who had his four year old kid with him, was saying, "Now, this one is about whether we want to build more schools." The kid said, "Yeah!", and I thought, now that's a *good* Daddy. :)
I also love voting. I've been reading articles all day about high turnout, and I keep getting all teary and sniffly about it, which is sort of embarrassing. But dammit, this is what it should be like, all the time! People should *care*! And when they do, I get a little verklempt. *fans self, sniffling*
-Catie
Finding a good critique group (or beta readers) is wildly effective, if you know *how* to find one. Giving the book to your mother and best friend isn't usually the way to get accurate criticisms, but I'm not sure how many new writers understand that.
I'm hardly disagreeing with the tactic, but I can't help wondering if many people in the early stages of a writing career literally don't know how to find a good critique group, or if they would know a good critique if it came up and bit them. To take G. Jules' fanfic example from above, I've seen an awful lot of fanfic with notes of grateful thanks to beta readers who, judging from the manuscript, have no grasp what-so-ever of how to use punctuation or even spell check, much less story structure or character deve...well, ok, a lot of fanfic character development comes pre-built. Nevermind that. :)
*I* know there are *lots* of ways to find critique groups; I remember checking college bulletin boards when I first started to write novels, so I must have had some kind of clue even then. I know I had classmates who would read my writing, and now you can find a critique group every five feet on the Internet. But how, I wonder, does someone who can't tell if her own writing is good judge whether the group she's got is a good one?
I'm largely spouting rhetoric here; I think the real answer is that you keep trying and you learn to recognize the talents, strengths, and weaknesses of the people around you in the growth process. It requires work on your own part, and if you never learn to recognize that, I suppose you stay in approximately the same place as a writer that you began in.
I also think some of what I'm responding to, at least emotionally, is the sheer frustration I've heard in people's voices as they ask how they can tell if their book is a good one. (I can hardly imagine actually being an editor. I think those waves of frustration would flatten me.) I'd love to be able to deliver a concrete answer to that question, even if I know perfectly well it's not one that concrete answers apply to.
...which, I suspect, brings us all the way back around to why PublishAmerica and AuthorHouse and other vanity presses succeed.
Every author with a book in the slushpile thinks their work is publishable. They literally can’t tell that it isn’t. If they could, they’d have written different books.
This is the thing I always have a hard time with. One hears, repeatedly, at conferences and whatnot, editors and agents saying, "Well, what you really need to do is write a good book." And, at many of those whatnots, I've heard people say, "But how can you *tell* if you've written a good book?"
And, of course, you can't. At least, you can't tell what other people are going to think. _You_ have to think it's a good book. And I was sitting here thinking, "Well, I know the book I sold last fall was good, and I knew it before I sold it. Same with others I've got out there. So I've always just *known* that what I was writing was good." Which is, I'm sure, exactly what everybody must think.
It suddenly occured to me that I could go dig up the manuscript of the first book I wrote, 12 years ago, and look at it (which I've been claiming I'm afraid to do) in order to see where it lies on the publishability scale. Obviously, at the time, I thought it was publishable. I seem to recall thinking it was good. Not great, but good. My suspicion now is that the underlying story isn't bad, but that the character development, motivation, and general writing is probably lacking.
Unfortunately, it's not in the bedroom where I thought it was. I'm going to have to go dig around in the garage, because now I'm *really* curious.
-Catie
We are driven to Nixon nostalgia.
What incredibly bad straits we're in. Oi.
-Catie
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