Insufficiently entertaining
Oct. 29th, 2004 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithThat's how I feel when I check my Friends list for whatever reason and find that someone has un-Friended me. I know this is a big place, and folks skip around for whatever reason. But I feel like I'm holding forth at a party only to find people yawning and checking their watches. Thank you thank you. 'preciate it. Words are my life, after all.
Some people can write quite good posts containing litcrit or discussions about writing, drawing out the conversation and keeping it flowing. Beyond the occasional word count or character-based mutter, I don't think you'll find much of that here. I'm not particularly good at criticism, or about explaining how I write or what type of writer I am. I admire the folks who can boil down methods or styles to a few facile sentences--the ability to define succinctly is a gift. I just write--it Happens. Bubbles up in the backbrain and downloads, usually early in the morning. If I had to consciously think out all the things I've written, I don't think I'd have finished one book, much less four. And the fact that I can't readily define what I do or how I do it makes me feel as though it's something outside me, beyond my control, and therefore not really mine. This conflicts quite nicely with the feeling that I'm not really a pro if I can't turn it off and on like a faucet. After all, it's a job, isn't it? Writing, as has been driven into all our heads with 40-lb sledges over the past however many years, is a Business. Product is Consumed by the Marketplace at a rapid clip, and my job is to kick out more product in a timely (more or less) manner.
So here I sit, wrestling with that which isn't really mine, trying to control that which does as it damned well pleases. Talking about crabapples really is simpler.
Some people can write quite good posts containing litcrit or discussions about writing, drawing out the conversation and keeping it flowing. Beyond the occasional word count or character-based mutter, I don't think you'll find much of that here. I'm not particularly good at criticism, or about explaining how I write or what type of writer I am. I admire the folks who can boil down methods or styles to a few facile sentences--the ability to define succinctly is a gift. I just write--it Happens. Bubbles up in the backbrain and downloads, usually early in the morning. If I had to consciously think out all the things I've written, I don't think I'd have finished one book, much less four. And the fact that I can't readily define what I do or how I do it makes me feel as though it's something outside me, beyond my control, and therefore not really mine. This conflicts quite nicely with the feeling that I'm not really a pro if I can't turn it off and on like a faucet. After all, it's a job, isn't it? Writing, as has been driven into all our heads with 40-lb sledges over the past however many years, is a Business. Product is Consumed by the Marketplace at a rapid clip, and my job is to kick out more product in a timely (more or less) manner.
So here I sit, wrestling with that which isn't really mine, trying to control that which does as it damned well pleases. Talking about crabapples really is simpler.
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To friend or un-friend, is occasionally the question
Date: 2004-10-30 04:47 pm (UTC)1) LJ is a journal, nothing more, nothing less. It should be what you want it to be.
2) People look for different things in our journal voyeurism. Some want hot bi-sexual drama, so want political activism, some just search out matches off their interests lists.
3) You'll get friended and unfriended. The journal needs to meet YOUR needs. I catch up friends and relatives on my life. Personal, life-changing, intimate stuff doesn't go in my LJ, it goes in my paper journal. YMMV.
4) People must do friends pogroms at a point. Mine is over 25 people and if they all started posting at once I'd have to trim. Luckily my folks are like me and post in cycles.
I picked you up because I respect your writing and have never "known" an author. (Take that back, never known a SCIFI author; Lloyd Kropp wrote Egyptian Mysteries). I wondered what your life is like... and it looks pretty much inside "normal" parameters. I continue to read you because you seem nice (counts for much in my estimation), I'd like to know you better, and some day get a chance to meet you at a Con and buy you dinner (platonic). (True Fan (TM) "swoon music" plays in the background.)
Perhaps those rotten people who dumped you were looking for the "wild side" of SCIFI? Maybe they want some drama or romance or orgies or such (they should follow Burning Man posters if they do, but that's another tale). You could write them, I suppose, but wouldn't that feel... craven?
BTW, I'm the proud owner of CoC in hard back now!!! YIPEE. Picked it up in a nice local book seller's in Yellow Springs, OH. Pristine condition, with plastic covered dust jacket. I can't make WindyCON, but am SO jonnesing for a chance to get you to autograph this baby!
Re: To friend or un-friend, is occasionally the question
Date: 2004-10-30 06:35 pm (UTC)Ah, that's the SF Book Club edition. I wish they'd have bought the rest of the series, but it wasn't to be.
CoC also came out in hard cover in Russia--my only foreign sale so far. Nifty cover, which I had posted on my website.