EXCELLENT topic this week, brought to you by the Irregulars. "Do you feel a certain confidence level with [writing] by this point or do you still ever get self-conscious about what you're writing or what you have written?" Join the Irregulars on Facebook: krisripper.com/irregulars https://youtu.be/4CPISlgPe68
Podcasts. I love podcasts. I'm listening to Aisha Tyler, episode 142, with Sara Gilbert. Let me pause here for a moment to say this: I love Sara Gilbert. For good reasons--like, I love her acting, and she's charming as hell on "The Talk"--and also for very dumb bone-deep reasons, like Darlene Conner was totally my first crush and finding out that your first crush (or the actor who played her) is queer is just stupidly validating. I'm not saying that's right, I'm saying it happens to be true. For me. Anyway. I like Aisha Tyler's Girl on Guy podcast because she's
Let's talk food. Because until someone invents a pill I can take three times a day and consider myself "fed," every body's got to eat. (See what I did there?) I neglect my body. My brain powers my fingers, and writing has been my priority for most of my life. It turns out--and this will shock some of you--one's physical health impacts one's mental acuity to varying degrees. Seriously. It's pretty annoying. I like to think that at my most slothful, I can still string words together in a coherent fashion. But there was a stretch last summer when the
So essentially, the story I'm currently writing--Roller Coasters--is taking over my life. And I'm still worried that I'm doing it wrong, that my genderqueer kid is just gonna read all over the place, and that he's not perfect enough, or too perfect, or humorless, or hiding behind humor. The bitch of it is he's all those things, cause he's twenty-five, and he's figuring himself out, and therefore he's all kinds of insecure, all kinds of awkward. I want him to be likeable. I also want him to be real. Which means he can't be too likeable. Except, how many people
I have a tattoo on my forearm. It reads: scribe. Because I scribble, you know. Because I put things down on paper, on screen. It's half past one, and I should be asleep. (That subject is an inside joke to myself. I've used "scribes should be sleeping" before, maybe on LiveJournal a million years ago. I'm sure Google can scare it up, if I look.) I'm writing a story. Rewriting a story, but it's a dramatic revision, the kind where the POV flips and the things you had one character telling another character in the rough draft, now occur on-page,
I love feedback on my writing. Doesn't everyone? That's the idea, right? That all writers love reviews, love feedback, love hearing from readers. And I think writers often believe this is true of themselves. Then some author goes apeshit on a reviewer and no one really re-evaluates the universal truth that authors love feedback. I wasn't the darling of the few fiction workshops I attended. I didn't write deep thematic stories, rife with symbolism and metaphoric language. I wrote straight-forward stories where people more or less said what they meant, or thought what they meant and said something else, something
I've never been blocked, or whatever. It's not that I don't believe writers get blocked. Sometimes I don't do the dishes for two days, and I love washing dishes. Sometimes my desire for clean dishes does not out-weigh my apathy about washing the fucking things. Sometimes my love for sitting here tapping letters, trying to fill the void, is out-weighted by being stuck. I tried the last scene from three perspectives before finally settling on one. This scene? Shit, I have no idea. No clue. Which is usually a sign that I'm writing the wrong scene. My stories are stronger when
Let's chat. I'm currently working on a fuck-ton of stories. It's invigorating, man. Do you juggle? I juggle. Not particularly well, but it's one of those great, mindless kinetic things you can do when you really ought to be doing other things. I can only juggle with three things, and they don't have to be identical, but then need to be relatively close in weight. I'll go for an hour, dropping, picking up, tossing. And thinking. And right now, I have an awful lot to think about whilst juggling. The Scientific Method and Hugh's New Dude are published! "Hugh Gets