Tag: amwriting

Brevis in longo

Dear Internet,
Apparently, I’m pretty prolific. In addition to upping my writing here, I’ve also been writing every day in DayOne, which I mentioned here, and also actually working on my fiction. There is one thing to be said for a humanities scholar: We know how to crank out verbiage like no one’s business. Between the three, and this is including the re-writes of public blog entires and the fiction, I’m cranking out about 5,000 words a day. And that is being conservative. Now how much of that is “good” writing? Hard to say, really. My writing in the public sphere tends to be tighter since I obsess over the editing, the writing on the private journal has better readability (because I an writing more freely and more about the minutia of my life), while the fiction writing is still uneven in a deckled edged way. Some of what I produce for the fiction side is dreck and other times, it’s pure gold.
(Also, I decided to style myself as a modern day Samuel Pepys, at least in my head.)
I think one of the reasons why this is becoming a lot easier is that I have finally figured out a system that works for me to keep all of this organized which was so problematic for me for years. I know, it’s crazy considering that I organize shit for a living, but I couldn’t organize my writing to really work for me until now. Finding the Day One app was probably the tipping point, and also being a heavy user of Evernote and Scrivener also helped.
Here’s the status of my current projects, and which will find it’s way to Readers. The main landing page for my writing will also have all posts about this topic on the page, and if a project has their own landing page, those too will have posts updated on their landing page. Thus, if you’re hot into Edwardian good times but not Viking gore, you can skip directly to the landing page for the Edwardian projet instead of slogging through all the posts about Vikings and everything else.

Books

Project Name: Cabinet Particulier
Status: Research
Details of the project on its own page, so I won’t repost them here. I started collecting the research in July and currently haven’t moved forward yet other than doing the readings. Ideally, I see this as a pretty big project (read book series) so I want to get it off to a good start and I have a vague idea of how the first book will go, I want to dig deeper into her world before I begin writing.
Project name: Unnamed Medieval project
Status: Idea formation and preliminary research
Details: At this point I know it’s going to concern a woman, possibly in Scotland, sometime before 1066. Possibly containing Vikings.

Short Fiction

Title: PETITIONS OF THE GODS
Status: 80% finished
Summary: From my notes: Anonymous protagonist gives background on the invitation, a brief history of the Althing, and beginning of the world creation.Our protagonist is losing power and she knows this. The struggle with her, and with others like her, is how to remain relevant in a world when less number of people are believing in them. What would you do to stay relevant?
The beginning and ending are strong, but I’m floundering in the middle. It’s already at 2500 words with some heavy revision in the last week, so much so that the outtakes have their own folder in Scrivener. TheHusband read one of the first drafts and liked a lot of the clever uses for explanation of things but I can’t unstick the sticky at the moment. While I think this is at 80%, I would not be surprised if I end up ripping it entirely apart and restructuring all of it.
Title: AD LIBITUM
Status: 80% finished
Summary: What happens inside the Sistine chapel when no one is looking? Answer: Sex, drugs, and disco.
Idea sparked a “what if” when reading an article tonight about Russia’s Golden Ring and the author wrote eloquently about the medieval cathedrals and churches they were visiting. The line, “Jesus jumped off the cross, stretched, and went to light a cigarette.”, which sparked the idea of what in the hell happens in a cathedral at night when no one is around? Within minutes, I found this gorgeous virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel and the story started writing itself.

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So far, I have nearly a dozen people signed up for Readers, which is awesome. I haven’t decided if I should close the request at this point or keep it open. I had planned on start pushing some of my older stuff through the list to get those cleaned up and publishable, but after reading through many of them decided not to. They are that wretched or I am not into the genre as much anymore or the story just doesn’t appeal to me. So they will stay buried in the digital trunk.
I’m so motivated to be creating again but I keep thinking what do I want to do with the stuff that I create? I definitely want it to be read by the world, but how to go about that is tap dancing in the back of my brain. Having been a bookseller for many years, I work now as a librarian, and then throw in all the writers, literary agents, artists, booksellers, and other people in the publishing world I either know personally or stalk online, I feel pretty grounded on the back end o the industry. I just want to make sure that I do the right thing by my work.
I was pretty thrilled to discover Duotrope yesterday in my quest to sort out submission organization for at least the short pieces because my librarian-fu was actually failing me looking for a comprehensive source for magazines, literary zines, and other such publications to submit my work to. At the very least, I know this is the path I want to take with my shorter fiction. I’m also thinking of some kind of crowdsourcing shenanigans might also be in place too. This is going to be amazing.
TTFN,
Lisa

Looking for alpha/beta readers

I need eyes other than my own (and TheHusband’s) to read, comment, make suggestions, and the like on stories that are mostly finished, on some that are rough sketches, and everything else in between.
Here’s how it will work:
I’ll subscribe you to an announcement list. Every time a story gets posted, you’ll get an email that will include a link to the password protected story on my blog as well as the password. You can either comment on the blog piece directly or email me with thoughts/suggestions.
Only major revisions will be posted. You’re not obligated to comment every time. The announcement list will only come from me.
Please add readers @ exitpursuedbyabear . net (minus the spaces) to your allow list. Gmail is sending confirmation emails directly to the junk folder.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!
(It goes without saying: Please do not post commentary in public spaces (Facebook/Twitter/etc) or repost my content anywhere without my explicit permission. Thanks!)
And a huge thank you to everyone whose already signed up!

Things I may or may not have learned

It’s a vampiric version of Romeo and Juliet with a mixture of The Cure and Morrissey song lyrics to fatten it up a bit

– My tl;dr summary of Breaking Dawn

Dear Internet,
TheHusband was kind enough to extract content from what I was thought to be corrupted SQL tables of previous incarnation of the blog, with the date range of 2008 – 2010. Because the data was all dumped in a text file for me, I had to manually place it in EPbaB, which is incredibly time consuming. If you follow me on Tumblr or LiveJournal, you may have seen a plethora of the posts show up that while were time stamped with the correct date of their original publication, were showing up as new content in the Tumblr and
LiveJournal feeds, which caused some confusion when several people asked me what the devil was going on! Understandable, so I turned off the auto-posting when I work on the project but plan on writing up a summary (such as this) of the content posted so you can follow along.
I’ve so far have been able to get through July and early August of 2008. A month has shown me definite patterns to my thoughts, like struggles with my mother and that I was able to expand nearly 3 THOUSAND WORDS on a review on Breaking Dawn. I’m both curiously fascinated and total cringe worthy of this forensic expedition. But one thing absolutely does not change: I am always of the fierce opinion.
More to come soon.
TTFN,
Lisa

Unfucking Throbbing Manor

Recently, I saw a bit of Tumblr posts on Twitter scroll on by from Cat Valente, which the titles lead me curious and curiouser down the dark rabbit hole that is Tumblr. I was fine with this since the occasional tapping of the Tumblr vein never really hurt anyone and Cat’s posts all pointed to the nirvana – a blog called Unfuck Your Habitat.
After perusing the site for a bit, it took me a minute to figure out that Unfuck Your Habitat builds/uses the same methods as The Fly Lady, only in a more OMGBBQ and animated gifs heavy way, with a teensy dose of profanity. Which if I’m honest amongst my close friends here on the intarwebs, I’m moar likely to use something where “fuck” is sprinkled liberally about and the cherry on top are vaguely obnoxious animated gifs say over a site that seems to be geared towards, well, women I’d like to strangle on a daily basis.
The premise is simple: You find something you want to unfuck and you unfuck it. It can be as small as simply taking the steps to making your bed everyday and laying out that day’s clothes the night before or even just unfucking an area that is always in a cluster and working on keeping that unfucked on a more regular basis. In an related but not kind of way, I’ve been working on unfucking my emotional/creative life for the last month by meditating every morning for five minutes and then writing for 7 minutes before I begin my day. And by “begin my day,” I mean pour coffee down my throat in order to become human.
Continue reading “Unfucking Throbbing Manor”

A Study in Scarlet


Backyard after the great snow, January 14, 2012. (Using the cutout filter from Photoshop.)

I have been incredibly lackadaisical in regards to posting here as of late, but much of that has more to do with technical difficulties over pure laziness. But this is said from the person who only took down their holiday tree on January 31.
To not put a too terrible fine point on it, several things occurred:

  • All of my domains were infected with the same malware injection not once, but three times
  • The same week as the last injection infection took place, my provider was dDOSed.
  • Though I was ritualistic with backups of my WordPress databases across all of my domains, I apparently missed a crucial step as when I restored the databases, none of the content populated through the WordPress GUI. Ergo, logging into PHPmyAdmin shows me all of the lovely, lovely entries from many, many years and logging into WordPress shows me posts = 0. That’s sobering.

So if you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been and why every single one of my domains is empty – here is that explanation.
While I took massive steps to protect myself from future attacks and did everything by the book (supposedly), the best recourse seemed to be to wipe everything, including SQL tables, across the Lisa network and start fresh. A week after I blew everything away, I remember thinking how much relief I felt having no presence (or virtually no presence) on the web. How long has it been? 10 years? Maybe 12? Actually it’s been 16 since my first page up on Geocities and wrote my first entries, wondering if anyone would ever read them? And even when I was not writing, there were bits of me always present. But during that semi-glorious week in January, there was nothing. And that relief turned to emptiness.
So the cycle starts again, as it was in the beginning and so too shall it go forward to the future.

Decadence Tackycake

For years I’ve talked about consolidating and collating every single thing I’ve written into a central, preferably online, location. And for years, I’ve ignored the digital written mess building up though I kept buying domains and designing pages like it was going out of style. I kept producing the near daily online journal, sure, but it was everything else (the prose, the poetry, the essays, the fiction and the absurd) that needed a separate digital home. Bits and pieces kept getting shoved about into folders and sub-folders, directories and strange cataloging systems that made sense to my 23, 28, 34 year old selves but that the 39 year old self could only ask, “What the bloody fuck is this mess?”
So years of “some day” and “perhaps next weekend” were piling up. Domains bought, produced and lapsed. Finally, it was thanks to our telephone lines getting cut this past Monday morning for the fifth or sixth time1, I found myself with plenty of time (and with lack of Internet comes no procrastination) and renewed interest to work on this project. I pillaged my hard drive, went digging through all the nooks and crannies.
Here is what I found:

  • 16 books outlined & started (Though to be fair, most of them are similar in theme to the other and some are only a chapter or two in.)
  • Hundreds, literally hundreds, of finished pieces written in a variety of formats (prose, poetry, non-fiction essays, stories, etc.) that were published $deity know where
  • Dozens of pieces started, notated and never quite finished.
  • Hundreds of web journal entries dating back to 1996, with web publication “officially”beginning in July, 1998. This is in combination of what was published on The Lisa Chronicles from 1998 forward AND LiveJournal entries from 2001 and forward. For a long time there was separation between the two, but consolidation between the two started in the late 2000s.

Mind, this is just the digital forms. This is not including all the materials & research I have in paper format from when I unearthed what I unpacked and sorted my office last week.
Not everything I wrote is pure brilliance. Or even witty. Or fuck, even good for that matter. But finding those chunks of writing that are so pure, the language so on target or even just a simple line is so beautiful, I question who the author is every single time. And every single time, I genuinely am surprised to find out that said author is me.
I am overwhelmed, not only with the voracity of my output, but with the range of topics from men to sex to jobs to emotions to state of affairs to current events. I pile on reviews on books, movies and music. I drop science and knowledge on so much goddamned information, philosophize about everything. I thought the discovery of my high school journals was bad, simply because I had much more material then I originally believed, but the digital format makes the analog look paltry.
Writing is such a fucked up career move. I’m not talking about the Cassandras who pontificate about the chances of a writer making a living off of their work (slim to none), or how difficult it is to break into traditional publishing (slim to none) or even finding an agent (slim to none). I’m talking about this catch-22 mythos that if you do not publish something of brilliance before you are 30, you are worthless. But by the same token, there are dozens of critics who postulate that clearly one cannot have written a masterpiece when one is under 30 because they have nothing of substance to write about, let alone publish. (We’re a pampered generation, after all.)
25 came and went. 30 came and went. 35 came and went. I ate myself alive knowing I would never make it to 20 Under 40 or make some supposed (depending on who you ask) prestigious book list for best young writer. I would not be crowed with my supposed speakers for my generation, at least those as assigned by Time. Many of whom, if you’ve asked me on such topics, I tend to wholly disagree with or find their work highly derivative.2 Or full of crap.
It was like those years of interviewing myself in front of a full-length mirror, prepping for my big interview with Arsenio Hall that sadly never came to pass, was all for naught?
This is what I told myself (and continue to tell myself) for weeks, months and years. All the while, being bitterly, insanely jealous of writers as I watch them come from under the pack and push forward to the big times. While I beat my chest in mea culpa, waiting for my own recognition when I’ve done what? As time moves forward, as opportunities (we believe) get more scarce, as we find ourselves tired and lacking of energy because our youth has faded past us. Because tomorrow, tomorrow tomorrow is always another day but we always seem to think we can get caught up, inbox zero, take time off of work.
And we never fucking do.
I installed in myself I had completed nothing, when discovering all these years later that was such a blatant mistruth. How could I have ignored so much of what was completed?
Why did I live vicariously through others, paralyzed by jealousy when the back list actually exists?
Why did I, in so many ways, sabotage myself?
It ends now.
I have so much work to do.

1. Major construction on our road, the telephone company (regardless of various incarnation of said company throughout the years did not bury our lines at the minimum of 18″ as policy but between 3-4″. In addition, some of the lines were not properly marked.
2. Except for Gary Shteyngart whom I harbor such a major fan-girl crush on, that it is kind of (but not quite), stalkerish in its intensity.

Collection: 11/08/2010

A weekly collection of my writings from around the web as defined here.
Format:
name of blog : direct link to article
AMPed – Your Virtual Front Door: Part V – Using Social Media for Outreach and PR, part ii
Excessively Diverting – First it begins with an idea…then all hell breaks loose.
Excessively Diverting – Excessively Diverting is open!
Excessively Diverting – [Contest]: Pick the literacy foundation for donations from E.D.!
Jane Austen Tumblelog [tumblr] – Chapters 7 – 10 quotes, Pride and Prejudice
Reviews – Books:
The Library Diaries by Ann Miketa (GoodReads, LibraryThing)

Collection: 11/02/2010

A weekly collection of my writings from around the web as defined here.
Format:
name of blog : direct link to article
AMPed – Your Virtual Front Door: Part IV – Using Social Media for Outreach and PR
Jane Austen Tumblelog (tumblr) – Chapters 4 – 6 quotes, Pride and Prejudice
Reviews – Books:
Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris (Amazon, GoodReads, LibraryThing)
 

Collection: 10/18/2010

Since I’m becoming more prolific as of late with my writing not only here but across the web, I thought it would be a good idea to compile a once a week posting of what I’ve written and where. This will also allow readers of the TLC to get introduced to other blogs/sites they may not have been introduced to before. Win-Win situation, me thinks.
Format: name of blog : direct link to article
{the farce.}: likely bedfellows: an introduction
AMPed: Your Virtual Front Door: Part I – Introduction
AMPed: Your Virtual Front Door: Part II – Social Media Simply Explained