9 Things at the end of the day...

[shadowkat]

1. Going out on a limb and stating I don't like Firefox 4.0. Damn stupid thing made me update. I really wish whoever designs these things would stop updating them.

2. Work has been a bitch lately. The abatement contracts are killing me. Emergencies right and left, and changes. Seriously you'd think every portion of the Rail road had lead and asbestos, I also know more about lead and asbestos than I want to. Asbestos by the way, is what caused Steve McQueen's death.

3. In regards to 2, I was reminded again tonight of why I can't get a book published.
While I'm happy for the friend whose book I betaed way back in 2003, who finally got published, I feel like my poor book will reside forever and a day on my hard-drive, because I can't find the energy to send it out, and write up the query letters. Work takes too much out of me. My casual friend who got published - didn't have the work issue, just the kid issue. And having never had a kid - I honestly don't know which is harder to maneauver. I envy her...in a way, she has the hubby, the great apt, the kid, and the published book. But what motivates me is so different...I have a bit of a savior complex, I need to feel that I am doing something to make the world safer or better for others.
I have always had it. I feel guilty when I'm not actively helping strangers or fighting for them in some way. See? Savior complex. My current job at least provides that certainity - I know I'm helping strangers, making their lives better somehow. I'd blame my Catholic origins, but I doubt that's it. I have no idea why I have this complex, but it may explain why I fell so hard for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and why I loved the Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Savior Complex. Plus, I hate fame...I think it's evil - toxic to the human soul. And I'm incredibly hard on myself. I look at my book and I see everything that is wrong with it. To be fair, I see what is wrong with everyone else's works too. Highly critical. I ripped Hunger Games apart - it's fun, but I disagree with Kristen Cahshore...Suzanne Collins does not write beautiful sentences. But then I don't think Cashore does either...Graceling had lots of problems. Nancy Kay Shapiro actually does write beautiful sentences...in What Love Means to You People...her plotting just needs a bit of work. See? Critical. I'm critical of Hemingway - he wrote too journalistic for my taste and too sparse, as does my father who has co-opted Hemingway's style. Not a fan of the journalistic style - it feels as if you are reading a dry retelling of events, the emotion sucked from it. My father is a witty writer, but not an emotional one. In some respects, I identify with JD Salinger - who was reculsive, hated fame, and just loved to write...except I'm not a fan of Salinger's writing - tooo...I don't know what to call it, whiny? Holden Caulfield grated on my nerves in Catcher in the Rye, there I said it.

I've read a lot of bad books this year, enjoyable fluffy books but poorly written. I notice because I've read amazing books and literary masterpieces. I'm an English Lit major, it came with the territory. Never been a fan of Dickens though...this may be genetic, the Momster hates Dickens too. The Victorians just don't work for me. Too flowery in their prose style and too formal. I tried to write a book that took place in Victorian times but got stuck, because I just hate the Victorians. Was forced to read them in undergrad, kept trying to get around it. The Elizabethans worked for me, as did the period directly after, the early 1800s with Jane Austen - I liked the period in which everything was a bunch of letters. Austen was witty, if a bit formal. The Brontes annoyed me - too melodramatic and whiny, and Edith Wharton - same problem. Ditto for Nathanel Hawthorne, Henry James, and whoever wrote Ivanhoe. I agreed with Mark Twain. While during Hemingway's time period - I prefered James Joyce, whom Hemingway hated, and Twain, and to a degree Fitzgerald. I must admit I remember the Great Gatsby far more vividly than Old Man and the Sea or The Sun Also Rises. Not a lot happens in Hemingway. But he does do dialogue well.
I adored Steinbeck - Steinbeck's writing is haunting and the emotion drips from the prose without overwhelming it...you feel as if you are there. Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Travels with Charlie all stick in my brain like gum on a shoe. Also adored Carson McCullers - Member of the Wedding, or Toni Morrison's poetic style, then there was Garcia Gabriel Marquez who made me wish I was better at learning languages. Once you've read good literature, you can see what is wrong with the lesser works including your own, particularly if you've been trained to rip them apart with a critical eye.

When I write...I rip at myself if it isn't literary. Character centric. Real. I can't really write genre, because of my own training...too many creative writing profs who told me not to. Even if I tell genre inside my head.

How many books have I written? About five. One is possibly publishable - that's the one sitting on my hard-drive. It's almost embarrassing to tell people you've finished at least three books and worked on five. I feel lazy in a way. I have no problems writing...the vomit of words upon a page comes as easy to me now as breathing...no it's getting someone else to read those words, to feel them, to understand that is difficult. To more importantly buy them, to publish them, to crave them. Selling myself to others was never my strong suit. I have little patience for marketing and self-promotion. And that is perhaps my curse in all things. If I could only figure out the trick to it. Like learning some weird dance...maybe the tango.

I should be working on that book now, instead I'm blogging. Blogging is safe. It's comfortable. It's easy. It comes naturally. Trying to sell a book you no longer quite believe in yourself is hard.


4. Watched Smash this week...it continues to hold my interest. It has problems, but it appears to be working through them. Very cliche and soapy in places, but fun and quirky in others. The "putting on a show" bit still works. It's the personal relationships that don't.

5. Working my way through Erin Morgernstern's The Night Circus which is almost too journalistic in style to my taste. I feel as if I'm removed from it. It fascinates me enough to stick with it, but also has the oddest tendency to put me to sleep. I blame the style not the story. The writer has a stiff formalistic journalist style...like someone writing an entry for a Victorian version of the UK Guardian or NY Times. In that respect it reminds me a little of Jack Finney's Time and Again. I'm not a fan of this type of style - I find it a bit like classical music, it lulls me to sleep.

But the story remains fascinating. It's about two competing magicians who compete with exhitibitons in a circus. Their exhibitions are described in great and precise detail, along with the effects on those involved directly with the circus. They are competing for two different teachers and the contest is actually more about teaching styles than the students. Fascinating story idea, and the characters are quirky and interesting.

6. Thank you to green_maia for the v-gift of the spring sapling, mucho appreciated. I'm horrible at giving v-gifts, since I can't get it to work. I've tried a couple of times.

7. Scanned Mark Watches Again...sigh, I'm sorry, but F&*K in capital letters over and over and over again is NOT work safe. I felt embarrassed scanning this during my lunch break. Dude, I wanted to say...get a grip or if you plan on turning this into a living learn to substitute another word such as FRAK. Not that I have any problems with FUCK pers se, but other people do.

Will state that I was right, he did go insane over Hush, thought he would. The boy just has no experience with quality television...all he's seen is the fairly formulaic X-Files. It's sad. Really quite sad. Can someone please send him DVDs of Hill Street Blues, Homicide Life on the Streets, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, NYPD Blue, St. Elsewhere, Cheers, MASH, and various others. I want to do the same thing in regards to reading material. It boggles my mind how few people are "well-read". They are educated but not well-read. They haven't read Tolstoy, Austen, Dickens, CS Lewis, Edith Wharton, Shakespeare, Dosteovsky, Checkov, Ibsin, Harold Pinter, Woody Allen, Lillian Hellman, Toni Morrison, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Ayn Rand, John Lock, Machiavelli, Tolkein, Frank Herbert, Voltaire, Molaire, Hugo, Collette, HP Lovecraft, James Joyce, Steinbeck, Heminway, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Francis O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, etc. How can't you have read these things? Didn't you go to high school? I read Mark and I wonder about his education, more to the point, I wonder about the sorry state of the US educational system. Seriously, is it getting worse? I think it is. Mark clearly hasn't read very much. He's so adorably clueless.

Outside of this observation...he didn't have much to say about Hush. Although he did predictably fall in love with Tara, and even more predictably Tara and Willow. S6 is going to kill this poor boy. Just saying. He's also a huge S4 Spike fan...which doesn't bode well for S6, Spike is less humorous in the later seasons, although, oddly, I still found him to have the best lines. He has some great ones in S6 and S7. God, I love that character. Adore that character. Much to the chagrin of many a member of my flist who just doesn't get the appeal. He's also predictably an Anya fan.

He's take on Hero amused me. I reacted to Hero in a different manner, I thought the episode was dumb. Was highly annoyed they killed off the only character I liked and stopped watching for a bit after Wes showed up, because I disliked Wes at first. I came back for Darla and for the Faith/Buffy cross-over. Stayed through most of S2, gave up again during Pylea, which I thought was beyond stupid and still do, came back again in S3, gave up around the episode Provider and the whole St. Cordy/Baby Connor arc which I found unwatchable. Online viewers convinced me to try again...because they wanted me to write meta on Angel. Why, I've no idea. Guessing they liked my Buffy meta and wanted Angel too?
Anyhow..came back in time for the whole Holtz/Justine/Wes arc to take off. Liked that arc.
I preferred the snarky dark tragid angst to the smoopy baby/romantic stuff - this may explain why S4 and S5 were my favorite seasons, and I found 1-3 barely watchable. Still don't own 3. And Whedon's episode Waiting in the Wings...is in my opinion the worst episode next to She - unwatchable is an understatement. I hated that episode. Whedon didn't do a good job with Angel. The only episode he wrote that I liked, is I think, Spin the Bottle and possibly Hole in the World. Everything else stunk. He didn't get Angel or the redemptive arc stuff. Was clearly not his thing. Minear, Fury, Bell, DeKnight, Espenson, Merle, Goodard, and Craft/Fain on the other hand did get Angel. Greenwalt was a bit too smulchy for my taste - I preferred Minear who was dark and snarky, as was Fury and Bell.

At any rate, I was annoyed when they wrote out Glenn Quinn. Discovered later they had no choice. Whedon had grabbed him from Roseanne. But Quinn was an addict and they had issues with him so had to let him go. They had casting problems with Angel - big ones. Whistler?
The guy who played him was arrested and put in jail before he could start work. So they replaced the character with Glenn Quin's Doyle. Quinn...got addicted to drugs. They had to let him go. Then David Greenwalt and CC were causing issues...according to the rumor mill.
Rumor had it...the network wanted both gone, because they were costing the series money, delaying work, etc. Boreanze had a rep as a practical joker who drove other actors nuts and caused delays for lots of laughing on-stage. The only actors who didn't get a bad rep during the shoot were Marsters, J August Young, Amy Acker, Adam Baldwin, and Alexis Denisof.

I admittedly found the rumors surrounding Angel far more interesting than the story at times. Particularly the rumors regarding how they planned to get rid of the Cordelia character.


8. Got more sleep last night and less. Damn allergies. Have decided that the air conditioner is my friend. It killed my allergies. I could breath when it was on. Also not hot. Still unseasonably warm. Made it to 80 today in the city, was cooler out on the island, thankfully. It's always ten degrees cooler in Jamaica than Manhattan for some reason.

9. May marathon the Game of Thrones DVD's soon...in preparation for the April 1st start. The nice thing about reading the books so long ago is I really can't remember them well enough to know the variations. There's a great interview with GRR Martin and Jimmy Kimmel live that you should all check out. It discusses the differences between writing for tv and novels, also how to deal with insane fans. He mentions that he has fans who defend him against the trolls. The trolls attack him, his defenders swoop to his defense, and they go at it for pages and pages and pages...this will cause more than a 100 comments and he's had to start moderating. Because they will get into a kerfuffle. LOL! Ah fandom, don't ever change. And he states how he has gotten letters stating that he changed a stallion into a mare in a book, or changed Renly's eyes from blue to green. His fans are more detail oriented than he is. But my favorite comment? Is about how people write or the process, does he have a character bible, a thorough outline, everything spelled out?
He said yes and no. He's not as detail oriented as some of his fans are, and yes in some cases they know the tale better than he does. HE said, and I do love this:

"Some writers are gardners and some are architects. Although no one is purely one or the other. But we fall along the spectrum. I'm more of a gardner...I like to wander about and dig, explore the story, dig into the characters, I don't have it all neatly laid out and outlined."

This is important. Because what people like in tv, film and books also runs along these lines. The people who love Breaking Bad, Justified, those stories - are fans of the "architects" - they like a tale that is tightly plotted, well laid out, no words minced,
everything fits. No wandering about or digging around. They want to see the blue prints.
Elmore Leonard is closer to the architect, he outlines his stories thorougly, he knows everything. He's a tight plotter. While Joss Whedon is more of a digger, he wanders about.
Moffat? Architect. RT Davies? Gardner. Vince Gallian? Architect. Shondra Rhimes? Gardner.
Although as Martin states it can't be that neatly defined and no one is purely one or the other.

I like both, personally. But I'm admittedly odd. I tend to have eclectic tastes. Not many people I know like the Good Wife, Vamp Diaries, Being Human, Merlin, Game of Thrones, Justified, Cheers, Once Upon a Time, Big Bang Theory, In Plain Sight, General Hospital, Revenge, Walking Dead, Mad Men, Awake, Smash, Glee, MASH, Seinfeild, As Time Goes By,
Secret Circle, Grey's Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, The Wire, Homicide Life on the Streets, Dowtown Abbey, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Torchwood, and romance novels, noir fiction, literary, contemp literary, young adult, mystery, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, dysfunctional family, humor, satire, poetry, historical, and comic books. Or think it is cool to be in a church that has athesists, agnostics, Jews, Catholics, protestants, muslims,buddhists, hindus, etc all side by side. The more diverse the group is, the happier I am. The less I stand out and the more comfortable I feel. You should see my music collection - it blows people's minds. I have every possible style available, except maybe opera - I like Gershwin, but the Italians and Germans continue to elude me.


Okay off to sleep and bed. Hopefully.

Comments

[fishsanwitt]

Whew - so many books!

I've read almost every author you listed - but I went to university in the 1970s - and aside from my theatre courses - took English, History, the Classics and 20th Century Writers - and we had to read *tons* of stuff.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Probably helps that I read most of these in the 70s and 80s as well, we had less "other" entertainment distractions back then (ie. no computers and internet). And, I was English Lit Major and an insatiable reader. My brother is reading half of the books I read as a child for the first time to his daughter. He barely read when he was a kid - more into sports.