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shadowkatGloomy day. Overcast, with an insistent misty drizzle. And in the 50s. Wore a coat for the first time in a while, which I didn't mind. I actually liked putting on a jacket and sweater for a change of pace. Gotten bored of the summer clothes. This is why I live in NY or the northeast and not, the south. But could do without the insistent gloom, looked like a day out of an Edward Gorey cartoon.
Supposed to be this way pretty much all week, but with any luck will let up in time for the weekend, when I'm off to take my Aunts (K&M) to the theater. They are in town from the Poconos.
If a woman does not keep pace with her companions, perhaps it is because she hears the beat of a different drummer, let her step to the music in which she hears, no matter how measured or far away - from Walden Pond (by way of Brothers and Sisters, which changed the pronouns, and Henry David Thoreau) I rather like that quote...seems to fit me, forever and a day. Albeit makes me feel dreadfully lonely at times.
Wondered on the way home why I got the law degree instead of the MFA in Creative Writing...because at the time I wanted to make a difference, to contribute and that seemed the best path. And I guess it still is, even though sometimes it really doesn't feel like it, such as today for instance. I don't know how I ended up in the field I did, it was not planned. And I feel as if I have zip in common with the people that surround me, who have degrees mainly in finance and business administration next to my BA in English Lit and Cultural Anthropology. Never been fond of math, yet I'm working with it constantly, along with writing - I write constantly too, so there is that. But it is not the type of writing that I planned on. It's sometimes telling a story, but a story of how I negotiated a contract or procured a consultant for a job. That's not to say I don't do other writing. I write constantly. Every day.
I've met people who want to be writers but they hate writing, they never write. They procrastinate.
Sort of how I would like to be a singer. But can't sing. Those of us who write all the time, if we tell you we hate it - we are lying, because why would you do something you hate in your spare time, unless they are paying you for it? You don't. For some reason they've romanticized writing, glamorized it, as I have singing. But to be good at either takes discipline and hard work.
This weekend I volunteered to write an article for a newspaper on an event that I attended and participated in for the social justice/action committee that I'm a member of. I wrote it in the space of maybe two hours, edited it, slicing three pages to one and a half within an hour, and sent it off - got a wonderful response. It was a different writing style than the one I use at work - which tends to be quite formal and informative, or business writing. This style is more similar to the personal essays that I post on my blog, formal, but with emotion. There's multiple styles of writing - that I've learned how to utilize. That I've worked hard to figure out, jumping from job to job and career to career. But I'm boring, I suspect.
If I thought about the fictional writers that influenced me in my life - it would be a mixed bag.
There's the one's I remember, and the one's I don't. The guilty pleasures that I prefer not to mention and the literary greats that I brag about. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to both being influences for good or ill. I tend to be a bit of an eclectic reader with a diverse taste in styles. I don't know anyone online who shares my weird diverse taste - who has read Elmore Leonard, Ann McCaffrey, James Joyce, Kim Harrison, Proust, Edith Wharton, George RR Martin, PD James, Terry PRachett, James Patterson, Stephen King, Maria Doria Russell, Jonathan Franzen (essays only), Kurt Vonnegurt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julie Garwood, Kathleen E. Woodwiss, Rosemary Rodgers, Jennifer Crusie, JK Rowling, Heminway, Fitzgerald, Yeats, Slyvia Plath,
Tolkien, CS Lewis, Frank Herbert, PD Wodehouse, Dan Simmions, George Simeonon, Checkov, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Butcher, Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear, Sheri S. Teper,
Lewis Carroll, Zelphia Keatley Synder, Judy Bloome, SE Hinton, Laurel S. Hamilton, Raymond Chandler, Charlain Harris, John Irving, John Updike, Minnette Walters, TJ McGregor, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Keri Hume, Artur Perez-Reverte, Lois McMaster Bujold, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, William Gibson, Michael Chabon, Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley,
Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Lorrie Moore, Connie Willis, Michael Swanick, Janet Evanouich,
Mickey Spilliane, CJ Cherryh, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickensen, Shirley Jackson, Wallace Stieger, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Peters, Dorothy Dunnett and more than I can remember. I've read every genre, non-fiction and fiction, literary and non-literary, classical and non-classical. I jump around. I don't care if it is pulp, I will read it. And I pick up things from each of them. I submerged myself in the stream of consciousness writers in college - William S. Burroughs (who drove me crazy), James Joyce, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez...et al. Also submerged myself in the 18th century moralists - Austen and Richardson. Read Stendal's Red and The Black in high school - devoured it and still remember ranting at the main character every twenty pages. I fell in love with Paul Atredis and Thomas White Gold Welder...as well as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. Later, it was characters like Sir John Smyth, Lymond, the Scarlette Pimpernel from Baroness Orcey's classic novel (not the movies that came later), and heroines such as Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice or Vicky Bliss from Elizabeth Peters mysteries. Although my current female crush may be Rachel Morgan.
Books were friends. Bullied and teased relentlessly in school, I retreated into the stories in my head or in the books I carried around like amour. Retreating to libraries. I still do to an extent. Go to a party or read a book? Read the book, duh. Never understood the people who had to cheat on their English Lit exam because they hadn't read the book or needed the cliffnotes version. I actually read the books. Catch-22 in the space of 24 hours. Although I'd have preferred taking longer.
And since I can remember...I've always wanted or worked at writing. I kept journals from the age of 8 to...well the internet. Now I write online. Upon discovering them in her closet, Momster read a few then called and wondered - why I never really wrote about what I did during the day, but instead wrote about what I was thinking, how I felt about things, books, tv shows, films I'd seen, or events and what I thought of them. It wasn't an actual log. I told her that I got the idea of how to write a journal from books I'd read such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple or The Diary of Anne Frank or Charly. I wanted to write a journal that was like a story, or a collection of thoughts. Finding my daily activities rather dull. I suppose I wrote it as if someone else was reading it over my shoulder. An odd way to write a personal journal - I know.
When I write in my online journals...now two of them simulataneously - which feels a bit like overkill, but I hate the ads on lj and not many people are on DW - I wonder who is reading it over my shoulder? It's often hard to tell.
My own novel sits on my new computer...untouched at the moment. Perhaps I should sign up for that Nano deal and use that as a way of revising my novel? Ponders. No. Then I'd have to post the thing to it, and really don't want to do that. It's a good novel, just needs tweaking here and there, and promoting - which I'm not good at and don't want to do and procrastinate something fierce.
Hmm. This was not what I meant to write tonight. I meant to write a review of the tv shows I'd been watching...but for some reason this popped out instead.
Supposed to be this way pretty much all week, but with any luck will let up in time for the weekend, when I'm off to take my Aunts (K&M) to the theater. They are in town from the Poconos.
If a woman does not keep pace with her companions, perhaps it is because she hears the beat of a different drummer, let her step to the music in which she hears, no matter how measured or far away - from Walden Pond (by way of Brothers and Sisters, which changed the pronouns, and Henry David Thoreau) I rather like that quote...seems to fit me, forever and a day. Albeit makes me feel dreadfully lonely at times.
Wondered on the way home why I got the law degree instead of the MFA in Creative Writing...because at the time I wanted to make a difference, to contribute and that seemed the best path. And I guess it still is, even though sometimes it really doesn't feel like it, such as today for instance. I don't know how I ended up in the field I did, it was not planned. And I feel as if I have zip in common with the people that surround me, who have degrees mainly in finance and business administration next to my BA in English Lit and Cultural Anthropology. Never been fond of math, yet I'm working with it constantly, along with writing - I write constantly too, so there is that. But it is not the type of writing that I planned on. It's sometimes telling a story, but a story of how I negotiated a contract or procured a consultant for a job. That's not to say I don't do other writing. I write constantly. Every day.
I've met people who want to be writers but they hate writing, they never write. They procrastinate.
Sort of how I would like to be a singer. But can't sing. Those of us who write all the time, if we tell you we hate it - we are lying, because why would you do something you hate in your spare time, unless they are paying you for it? You don't. For some reason they've romanticized writing, glamorized it, as I have singing. But to be good at either takes discipline and hard work.
This weekend I volunteered to write an article for a newspaper on an event that I attended and participated in for the social justice/action committee that I'm a member of. I wrote it in the space of maybe two hours, edited it, slicing three pages to one and a half within an hour, and sent it off - got a wonderful response. It was a different writing style than the one I use at work - which tends to be quite formal and informative, or business writing. This style is more similar to the personal essays that I post on my blog, formal, but with emotion. There's multiple styles of writing - that I've learned how to utilize. That I've worked hard to figure out, jumping from job to job and career to career. But I'm boring, I suspect.
If I thought about the fictional writers that influenced me in my life - it would be a mixed bag.
There's the one's I remember, and the one's I don't. The guilty pleasures that I prefer not to mention and the literary greats that I brag about. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to both being influences for good or ill. I tend to be a bit of an eclectic reader with a diverse taste in styles. I don't know anyone online who shares my weird diverse taste - who has read Elmore Leonard, Ann McCaffrey, James Joyce, Kim Harrison, Proust, Edith Wharton, George RR Martin, PD James, Terry PRachett, James Patterson, Stephen King, Maria Doria Russell, Jonathan Franzen (essays only), Kurt Vonnegurt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julie Garwood, Kathleen E. Woodwiss, Rosemary Rodgers, Jennifer Crusie, JK Rowling, Heminway, Fitzgerald, Yeats, Slyvia Plath,
Tolkien, CS Lewis, Frank Herbert, PD Wodehouse, Dan Simmions, George Simeonon, Checkov, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Butcher, Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear, Sheri S. Teper,
Lewis Carroll, Zelphia Keatley Synder, Judy Bloome, SE Hinton, Laurel S. Hamilton, Raymond Chandler, Charlain Harris, John Irving, John Updike, Minnette Walters, TJ McGregor, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Keri Hume, Artur Perez-Reverte, Lois McMaster Bujold, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, William Gibson, Michael Chabon, Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley,
Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Lorrie Moore, Connie Willis, Michael Swanick, Janet Evanouich,
Mickey Spilliane, CJ Cherryh, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickensen, Shirley Jackson, Wallace Stieger, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Peters, Dorothy Dunnett and more than I can remember. I've read every genre, non-fiction and fiction, literary and non-literary, classical and non-classical. I jump around. I don't care if it is pulp, I will read it. And I pick up things from each of them. I submerged myself in the stream of consciousness writers in college - William S. Burroughs (who drove me crazy), James Joyce, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez...et al. Also submerged myself in the 18th century moralists - Austen and Richardson. Read Stendal's Red and The Black in high school - devoured it and still remember ranting at the main character every twenty pages. I fell in love with Paul Atredis and Thomas White Gold Welder...as well as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. Later, it was characters like Sir John Smyth, Lymond, the Scarlette Pimpernel from Baroness Orcey's classic novel (not the movies that came later), and heroines such as Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice or Vicky Bliss from Elizabeth Peters mysteries. Although my current female crush may be Rachel Morgan.
Books were friends. Bullied and teased relentlessly in school, I retreated into the stories in my head or in the books I carried around like amour. Retreating to libraries. I still do to an extent. Go to a party or read a book? Read the book, duh. Never understood the people who had to cheat on their English Lit exam because they hadn't read the book or needed the cliffnotes version. I actually read the books. Catch-22 in the space of 24 hours. Although I'd have preferred taking longer.
And since I can remember...I've always wanted or worked at writing. I kept journals from the age of 8 to...well the internet. Now I write online. Upon discovering them in her closet, Momster read a few then called and wondered - why I never really wrote about what I did during the day, but instead wrote about what I was thinking, how I felt about things, books, tv shows, films I'd seen, or events and what I thought of them. It wasn't an actual log. I told her that I got the idea of how to write a journal from books I'd read such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple or The Diary of Anne Frank or Charly. I wanted to write a journal that was like a story, or a collection of thoughts. Finding my daily activities rather dull. I suppose I wrote it as if someone else was reading it over my shoulder. An odd way to write a personal journal - I know.
When I write in my online journals...now two of them simulataneously - which feels a bit like overkill, but I hate the ads on lj and not many people are on DW - I wonder who is reading it over my shoulder? It's often hard to tell.
My own novel sits on my new computer...untouched at the moment. Perhaps I should sign up for that Nano deal and use that as a way of revising my novel? Ponders. No. Then I'd have to post the thing to it, and really don't want to do that. It's a good novel, just needs tweaking here and there, and promoting - which I'm not good at and don't want to do and procrastinate something fierce.
Hmm. This was not what I meant to write tonight. I meant to write a review of the tv shows I'd been watching...but for some reason this popped out instead.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 05:06 pm (UTC)I think that I over loaded my DVR, I programmed it to record all of 'Voyager' on FX (I expect that most of the episodes I'll delete because they weren't very good, but I wanted to give the series another view...)....
And I'm sorry I didn't post anything about the Unitarian church article, I couldn't really think of anything to say or add, though I could have at least told you I liked it!