Quizzes, Computer hell, Puppeteers and Writing

[shadowkat]

My inner child is ten years old!

The adult world is pretty irrelevant to me. Whether
I'm off on my bicycle (or pony) exploring, lost
in a good book, or giggling with my best
friend, I live in a world apart, one full of
adventure and wonder and other stuff adults
don't understand.


How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hope that worked and didn't just come out looking like code. Never quite trust HTML to work. Weird response on that quiz, I swore I put prefers to walk. But for some reason it thinks I own a bicycle or a pony (uhm I wish.).

Feeling quite the luddite today. Can't get my sema livejournal program to work. I downloaded it. I unzipped it. But there is no .exe file to execute or click on. UGH! So gave up. I may just delete the dang thing, since all it's doing is taking up space on my hard drive. Second problem of the day was printer difficulties - for some bizarre reason my printer decided it no longer wanted to print anything. Finally got it to work again, but then it decided it did not want to print color, just black and white. It's a Lexmark ink jet printer. Cheap I know. And it just is being persnickety all of a sudden. Dang thing. Now the ironic thing about all of this - is I'd just finished watching the old Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy flick The Desk Set which is about the fear of a computer taking people's jobs. The computer is as big as a room and not that accurrate. In the end, Tracy gets across to Hepburn that the computer was never meant to replace them - just assist them, which they do rather well when they are working - the troublesome buggers.

Had a nice outting today with a lurker from the ATPO board. She'd read my Season 7 critique and the chapters of my book and was kind enough to take me out to tea to discuss. She's one of those lucky people who actually has two non-fiction books published and a contract to get a fictional novel out. Very interesting woman. Her husband is a puppeteer with Jim Henson. He plays the Bear on the playhouse show on the Disney Channel (if you have kids you probably know what I'm talking about - I've never seen it myself), he's also been Big Bird's stunt double, the hand-puppets and the puppet who put Kathie Lee Gifford in her place. Oh and he used to operate the snuggle bear puppet for those snuggle commercials. (That's right I met Snuggle's wife. LOL!) Interesting career - sounds sort of fun.

Seems a friend of her's has been contracted to write a Buffy book. Funny thing is her friend has never watched Buffy, but she's a religion book editor for Publisher's Weekly and has a Ph.D in religion and has edited young adult books - so apparently that's enough to get her to write a Buffy book. Why these silly publishers don't contact folks on the internet who have actually written essays on Buffy and watch the show, I have no clue. It does however explain why so many of the Buffy novels and other related books I've seen on the shelves don't measure up to anything I've seen on the internet. Bit of unsolicited advice? Want stuff on Buffy? Go to the internet - don't waste your money on some of these ancillary products, half of those writers barely watch the show. At any rate - the book sort of uses Buffy as a moral guide with Buddhist overtones. Its basically a self-help book for kids with Buffy as the guide. I suggested her friend visit the Atpo board archives and look for threads on Buddhism for guidance. The book's called: What Would Buffy Do?

My friend did give me some great writing advice though - ie. Revise. Revise. Revise. She's on her tenth revision for her publisher. Also check out The Writer's Journey - which basically breaks down the Hero's Journey in Writer's terms. Very nice woman. Buffy fans? Wonderful people. Best thing about watching BTVS and ATS is the fans I've met online.

So now, I'm wondering...should I go back and work on that novel again? Or keep working on that other thing I've been dicking around with? Tempted to post a portion of the other thing to my live journal, just to see what people think of it. But it's so rough. Has about five characters and five points of view at the moment. I've sort of combined elements of Angel with my own made-up universe. It takes place in a supernatural/apocalyptic NYC at a law firm. The lawyers are literally vampires. One of the characters is a former vampire/lawyer who is now operating on the outside trying to redeem himself. Have no clue where I'm going with it - which is actually half the fun, not knowing. I'm one of those writers who likes letting the characters take over, then going back and revising the whole thing. Shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone who reads this - since all my posts and essays have an odd free-flowing stream of consciousness style, which demonstrates that a) I don't outline, b)I throw my thoughts out on paper as they come in a conversational style, and c)pray no one shoots me down for it. Of course for my fiction, business writing and the stuff that really matters to me?
I do proof-read and revise, revise, revise. Most of those essays on my site? Same deal. I seldom post the first draft. For raw shadowkat? See the live journal or the review posts/responses I post to the boards - those are seldom proofed or revised.

Should end there...run out of thoughts to ramble on.

Oh and thanks to the folks who lent me the icons!

Comments

Welcome to LJ-land, s'kat!

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize till last night that you had one! I've been enjoying reading your entries. Hope to see you next Wednesday at the lunch meet!

Rob