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Saturday, Dec 9, 2006
Dec. 9th, 2006 04:34 pmI didn't feel very good when I woke up today but it's slowly going away. I stayed up very late and haven't done much of anything yet today. I have some errands to run before the meeting tonight so I need to get going... I need to refill my prescription at Fred Meyers, and get a little Christmas shopping done, among other things.
Last night after I logged off from Second Life I spent quite a long time designing a cd cover for a new mix cd. I took LiveJournal icons from all of my local friends and arranged them on the cover, with a track listing. I printed it out on photo paper so it looks really good, but the very last one didn't print so well -- I may be running out of ink. Something else to put on the list of things to get.
I cleverly titled my new mix cd "Blues, Bluegrass, and Alt Country" with the subtitle of "Writer's Night Dec 2006". This is because I made it to give out at Writer's Night this month, and it mostly contains bluegrass and alternative country, with a little world blues and old school jazz or even a bit of celtic folk thrown in. A lot of it could be called americana or old-timey music. Pretty clever naming scheme, eh? Leonard of Quirm has nothing on me!
Been rereading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents lately.
I printed up ten copies of my cd cover, and then proceeded to burn ten copies of said cd. So my "Writer's Night" cd is actually already finished and I'll probably bring it along to the meeting tonight. There won't be as many people there tonight as next week for the Christmas Party Writer's Night, of course. Also I'm not sure if 10 copies will be enough... considering that other people might show up at the writer's night that we don't normally see, I should probably have a few extra. On the other hand, I know a few people aren't as enamoured with bluegrass music as I am... my comic dealer Gabriel can't get past anything with a hint of a country twang, no matter what the style of music, which I think is mostly true for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
geojlc as well, and I know meirtam, while he doesn't hate such music, heard enough of it when he was young to last his whole life.
For me... country music is different from bluegrass or old-time music; bluegrass is interesting and exciting, country music is mostly not that interesting. Most of the bands on this collection really fall into the bluegrass camp, with liberal amounts of banjo and fiddle and mandolin. Stuff with more of a country feel doesn't always grab me as much. Neko Case is an exception, because of her outstanding voice and her songwriting... there are always exceptions, and there are certain country musicians that I like quite a bit. But good bluegrass is something I almost always like, from the traditional stuff like Bill Munroe to the far-out stuff like the speed-grass punk of Meat Purveyors and Splitlip Rayfield.
The other experiment of the week has been a failure... that was "force myself to write on another story now that my Christmas ghost story is done". What I did do was print the story out and give a copy to E at work, she'll read it and might even have some comments for me later. She'll be the first person to get to read it. I made a copy for myself as well, and went over it with the intention of trying to add a little concrete detail and scene-setting to each scene, if I can. For example, when Rasputin walks down the gangway in the opening scene: what sounds can he hear? The clank of his boots on the gangway? The sounds of people working the docks, voices yelling, freight being moved around? What is the sound of large freight containers being moved through the air by antigrav sleds? That would present an interesting visual image... massive, heavy containers floating by rather quietly... how would you finish this sentence, "Massive freight containers floated by like..."? What about other senses? Smell? Taste? Touch? If they're planetside and he's coming out of the ship, weather would be something noticed immediately.. wind, the smell of a recent rain, that sort of thing. Not something you get on a spaceship, not something space travelers are used to dealing with.
And the trick is, after thinking through all of these things for every scene, trying to condense it down to just a sentence or two that helps set the scene, because you don't want to spend very much time scene-setting. Maybe for the above scene, which is for all intents and purposes the opening scene (I have a very short first scene that is kind of a... I forget the word for it, a kind of prequel to the main plot), I could spend more than two sentences setting things up... but for most other scenes I want to try and accomplish that with only a sentence or two at most.
I'm bad at scene setting, and like many writers I tend to think visually first and foremost, so it helps to go back through the story and try to find better ways to set the scene or introduce a sound or smell or something that will give the reader something to latch onto, to help them visualize where they are. So I'll probably need to do a minor rewrite to account for that stuff before writer's night.
Last night after I logged off from Second Life I spent quite a long time designing a cd cover for a new mix cd. I took LiveJournal icons from all of my local friends and arranged them on the cover, with a track listing. I printed it out on photo paper so it looks really good, but the very last one didn't print so well -- I may be running out of ink. Something else to put on the list of things to get.
I cleverly titled my new mix cd "Blues, Bluegrass, and Alt Country" with the subtitle of "Writer's Night Dec 2006". This is because I made it to give out at Writer's Night this month, and it mostly contains bluegrass and alternative country, with a little world blues and old school jazz or even a bit of celtic folk thrown in. A lot of it could be called americana or old-timey music. Pretty clever naming scheme, eh? Leonard of Quirm has nothing on me!
Been rereading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents lately.
I printed up ten copies of my cd cover, and then proceeded to burn ten copies of said cd. So my "Writer's Night" cd is actually already finished and I'll probably bring it along to the meeting tonight. There won't be as many people there tonight as next week for the Christmas Party Writer's Night, of course. Also I'm not sure if 10 copies will be enough... considering that other people might show up at the writer's night that we don't normally see, I should probably have a few extra. On the other hand, I know a few people aren't as enamoured with bluegrass music as I am... my comic dealer Gabriel can't get past anything with a hint of a country twang, no matter what the style of music, which I think is mostly true for
geojlc as well, and I know meirtam, while he doesn't hate such music, heard enough of it when he was young to last his whole life.For me... country music is different from bluegrass or old-time music; bluegrass is interesting and exciting, country music is mostly not that interesting. Most of the bands on this collection really fall into the bluegrass camp, with liberal amounts of banjo and fiddle and mandolin. Stuff with more of a country feel doesn't always grab me as much. Neko Case is an exception, because of her outstanding voice and her songwriting... there are always exceptions, and there are certain country musicians that I like quite a bit. But good bluegrass is something I almost always like, from the traditional stuff like Bill Munroe to the far-out stuff like the speed-grass punk of Meat Purveyors and Splitlip Rayfield.
The other experiment of the week has been a failure... that was "force myself to write on another story now that my Christmas ghost story is done". What I did do was print the story out and give a copy to E at work, she'll read it and might even have some comments for me later. She'll be the first person to get to read it. I made a copy for myself as well, and went over it with the intention of trying to add a little concrete detail and scene-setting to each scene, if I can. For example, when Rasputin walks down the gangway in the opening scene: what sounds can he hear? The clank of his boots on the gangway? The sounds of people working the docks, voices yelling, freight being moved around? What is the sound of large freight containers being moved through the air by antigrav sleds? That would present an interesting visual image... massive, heavy containers floating by rather quietly... how would you finish this sentence, "Massive freight containers floated by like..."? What about other senses? Smell? Taste? Touch? If they're planetside and he's coming out of the ship, weather would be something noticed immediately.. wind, the smell of a recent rain, that sort of thing. Not something you get on a spaceship, not something space travelers are used to dealing with.
And the trick is, after thinking through all of these things for every scene, trying to condense it down to just a sentence or two that helps set the scene, because you don't want to spend very much time scene-setting. Maybe for the above scene, which is for all intents and purposes the opening scene (I have a very short first scene that is kind of a... I forget the word for it, a kind of prequel to the main plot), I could spend more than two sentences setting things up... but for most other scenes I want to try and accomplish that with only a sentence or two at most.
I'm bad at scene setting, and like many writers I tend to think visually first and foremost, so it helps to go back through the story and try to find better ways to set the scene or introduce a sound or smell or something that will give the reader something to latch onto, to help them visualize where they are. So I'll probably need to do a minor rewrite to account for that stuff before writer's night.
