Notecards

[mrissa]

It's the damned black notecards, is what. The red and green ones are for small things I need to put in the book (or take out, but there's less of that -- I write short drafts -- and the next book is 125K of short draft, and ask me how I feel about that, but not for another few weeks at least). The red is stuff of whose placement I'm pretty sure, and it has letters and numbers in the upper right corner: which book and which chapter. The green is still small, something that only has to go in once, but I don't yet know where. The purple cards are for sets of scenes and scenelets on the same idea/topic. The orange are for things I need to watch or fix through the whole stupid book or, when I'm unlucky, the whole stupid series. The orange, may I say here, are bad enough. The orange are a pain in my butt.

But the black notecards mean, "Oh [expletive of choice], I hope I remember what I meant by this note by the time I'm done with this stupid draft." There aren't many of them, but sometimes my choice of mnemonics leaves something to be desired, even internally. Anybody got any idea what I would have meant by "tientäjä flight times"? Would it help if I told you that no one is supposed to fly anywhere until the book I haven't written yet, so it has to be shorthand for something, and I don't know what?

And you know what? I'm going to have to stop on the way home from lunch with songwind and get more notecards. That's not the direction this is supposed to go! Fewer notecards, not more!

No, no. Deep breaths. More is good because more means I have those issues identified and organized rather than just having them floating out there ruining my book. We embrace the notecards. Yes.

I am using my mail from palinade to mark my place in matociquala's book. It's sitting on top of a letter to yhlee. I'm sure I could make this livejournallier if I tried.

(In college, Danny Pearson and I used to joke about name-dropping Ralston people. We'd say, with elaborately casual tones, "So I was talking to scottjames the other day...." And the other person would feign awe: "You know scottjames? Oh, wowwwww...what's he like in person?" This is much less funny once some of your friends think others of your friends actually are big-name famous people.)

Anyway, the thing about Bear's book is, it's the sort of thing I want to read and not the sort of thing I want to write. Isn't that nice of her? I call it friendly-like. For rehashed Shadowrun, it's really not too bad!

(For those of you who don't read Bear's journal: I am kidding. She got a very silly bad review on Amazon, and the best thing to do with bad reviews is to mock them. Especially when they miss major bits of worldbuilding in order to make their own political points. "Daring to become a non-white superpower"? Umm...did this reviewer miss all the references to Malaysia? What color does he think they are in Malaysia? Ahem. Anyway. Point is: if you're going to write a bad review of a book, make sure you write a bad review of that book and not some unrelated mental construct of your own. You can come up with nits to pick in nearly every book. Pulling them out of your various orifices is not useful to anyone.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, actually I thought the autobiographical theory stuff was dead on about Mars. Didn't Bear spend her first years out of college living on Mars? I thought I read that somewhere.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Which was really a bad choice, because with her coloring, she'd be much better off in a darker blue beret. Not that she asked me at the time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And when she [spoiler]ed the [spoiler] with the [spoiler], that must have been exciting.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I just wanna say, BTW, that I used the "various orifices" phrasing in my link salad post, just now, BEFORE I read my flist and saw this.

I'm only plagiarizing Shadowrun, I promise...

(Actually, what I find is really interesting is how obvious it is to me that the people making the "Shadowrun" comments aren't all that familiar with Cyberpunk-as-subgenre, nevermind Science Fiction Since 1965 (with special attention to the New Wave).

If anything, the book's biggest Cyberpunk debts are to When Gravity Fails (Effinger) and Hardwired (Williams) (heck, there are even nods to both books in the text; when I steal, I acknowledge the debt, at least sideways). But if it's anything-fanfiction, it's John Brunner fanfiction.

I hope if somebody ever decides to fanfic me, they write Shalmanezer/Feynman AI. *g* Now, THAT would be cool.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's funny how reading one reflection of something can make some people less literate than reading none of it.

I like Hammered better than John Brunner. But I haven't gotten to what would be the "oh [expletive] why the [expletive] am I even reading this [expletive] book" section if this was a John Brunner novel, so.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Um.

I like to think I'm a little more humane than Brunner. Slightly.

*g* At least, no nasty notes from the ASPCC yet....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Pope would have agreed - "Drink deep or taste not the Pieran spring."

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Shadowrun is a role playing game, although I've never played it.

I did run a Cyberpunk game for a couple of months back in the '90's, but the setting was very different than Hammered. For one thing, it took place in Kuala Lumpur....

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

There's a difference?

I know. And I live in Las Vegas now, and I keep selling these short stories about Las Vegas, too. I'm such a hack.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* But I wanted a baby so much....

Boy, it's a good thing I'm typing this on a laptop, or the sudden growth of my nose would have pinned me to the far wall, away from keyboard.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And you haven't even read the book about how I was eaten by Vampire Elvis yet. And the one about being adopted by a wolf-pack, with gang bangs.

And wait until I write the book about the space amazons. *g*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Are you forgetting the time you spent as a gay man in the late 16th/early 17th century?

Because, really, who could forget that?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

No, no, that comes of my early and lingering influence by Christopher Marlowe.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

We embrace the notecards. Yes.

First your journal gave me the itch to try writing non-sequentially (just to see how it felt, of course), and now you've got me thinking notecards would be wonderful way to order all those random thoughts about the book jingling around in my and on a word document.

What next?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I never know, myself.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but this week it's my turn to bail because I'm sick as a dog. :(

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Eek! Sorry to hear. What a great birthday present from your body, eh?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no kidding. :P

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

You wrote: "Anyway, the thing about Bear's book is, it's the sort of thing I want to read and not the sort of thing I want to write. Isn't that nice of her? I call it friendly-like."

I wanted to ask about that. I was just reading "Ruined by Reading" by Lynne Sharon Shwartz, who mentioned being surprised by an interview with another author who had said she couldn't find the kind of books she wanted to read wo she wrote them herself. Shwartz' comment was that the books she herself wanted to write were not at all the books she wanted to read. Is this common for writers, or is writing (one of the konds of) books you would like to read more usual? I find it hard to imagine living inside a world for months that you wouldn't enjoy if someone else had created it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I want to read a lot of books and a lot of kinds of books. The kind of books I want to write are only a subset of the kind of books I want to read. I don't think I could deal with writing a book I hated, but I can love lots of books I couldn't possibly have written myself.

In fact, I couldn't write anybody else's books at all, just mine. But in some cases I couldn't write them categorically (like this post-cyberpunk post-military-SF of Bear's) and in some cases I just couldn't write them specifically. I could write a fantasy novel set on a Minnesota college campus, but I'd have to be pameladean to write Tam Lin. But I couldn't even write Hammered's sibling. Maybe its second cousin once removed....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's why I said "one of the kinds of" (or would have if my fingers weren't so prone to typos). I can imagine, say, liking to read history and SF and fantasy and mysteries and biographies but writing only fantasy. What I find hard to imagine is liking to write mysteries when you don't like to read them.

Though in the case of Shwartz, she was talking less about genre than about writing style: e.g. preferring to read Henry Jamesian writing, but writing like Ernest Hemingway. That strikes me as less improbable but still a little odd. (Also, since I suspect the author she mentions was talking about genre, not style, she's mixing the two things as well and I'm not sure they're equivalent.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can imagine someone who adores a lyrical or even overblown style and just can't make words do that -- or possibly who adores it because they can't make words do that, so it looks more special than "any old thing" they could toss off.

And yes, I think style and genre are pretty different in this regard.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

Anybody got any idea what I would have meant by "tientäjä flight times"?

Finding out when the flights would have left (inconviniently) to explain why the characters chose to travel otherwise? Actual time differences between flight and over-land travel so they don't get where-ever just as fast by car/dogsled/riding moose? Or to point out that because of whatever circumstances they could reach the destination faster by other means?

my crystal ball is cloudy today, sorry.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, that's not it, because there's one train trip, and a little bit of local wandering around on skis, but mostly the travel in this book is accomplished by magical, non-flight-related means. Good try, but sadly no.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

Perhaps a plane comes in as they're out on skis & it's mentioned? so you'd need to know if planes acutally would be around at that time of day?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a very simple answer: no. Inari (in northern Finland) is not a major flight path of any kind, and even if it might have been, the main characters would have made sure it wasn't. Flying over Ilmarinen's blasted golden tree is not something they really want people to do.

No, that's why I said it had to be shorthand for something else, rather than about flight itself.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

::shrugs:: Maybe you were using 'flight' as flees/escapes? is anyone being driven from tientäjä (a place name?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU, KEV, YOU WIN!!!

you're welcome

[greykev.livejournal.com]

Even if you just posted that to keep me from speculating further. ;-)

Re: you're welcome

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hey, you ought to know that I've been perfectly willing to whap you on the head with, "no, Kev, and cut it out!" in the past when it seemed applicable.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

This whole exchange made me grin. :)

[greykev.livejournal.com]

::grins:: 'I'm here til Thursday, try the veal!'

PS

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A tientäjä is a type of person ("man of magic," roughly), not a placename. But the tientäjär do flee.