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

[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.