Working

Working is interfering with blogging. This is not tolerable. I require a computer built into the back of a glove, like Batman has. With wifi.

Or like implanted in my skull or something, but then there'd be NO way I'd run anything Microsoft on it. Bluescreen of death would be too literal then.

Tags: Me

Eight Rules for Writing Fiction

By Kurt Vonnegut. From here

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Tags: Writing, Quotes

Left Behind

The Left Behind series is astonishingly bad books, for many reasons. And reading Slacktivist's series of posts about the first book just makes me confused. He's only like 70 pages in. And as a writer, it makes me frustrated, confused, and gives me the urge to write something about the end of the world, because it's huge and dramatic and it's easy to have things to write about. Which doesn't happen in Left Behind. And it makes me wonder where they get this, I don't remember any of it from when I read the Bible. As not religious, it makes me rather read C.S. Lewis, who's much more interesting and better, even if he didn't convince me either. And when I realize how many people read these books and believe that this presents something like an actual literal version of what's going to happen, it scares me shitless. People who actually believe the world is going to end in their lifetimes. That the only thing that matters to make you a good person is reciting the right words. People who put Old Testament rules that went right beside ones about shellfish and how to stone a slave ahead of things like "Love your neighbor". That's scary.

(Barely related, at work today, I saw a CD called, I think "Waiting for redemption", which isn't a horrible title for a CD. But it made me think, "Oh, FFS. You don't get redemption by waiting around. You have to do stuff. And stop doing stuff. And make up for the bad stuff. You can't just wait.")

Tags: Writing, Religion, Links, Mindscribbles, Politics