| Update |
[Sep. 10th, 2006|11:08 pm] |
Finished reading Neuromancer; sex in a can. Brief respite before continuing the Sprawl Trilogy, though, because things never go quite as planned: I was at United Bookstore the other day and found an interesting-looking book, Roger Levy's Reckless Sleep. I'm loving it so far. I had never heard of it before, which is weird given it's six years old. A quarter of the way through, and I'm totally psyched to see where the story goes.
On the other side of the pen, things are coming along nicely; finished chapter four of Touched tonight. It's funny, I've gotten so used to writing...more mature...fiction, that when I go back to a YA work, I'm shocked at how short it seems. But given the pace I'm taking with the rewrite, I'll easily be able to fill it out into two- or three-hundred pages (four chapters saw the thirtieth page; not exciting, considering Blood, Tears, and Sand saw eighteen pages, I believe, but forty chapters isn't a difficult rock to climb).
I still haven't done any work on Tryst. Or, rather, I haven't done any significant amount of work on Tryst. I can envision how the story progresses, and I can see where I want it to end, but every time I go to actually write it, it's hard to come. Maybe I just need a little more time to think on things before plunging into it.
The jorio is quickly becoming one of my favourite forms of poetry. If you don't know what a jorio is, you can find the definition here, in the profile of the inventor's FictionPress account. Like all poetic forms, it's good for some purposes and poor for others, but I'm liking things so far. I have two joria on my FictionPress account, though you'll have to dig for them: Your Lips and On Betrayal. It's worth looking into for any poet looking to expand their horizons.
And...I think that's about it for today. I'll be back again at some point, if only to post some thoughts on the book I'm reading. Take care, and keep your pen on the paper. |
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| God's word through Gibson's lips. |
[Aug. 9th, 2006|12:39 am] |
"But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there."
For some reason, that line always hits me up-side the head, leaving a welt that'll make me see stars for minutes on end. I can see the flashes of cyberspace in Case's dreams as I read it, feel suffocated by the stale air in some sleazebag motel. Every time.
I'm reading William Gibson's Neuromancer again. I got most of the way through it last time I read it, but then got distracted by school or work or whatever pressure I was dealing with at the time and forgot to read it. I'm not the kind of person who can typically just pick it up at the bookmark and keep reading. I need to experience the entire piece in one flowing, vivid movement to truly enjoy something. So I started at page one again.
I have the entire Sprawl Trilogy sitting on my desk, in fact, waiting for me to tear through it with the voracious hunger I know I'll have. And once I'm through with Mona Lisa Overdrive, I have Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a book I've been dying to read for ages, waiting for me. And then, once a friend of mine has finished it, Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty (which I've only heard good things about).
I've got a few stories on the front/middle burners, too. Tryst is a story set in my lovely ficticious city of New Royal, about a gay teenager who falls for her latest crush's best friend. I'll try not to spoil the ending, though it should be evident in the title.
Romeo and Julian, the idea for which just came back to me from the recesses of long-forgotten memory, is a retooling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Romeo's an inner-city Hispanic teenager who's had a mortal fear of "coming out" since his friend's uncle was hospitalised for being gay. Julian's a well-off private school student whose parents, despite being reminded frequently, refuse to believe and choose to ignore that their son is homosexual. On a busride home from the mall, Julian witnesses a fistfight in the street; Romeo and a pusher who refuses to accept the fact that the teenager won't buy drugs from him; Romeo's losing. Julian gets off the bus and offers to take Romeo home with him, get him bandaged up. And thus the forbidden romance blooms.
Anyway, just felt like sharing. That's all for today, methinks, so I'll be off to read a couple chapters before bed. Good night! |
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| First post... |
[Aug. 6th, 2006|02:36 am] |
Breathing life into a new blog is always difficult business. You never know where to start, and usually, you just don't. Start, that is. You just ramble on like I'm doing now in hopes that no one will notice that you didn't actually say anything meaningful with the most meaningful space you've got. But I was never one for jumping right into the thick of things. I like to test the waters first, make sure I'm comfortable with the medium before I get the chance to put my foot in my mouth.
Anyway, down to business, I guess. This is not my personal journal, the place where I talk about what's pissing me off in life; I have one of those already. No, this blog is reserved for the authoress in me, where I'll come to rant and ramble about all the shit my friends--most of whom don't put pen to paper as often as all humans should--get sick of hearing: what's going on with my stories, random tidbits of lyrics or poems I thought up on the bus-ride home after work, my newest beef with Silver Ravenwolf or J. K. Rowling (honestly, there are probably other people in the business who piss me off from time to time, but nowhere near as often or extremely as those two do).
As an addendum to that last paragraph, I'd like to note--and I don't want to sound like a bitch, but this is a necessary thing to say--that any intellectual material I post in the blog to preview or share with the masses, is and/or will be saved and dated on my hard drive, as well as on my FictionPress portfolio. Plagiarism is a crime and an insult to both me personally and the writing community in general. On a completely unrelated note, I have a tendency to hunt for blood when I'm insulted.
You may be wondering why I'm doing this at all? I mean, couldn't I just post this stuff to my personal journal to share with the masses? Couldn't I even just bottle it up inside? I read an interesting article earlier today by Cory Doctorow entitled "Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet." Ironically, I came across this article while searching for BitTorrents of science fiction novels (this is the part where the audience laughs). Anyway, in this article, Cory mentioned some names of well-to-do authors who keep blogs. I'm not trying to say I'm well-to-do or anything, I'm just trying to jump on the bandwagon. But seriously, it just struck me as a good idea.
And here we are. I think I've gotten everything out of the way, so I'll take this moment to depart, retire for the night, and hopefully dream up something witty I can post soon. Enjoy yourselves, World. |
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