Sunday, April 1st, 2007

Time	Event
9:08a	New Literary Movement I've been meaning to post about this for a while. I'm not really one for manifestos, but it's become increasingly apparent to me that we need a new literary movement. I've been interested for a while in metafictional works of SF and fantasy that include the author as a character (like some of Jeffrey Ford's stories, or Rudy Rucker's transrealism). I experimented with the subject in a recent story I wrote, "Her Voice in a Bottle." And while the results were satisfactory (me, and my voice, explicitly present in a fantasy story) they seem, ultimately, rather too limited. It's clear to me now that I need to appear as a major, preferably heroic, character in everyone's stories. Tim Pratt, on the page, fighting air pirates, defusing space bombs, sexing up the sexy sex nymphs, and what have you. (When a female or neuter character is necessary, authors may wish to use my nom de plume "T.A. Pratt") The name for this literary movement will, of course, be PrattPunk (except in the U.K., where a "prat" is an asshole or moron, where the movement will be known as TimPunk). To ease your transition into this new compulsory movement, I'm releasing myself under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, which allows you to use or modify the source material -- me -- for your own work, while giving the creator -- me -- due credit for the original material -- me -- and granting permission for others to modify your works (about me). I'll also turn a blind eye toward any unauthorized fanfic if enterprising authors wish to transform any existing works of SF literature -- Dune, say, or Harry Potter -- into ideologically pure works of PrattPunk. Happy writing, my Prattians! (8 Comments | Comment on this)
11:25p	No Fooling Morning (Well, maybe a little fooling: Heather reveals the hidden truth.) Now that my April Fool's post is out of the way, a more sincere entry... I finished marking changes to Poison Sleep, and as expected, the rewrites got more extensive near the end. Eventually my changes became so extreme that I couldn't legibly handwrite them, and I had to go into the Word document and do some wholesale rewriting. I'm happy with it now, though, and the final scene is much better, which is good, since endings are important, and I wanted to stick the landing. I do have a lot of handwritten corrections to type in, though, and will do that this afternoon. Exciting! I finished the read-through on Friday, and decided to take Saturday off from writing work. It was hard! I usually do some work on Saturdays and Sundays, and having a whole day with no writing and no social plans proved tricky. We went shopping instead, visiting assorted furniture stores in our quest for a new coffee table. (Our old long table doesn't fit in front of our new couch, so we needed a smaller one.) We saw some gorgeous stuff in Chinatown (that's the Oakland Chinatown), but it was all either too expensive or all wrong for our décor. (Which is, admittedly, rather eclectic, but a big marble-topped table just wouldn't fit in.) Finally we wound up at Cost Plus World Market, where we found a gorgeous table of the perfect size for $160 bucks on sale. Naturally, they didn't have any in stock, and had no expectation of ever getting more in stock, so we thought we were out of luck, but Heather convinced them to sell us the floor model. (It's in pretty good shape.) Holly came over with her big car and helped us get it home. It looks good in our house. We also bought a new bath mat and some Jones juices (I love their Bada Bing flavor, but none of the restaurants or grocery stores or convenience stores I frequent carry it anymore! Except Cost Plus) and some glassware, etc. What with buying the table, paying taxes for last year and the first quarter of this year, and booking Wiscon plane tickets, I've spent more money this weekend than I make in two months at the day job... sigh. Then again, having to pay a bunch in taxes is a sign that I'm getting decent writing income, so I won't complain. Plus I'm a liberal who likes public works, so I don't mind paying taxes, though I wish it was spent more on education and public parks and such, and less on violent altercations overseas... Night Wandered away from this entry for a while. But I'm back! I finished the revisions and e-mailed the book off to the interested parties. Let's wish my little manuscript well. Today was productive, actually. Apart from the hours of working on Poison Sleep, I wrote another Caught in the Net column (on porn parodies, in honor of April Fool's Day), and I took a walk, and washed dishes, and did filing, and disposed of our old coffee table, and washed about a zillion loads of laundry. It was a lonely afternoon, though -- Heather was working a table at an event, in exchange for a day off during the week sometime, so with luck we'll get a midweek day off together soon. I watched Saw via the wonder of Tivo, and thought it was a decent horror movie, though I'm not sufficiently interested to rent the sequels. When Heather got home, we started watching season 1 of Criminal Minds (because ebear keeps talking about how great it is, and I'm always up for good cop drama). The first couple of episodes were good, so we'll keep it up. And that's a weekend. I printed out the manuscript of The Light of a Better World, which I haven't looked at in nearly a year, since Blue Heaven last year. I should be able to look at it objectively at this point, at least, and after my read through, I'll go back to the notes I took at the workshop... I distantly recall having good ideas to fix some of the problems people saw. I'm looking forward to digging into this book again. When did I start liking revision? I used to hate rewrites, but now I enjoy them almost as much as committing fresh fiction. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2007/04/01 [Calendar]

Next Day >>