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Showing posts from April, 2016

Fire light

Recently, I had the opportunity to do a podcast. It's still being edited, I'm told, but I will not fail to post the link here, and in other places when it's done. My first thought after finishing it was that I will be much less critical of other interviewees in the future. It was a new experience for me, having a conversation and imagining an audience. I didn't think I would feel such pressure to make sense, to answer the questions, to be persuasive and inviting. I wish I could do it over again. I wish I had followed a much earlier thought and jotted down some notes. As it was all I thought to have with me was water. That I learned from the artist talk I did back in Februrary, how quickly I become dehydrated when speaking. At least, I understand where you're coming from, Senator. In other news, the fantasy novel has taken off. In the Wright brothers' sense. It's not touching the ground, but I don't know if anyone in the current era would quite call it

It is not safe

I'm going to have to do something unpleasant to one of my characters. Well, that isn't entirely accurate, but I do have a lead on what has to happen next to improve the short story. It is a personal weakness of my craft that I struggle with writing less likable individuals. Evil, I can do, because I've always thought that evil depended almost entirely on perspective. One woman's trash, or treasure. Heroes can look a lot like villains depending the jersey the beholder is wearing. But for this story, for this character, to capture the perspective I am trying to highlight, I really need to make the narrator wrong-headed. Which is far afield of the person being unreliable. There can be some fun in unreliability. This will probably not be fun. And a particular weakness of mine is that I struggle moving forward with unpleasant tasks. Maybe that's why there was significant movement on the next novel idea. I woke up at midnight a week or so ago, and things all began fal