Month:
June, 2003
Aha! Thanks to the internet and far more time spent thinking about this than is merited, the penny finally dropped. The girl in my dream of a few nights ago whom I was sure was an actress of some type has turned out to be Marisa Tomei. She appeared in my nightscape circa her “A Different World” days.
A couple of meta things:
- Woo me! I have entries for over half the days of the month this month (ok, so just barely, and just by one, but still!). This is even after my tiff with the blog for eating an entry and my spiteful week of non-posting, so I’m quite proud. Granted, the dream journal really pads those numbers out a lot, but there’s some meat to be found even excluding that.
- As of last week, I’m now pinging weblogs.com whenever I post a new entry. I don’t see that it has generated extra hits, but it’s kind of cool anyways. Feels like an announcement : hey, new stuff! It works about half the time, though, sometimes giving me a freaky error that may have more to do with them being overburdened than with issues on my end. I know I said I wouldn’t do this until I had finished posting to the past, but I’ve kind of dropped the ball on that. I haven’t posted any of the older entries since March, so I figure it’s ok to go ahead with the weblogs ping.
- No one ever asked to be notified on new entries, so instead I’m using that feature to notify ME of when new comments show up. Because people can comment on any entry, no matter how old, I was sometimes not seeing the comments for ages and ages, and the software doesn’t include and easy way for me to browse the latest comments (though I wish it did) so I’ll be glad to get a heads up when people leave comments. However, I’m not sure it’s working, as I think I set it up before I asked for comments on the American Apology t-shirt and didn’t get emails about that, but I could just be misremembering.
- I still have plans of things I’d like to add to the site. I have some leftover luscious graphics from Wyldkyss that I haven’t yet added to the site, and of course I’d like to reconstruct my list of links, as right now I just have the default list that comes with nucleus over on the left: daypop, weblogs and nucleus. I also haven’t completely finished looking at the list of add-ons for the software I’m using. The calendar (one of the add-ons I managed to work in so far) is fantastic, as it gives me a glanceable sense of how much (or little) I’m writing in the current month. It also encourages me, as seeing the days without links makes me more aware of when I neglect the blog. I think I’d like to fiddle with the calendar some and include it on some of the other pages, but I haven’t made up my mind about that. At any rate, plenty of ambitious plans in the works. If anyone has some spare time to donate to my cause, I’d be most grateful.
Dream bits. I dreamed about nursing, so that’s fair warning for the squeamish.
I am not alone! It doesn’t only happen to me. Heck, it even happens to Neil Gaiman.
Ooops. Did it again, didn’t I? Linked his blog. Haha. Possibly I should quit writing my own entries and just have each entry be a pointer to his entry for the day.
I have the briefest of dreams to recount today. Subjects include P.J. (first appearance) and lifeguarding.
Let’s add that it’s hard to read other people’s souls: it’s dark and not everyone knows how to do it. Vague conclusions, attempts at answers — nothing more.
I’m not quite finished with On The Golden Porch by Tatyana Tolstaya. I’m on the twelfth of thirteen stories, though, so I think I have a good enough idea of what I’ll be getting out of this book to write a review, and so I will.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a book of short stories. I’d forgotten how wonderful it can be to dip into a world just for a half hour, take in the sights, and then be on my way again. It’s a special treat when the worlds are as sumptuously appointed as Tolstaya’s. I’d also forgotten how easy it is to breeze over stories you don’t like if they are mercifully brief. Not all the stories of this book are of the same high quality. Some feel lost on the page, as though they’ve forgotten why they are there or where they were going. Most, however, are charming, engaging and thought-provoking. One of the best things about this book is that it’s indelibly Russian but without requiring thousands of pages to be so. I loved Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as a teen, devouring their works, but if I had to pick them up today I just wouldn’t have the time required to plumb their depths. This book is like little slices of Dostoevsky pie with sweet, and somehow sad, Tolstoy tea. Some of her core ideas are a bit repetitive, but the use of language is so luxuriantly rich that it seems a small sin, completely forgivable. And sometimes, in the middle of a set of ideas and characters you are convinced you read about in the previous three stories, she’ll suddenly rip aside a veil and leave you gasping with surprise. That these moments come infrequently is not a fault, as it would be painful to read a constant barrage of them. No, she has clearly orchestrated these moments with care.
I don’t think this book is for everyone, but if you enjoy Russian literature and flowing language, and think that these qualities compressed and cut up into manageable portions would be like a much needed balm for a busy life, then you will get much reward from this book. My favorite stories are probably “A Clean Sheet”, “Hunting The Wooly Mammoth”, and “Sonya”.
As a final note, I have had more ideas of things to write and think about while holding this book over the past couple of weeks than in the three months prior, and I can’t think of a higher endorsement than that.
I’ve been re-reading Cualcotel, and I discovered yesterday during my Sacred Hour (which when I’ve managed to get it has been nothing but reading and figuring out scene breaks and trying to get a handle on the continuity of the story) as I neared the end of my printed pages that I hadn’t printed the whole thing. I had apparently only printed the part I wrote during Nanowrimo and not the part I’d written afterwards. So I thought I was three pages away from starting to write again, but I have another 5,000 words to print and read before I’m caught up. Because I’ve been reading about manuscript formatting (mostly from links off of Neil Gaiman’s blog) I decided to try and get my story into manuscript submittable printable shape. Enter troff. I had never used it before, and found it pretty obtuse at first, but after fiddling around with it for about 4 hours, I can do exactly what I want and print a submittable manuscript from my humble vim typings. Troff rules!
So, for those who may be interested and for the record, my almost finished novel is 127 double spaced pages long. It’s 56,901 words. You’ll notice I had almost 52,000 (51,990) at the end of NaNoWrimo, so I’ve written more or less 5,000 words since then, which isn’t much. However, the thing is only 2 or 3 scenes short of completion and then safely into rewrites. I only skipped one or two descriptive passages so I don’t have too much I’ll have to go back and fill in, though there’ll be some pruning and plenty of correcting to do before too long. I’m pretty excited about the heft and bulk of the printed thing. Also, it doesn’t suck. Not a Newbery candidate or anything (it’s turned out to be pretty YA, though that wasn’t my intention starting out) but nonetheless good, solid, interesting reading. I’ll say you can probably expect to see some of it floating around here before the end of the summer.
I apologize for constantly linking Neil Gaiman’s blog. However, it provides me with lots of thought fodder and I have this compulsion about attributing, so you’re going to have to live with it.
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This blog, Among Mad People, and its contents by Anna Schwind are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.