“The Slush God: Are you totally sick of seeing rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors stories in the slush pile? Have you ever read a good one?
Kelly Link: There is a wonderful epistolary story by a Canadian writer, Robert Boycuk, in which an editor is lowering himself into a terrible void, in pursuit of an author’s manuscript. It’s a sort of apology from the editor for how long it’s taken him to get back to the writer.
Otherwise, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I would say that there’s probably a novel waiting to be written about hapless slush readers, but it would have to be very well done.”
Category: Writing
So apparently my “include virtual” server-side commands (which make all the content appear at xorph.com/creator) have stopped working, and are now rendering as plaintext. Awesome! Luckily, I appear to have exactly two readers who actually go to that page instead of reading via RSS or LJ, so the tide of complaint and bewilderment has been, well, minor.
Of course, if you do read NFD via the front page, you won’t be able to see this, and if you don’t, you probably haven’t noticed the problem. So this is pretty much a reminder to myself to change the damn Advent webcam already.
The shooting scripts for Firefly. I borrowed a book on television writing a while back and never read it; I think these will be more valuable.
I will probably post about presents later
For the first time, I can say that I’ve posted a year’s worth of Anacrusis without skipping a single day. It would have been much sooner but for the two days I missed before last year’s Worst Christmas Ever.
Christmas was much better this year, but we all missed Joe.
Via Kevan comes a 1978 speech by Philip K. Dick about science fiction, solipsism, Gnosticism and Disneyland that everybody else has probably read before. Regardless, it offered me the best answer to the question “why write?” I’ve ever encountered:
“What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?”
Man, all I post lately is little link blurbs, but I have to plug this: Holly’s amazing crossword-based constrained-writing project and PhD thesis is finally going online! Two stories in and I am already jealous of her ideas, in both format and content.
Jake Berendes sums it up
“flawlessness is not the goal. a compulsive habit of creation matched with an editorial mindset is a far more viable goal.”
Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.
I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.
So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.
Sumana asked the other night whether there was any depth to which I wouldn’t sink for a story idea. I have discovered that there is. I just can’t try to pawn this off as fiction.
C O R Y
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PALO ALTO, CA — Researchers at Stanford University have announced that the hole in Earth’s ozone layer is rapidly being filled by another stratum of the atmosphere.
“We’ve done spectroscopic analysis,” said Doctor Cory Wonkette-Searls on Thursday, “and Dooce Gaiman at Washington State has obtained confirming results. The replacement gas is coming from the blogosphere.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in Antarctica right now,” he added. “Wheeoo.”
The ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and has been depleted by chlorofluorocarbon pollution. The blogosphere, composed of superheated air and self-absorbed methane, is separated from life on Earth by several orders of magnitude.