Archives for July 2009

…she asked sternly, slowly shaking her head from side to side…

That was a comment made by the wife of someone who is currently reading the second draft of Night and Day – well, the part about me not liking adverbs.

Actually, I don’t have anything in particular against the adverb – it’s just that they can end up overused, which really makes the writing seem…overwrought. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written, or even this blog, you know that I’m not much for overwrought writing – I get wordy, occasionally (maybe more than occasionally), but I try to keep it simple and relatively straightforward.

Much like what I prefer to read…

Right now I’m in the middle of a couple of books – Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess and Risen by Brian Keene. Both zombie novels of a sort, though very different in their take on the subject matter and even more different in the writing.

The Keene book is written in a relatively direct manner, and though I haven’t found the writing to be especially memorable, it’s functional and serviceable, and does the job of telling the story. The Burgess book, on the other hand, is better written, but more…ornately written. Not heavy on the adverbs and adjectives, to the point where you want to scream “Stop!”. But the writing and imagery are very complex, which makes it more difficult to read – at least for me.

I’ll be honest – I’m not a fan of “The Great Books” – those classics of bygone ages that delight the souls of spinster English teachers and young pseudo-intellectual girls with their involved descriptions of everything, their stiff, formal writing (but using only the very best words for your reading pleasure), etc. Call me plebeian, but it’s just not what I want to read for pleasure.

I select a book for the story, the concept, what it’s about. Read the flyleaf, read the back cover, whatever. Tell me what it’s about in general terms. If it sounds interesting, I’ll give it a go. Then I judge how the author handles the story and the characters, and finally, the writing.

The writing isn’t the draw for me – if it’s competent, and it tells the story in a way I can understand, I’m good to go. If not, then I fling the book across the room (or stop reading it on the Kindle) and move on to another one – my to-read pile is very large.

So I write the kind of writing that I like to read. It’s not elegant (though I do have an occasional good sentence or line of dialogue), but it tells the story. Adverbs optional.

…I should probably be looking for a window in Amsterdam.  But never mind that….

I’ve got a gazillion songs on my computer.  That’s right, a gazillion.  Okay, a gazillion and seven.  I listen to a lot of music, both for the whole internet radio thing (though we’re not a “music” station, I usually play a couple of hours of music before shows begin) and more importantly for this particular slideshow of my life, while I’m writing.

It started back when I was a kid, typewriter on the kitchen table, pounding out whatever childish crap I was pounding out in those days – in a house with a couple of parents, and three younger siblings, things could sometimes get a little loud, and I value my concentration when I’m writing.  Music provided a kind of white noise to filter out distractions.  Living in the environs of New York City, my music of choice was a radio tuned to WQXR, one of the country’s premier classical radio stations.

Why classical?  Though I’m fairly conversant with classical music (more so now than then, of course), I rarely find myself stopping to “listen” to a particular piece of classical music when I’m writing.  And that’s important.  If it distracts me, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to.  Moving to Florida after high school thrust me into an art-free environment, where you could maybe, at the time, get a Miami public radio station if you were lucky, and catch some classical programming.  For years I had to write in silence.

The advent of streaming music over the internet made it possible to listen to music again while I write – in some of the earlier posts, I mention listening to WCPE in North Carolina via the net, and later listening to a classical station in Hamburg, Germany.  I had a couple of others I listened to regularly, including KING FM in Seattle.

Sometimes I’d switch it around and listen to jazz – preferably bop, if I could find it – for much the same reason – I would listen on some primal level (like an animal!) but it wouldn’t distract me from writing.

Satellite radio has been the next stage of my “writing music” journey – in the car, I usually listen to classical or jazz, and lately some new agey/ambient stuff as well.  Again, it allows me to drive, think, and not make me want to start singing along, or go looking for something to jot down a song title or artist name so I can track them down later.  Not that I don’t do that, when I’m not in writing mode.  Always gotta find new, interesting music.  And I can stream the sat radio music at home as well, which I did through much of the Night and Day rewrite process – mostly the ambient, switched off with classical when the ambient would irritate me and make me feel like a Yanni-lover.

Right now, as I write this and half think about my Bleeding Sky mystery problem, I’m listening to Shiva in Exile, which is sort of arabic-themed electronic/world/ambient/whatever, as it streams out onto the internet from my computer.  When that’s done it’s time for The Infrasonics, which is an analog instrument rock/electronic/drone/ambient/whatever band.  It won’t distract me either.  Last will be Elvis Schoenburg’s Orchestre Surreal, which is some bizarro stuff that I’m playing for the audience as they arrive for tonight’s show.  I doubt most listeners like a whole lot of anything I’m playing, but hey, I’m not playing it for them, I’m playing it for me.

I should be able to get a little writing type stuff done until Elvis Schoenburg begins – then, like everyone else, I’ll just listen because I have a feeling I’ll be too distracted to do anything else.

So this morning, I decided to spruce up the blog a little bit – make it more my own than “put content here”.

I still have more to do – I guess I’ll eventually do the “about” page to some extent, but I don’t think it’s all that necessary at this early date.  However, I did want to get rid of the default links and put something a little more useful there – plus I added a who’s on widget thing, just to make me feel special when I’m the only one on the blog…

The links fall into two categories – Machinima, which are the blogs of friends and collegues who make machinima movies and Writing, which are some of the sites/blogs I check, mostly for entertainment value and the occasional worthwhile hint.  There are other writing blogs and other machinima blogs/sites, and I’m sure if you’re interested to exploring further, all of those links will lead you in many directions as you search for knowledge.

Since I have nothing interesting of my own right now – catch me later after a couple of pints of Arrogant Bastard…let me share a couple of writing related interesting things…

11 Types of Bad Writing Advice

Advice I may be following soon…

An interesting take on plotting a novel