Whatnots
Book in Hand: Nine Supernatural Stories
Edited by April Yap Timbol and my Hum 1 prof Lara Saguisag
Had been needing my E-fix over the weekend, and I found a link (again, by rickey) which could suffice for now. :) Man, this is worse than being a druggie. :)
Turn off the sound first while it downloads so you won't get robotic sounds. Just wanted to prove I'm not utterly insane to think this guy can sing and that he's pretty great.
Try opening this link in a new window:
www.rickey.org/blog/2006/06/elliott_yamin_moodys_mood_for_1.html
While waiting for the video to download, let me talk to you about this recent news I have heard about Britney Spears.
She (get this) wants to give birth to her second baby in Namibia. She wrote a letter to the Namibian government and everything, asking if she can be afforded the same Baby Plus package (well, wtf would you call it?) provided to Angelina Jolie-Pitt. It seems that this package covers (aside from a nifty hospital delivery) security and media restrictions which would protect her precious second child.
Am I just out of the loop, or does anybody really care that she's going to give birth again barely a year after her last pregnancy? Why go to Namibia? She can just drive over to Mexico City and I'm pretty sure only a handful of reporters would really ever care.
I'm not a very big fan of this Brad - Angelina whoring their baby to the local press (if you can pay the price) and as far as I can see, Mommy Soda Pop just wants to have that "branding", that heck, she can afford to travel to Namibia to whelp a mini-Kevin Federline too.
Jaysuz, why not just go to Timbuktu, Brittle-ney, and maybe stay there? Just a suggestion.
Okay, so is the video downloaded yet? I figure mebbe not, unless you're on broadband so...
I am a frequent visitor of Neil Gaiman's website and in his journal, he's really into answering questions from his fans. I wanted to ask him a gazillion questions, and I did, but I guess I didn't frame my questions interestingly enough because they never made it to his blog. I guess, I should have writte it more honestly rather than take that star-struck tone, because this question was pretty straightforward and what i reall, really wanted to ask him but just didn't have the proper intensity to actually do so. Im happy it got asked, and was answered:
Neil,
I am a huge fan of both your work and your advice to aspiring authors (I have a post-it note with a quote from you about bear wrestling for when i get discouraged). So I know that your most common advice to aspiring writers is to write.Well what about when your youngish (23) and you do write, but you just feel like your skills aren't matching your ideas. In other words, you feel like most of your stuff is utter crap.Did you ever feel like this? And if so what did you do to hone your skills, or improve your techniques?How important do you think college is for writers?Regardless of an answer, thanks for taking the time to read these questions.
Truly,'tricia
That was pretty much how I felt when I was 22-23, too. I had a fairly good ear for other authorial voices, so I could pastiche, and I wanted to be a writer more than most people want to breathe, but I didn't have a lot to say and I knew that I wasn't very good yet -- and also that I had ideas that were better than I was.What I did was work as a journalist. It forced me to write, to write in quantity, to write to deadline. It forced me to get better than I was, very fast.It got stuff I wrote into print. There is nothing for a young author that teaches you how to get better faster than reading something you wrote in print -- suddenly every mistake, every infelicity, every laziness, shows up as if in neon letters.And the process of transcribing conversations forced me to learn to write dialogue and learn the economies of getting speech patterns into just a few words. (Dialogue -- even "naturalistic dialogue" -- isn't how people speak. So you need to learn to distill.)
And I was also lucky in finding myself with several book review columns, being forced to read and review everything, including stuff way out of my comfort zone, or books I simply would never have picked up. (I think writers should read from the shelves they wouldn't normally go.) And it was great reading stuff where I'd read something and go "I may be crap, but I'm better than this." (Working on Ghastly Beyond Belief was a great help on this, too.)Also I got to do some living. That bit was important too, and much of it was a side effect of being a journalist -- I got to see lots of bits of the world I hadn't known existed, and talk to people I would never otherwise have encountered. That was important too.So that was how I did it.
You'll probably want to do it differently. I don't think any two people are going to take the same path, or need to.As for how important college is for writers -- I remember someone once asking here if he needed an MFA before he could write -- the awful truth is that no editor, picking up a manuscript, is going to check your qualifications before reading page 1, and no qualifications will keep her reading past page 2 if she isn't enjoying it and interested in what happens next. (On the other hand, to the extent that college makes you write, get stuff into print, read outside your comfort zone, and meet people you might not otherwise meet, I think it's great. But it's not any kind of prerequisite.)
Does that help?
YES IT DOES, SIR.
YES IT DOES.
Edited by April Yap Timbol and my Hum 1 prof Lara Saguisag
Had been needing my E-fix over the weekend, and I found a link (again, by rickey) which could suffice for now. :) Man, this is worse than being a druggie. :)
Turn off the sound first while it downloads so you won't get robotic sounds. Just wanted to prove I'm not utterly insane to think this guy can sing and that he's pretty great.
Try opening this link in a new window:
www.rickey.org/blog/2006/06/elliott_yamin_moodys_mood_for_1.html
While waiting for the video to download, let me talk to you about this recent news I have heard about Britney Spears.
She (get this) wants to give birth to her second baby in Namibia. She wrote a letter to the Namibian government and everything, asking if she can be afforded the same Baby Plus package (well, wtf would you call it?) provided to Angelina Jolie-Pitt. It seems that this package covers (aside from a nifty hospital delivery) security and media restrictions which would protect her precious second child.
Am I just out of the loop, or does anybody really care that she's going to give birth again barely a year after her last pregnancy? Why go to Namibia? She can just drive over to Mexico City and I'm pretty sure only a handful of reporters would really ever care.
I'm not a very big fan of this Brad - Angelina whoring their baby to the local press (if you can pay the price) and as far as I can see, Mommy Soda Pop just wants to have that "branding", that heck, she can afford to travel to Namibia to whelp a mini-Kevin Federline too.
Jaysuz, why not just go to Timbuktu, Brittle-ney, and maybe stay there? Just a suggestion.
Okay, so is the video downloaded yet? I figure mebbe not, unless you're on broadband so...
I am a frequent visitor of Neil Gaiman's website and in his journal, he's really into answering questions from his fans. I wanted to ask him a gazillion questions, and I did, but I guess I didn't frame my questions interestingly enough because they never made it to his blog. I guess, I should have writte it more honestly rather than take that star-struck tone, because this question was pretty straightforward and what i reall, really wanted to ask him but just didn't have the proper intensity to actually do so. Im happy it got asked, and was answered:
Neil,
I am a huge fan of both your work and your advice to aspiring authors (I have a post-it note with a quote from you about bear wrestling for when i get discouraged). So I know that your most common advice to aspiring writers is to write.Well what about when your youngish (23) and you do write, but you just feel like your skills aren't matching your ideas. In other words, you feel like most of your stuff is utter crap.Did you ever feel like this? And if so what did you do to hone your skills, or improve your techniques?How important do you think college is for writers?Regardless of an answer, thanks for taking the time to read these questions.
Truly,'tricia
That was pretty much how I felt when I was 22-23, too. I had a fairly good ear for other authorial voices, so I could pastiche, and I wanted to be a writer more than most people want to breathe, but I didn't have a lot to say and I knew that I wasn't very good yet -- and also that I had ideas that were better than I was.What I did was work as a journalist. It forced me to write, to write in quantity, to write to deadline. It forced me to get better than I was, very fast.It got stuff I wrote into print. There is nothing for a young author that teaches you how to get better faster than reading something you wrote in print -- suddenly every mistake, every infelicity, every laziness, shows up as if in neon letters.And the process of transcribing conversations forced me to learn to write dialogue and learn the economies of getting speech patterns into just a few words. (Dialogue -- even "naturalistic dialogue" -- isn't how people speak. So you need to learn to distill.)
And I was also lucky in finding myself with several book review columns, being forced to read and review everything, including stuff way out of my comfort zone, or books I simply would never have picked up. (I think writers should read from the shelves they wouldn't normally go.) And it was great reading stuff where I'd read something and go "I may be crap, but I'm better than this." (Working on Ghastly Beyond Belief was a great help on this, too.)Also I got to do some living. That bit was important too, and much of it was a side effect of being a journalist -- I got to see lots of bits of the world I hadn't known existed, and talk to people I would never otherwise have encountered. That was important too.So that was how I did it.
You'll probably want to do it differently. I don't think any two people are going to take the same path, or need to.As for how important college is for writers -- I remember someone once asking here if he needed an MFA before he could write -- the awful truth is that no editor, picking up a manuscript, is going to check your qualifications before reading page 1, and no qualifications will keep her reading past page 2 if she isn't enjoying it and interested in what happens next. (On the other hand, to the extent that college makes you write, get stuff into print, read outside your comfort zone, and meet people you might not otherwise meet, I think it's great. But it's not any kind of prerequisite.)
Does that help?
YES IT DOES, SIR.
YES IT DOES.
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