Haunted Mirror

Just in case you never wondered what Aolon's capital looked like...well, you should because the Italian city I found that looks like it is amazing, and I can't believe I stumbled across this:
Today's Google Image Search hot topics were: Dogtown and Z-boys (as well as Zephyr Skate Team and Stacy Peralta...where's his spinning hair picture? *grumps*), air trolley (you'd be surprised...), streetcar/night, flower boxes (Holland/Netherlands) and city stairways.

Which brought me to Dolceaqua, as well as Kaymakli, a totally underground city among the many built in Turkey-area at the time of Arab invasions.
Good idea. People are such geniuses. I mean, they had an air system, still camoflagued entrances, and multiple levels.
    You think you're coming up with something fantastic for your speculative fiction, and there you have it. Just do random collage-bits image searches for thematic elements in your worldbuilding and it'll come to you.

Now, onto the to-the-death duel I have on with the books to be read on my shelves...


Shoubu! Stats:
Truth of the matter? It's all still there.
Headway made only against the incomers. I do want to read Name of the Wind and Water Mirror, but...
Well, I have two days. I'm not working.

And my Aolon Wordcount is:

29791.

I'm gonna make it. I may even have a novel by the end, too.

The last crazy day of tour successions is over. This morning's Big Event was having a school bus stuck down by the pond where Diane had not told them to park. Yesterday's was having two groups of one hundred arrive at the same time, because of the first group being an hour late. Luckily the second was lunching first.
 My real problem with these was dealing with the Tourist Style trash cornucopias. 2x100 kids' bag lunches in pieces, yesterday crammed ON TOP of the bag. Not really something you can get mad at anyone for, but icky 'su. I find the waste of food odd. But I guess different kids like different things, and we've had a lot of four and five year olds these last two days.

I've had something [else] bothering me since the VP workshop I want thoughts on. Sorry. Must vent; will allow you to chose to ignore or not: comment only if you will. However, if I don't get thoughts on this, I may rephrase it to be less emo-angst-drama and post other places you may just see it again and be compelled more strongly to answer. You've been warned. I was typing this for a Yahoo-List e-mail and realized it WAS far too emo-angst-drama to suffer through having go the rounds there.



Look, I even used italics. Teenie-bop spirit begone! *sigh*

I'm surprised by the kinds of people who get to talking with my boss about her farm and eventually say something about wanting to get back to sustainable living. That they're doing something about it, working on their life skills.

I know that around here is actually kind of a hotbed of this sort of commitment, but I evaluate covers, I admit it. Often the contents surprise me. Not because I want to limit them, but because they vary from my expectations.
It is kind of funny to know that my family is so low-brow looking, with the farm we have: baling wire lying around, rusted, no less; last week's butchering's telltale feathers floating about, the brown-painted outbuildings looking just as shabby as when we moved in. Four cars, only one of which looks like decent and is currently out of commission.

It kind of bothers me. But I'm not the one out there working it. So the fact that I don't take  up the slack on neatening makes it really my own responsibility.

I'm tired right now, so I feel doubly like some major acknowledgement of shabby laziness in the family enterprise. I won't because I can't say objectively right now. I wish I cared more practically instead of absorbing it all theoretically. I seem to be a disseminator of knowledge, though. And ownership means a lot to me.

Which is the point of family enterprise.

I think I'm too old to not have my own personal enterprise now. Too bad I've latched onto writing fiction, FANTASY fiction, at that, to be the enterprise I pour heart and soul into.

I had a real inspiration for World Domination 101 yesterday.
 So I've thought before.
But that doesn't mean this one isn't good, or those were less valid. Just that I keep needing them. Basically, Illiana has to come on annoyed at Jude, that everyone should be less happy at the start of the story. I really need to mull over this more (and I've had time to mull, if I haven't touched it.


  I honestly don't know what I get out of writing girls-dressing-as-boys stories, but they happen ALL THE TIME.

Also? The supers short I've been contemplating just for a change of pace, and exercise again, a bit of fun? Has decided to be from the POV of the mindreader. It's so perfect.
 That will be so hard.          *cries*

My Evil Overlord Fragment

 I picked up De Lint's Moonheart this morning. I was sucked in from the first paragraph--not that I couldn't put it down, but I was grinning inside, and thought "Yes, I want to read this book."

He did establish a sort of a hook. Not a problem necessarily. He's taking his time to establish. No, it's the setting, the character where he puts in just enough quirk you know it's a real person, but they're also recognizeable as the sort of person you've met somewhere. The fascinating place. The hint of the magical about to impact on that life and challenge them to new growth and new gifts.

I've known for a while that my strengths (and, more importantly, my interests) lay not in intense plotting. I love twisty plots. They always astound me, and so I'm great fan for those like Megan Whalen Turner who can put together a story that bends around your brain and then comes straight at you, unexpected.
But I can't write them. At least, not yet.

McKillip is another favorite, but she doesn't twist the plot so much as complicate it by introducing new things, characters especially who you want to win ALSO.

I wonder how much frustration I'd save by learning to write the stories I can tell? I'm getting better about it, but still...

For now there certainly is value in stretching myself to do things I can't do easily or well. But when I become a serious careerist, I think I'll have to let go of the supers. They run me ragged, and still look rather sedentary.

Actually, I just want to have the term "Viable Paradise" here for any Googlers who, like me, came up with a dearth of information outside the site. Which is sad. Because it's street cred should be puffed up on the Intrawebs, not otherwise.

 Hello, I'm Bethany Powell and I'm a writer. I've come to VP to get a hold on what I'm doing wrong.

It was definitely worth all the months I spent earning airfare/hotel rates/tuition. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, if that wasn't blatantly the wrong thing for me to do. I have about ten years of work ahead of me!
 Why?
It's not that I'm going to sit home and write short stories that ache for meaning until I'm 27, like Jean (roommate) maybe worried about. I agreed totally with the idea that I need five more years (which will make me 26 1/2, actually) (parentheses! mwahahaha, Ben Biggs, I R IN MY BLOG IGNRING UR STILE CRITS) to grow up and have enough life experience to write seriously from. Doctorow's observation that I was overreaching myself was spot on.
 But. Though I at least interpreted his comments to mean I have a lot of juvenility going on in my writing, I am pretty sure what I submitted typifies my bad writing, not my good. Lack of control is what typified World Domination 101.
 It wouldn't exist, and it certainly would be no good, if I hadn't lost control somewhat. The over-the-top humor came straight from my giggling into the keyboard. When I write by pen I am controlled, I contemplate, and even my humorous pieces come with a certain pacing enforced by my sense of timing.
 And there is a grace in it because I've been doing this for almost 10 years, I am a very lingual person, and control of your craft is good.
 But what was broken up by typing things as they came for my superkids with mediocre powers (! hook phrasing !) was that it's a blatant oil-spill of my native humor as I speak, as my Boston Irish side of the family talks with each other, as I've grown up bantering with other home schooled/cross-cultural/book geek kids with large vocabulary, advanced critical skills, and a precocious perspective on the world. So I need to clean it up. I need to rework it so the huge possibilities for solved=new problem are exploited, instead of incidental.

Maybe tomorrow I'll go anecdotal, but yesterday I spent telling my family all that and it's not so interesting right now. Freeskate on what I'm thinking about what I learned is much more interesting to me.

Now it's time to go write for once. I did get two pages in on my first flight. Aolon suffers from the same plotting problems, but at least it's syntax is fairly clean, now I've gotten past the bits were I'm trying to be archaic and failing to make archaism sound fluent and fresh.

At least I know the problem, right?
    That is--Bethany thinks she's far cleverer than she is, and writes accordingly...