I usually save any political posts for my other blog. However, this one’s more of a statement about myself than about anything to do with politics. It’s not about who I vote for, or even why I would vote for them: it’s about what guides me when I’m deciding who will earn my vote.
Author: Justin Page 56 of 66
Some carefully honed thoughts about diversity inspired by the recent Tor books kerfuffle.
While May wasn’t quite my worst writing month to date (at least since Morning Shift records began) it was still pretty bad. And, yet, in some other ways, it was also one of my most successful months so far.
I was going to write a short post on where I get my ideas from – despite the fact that no one has ever asked me that (or, perhaps, to spite the fact that no one has ever asked me that). But then I realised that ideas on their own aren’t particularly interesting or useful: it’s what we do with them that matters.
Applying your own interpretation to a piece of art is perfectly valid
but
it’s entirely solipsistic
and will only ever tell you what you already think about the world.
The real value of art comes when you look at the range of interpretations.
That’s when you start to understand
how everyone else sees the world.
The contractually required update on my writing activities for April 2015. Well, not really, but anyway …
April was a relatively straightforward month for me: I dedicated the entire month to finishing my final draft of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. (Spoiler alert: I finally finished the edit on May 5). I probably wrote some blog posts as well, but being a neglectful sort I failed to count those.
I did pretty well at getting up for my morning shifts. There were only five days that I overslept, and on several of those days I caught up during my lunchbreak. There was one morning that I got up in good time, but my youngest son also decided to get up early and was rather more in the mood for playing than for sitting quietly on the sofa. So, writing did not happen on that occasion.
This was by far my best month for editing (in terms of total word count), but that feat is tempered somewhat by the lack of any actual writing and the fact that it’s nowhere near my best average (that was February, during which I edited an average of 1806 words on the days that I did editing). Given that this was the ‘final’ draft of a story I already thought I’d finished, the obvious conclusion is that the story needed a fair bit of extra work and the decision to give it a final pass was the right one.
I also had a story rejected, which I view as more of an achievement than anything else. I’ve been attempting to write stories for quite some years now and, apart from a few efforts several decades ago, I’ve not really felt in a position to do anything other than self-publish. That I’m getting to the point where I think my stories might possibly be worth having someone else publish them is a mark, however potentially misguided, of how much more seriously I’m taking my writing these days. Bring on some more rejections!
The stats
- Number of writing sessions: 0
- Number of editing sessions: 26
- Days missed: 4
- Words written: 0
- Words edited: 32,733
- Average words written: 0
- Average words edited: 1,259
In which I continue to explore the fallout from, and possible precursor to, Joss Whedon’s exit from twitter.
I’d heard many good things about London Falling, and had always liked Paul Cornell’s work on Doctor Who, so it was with some degree of anticipation that I added this book to my reading list.
Fashionably late, as ever, here’s an update on my writing progress and activities for March.
In the first part of The Joy Of Gender I discussed some general principles I’ve adopted when determining the gender of characters in my stories. In this follow-up I offer some specific examples along with, hopefully, an overview of how my approach has matured over the recent years