your subconscious has a point that if you faithfully wrote 100 words a night, you'd have a novel-length manuscript in less than two years.

Which is a thing well worth remembering, I think-- if only because it makes the task sound manageable!

a purely successful drabble, which stands alone has a more emphatic structure than a drabble which would be a building block in a chapter or novel -- a standalone has to introduce characters, setting, dramatic tension and resolution, whereas a structural drabble has to successfully link up with the dramatic tension and resolution of the previous drabble, and provide hooks that set up the successive drabble

One of my concerns would be linking them; but I think it should be possible to use the drabble structure to make busts of information that, like a mosaic, sort of fit together in the reader's mind to create a story.

You could do a lot worse than approaching 'every hundred words' of your longer stories as drabbles, and subjecting them to the same level of intensive scrutiny and manicuring, judging every word and phrase as to its value to the micro-plot of the immediate dramatic unit, plus its utility to the macro-plot.

It would certainly tighten up the writing. Which needs doing.

It's a lot to juggle... but that's why writing is one of the fine arts, and why you can practice it for the rest of your life and still enjoy it.

Heh. Yeah. Thanks for the thoughts.

Which is a thing well worth remembering, I think-- if only because it makes the task sound manageable!

That's the way to do it. It's entirely too easy to psyche yourself out of a big work, even when you're doing an equivalent amount of work each day for your own pleasure.

One of the lessons I've learned in my short time writing fic is the value in writing small, just let each piece be self-contained and stand on its own, and just try to build on the last bit you wrote. Don't know if it'll work for anyone else, but ti's serving me well on Nihilist Chic. (Where, in tonight's posting over on LJ, BTW, many characters finally all meet, and there's even quality violence. (:

In other writing thoughts, after the Horror Writers panel last night, I was looking over some of the boks I have on writing horror and fantasy. Oddly, there's not much particular discussion on character, and this disturbs me.

One of the lessons I've learned in my short time writing fic is the value in writing small, just let each piece be self-contained and stand on its own, and just try to build on the last bit you wrote.

I'm definately going to try approaching it this way. I can, after all, write 44K words of fic that way, quite naturally; my old novel writing "one big rush" method doesn't get past 15K mostly, never past 30K.

after the Horror Writers panel last night, I was looking over some of the boks I have on writing horror and fantasy. Oddly, there's not much particular discussion on character, and this disturbs me.

Yeah. Characters are what make any story work. The power of the best fantasy, IMHO, comes from the fact that while we don't recognise the world, we can understand the people. Horror isn't so much my genre, but what I have read leads me to the opinion that truly good horror springs from characters as much as situations.

The best book I've come across on characterization is Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card -- most of the Writer's Digest books I've come across are fuzzy and useless, but that had some crackerjack examples and explanations that really helped me formalize my technique.

Susan, what Betsy said. Why an entire trip to London and parents who have no earthly purpose in the rest of the novel? Lose 'em, I say.

Sean, I'll beta anything you want to send me.

Back from LA and I am going to get no writing done this week. Damnation.

Okay, I'm a little excited because I actually got some writing done last night.

For the past 2-3 months (probably 3), all I've really done in the way of writing is stream-of-consciousness journal entries. Which I realize are technically writing. But what I mean by "getting some writing done" is writing where I work on something, crafting it to say exactly what I want, in exactly the way I want it to; writing where the craft is as important as the content. And journal entries aren't that.

So I worked on what wants to be a poem. We'll see how it turns out. It may suck, but it's just such a good feeling to sit there and contemplate what verb would be the best in a certain line, you know?

Go, Tep.

Go get 'em, Teppy!

I'm applying for a copywriting job, and I wondering about some things.

These are going to sound like stooopid questions. 1) The FB at the ad agency won't give me copies of the stuff I did there. Should I include a note, something, anything? I really want them to know about my work there. 2) My writing samples. Copied and pasted into a document with publication information at the bottom? Scanned and sent as an attatchment? (resumes are only being accepted via e-mail, and I'm not sure about sending attatchments since some people won't open them for fear of viruses) A scanner that will take a newspaper page is a little hard to come by at my house.

OK, a nice preeny moment in a long, infuriating day.

As several people know, I'm doing a joint reading with Tad Williams around Thanksgiving. I gave him an uncorrected proof of Weaver awhile back; he offered a blurb for promotional materials and/or the cover.

He just sent it:

Deborah Grabien's "The Weaver and the Factory Maid" is nominally about music and ghosts, and this book has plenty of both, but what this mystery has in even greater abundance is heart and soul -- especially the disembodied sort. The characters are likeable, the haunting spirits suitably frightening yet truly pitiful, but best of all for this reader, no one involved wastes time trying to come up with workaday explanations for the fantastical truth before getting on with the important things.

"The Weaver and the Factory Maid" is charming, in all senses of the word, but also a meditation on love and eternity and all the lives that have been lived, for good or ill, in fields and cottages far from History's main roads.

I am, as they say, all pink and pleased and stuff.