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.

I'm sure it's nothing more than you deserve.

Deb, that's truly marvelous.

Such a nice Tad.

Also, he managed to get to the heart of it: the unseen world is wondrous, stop trying to explain it away with slide rules and get on it with dealing, and not all history is about the big epic pageantry.