Kristin, by all means send, but I may not get to it for a day. Just back from reading and have to go back out and I am dizzy and mildly out of it.

In re the library funding? Salinas - 125,000 residents, home of John Steinbeck - is about to become the largest city west of the Rockies without a library. No money to fund it.

I wonder if Ahnuld has an economoc recovery plan for it?

Feh.

Kristin, may I try it too?

*popping in with thanks, news etc*

Deb: I'm sorry to hear you've been sick. I wanted to thank *you*(edit) and Deena (and others who I am sure I am forgetting) for the beta-reading waaaay back in May... While nothing has happened with 'Senior's Day' yet in terms of publication, it got me *edit* recommended (by CW prof) for an editing assistant job on the U of W CW journal, which I got, and it turns out one of the two editors pulled a disappearing act over the summer so working opposite schedules of the remaining editor (I was full-time days at daycare, she was full-time nights elsewhere) I trained myself on crazy Pagemaker worked 70 hour weeks and we managed to get the journal done and re-vamped... As of Septemeber I've been promoted to co-editor... you buffistas helped get me there!

Also, the drabbling is and continues to be fantastic and I intend to join in as soon as I get a better handle on school... The 70 hour work week summer seemed to wreak havoc with my immune system and I've had mono it seems for months now...

attributing all the typos to *Yee*.. too much 18th Century Seminar...

Whoa! Brynn, take a deep breath, girl. Congrats on all the good stuff, but boo on the mono; I've had it and it is zero fun.

Victor, all I could think of as I clicked through was "Love in the Time of Cholera." You know, you've put rather succinctly and clearly what a precarious place the traditional writers' position is in. I nodded all through the piece, and I don't think you've at all lost your mind. I'm only surprised you were able to be lucid and well-spoken throughout.

Lately? I tend to break down in tears or foam at the mouth. Nothing much in between. So thank you for being clear and, well, clear.

Deb, we want to hear about the reading, how it went, and how you survived it.

erika, did I say I loved your most recent entry here? I did.

Kristin, I'd be happy to read your nonfiction piece, if you'd care to share it. Profile addy works.

And Brynn, congratulations!

Whoa! Brynn, take a deep breath, girl.

Deb: Yeah, it's the school/work/school isolation... Things tend to explode out of me. Sorry. Yeah, I must have slept 40 hours this weekend and I still feel like I just peeled myself from the underside of a tanker.

Erika, I'm going to be honest, because I respect you and like you: You are a fantastic writer. Your brain is clearly very fast and very busy, and I would love to have a day or so to play with it. But, when I read something you wrote, I feel like I'm in the middle of a carnival -- allusions and metaphors and wordplay and sex and shiny shiny ideas get thrown at me so fast that it burns me out, and I end up missing the signal for all the ... other signals that aren't the main one, if that makes sense.

I don't know what the cure is. There may not even be a problem outside my head. from where i'm sitting, I sincerely believe that your writing would be better if it were sparer, if you took your 15 ideas and ruthlessly chopped them down to 8 or 10. For example, in the piece you just posted, you could easily lose some or all of these things: the age difference, spring break, free cone day, exotic fevers, and John's SAT scores. Not don't put those in the story, you understand. Just they don't need to be right there.

Again, I offer this with all respect, and with full knowledge that someone who barely writes at all maybe shouldn't be advising someone like you. But I'm hoping you'll take it for what it's worth.

Heh. Lyra likes it spare; generally, so do I. In fact, erika will tell you that I'm usually the voice saying "no, that's you, not that character, in that little bit over there! No parentheticals in fiction! Lose it lose it!"

There are times, though, when the really fast clap of metaphors is precisely what's needed.

Yeah, I plead guilty to the charge of needing it spare. And I even agree with Deb that sometimes, breakneck metaphors exactly what you need. I just think keeping that pace up for more than a paragraph or two will almost always burn the reader out. (or, at least, it burns me out -- I can't read with anyone else's mind.)

But then, it's proportional, too, and having that pace for the first page of a 20-page story that also slows down later on, might feel very different from seeing that page as a world onto itself.

*loves this thread...* I need to relearn the zen art of multitasking/prioritizing so I can actually keep up with the things wrap me up rather than wring me out.