Yeah, Lizard. As always, I remain impressed.

Cindy--nargh. Maybe tonight. It took me 15 minutes to find the thread and now I have to run again.

But your Joyce was so damned real. She was alive again. sniff Just 15 minutes. It'll take you mind off the smell of your walls. Really!

I can't write my name in fifteen minutes.

You, my dear, can have as long as you want. This is to kick in the arse, those of us who need kicking in the arse. You've been quite prolific lately. And damn! You're good.

cereal...

deb, you're going to play? Woo hoo.

Plei! 45 minutes! Yes! Yes! Oh my! Yes!

I'm going to play, definitely, assuming I ever get 15 minutes in which to breathe.

There is no record of Target Corporate HQ phone number in Minneapolis. I klnow they're HQ'd in Minneapolis. All I want is to tlak to someone about ordering books.

Feh. I'd rather be writing, damnit.

edit: whoohoo! Nic found it.

Score!

I have sent people to Anne, and lo, they liked! (Sorry, I just always get happy when pimpin' works.)

Sweet! Thank you ever so much, Plei. Getting your seal of approval on a Wes-centric fic was a wonderful way to start the morning.

You were supposed to get it last night, but I read and spaced about gushing until after your bedtime. *g*

It's really, really good.

Hm. If you liked that fic, then you might like Chuck Palahniuk's latest, Diary. ... I really, really didn't, though, and actually wrote it just because I was so angry at the laziness of his style and wanted to show that I could do it, too, I just choose not to because I think it's too easy, inelegant, cheap.

There was nothing remotely inelegant about the prose in yours, Liz. It was sleek and if there was a lot of surface, there was also an astonishing amount of yin, hinted at rather than offered.

So I don't call your piece lazy, cheap or inelegant. I call your piece subtle.

edit: also, I have a lifelong "AHEM" going with the idea that finding something easy automatically renders it worthless. The fact that you may finding writing something easy means only that you have an affinity with it. If all the piece offered was surface gloss, I would feel the disconnection, shrug, and forget its existence; see Literary for my own take on William Gibson.

That doesn't apply to yours.

edit: also, I have a lifelong "AHEM" going with the idea that finding something easy automatically renders it worthless. The fact that you may finding writing something easy means only that you have an affinity with it.

I had the first class of my poetry workshop with Charles Bernstein today.

All of our assignments are prodecedure poems, or things that require even less thought. (Poems written by Google: how so 1999.) You plug words into algorithms and a computer program hands you a bunch of phrases with linebreaks in, and, magically, this is your poem. You're an author!

(This marvelously experimental experimentalism! Soon there will be no poets left: we will all be users. The only artists are the people who actually write the code we process.)

There's no work involved. And even if I do end up with a marvelously compelling piece of poetry, I still feel uneasy with myself. Because art, I think-- if you want to really live as an artist-- involves push, involves some sweat.

I don't mind easy (I love writing when it's effortless, and wish the stuff I'm proud of came as effortlessly as that Tara story) but I don't like lazy. I don't like seeing an author Mexican-Salad his way through a novel, tossing in cheap tricks like C.P.'s verbal tics because it keeps the reader on the end of the line. I don't like trendy over-the-top rhetoric being all that's disguising a paper-thin premise. Because it can, to an extent, because it's easy to do, and it will make readers. And, mmph, maybe my story wasn't so bad on its own, even though the style's overdone, the way, you know, a chapter of Diary isn't so bad on its own. But it's still a cheap lyricism, and there's only so long, as an artist, one can coast on that.