cleolinda | Entries tagged with advice

Internets, I am not feeling so good. Just sinus blarg and a low fever, but I have been sleeping a lot. So that's where I've been.

Two bits of writerly advice:

@victoriastrauss: Agent Andrew Lownie on how to blow your chances in the first line of your email.

@MaryRobinette: Debut Author Lessons: 10 things about signing books.

Linkspam: movie news and your chance to be a werewolf, for really real. ( HOW CAN YOU BEAT THAT VALUE )

Dishwasher advice I got from the stovetop delivery guy today: ( This may CHANGE YOUR LIFE or probably not )

Another quick smattering of linkspam while I rest up for Midnight Harry Potter:

Half-Blood Prince Review Roundup; 'Half-Blood Prince' is witty, spectacular and one of the best; 'Harry Potter': EW review.

Heyman: Imelda Staunton to Return as Umbridge for Deathly Hallows; John Williams' Return to Harry Potter is Officially a Possibility!

I keep thinking Radcakes can't get any awesomer and I keep being wrong:

You've said recently that you would like to date older women. You know who's older, single now and likes British guys? Madonna.

Christ. I don't think that I'd do my chances of working with Guy Ritchie any good.

Gary Oldman reportedly taught you bass guitar on the set of 'Potter.' Have you ever considered starting a band?

No, he gave me one bass guitar lesson. [...] I haven't played bass in years, I gave it up because I wasn't getting any better. You have the realization of going, "I don't know what I'm going to do with this." And also bass isn't an instrument particularly that gets you laid. On its own, cool, but not like guitar, you can't really be a flash bastard with bass.

Tom Felton For Riley* In ‘The Twilight Saga: Eclipse’? WHAT ARE YOU DOING they'll eat you alive! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN

* That dude who thinks Victoria loves him but she's only using him to build an army of disposable vampire losers to kill Bella or whatever. Yeah, I forgot about him too.

New Photo of Alice in Wonderland 's White Queen.

'Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief' Teaser: Probably One of Our Best Elevators.

Don't Watch: First Trailer for Steve Carell's 'Despicable Me.'

From

alliancesjr: THE BEST USED CAR ADVERTISEMENT EVER WRITTEN.

And, most importantly: Things to say during sex.

Current Music: Stevie Nicks - Stand Back

I am horribly behind on things I have promised to post for people, so if I haven't done yours yet, it's... because I suck, basically.

From Fandom Lounge: "

rachelmanija and

lady_ganesh have created a fandom auction in support of marriage equality" over at

livelongnmarry.

From

amberkb: "As I'm sure you've seen on the TV, there's been massive flooding in the midwest. I live in Cedar Rapids... and I'm sure you've seen on the news that our town was really hard hit. I have up pictures from before and after up on my LJ. If you could post a little blurb asking people to donate to the Red Cross, that would be great. So many people's homes were destroyed, and businesses too." Another problem, I should add, is that so many crops were destroyed--which not only raises food prices in general, but kills this year's income for the farmers.

( More linkspam )

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Republica, "Ready to Go"

Omg, Sister Girl is going to kill me. She asked me to ask y'all this, and Lexicongate put it clean out of my head:

She's going to be in New York for Comic-Con (her boyfriend is a comics buyer for a national bookstore chain), with a few extra days for going around and such, and she wants to know what would be good to go around and see. Particularly bakeries, she said (not necessarily restaurants to eat out at night, just bakeries) and anything fun to go do. You know, that isn't just "Go see a show." Any ideas?

Important question. We're dealing with a hangover (not mine) over here, severe nausea in particular. I tried to administer water, knowing that hydration is key, but she nearly threw it up. What do we do? And is there a point where it's so bad she may need to go to the hospital?

ETA: She--Sister Girl (what? She's 22. I started having flashbacks to my own college days)--is still feeling pretty crappy, but she's had Gatorade and a Lunchable (hey, it was what she wanted), and she's up and about again. Turns out she'd already thrown up most of whatever at the original location; I was mostly ~~overreacting~~ concerned about her possibly having to go to the hospital for dehydration, but she seems to be holding fluids down and is at her boyfriend's now.

Why aren't you at Stardust ? No, I'm not going to leave you alone until you go see it.

Anyone from Savannah here? Sister Girl is going to spend most of next week there, just for fun, so if you have any touristy (or foody or even drinky) suggestions, let me know. And yes, she is aware that she picked one of the worst areas in the country to visit in the middle of Satan's Heatwave, but at least she'll have some damp heat for variety.

( Some prime asshaberdashery, and linkspam )

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you: the POTC3 trailer, a full day early. Yes, it's dubbed into Russian. We can't have everything, now, can we? ( Can you have spoilers for a trailer? )

Also: More POTC3 pics.

( Linkspam )

Omg, I totally forgot that it's V Day. So much for "Remember, remember."

Meanwhile, I didn't end up going to a movie this afternoon, but it looks like I might be going tonight. So I might as well post what I've got now:

Since it's NaNo time, and since I'm actually using some of these techniques myself, it seemed like as good a time as any to pick up with the third installment of the writer's block thing I was doing in July. Yes, it's November now. Y'all should know by now how badly I suck at finishing things.

Part of the reason I didn't write this up at the time is that I had a lot of grandiose ideas that I couldn't quite organize or articulate. (Oh, the ironing.) I think what I have to admit up front here is that I'm so incredibly not qualified to teach a class in Structure of the Narrative, which is what my original idea resembled. I should just say, very simply, that there are two approaches to looking at narrative structure when you get stuck, and they are this: ( Read more... )

Current Music: George Harrison, "I Got My Mind Set on You"

Ohhhhhhhh no. No no no no no. My mother put a load of my sister's laundry in to wash this morning and asked me to put it in the dryer for a little bit and then hang it all up to dry. (For those of you asking where my sister was that she couldn't do her own laundry, her shift started at five this morning and she had a class last night. She's been a lazy cuss in the past, yes, but for the last six months, her schedule's been insane.) So I throw the clothes in the dryer, don't really look at them, and come back a couple of hours later to hang them up. They're covered in spots. Clutches of small, random, oily spots. Most of the load was polo shirts for work, but also in there? The outfit she was going to wear on her date tonight. Ohhhhhhhh no. And Sister Girl has, let us say, an Irish temper. I thought I had an Irish temper, but I realized it isn't really--with me, the amount of bluster is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of mad I am. I read something ridiculous in the paper, and it's like, "OH, WHATEVER, I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS GUY, DID YOU SEEEEEEE THIS?!"; someone does something shitty directly to me and I turn into my mother with the "I'm sorry, this is NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR" Terrifying Calm thing. With Sister Girl, on the other hand, the dial's pretty much on eleven all the time. We're all going to die, is what I'm saying.

( CSI: Special Laundry Unit )

Movies this weekend: The Wicker Man at 17% fresh: snap. Crank seems to have amazingly good reviews at the moment, though.

Munch's "The Scream" found by police after two years.

Meanwhile: apparently by the time y'all got to the gelfling porn Wikipedia entry, it had been sanitized, making me look insane. Well, nothing ever disappears entirely from the internet, baby. (I like how a note on the history page says, "Classified everything below the first paragraph as 'Gelflings in Fan Fiction' since that is all the contents really are at best.")

Maybe the Russian Wtf, as y'all call it, was an ambulocetus? Yeah, I don't feel better.

("Russian Wtf" reminds me of the old joke--a reporter at a garden show or a greenhouse or something (look, I forget the context) asks the gardener what the big purple flower is, and he says, "Damn if I know." Next day in the paper, a picture of it with the caption: The rare purple damifino.)

Brian De Palma talks about The Black Dahlia a bit. "De Palma was juggling simultaneous plot lines 'that overlap in ways you don't realize until later,' he says. 'Some things I changed were too complex for audiences to absorb unless they were able to pick up the book. I had to pare down a lot of the eccentricities of the storytelling. If four things were going on simultaneously, we didn't need five.'" This is the kind of thing I find fascinating, if only for my own writerly purposes.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Okay, I howled at this one. Maybe it works in action, but it's just hilarious out of context in stills. I forget which other actors are playing Dylan--seven total, I believe--but more of the cast in general is here. Definitely Heath Ledger, apparently.

Queen Fights for Right to Party, Blog. Brian May is ready to go over to MySpace and "apply a fist or two." I support this motion one hundred percent, sir.

Current Music: Tori Amos, "Jamaica Inn"

Okay. Having somewhat recovered from The Migraine That Ate My Brain and borrowed a temporary replacement mouse, I'm back with some more thoughts on writer's block.

(A quick interjection first, however. I was telling Sister Girl about the evil in the MySpace banner ads and how it felled a million Internet Explorer users, mostly because I wanted to make her feel guilty for pulling MySpace up on my computer and causing all this in the first place, and she says, "Oh, well, I don't have anything to worry about, then--I use Firefox." When did my life become an O. Henry story?)

( It's like Dracula in space! )

I ended up writing a bit last night about fighting writer's block--adapted in part from my response to a comment on the previous entry. So, you know, if it helps you, rock on.

One of the books we got assigned for a writer's workshop was really tough-love about it--I forget the book, probably because I was so busy trying to meet the frickin' class deadlines to read it--but the guy was basically like, "If you have block, it's because you don't want to write bad enough. Get off your ass and DO IT." He may have been more helpful than that, but I wouldn't know, because OH MY GOD I HAVE TO HAVE 5000 WORDS BY 5 PM. So let's take his advice out of context and say that "DO IT" is not, in and of itself, the most helpful advice. I think it can be helpful for a certain strain of writer's block, the fearful procrastinatory kind, but--and this is precisely my point--I think there really are different kinds of writer's block, and you really do need to treat each one differently.

( [Something funny here] )

Later today: what to do when you get stalled mid-story.