Cleolinda everywhere

@christylemire: Greetings from the Academy. It's Hollywood's biggest morning. We are all very glamorous. And jacked up on caffeine.


@ropeofsilicon: Hugo leads the pack with 11 nominations followed by The Artist with 10.

( TWEETRAGE )

omg so tired. I've been pleasantly busy but not getting much sleep, which is kind of a problem, given that I'm still consumptive. Lots of errands, lots of cleaning, not as much recap writing as needs to be done. My own Christmas shopping is pretty much accomplished, so I'm helping my mother agonize over what the hell to get for everyone else. Also, if anything needs to be ordered online, this is generally my department.


@cleolinda: My grandmother can't see her Bible well enough anymore, so my mother found the whole thing on CD, as read by James Earl Jones.

@cleolinda: This was my question. RT @swirlee: What, was the Morgan Freeman edition sold out?

@queenanthai: "THOMAS. I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING."


Did leave the house omg and see Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which was... ehhhhh, I don't know. ( Let's discuss )


Let's have a little linkspam. I confess, this is a catch-up pulled from my Twitter, but some really interesting trailers came out that I don't want you to miss. Plus, an update on The Arachnid Musical.

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From Saturday: New Secret Life of Dolls, in which a sparklepire finds out exactly for whom the bell tolls. Looking at my calendar, I'm thinking we'll have the next installment on Saturday (as usual), and then we'll skip the next week, because that's Harry Potter and I have a podcast to do on Saturday and I don't think anyone will be paying attention to anything else anyway. Unless there are unexpectedly high number of Potter non-fans here who want counter-programming?

Meanwhile, I fell into a gigantic plot hole over the weekend and realized that the central premise of the first half of the novel (the first Black Ribbon novel) doesn't make any sense. I won't get into specifics, but it came down to an anguished writer-wail of "Wait--but--why wouldn't he tell her? OH, FFFFFFFFF--"

The thing is, I'd been sitting there trying to jam together puzzle pieces that didn't fit for--I don't know, months, probably. I just kept telling myself that I had all these nice, shiny scenes I had created--some of them independent of the others--and that if I just thought about it hard enough, my Powers of Logic would force them into place. And then I finally ran into the one failure of logic that made the whole thing collapse. So I'm opening a fresh Word document (I save every variation of everything, so it's not like I lose anything by experimenting) and just talking it out. So far, it's... actually going really well. I got something like 4000 words done today, and about 2000 on Saturday. It's kind of liberating, in fact, to just be like, "Fuck it, I'll just start over." I mean, there are older bits that will get absorbed into the new as I go. But at least I'm not trying to pound the same square pegs into round plot holes anymore. So... I've got that going for me, I guess.

Linkspam! ( Read more... )

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Just a short bit, because I liked the question: I always related a lot to Jo March as a kid, since I was a writer too. So many people identify with Elizabeth Bennet--probably because she's just that well-written a character--but more specifically, I always identified with Elinor Dashwood (my sister is very much a Marianne); I tend to choke a lot of things down. And Jane Eyre and Sara Louise in Jacob Have I Loved appealed to me a lot for that sense of outsider-ness, of not fitting in.

(As a side note, I try to find something I can identify with, or at least understand, in every single character I write. It's a useful way to prevent cardboard villains, for example. You know, what beliefs do they hold, or habits do they have, or what do they really want, and can I identify with wanting that, even if I don't want it for myself?)

Won't be around much tomorrow--it's the birthday of a friend of mine, so we're going out to a movie and then meeting other friends for dinner. Have gotten a number of tiny things for Secret Life via readers--they'll be fun to incorporate, but I'm not sure when the next installment will go up. Looks like it's going to be a busy week.

Question from my mother: does anyone out here sell Lia Sophia jewelry? Her old pusher's moved away, and she needs a new hookup.

Also, I have worn out the beloved paperback of Jane Eyre that I have had since I was thirteen, and I need a new copy. I want a hardback this time --I heard something about an annotated version, but can't find one. Can anyone recommend a good edition?

(Man, I don't know that I'd actually sat down and read the whole thing through since I was in college, and it is such a different book to me now. Jane always seemed meek and retiring, in a virtuous heroine kind of way--in comparison to me as a modern, unrestrained teenager. Now that 1) I'm older and 2) I've spent a lot of time studying the Victorian era, it's amazing to realize what a rebel Jane actually is, in her own controlled way. I also thought I'd go back and reread something I thought was so swoonworthy when I was thirteen and find it kind of silly now, but--damn, it is so much more fiery than I remembered. Maybe because I know more about the Victorian era now, I don't know. And for the first time, I actually understood why the hell the stuff about Lowood and the Rivers cousins was in there, in terms of what it says about Jane's moral character, how it was formed, and how that plays out. [Of course, when I was thirteen, I was all just MOAR ROCHESTER.] I'm gonna have to get the miniseries they made a couple of years back now.)

( Linkspam )