Last week I ignored the Seahawks since, well, the worst team in the playoffs was facing the Super Bowl defending champs. Now that they’ve stunned everyone, fans especially, I’m hereby obligated to watch their playoff games. It’s easy enough to say that they are still the worst team in the league, and it’s probably true, but the Bears? They can totally take the Bears. They already whomped them once this year and no can argue that the Hawks don’t have momentum right now. It’s just too bad that every game can’t take place at Qwest Field.
I finished my 5th chapter. I had a breakthrough yesterday on the 6th. I always seem to get into a rut where I spend 3 days hacking away at the same two or three paragraphs. Sometime later I decide to start my chapter anew with a new angle, usually a little closer to the action, and somehow it all comes together quickly. So far I’m just after the breakthrough but a few days before I can call the thing finished. This chapter seems to be a bit longer than the others so I’m not convinced that I’m not bull-rushing into another knot…at least I have a nice long weekend to look at it.
One of my short stories was returned to me this morning, rejected, but with a few pages of comments from various editors. The notes were all pretty complimentary: no one said that I should get out of the writing game anyway. One person did take umbrage at some casual swearing that I had included, sparsely by my estimation, in the dialog of a character shown to be going out of his way to be offensive.
“Swears are never acceptable!” was the suggestion. Really? What sort of an editor would ever suggest that? You argue that my use was unnecessary (I would argue that it was verisimilitude given the circumstances), but to deny the power of curse words in literature…that’s absurd. Everyone from Shakespeare to Hemingway to pretty much anything written by anyone over the age of 12 (or for an audiance over 12) in the last decade has used swearing to establish reality. It takes some amount of effort to turn thinly bonded wood pulp into a story. Ignoring half of human conversation (and the more colorful half besides) is just absurdity, a genuinelly terrible suggestion.
And that’s really all of my ranting. School starts in two weeks. My time at Mid-Hudson…remains a topic of speculation for myself and others. I finished Fallout New Vegas (phenomenal) and I’m starting the original Deus Ex. Also winter is a terrible bother and I look forward to its future demise.
Adieu.
