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Yesterday sucked. My shoulder hurt, my leg hurt, my toe hurt, I banged my chin on the car door while getting into it at Lowe's after not finding what I went there for, I got a parking ticket by missing the meter by at most 5 minutes (I swear the guy waits around the corner for the meter to run out), and in general the parking ticket ruined the rest of my day because I get seriously worked up over getting them in the first place. The association with "guilt" even though I'm very conscientious about going down and putting money in the meter--let alone the fact that I freaking LIVE on the street so shouldn't there be some kind of parking pass I can buy to park on the street without feeding the meter?--just rubs me raw. Most of the other people on the street don't care and don't feed the meter and get ticketed all of the time, which is good, but when someone sets alarms so they remember to go down and . . . well, I'm getting worked up again. Suffice it to say that, yes, I admit I missed feeding the meter on time and the ticket guy was technically only doing his job, but still. . . . I ended up ditching any effort to do anything productive since I was so upset and everything was getting ruined anyway and just read. Well, I did put my CD tower from IKEA together and rearranged CDs and DVDs, since it seemed unlikely I could screw that up somehow.
But enough about yesterday. Hopefully today will be better. And it will be for 2 people at least because . . .
I drew at random the winners of the two somewhat abused copies of The Skewed Throne from the comments section last week and they are . . .![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elfinecstasy and music_lover3! Congrats! You can send me a message here on LJ with the address I should send the books to, or send an email to jpalmatier@sff.net, and I'll get those shipped out to you ASAP. Congrats again!
So, I promised a return to some writerly posts, so here's the first one, and it's meant to be interactive. I wanted to tell everyone my writing epiphany, which I may have talked about before on here, but it's a good way to see how everyone else ended up as a writer, whether it was by epiphany (like me) or through some other method.
So what do I mean by the writing epiphany? Well, it seems to me that most people when they're in school have this mental image that the people who have written the books they're reading either for English class or for fun or that are in the library or whatever are these enigmatic figures that live on some other planet with their servants and lush private gardens with fountains and hedge mazes and sunlight continuously shining through the study and write the stuff that entertains us. Something usually happens somewhere along the line that breaks this idealized image *cough* of writers and makes us realize that, wait, writers are just like us and that perhaps we could become writers ourselves. That's what I mean by the writing epiphany: that magical moment when it suddenly strikes us that writer's are normal people *cough* and we could be writers.
My epiphany (as some of you have probably heard) happened in the eighth grade and was caused by a single sentence written by an English teacher on the top of one of my papers. Up until this moment, I'd read and read and read and read books for fun, mostly mystery (Hardy Boys, etc) and SF&F (Andre Norton) and loved it all and I honestly can't say that I thought much about the person behind the book, the person who wrote it. And by that I mean, I didn't think about it at all. As far as I was concerned, the books magically appeared in the library for my amusement, and on occasion I had to ask the library to get another book that had magically appeared at some other library because it had obviously been delivered to the wrong place (interlibrary loan is my friend).
So then I hit eighth grade English with Mrs. Eloph and we were assigned to write stories. Most of the time they were boring assignments, like write a theme and write an argument and it should be in the three-paragraph format and the first paragraph should have 3 main points and blah blah blah. This is probably why I never made a serious connection between writing and, you know, writing. But then we were assigned to write a short story like the Twilight Zone TV series, which I only vaguely knew about but had seen a few episodes, mostly because it was in reruns and was in black and white and who watched anything in black and white? All I knew was that the premise was SF&F oriented and for the first time I could write something COOL. So I did, totally ripping off Atlantis. Except I threw in spaceships. In fact, the entire story was from the perspective of a man looking out of the porthole of this spaceship as it launches from Aquantico (the world). He's watching the raging seas as they engulf the only world he's ever known, the land sinking beneath the waves, and I'm sure he was having very ponderous and meaningful thoughts while this was happening. I don't know, because I've lost the one page, hand-written story since then (although I tried to keep it), but the image of the man looking out of the porthole is very vivid. In any case, Mrs. Eloph wrote on the top of the paper that the story was very well written, with nice connectives between the sentences, one following on the other. And then the magical sentence: You should write more.
And that was all it took. When I read that, this explosion went off in my head and I suddenly realized that REAL PEOPLE wrote the stuff I was reading, that they weren't just magically appearing on the shelf at the library, that perhaps all of this crap I was suffering through in English (sorry to all of my English teachers but . . .) was useful for something besides the 3 paragraph argument. OMG! I COULD BE ANDRE NORTON!!!
I can't emphasize how huge this revelation was for me. When I say explosion, I really mean it. My epiphanies don't come as slow revelations, they pretty much smack me upside the head like a meteor from the sky, usually eliciting a GASP! Some people in my 12th grade English class can attest to this because they heard the GASP! when I finally figured out what the icky, malleable, squishy stuff that the main character had his hands in at the end of the short story "Clay" by James Joyce (I think) was.
Anyway, I set off to be Andre Norton. Literally. At the time, she had a set of short story anthologies going on called Magic in Ithkar (I still have a few of them), so I started writing short stories for that, on a typewriter, with lots of white correction tape. I remember the first short story I wrote for that, actually, or at least one very vivid scene from the short story. (It had ninjas and throwing stars, and one of the throwing stars gets embedded in the tent post during the fight and instead of just leaving it there unused like all of the movies I'd ever seen, I had the fight scene swing back to that area of the tent and then the good guy shoved the bad guy up against the tent pole in desperation, forgetting that the star was already sticking out of the tent post, and . . . well, you have an imagination.)
In any case, that was my writing epiphany. And my world hasn't been the same since. What about you guys? Did you have a writing epiphany? Do you remember it vividly? Do you still have that first piece of writing and what was it about?
But enough about yesterday. Hopefully today will be better. And it will be for 2 people at least because . . .
I drew at random the winners of the two somewhat abused copies of The Skewed Throne from the comments section last week and they are . . .
elfinecstasy and music_lover3! Congrats! You can send me a message here on LJ with the address I should send the books to, or send an email to jpalmatier@sff.net, and I'll get those shipped out to you ASAP. Congrats again!So, I promised a return to some writerly posts, so here's the first one, and it's meant to be interactive. I wanted to tell everyone my writing epiphany, which I may have talked about before on here, but it's a good way to see how everyone else ended up as a writer, whether it was by epiphany (like me) or through some other method.
So what do I mean by the writing epiphany? Well, it seems to me that most people when they're in school have this mental image that the people who have written the books they're reading either for English class or for fun or that are in the library or whatever are these enigmatic figures that live on some other planet with their servants and lush private gardens with fountains and hedge mazes and sunlight continuously shining through the study and write the stuff that entertains us. Something usually happens somewhere along the line that breaks this idealized image *cough* of writers and makes us realize that, wait, writers are just like us and that perhaps we could become writers ourselves. That's what I mean by the writing epiphany: that magical moment when it suddenly strikes us that writer's are normal people *cough* and we could be writers.
My epiphany (as some of you have probably heard) happened in the eighth grade and was caused by a single sentence written by an English teacher on the top of one of my papers. Up until this moment, I'd read and read and read and read books for fun, mostly mystery (Hardy Boys, etc) and SF&F (Andre Norton) and loved it all and I honestly can't say that I thought much about the person behind the book, the person who wrote it. And by that I mean, I didn't think about it at all. As far as I was concerned, the books magically appeared in the library for my amusement, and on occasion I had to ask the library to get another book that had magically appeared at some other library because it had obviously been delivered to the wrong place (interlibrary loan is my friend).
So then I hit eighth grade English with Mrs. Eloph and we were assigned to write stories. Most of the time they were boring assignments, like write a theme and write an argument and it should be in the three-paragraph format and the first paragraph should have 3 main points and blah blah blah. This is probably why I never made a serious connection between writing and, you know, writing. But then we were assigned to write a short story like the Twilight Zone TV series, which I only vaguely knew about but had seen a few episodes, mostly because it was in reruns and was in black and white and who watched anything in black and white? All I knew was that the premise was SF&F oriented and for the first time I could write something COOL. So I did, totally ripping off Atlantis. Except I threw in spaceships. In fact, the entire story was from the perspective of a man looking out of the porthole of this spaceship as it launches from Aquantico (the world). He's watching the raging seas as they engulf the only world he's ever known, the land sinking beneath the waves, and I'm sure he was having very ponderous and meaningful thoughts while this was happening. I don't know, because I've lost the one page, hand-written story since then (although I tried to keep it), but the image of the man looking out of the porthole is very vivid. In any case, Mrs. Eloph wrote on the top of the paper that the story was very well written, with nice connectives between the sentences, one following on the other. And then the magical sentence: You should write more.
And that was all it took. When I read that, this explosion went off in my head and I suddenly realized that REAL PEOPLE wrote the stuff I was reading, that they weren't just magically appearing on the shelf at the library, that perhaps all of this crap I was suffering through in English (sorry to all of my English teachers but . . .) was useful for something besides the 3 paragraph argument. OMG! I COULD BE ANDRE NORTON!!!
I can't emphasize how huge this revelation was for me. When I say explosion, I really mean it. My epiphanies don't come as slow revelations, they pretty much smack me upside the head like a meteor from the sky, usually eliciting a GASP! Some people in my 12th grade English class can attest to this because they heard the GASP! when I finally figured out what the icky, malleable, squishy stuff that the main character had his hands in at the end of the short story "Clay" by James Joyce (I think) was.
Anyway, I set off to be Andre Norton. Literally. At the time, she had a set of short story anthologies going on called Magic in Ithkar (I still have a few of them), so I started writing short stories for that, on a typewriter, with lots of white correction tape. I remember the first short story I wrote for that, actually, or at least one very vivid scene from the short story. (It had ninjas and throwing stars, and one of the throwing stars gets embedded in the tent post during the fight and instead of just leaving it there unused like all of the movies I'd ever seen, I had the fight scene swing back to that area of the tent and then the good guy shoved the bad guy up against the tent pole in desperation, forgetting that the star was already sticking out of the tent post, and . . . well, you have an imagination.)
In any case, that was my writing epiphany. And my world hasn't been the same since. What about you guys? Did you have a writing epiphany? Do you remember it vividly? Do you still have that first piece of writing and what was it about?
