writing 1 Comment

Butt In Chair

I like to write, but I am not a writer.

I have several unfinished stories of various scopes and degrees of completion sitting in the Writing folder on my computer — a dozen short stories, two potential novella-length works (19,500 words and 10,100 words so far, respectively), and one completed piece of short fiction that I wrote seven years ago, trite and utterly predictable though it may be. (I believe it was Ray Bradbury who said that a writer’s first million words are just for practice.)

I’d like to try my hand at short fiction, especially since I don’t seem to have the mental stamina to stick with a novel-length work long enough to finish it. (I’d love to know how both of my books end! I’d love nothing more than to pick one of them up at a Barnes & Noble and thumb through it in one of the comfy chairs in a corner, learning about my characters and their worlds… but that’s not how it works.) Short fiction, though… that takes a certain amount of wit. Savvy. Planning. All of which will take some time to develop.

Unfortunately, the base issue I have with my writing is the same base issue I have with my Zen practice. Call it Butt In Chair, call it Tush To The Cushion, or (in photography parlance) call it f/8 And Be There. It all boils down to just doing something. Do something, and keep doing it until you get better at it.

Until I get better at it.

roadtrips 1 Comment

Animarathon and Asimov’s

I skipped out on the Saturday afternoon session of this weekend’s Aikido seminar to go to Bowling Green with Aaron. We checked out the Animarathon for a short while, walked around campus, then got a coffee at Grounds.

But first, an aside. BGSU alumni: take a look at this landscape and tell me what’s missing:

I’ll give you a hint: I’m standing in the parking lot by Jerome Library and Anderson Arena. On the left is Kreischer. On the right is the art building.

If you said the Saddlemire Student Services Building, give yourself a point! The old bookstore building was torn down late last year in preparation for a new Fine Arts building. It was unsettling to see a big empty dirt plot where the bookstore once stood. Almost as unsettling as walking around an anime convention inside Olscamp Hall, where I attended so many classes nearly a decade ago.

Grounds for Thought, however, is a more comfortable sort of familiar, as is the taste and smell of a single mocha and the feel of the heavy, tall glass mug in my hands. It feels like home, somehow.

A good part of the joy of Grounds — for me and mine, anyway — is perusing the used books. In particular, I like looking for new-to-me science fiction. And we hit the jackpot this time, when we saw an entire shelf of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog magazines. Aaron and I sat Indian-style on the floor in the middle of the aisle and scanned the table of contents for each one, looking for authors whose names we recognized. Our resultant haul:

  • Asimov’s, January 1985
    Including stories by Frederick Pohl, Connie Willis, et al.
  • Asimov’s, August 1986
    Including stories by Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, et al.
  • Asimov’s, August 1989
    Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, et al.
  • Asimov’s, Mid-December 1989
    Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, Harry Turtledove, et al.
  • Asimov’s, February 1990
    Including stories by Bruce Sterling, et al.
  • Asimov’s, June 1990
    Including stories by James Patrick Kelly, Larry Niven, et al.
  • Asimov’s, November 1991 (double issue)
    Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Mike Resnick, Robert Silverberg, et al.
  • Asimov’s, November 1993
    Including stories by Frederick Pohl, Connie Willis, et al.
  • The Black Hole: The Illustrated Adaptation of the Exciting Film.
  • I, Jedi – A Star Wars novel by Michael A. Stackpole

After we got our coffee buzz and our sci-fi books, we went to Goodwill and found the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2 DVD game (with questions we can answer! Yay!), then headed to the Woodland Small Mall to Steve and Barry’s, where Aaron and I got some geeky T-shirts.

I’m going to have plenty of short fiction to read for a while, and hopefully will discover some new sci-fi authors to follow. I’m looking forward to this…

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links for 2008-03-29