Blog comments vs. spam comments
This blog doesn’t receive a lot of reader comments, which sometimes makes me wonder if I’m writing to myself (plus side, at least I’m writing something nearly every day). That said, nothing’s funnier to me than when a comment comes in that’s nothing more than someone asking me to link to their writing website.
There’s a comment that’s been sitting in the blog’s controls since September. All that it says is “my site” with a link to his writing website in his user name. I don’t know why I keep it there; why not just delete it? I resent his comment enough to do so; it’s clear he didn’t read my blog beyond acknowledging it’s about writing.
If I write something worth your comments, please comment. If I don’t, then don’t. But please don’t spam me with a link to your writing website. If you want to create a synergistic partnership, send me an email about it. As for the comment in question, I’ve marked it as spam. And I feel great!
-nm
Technorati Tags: spam comments, no blog comments, September
Three Uncle Ukulele shows in March
Too late, I considered the plug power of this blog. That means I failed to plug my three-show run at Improv A Go-Go, which just ended last night. However, I am in time to plug my upcoming three-show run at the Monday Night Comedy Show beginning tonight. Basic information for you:
03.03.08 - Uncle Ukulele (solo improv) @ Monday Night Comedy Show, 8:00pm, $3 The Beat Coffee House - 1414 W 28th St. Minneapolis, MN 55408 (map)
03.10.08 - Uncle Ukulele (solo improv) @ Monday Night Comedy Show, 8:00pm, $3 The Beat Coffee House - 1414 W 28th St. Minneapolis, MN 55408 (map) One of my improv students does his great magic act this night, too.
03.17.08 - Uncle Ukulele (solo improv) @ Monday Night Comedy Show, 8:00pm, $3 The Beat Coffee House - 1414 W 28th St. Minneapolis, MN 55408 (map)
I hope to see you there, dear reader, and my contributions to this blog will get back to a regular schedule soon. In the meantime, enjoy a few posts by Barry Hess about the latest features at Scrawlers.com. He’s been busy tweaking and adjusting the site to make it better than ever.
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Your Monday Prompt #18
Write a story in which fictional characters of your own invention interact with a real location you know extremely well. What if two fresh characters lived and breathed in your own home? What if there was a robbery at your favorite restaurant? What if a new kid arrived at your elementary school? Avoid placing you in the story, and really utilize the details you know of the location instead. Setting should play a key role in your story, and this will rely on the specific details you know about the location.
Give this exercise at least fifteen minutes of your time, and consider sharing it with someone in your life who also knows the real location used in the story.
Write it up and see what happens.
-nm
(this post was added retro-actively to assist continuity.)
Technorati Tags: writing prompt, writing exercise, surprise yourself
Your Monday Prompt #17
Write about a character looking back at their childhood. The voice should clearly be that of an adult, and they should examine moments in their childhood with all the experience and perspective that comes with distance and time. The “occasion for the utterance” should be clear, too, meaning let the reader understand why the character has decided to reflect on a particular childhood experience. Perhaps the adult sees a lone monarch butterfly in a sea of green plant life and remembers when he was four and ate a butterfly. Maybe the adult is on jury duty for someone accused of robbery and she remembers being a little girl and swiping money from her mother’s purse.
Whatever the situation, keep the voice adult and draw parallels between the past and present. Give this exercise at least fifteen minutes of your time, though this is the sort of exercise that might demand more of your time to really get the story rolling.
Write it up and see what happens.
-nm
(this post was added retro-actively to assist continuity.)
Technorati Tags: writing prompt, writing exercise, surprise yourself
Your Friday Recommendation #2
I have a group of friends who meet on the first Monday of the month for the Ron Book Club. I’m usually unavailable due to Monday night class, but I always get to join them in January over winter break. This month, we read and discussed The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia.
This is MFA-earner Plascencia’s first novel and he does well combining three things he knows well: the culture and geography of Mexico and southern California, presentation, and writing. Stay with me here, the story is narrated by the planet Saturn, who watches a few people on earth, who then narrate their own tale of battling for their freedom against the planet Saturn for watching them. The novel continues to turn inside on itself, becoming meta as characters realize their story is a novel (this doesn’t stop them from trying to rebel from their narrator, however). Plascencia has written a story for keen-eyed readers who enjoy connecting the dots and for writers who have ever felt their characters take over the story they’re writing, whether they wanted it or not.
Reading the novel, I enjoyed the story and annotated along the way, but halfway through I wondered if I would be as intrigued as I was if it wasn’t for the presentation style, the book’s primary novelty. Point of view switches between first and third person, sometimes within the same character’s narration. Some characters speak in blocks of black ink, their words missing, censored, or intelligible, other characters have moments of blank white space to represent their silence. Ink also serves as blood, splashing pages in great drops, blotting out text. One character’s name is even completely scratched out of the novel. While these are fascinating craft choices, I wonder if the “gimmick” outshines the fourth-wall smashing story. Still, it’s worth a read to see these craft choices in practice.
Ron Book Team’s February selection is New York Times bestseller Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. I hope to make at least a few of the RBT meetings and keep you updated on our selections and subsequent discussions.
-nm
Technorati Tags: reading recommendation, people of paper, salvador plascencia
Ten favorite blog entries from 2007.
Without intended order, here are ten of my favorite posts at this blog from the past year:
Dust off your forgotten, unfinished writing. - In which I remember an old story I want to revisit.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Story Notes. - What makes workshop notes great and what makes them less than great (and really terrible).
“You words are dead to me,” I (something besides said). - Me vs. the North Carolina education system.
Discovering niche reading/writing websites: LibraryThing. - A post with my initial reaction of a website I now use every day.
Picking and choosing good writing tools. - In which I stumble upon, and comment upon, some tips by Roy Thomas Clark.
Saving ideas and surprising yourself. - Details on how two long-dormant ideas finally came together in one new story.
Poetry can be a gateway to getting prose. - Discovering how poetry language works can really boost your level of prose.
The secret formula’s written on a receipt. - A plea to young writers to always be prepared to scrawl down story ideas.
Why The Road deserves its Pulitzer. - My immediate reaction to reading the latest by Cormac McCarthy.
Scrawlers welcomes RSS. - Some of my favorite people in the world are my subscribers, and that’s you, dear reader. Thank you for reading in 2007 and I look forward to our time together in 2008.
-nm
Technorati Tags: top ten posts, favorite blog, North Carolina education system
Brainstorming one-hundred solutions.
I’m not a computer freelancer, but I’ve found FreelanceSwitch.com has plenty to offer anyone looking to be more organized, more original, and more creative. I attempted the activity presented there by Robert Janelle earlier this week - solve a problem by writing a list of one-hundred solutions. Joe latched onto the idea from . In true interweb fashion, Janelle professes to have snagged the idea from Litemind writer, Luciano Passuello. By subscribing to Freelance Switch, I not only get a great idea to try but a link to a blog I’ve never heard of but which appears to be right up my alley (it’s about creating higher efficiency, which I need in spades).
I followed the guidelines from Janelle and Passuello and wrote out one-hundred possible blog topics for The Scrawl. Some I really dig (where and when I like to write, magazines and journals I read and why), some feel like I’m reaching a little (which pens and pencils I prefer to write with), and some are dependent on a specific timeline (writing about my thesis reading, comprehensive exam). Expect to read some posts generated from this list.
I plan on trying this one-hundred listing activity again for creative projects and work projects, and maybe even try it again for The Scrawl if the well begins to run dry. If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about in this blog then comment away, dear reader.
-nm
Technorati Tags: one-hundred list, Freelance Switch, generating blog topics
Juggling projects.
After ten posts in eight days, I took an accidental leave of the blog to work on a few writing projects at-hand. I’m trying to flesh out a few short stories for submissions, write Act II of a spec script for class, and plug away at a new novel idea for NaNoWriMo. Each category gets a little more done on it, but none are finished. Here’s another way to look at it:
I should have been trying to publish short stories for the past year, but I’m not on the submissions train like I should be. I’m getting better at it, though. This, I suppose, could be categorized as an ongoing deadline. I should always be working on something which could get out there into submission land.
The spec script pages are due on November 19. That’s just how that is.
The NaNoWriMo novel idea is “due” on November 30, a contest-imposed deadline for a not-really-a-contest website based solely on members’ drive to strive in their dutiful writing. It’s fun, but not pressing. Still, if the novel is good (and really, it’s been interesting and fun to write), this is something which could feed back into submission land, someday.
All three projects have different formats - short stories, screenplays, novels - and all three projects have deadlines - immediate, self-imposed, and late - and all three projects lead to the same goal: get them into submission land. If you’re going to juggle a few balls in the air, you might as well do your best to keep them focused on the same goal. Jugglers don’t concentrate more on one ball than the next because they understand it takes working with all the balls as one solid unit to keep them in the air. I’m a writer who likes to keep busy, and that’s part of why I work on so many different projects at once (this also may keep things from being finished, but that’s another story). For me, letting each project feed into each other and unite as one big cacophony of creativity keeps what I’m doing fresh and far from overwhelming.
-nm
Technorati Tags: writing submission, spec script, NaNoWriMo, juggling projects
I am everyday people.
I’m going to write (at least) one short story and give a note to (at least) one short story a day through the rest of the month here at Scrawlers. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do, something I should have been doing. One of my pet peeves in a regular writing workshop is when someone doesn’t actively participate, and thus I’ve become what I do not like. So to that, I will try a change and see what comes of it.
Writing here every day shouldn’t be hard, so long as I put in the time. See, I write my Scrawlers stories as flash fiction, for the most part. It seems easiest when staring at a blank screen which asks me for one-hundred words. Something pops in my head, an image, a line, a mood, and I let that inform the piece. Mood is most interesting to me; one can tell what sort of mood I’m in when I write a Scrawlers piece. My work here has gone from melancholy to outright silly. And that’s fiction. Versatile, versatile fiction.
Off to read a little of Elmore Leonard’s latest. Later, I’ll head out for the midnight show. Tomorrow morning calls for more research and of course, a Scrawlers post or two…
~nm
All Camping, No Reading.
I’m the dean of a youth camp in rural Minnesota for a week in June every summer, and I’m smackdab in the middle of our fast-paced week. Every year, I bring a book along, and laugh to myself when I see it sitting in my luggage amongst the shirts and shorts and bug spray and Birkenstocks. I bring a book because I’m used to bringing a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to actually pick it up at camp.
This hasn’t really mattered until now. The book I brought this year is a research book for the screenplay. Between this week, a family vacation next week, and the Twin Cities Improv Festival next weekend, June may officially be a wash when it comes to getting research done. So much for the research “an hour every day” idea. On the other hand, at least I’m self-aware of the issue I need to correct, so hopefully I can make that work to my advantage.
Back to camp. I have some sand-beach volleyball to attend to…
~nm
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About
Brought together by mutual interest in creative arts and web development, Minnesota duo Barry Hess and Nathan Melcher founded Scrawlers.com in 2006. Scrawlers marries creativity with a web-based outlet for aspiring writers and The Scrawl blog seeks to add fuel your creative fire.
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Recently Written
- More free books for you to win
- Still time to enter our “Back to School” contest
- I’m teaching English this fall.
- Your Friday Recommendation #18
- Win a free hardcover copy of Stephen King’s “On Writing”
- Why I Haven’t Been Blogging #2: Improv Festivals
- Why I Haven’t Been Blogging #1: I got married.
- How does one get back into blogging?
- Your Friday Recommendation #21
- So where have I been?…
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