asher553 | Entries tagged with writing

I've promised myself that Calendar Year 2024 is the year I'm going to get serious about writing, as in writing for publication. I still have only vague and half-formed ideas about what I want to write, and where and how I want to publish, but I'm working on getting clearer on these details and that's part of the process.

I want to produce both fiction and non-fiction. For the latter, I have some thoughts on moral and social matters that I want to flesh out and build on. Also, maybe some personal reflections, although I'm not keen on sharing a lot of intimate details of my personal history. I'm hoping to see at least a trickle of income from it, mostly for my own satisfaction.

Currently I have a Substack, although I've posted on it very sporadically, and I'm still trying to learn how to monetize it. I'm promising myself that I'm going to invest the time and effort to master the nuts-and-bolts details.

Technical writing is another avenue I'd like to explore; I think I could probably be effective because I enjoy explaining things clearly and concisely, and I know I have a good grasp of basic science, and of the mechanics of expository writing.

So, that's the plan. Friends with experience or knowledge of the field, any suggestions or ideas?

[city mail left]

By that time, all services in the city had stopped. Municipal water and electricity were gone. There was no regular mail delivery, but you could find people who would act as couriers for the right price, and some of them even ran regular routes. But most of the people had already left.

[subtle small all]

The changes were very subtle at first, and only a few people among the crew noticed them; the rest suspected that we were seeing an outbreak of space sickness. A flicker in the lighting, a faint chemical odor in the recirculated air - easy enough to put down to the stress of a long voyage. But then we started seeing things we couldn't ignore: small errors in the ship's astrogation computer, easily enough corrected, but still troubling. We began to wonder if the ship was breaking down, or if there was a hostile force at work.

So we were all relieved when the video message came from Earth Central, saying that a major attack on the planetary system network by the Thanatos League had been detected and defeated. Additionally, there had been a restructuring of the leadership at Earth Central - to enhance security, of course - and the High Command unveiled its new official emblem. It was a stylized representation of Earth, a plain circle with a horizontal band at the equator.

[nerve pro honor]

If I had the nerve, I'd try playing again. I used to play like a pro - at least, up until that last time. But I don't want to embarrass myself again. I'll walk away with honor.

--

You could question the narrator's judgement here - is it really more "honorable" to quit?

The game could be anything - baseball, chess, whatever. A writer with some real-life experience with sports - somebody like Alex Perez - would be able to write more convincingly. I never played sports, and while I probably never would have been a major sports person in any case, I do feel like I missed out on something by not having at least some basic experience and knowledge of sports.

[brush unfair safe]

She keeps the hairbrush in a shoebox. Mother used to use it on both of us - to brush our hair, and to spank our butts when we were "ornery" as she would say. So our hair is tangled up in the bristles, hers and mine, as well as a lot of memories, good and bad. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole thing - part of me thinks it's unfair that she gets to keep the brush, when it's mine as well as hers (and after all, I was on the scene first), but then a lot of what Mother did to us wasn't fair either, so there you are. Probably better for her to keep it anyway, at least with her it'll be safe.

[Writing exercise using three random words as a prompt, supplied by a random word passphrase generator. Prompts: shop, jaw, sound.]

It was starting to rain, so I ducked under the overhang in a corner of the outdoo mall. There was a lighting store, a Korean restaurant, and a shop I hadn't noticed before. It looked to be a resale store that sold bargain items and novelties. There was a manual typewriter, complete with ribbon. Old furniture. Well-worn board games and used books. And a plastic skull on a black wooden base, with a wind-up key. I turned the key, figuring the clockwork mechanism inside would make the thing's jaw chatter in comical fashion.

What I wasn't ready for, was the sound ...

Kabbalah has an idea that there are four universes - Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and 'Asiyah - and I think that's a useful model for the writing process. Atzilut is Emanation, the world of pure inspiration. Beriah is Creation, your first notes and your rough drafts. Yetzirah is Formation, the process of taking the raw material and editing, redacting, and re-writing it until it's a polished work. And 'Asiyah is Action - that's the whole mundane business of all the practical stuff connected with writing: the publication process (submitting, reading rejection slips, etc.), organizing your workspace and writing materials, that kind of stuff. All of these levels are important, and a blockage in one ends up affecting all of them.

Since 2010 I've been keeping a diary on my computer. Last week I got around to printing the whole thing out. Three years (and counting) of personal journal entries are now printed in 16-point Courier on 3-hole punch paper, and they fill three 2-inch ring binders. Somehow it's comforting to have my journals in physical form, but it also helps me to feel my writing is going somewhere.

I'm making it a point to print out what I write, rather than just leaving it on the computer, because I think having it in tangible form helps to keep the process going.

[from my OhLife! journal]
So a quick review of my last OL backup, cut and pasted onto Word:mac, shows a word count of over 228,000 words since my first entry in 2010 August. So assuming that that figure is ballpark-accurate (even allowing for things like formatting tags getting counted as "words" when the formatting is stripped), that means that I've written the equivalent of almost three standard-length novels in the last two years and 5 months - just in the form of journal entries e-mailed to myself.

So, how is it that I'm so prolific here at OL? I guess writing "stream-of-consciousness" feels natural to me; but it's not just a spontaneous, uncensored stream-of-consciousness. If you were to put a keystroke logger on my computer you'd see that I edit these emails constantly as I compose them. I ponder choices of vocabulary, punctuation, and style. Even at my least self-conscious, I'm pretty self-conscious about my writing.

Maybe that last observation explains why all this private writing hasn't carried over to more output on other fronts - my political blog, or my LJ, much less actual creative writing. That's the challenge I'm going to set for myself in the coming year: I know I write reasonably well, now I want to take some of the energy that I've put into "writing for the drawer" and invest it in writing for readers.

OK, I have to get this off my chest. What ever possessed the Israelis to call their operation "Pillar of Defense" in English? The Hebrew name is "Pillar of Smoke", which is dramatic, concrete, and Biblical. But what in the world does a "pillar of defense" look like? It's a mangled metaphor. Just plain bad writing. Grrrrr.

... at Media Tapper.
http://mediatapper.com/jihad-counter-jihad-and-why-you-should-care/

(That's not me in the picture.)

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Book of Days: asher553

The unlived life is not worth examining.

Entries tagged with writing

Writing.

Writing.

Writing.

Writing.

Writing.

Writing.

World of Action

Writing for the Drawer

Pillar of Whatever

My first published piece ...

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May 2025

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