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Category Archives: Writing

Anything about it, from how it makes me feel, to the differences in translating and just generating prose, to fiction and stage writing. If it’s about writing, it’ll sit here.

Dialectic and Drama in Compendio

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Even though I’m only a quarter of the way through Dialogue 2, In Pacheco’s Compendio, his very heavy redaction of Carranza’s Philosophy of Arms, the contrast between it and Dialogue 1 is stark. I kind of feel a kinship with Carranza, because as formal as he is in the First Dialogue, he lets his inner playwright run rampant in the second. (As much as I do research and fact-based work, my true love lies with fiction and dialogue.) This is just an early analysis, a sort of feeling things out about the book itself, but I think there’s much to be learned from the differences in these two sections. The first hews pretty closely to dialectic teaching structures. The second, however, is much more dramatic, much more like what you might see on stage. Why would Carranza do that? Was it caprice? What might it achieve? Let’s look at dialectics … Read on! →

Preparation

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I was thinking, yesterday, of preparation. It’s not something I have a really good grasp of outside of very formal or important situations, mainly because I seem to think that people, on the whole, don’t have to do much preparation to get smaller things done in their lives. Like get dressed in the morning. I know I stress less if I don’t have to make choices when my mind’s not up to speed, which is the majority of a morning. I can if the scope is limited (find error in text, fix error in text) but not if the scope is open (I literally have twelve different top combinations I can put on for work this morning OH GOD NO). I’ve done that sort of thing before — prepping wardrobe at an hour where my brain’s warmed up and okay with picking things out — though I often fall out … Read on! →

Back on the keyboard

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Aw, man, good morning. Things on my mind: I have some kind of back of the hand tendonitis. Haven’t done much research on it to see what I can do about it aside from ice and anti-inflammatories, but I know what causes it and no, I’m not going to back off the fencing. Not yet, anyway. Also — need better forearm protection than the junior shinguards that I picked up. Maybe adult-sized shinguards? Eh. I want to get back into translating primary documents. I was working on bits and pieces of Destreza texts, but I’ve lost the plot for a while now. I used to do it, in fact, in the mornings when I would wake up at 5:30 but didn’t need to be at work until 8:30, which meant I had more time at home to putter. I like having the extra time, but I am absolutely NOT waking … Read on! →

A half hour is not enough, confirmed

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Due to temporary shifts in my schedule over the next couple of days, I had to move my personal training session to today at 5:30 AM so as not to miss it completely this week. Today. At 5:30. I have conclusively proven despite the itty bitty dataset that I absolutely cannot function completely without a full hour to let the brain spool up. I am now writing this at noon-ish after having come back, eaten a bit of breakfast, and taken a 3 hour nap (though I do want to say I was in bed before 10 so I stood a reasonable chance of getting enough sleep for a 5 AM wake-up). This means that I am now more or less properly awake, have been working on modifying a gambeson so it properly fits me (this is a rant for another time), and the Sock Puppet is well awake and … Read on! →

An hour is not enough

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I don’t ramp up fast unless there’s fear for my life involved. By this I mean that if I need to be properly awake by a certain hour so I’m not the equivalent of drunk behind the wheel due to sleepiness, I need to be awake for about an hour. Unless the house is like on fire or something. Or so I thought. This experiment is showing me that I need at least a half hour to spool up into a consciousness functional enough to sit a computer and type things, which means if I’m giving myself an hour between waking and putting my butt in a car seat, I get maybe half an hour to get other things done. That’s just not enough. I do harp on about time. I suspect this time-buffer between waking and being truly awake can shorten significantly if I get more than 5 hours … Read on! →

Half an hour goes by really fast

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I have never had a good grasp of the passage of time. I used to think that it was just a thing, you know, no one ever really does have a good grasp of the passage of time, but revelations about my neurology show that it’s actually more acute for me than I thought. Or imagined. The Sock Puppet is awake this morning. Didn’t take long to spool up. I am not a morning person. I appreciate mornings in a mechanical sense; I can, with effort, shake my mind to some relative plateau of awareness, and I like the quiet and the dim gray light. But morning s are not a natural state for me. Part of it, I suppose, is the wheeling and churning of my head which I thought everyone dealt with — I thought it was just a natural part of being human. Again, this particular wheel-spinning … Read on! →

An experiment

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Less of an experiment, really, and more of a thing to try to see how I go. I have a nice blog with a nice site and it sits sort of empty and to add to that I’ve got issues with sitting down at my desk to actually compose something to post. Because I sit here and think how presumptuous I’ve got to be to believe that my perspective on anything is interesting. It’s ridiculous when you look at it in black and white. At any rate, the culprit behind thinking who wants to read what I write is the Sock Puppet of Self Doubt (I’ve talked about him before). And with a fairly new work schedule that requires me to be up at stupid o’clock, I’m up and running before it is. It’s a narrow band of time, but it’s long enough for me to get something written. So you … Read on! →

Representation matters, part N of [infinite]

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Representation matters, still and always. Leslie Jones tweeted in response (one of a longer thread of tweets) to people complaining that she’s been pigeonholed as the only non-scientist in the upcoming Ghostbusters film. To be clear — I had some reservations about just that, but most of them were fairly small, especially after seeing Patty in action in the trailer. But then this Twitter thread cropped up on the interwebz. Jones talks about a message she received from  Joanna Briley, writer-performer of SWIPE THIS! MY LIFE IN TRANSIT*, who herself is an MTA token booth clerk; Briley had been asked by a reporter about her thoughts on Jones’s role in the new film. I received this from a MTA worker:Hey Leslie, thanks for being you. A question was asked by a news writer about your role on your new movie — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) March 4, 2016 black actresses. This was my … Read on! →

A hell of an opportunity

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I know I’ve spoken in the past about GenreCon (and it’s happening again this year! GO. DO IT), and what a phenomenal experience it was for me, and all the fantastic people I met there. I want to tell you about one of them, because she’s offering a twelve-week mentorship program centering on writing and creative exploration. Jodi Cleghorn writes: My vision is to be the curator of a supported creative space with the benefits of one-to-one personalised attention and small group interaction. One of the greatest things to have come from GenreCon, for me, is the discovery of a creative community of vastly different people with incredibly different talents and styles and genres, but who are united by a sense of inclusivity, generosity, and openness. And this mentorship program is a distillation of that. I imagine I’m not being terribly clear, so I’ll let Jodi explain it better: For … Read on! →

A sense of place

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I have always been absorbed by context, whether it’s historical or political or environmental. Really, these things are inseparable, and they weave into my own history an out of it like tendrils on creeper vines. Of the world, and in it. I had asked whether the brutal monolith apartment blocks that lined the avenue between the airport and the heart of the old city were attributable to him. I moved around a lot as a kid, every two or three years or so. Place became something meaningful, not just a location but a collection of sensations and impressions and people and their lives in that place, too. The texture of the earth underfoot or the smell of exhaust over petrichor is enough to take me back to places I haven’t been in years. The sound of crickets, the fall of light on a late winter day, a spark of unexpected … Read on! →