it must be summer...

because *sigh* Pandora apparently blew her entire undercoat last night, thanks to yesterday's painfully muggy high of 95 degrees. Just spent half an hour brushing her out. Know anyone who could use a gallon baggie of fine gray fur?

yes, there is more going on in my life right now than that, but that's what I can talk about without a) talking too soon about stuff Still In Motion, or b) boring y'all to death with iterations of "and then I did another pass on the manuscript, fixing the things that are still broken..."


EtA: on feminism & genre: Maura McHugh's "be part of the solution" http://t.co/aPOBHod <-- rather than restate less eloquently, I repost.

on writing, "but what IS it?"

And so on Twitter, a random comment about 'are you working if...?" led to Kris Rusch and I getting feisty* over what constitutes "writing."

Kris said that words-on-page is "the only sign" of writing, and that nothing else count. I disagreed: the inspiration and the thinking and the researching are all part of the writing. Words-on-page is the final and most important part of it, of course: if you don't get the words down, nobody else can see what you've done/share the story.

But to say that words-on-page is the ONLY sign... that bothered me. A lot.

A story isn't words. Words are what convey the story. The stronger and more effective your conveyance, the better people respond. That's the goal. But Kris would agree that a story without research is going to fall flat, no matter how well-structured your words (as her former editor, I am in a prime position to say that Kris does a hell of a lot of research!)

And I know from my own and others' experience that research triggers ideas, and the ideas trigger thoughts, and those thoughts move the story in ways we-the-writer might not have anticipated or planned.

So how can that process be any less "writing a story" than the actual choosing/typing of words?

Idea + Plotting + Research + Word choice + Editing/revising = Writing.

I suspect that this is an argument of semantics, but it really bothers me to see writers discounting everything that comes before as not actually working-at-writing. Because it IS. And they should give themselves credit for the whole damned difficult process.





As an aside, I have decided that the push to post daily wordcounts has the potential to become akin to measuring dicks in the locker room: pointless and potentially damaging. Too much guilt coming off people who "only" wrote 1000 words, or "only" revised one chapter. If you're on schedule, and feel good about what you did - isn't that a good day's work?




*we've been friends for a long time. Hopefully nobody thought it was daggers-drawn....