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Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: reading

My Brain is a Border Collie

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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ADHD, border collies, editing, reading, thinking, writing, writing process

I have this freakish thing going on: Although I can be miserably incompetent at many things (like housework and math), I’m wicked good at decoding my native language–I can read really hard stuff (and really bad stuff), think about it, and then spit it back out in writing. I also write at least tolerably well myself, and I write a lot. (No, not here; I’m sorry, followers! I just don’t want to have a whineblog, so I try to post only when I have something to say.) But I’ve written a doctoral dissertation and ten novels, seven of which are finished. (My first book, which needed to be split into a trilogy, is currently up on a mechanic’s lift being taken apart. In my copious spare time.)

I can also write non-fiction, and I’m an excellent editor. If I didn’t enjoy my day job, I could probably manage as a free-lancer. (I’m on disability, thank God and my fellow taxpayers, which limits my income. So I’m not fantasizing about limitless wealth here.)

Putting it a different way, my brain is one of those amazing little Welsh border collies who can herd sheep into marching-band patterns: Neither of us is close to the unified field theory, but man, are we good at what we do! It took skilled training and the sort of hyperfocused attention that only dogs and ADHDers have. (All dogs have ADH–squirrel!)

I’ve spent twenty hours this month working on a huge grant which is vitally important to a bunch of people I love dearly. They have a spectrum of writing skills, and the first draft was sorting out their various snapshots of the same subject, so we wouldn’t make the nice folks at DHCD tear their hair out. It was sort of like the Hebrew Bible, where important stories in different versions are all just plopped in next to each other, leading bored children to try to figure out just how many animals Noah took with him anyway. Only I don’t just have the J and P authors, I have three social workers, an accountant, a grantwriter, an IT guy, and the entrepreneur heading the organization. Kind of crazy–and I love it!

Taking paragraphs apart, fixing sentences, and moving things around is fun for me. I am more than happy spending my prime creative time (3 a.m. to 8 a.m.) doing this. I would probably do this for free, but I crave an iPhone. (Hey, only a 6, and I found a good deal. I’m not that crazy.)

My border collie gets bored a lot. NaNoWriMo is sort of me buying a flock of sheep to keep it occupied. But that’s only once a year. Major grants like this one only happen once every decade or so. What to do?

So the answer occurred to me this morning at about 5 a.m.: Maybe I should try writing poetry. Truth impels me to say that I can change things up most by attempting to write good poetry. It will be interesting to see if the mutt can make the sheep tap dance. (I promise not to overwhelm you with the results of this cockamamie idea.)

Confession: I loathe most modern poetry (the sort you wrote in high school with lots of emotion on each line) so will probably pick some random classic format for structure. An extra lap or two around the flock, and a nice huddle of well-behaved words as a result. Sounds like–squirrel!

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Woo-Woo Scale for New Age Books

04 Monday Sep 2017

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humor, life, New Age, reading, religion, writing

1—My Journey

2—Crystals  are Our Friends

3—My Trek Through Holistic Healing: Drugs You Have to Google

4—Karma: Love It or Hate It?

5—All You Need to Do is Breathe. Or Cleanse. Whatever.

6—Whaddya Mean, You Don’t Have the Money to go to X and Experience Y?

7—Our Upcoming Evolution

8—Jesus Helped Me Write This

9—My Dog Helped Me Write This

10—(must bring in saucer people in a meaningful way)

Turning the Pages

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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job, Kindle, life, reading, real books v. ebooks, work, writing

I think it was my “year off” getting my knees replaced that did it. The tiny Kindle was a sanity-saver (and a hats-off to Project Gutenberg, while we’re on the topic) and I got disconnected from paper books. But then, I haven’t been a big consumer of even paper books since the dissertation. My recovery from that segued into a depressive episode, and when I emerged, I was in a life where I’d read/reread most of my books. (I view libraries as evil guilt-producing crackmasters, and have been known to brag about my current immaculate relationship with Cambridge Public the way people in recovery show off their five-year chips.)

By then, I’d started writing, and I had this idea from some quote somewhere that the more I’d read, then the less I’d write–and I’d risk sounding derivative of the writer. So for quite a while, the most complex prose I had was my daughter’s subscription to Cosmopolitan. (Don’t knock it. It ‘splained how to keep my eye shadow out of the creases. I’m a little sad that my daughter traded up to National Geographic.)

I gradually began to read Victorians and mysteries (and have now discovered Victorian mysteries). But then I got a gig of reading and commenting on other people’s novels, so all of a sudden I was reading for a living. Very weird. Sometimes I get a manuscript that is slick clean classy content–and then I don’t, and have to force myself to sit my ass in the chair for five, ten, fifteen minutes as a whack. Mercifully, I read fast. And eventually, I got used to being a writer too. The whole thing made me pickier about what I’d read for fun.

However, my daughter and I always stop by our favorite bookstore when we’re out, and I pick something out with the best of intentions. It is added to the stack, but every so often one jumps into my purse if the Kindle is charging, or if it’s Neil Gaiman, apparently.

So, there I am with  Neverwhere in the waiting room. My shrink emerges and gushes over *book* reading, claiming that studies have shown there to be superior cognitive benefit from the physicality of the book. I must admit I recall little of the Kindle-corn I’ve been consuming all year, but had put that down to the quality of writing.

My books (Long Leggedy Beasties, Things that Go Bump in the Night, their forthcoming cousins) are non-physical. I’ve been trying not to feel bad about that. This doesn’t help. Sigh.

You’re reading from a screen right now–what do you think?

If You Wanna Write, You Need to Read

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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bad writing, novels, reading, self-help, teaching, writing, writing process

I found this out empirically when teaching a remedial composition class at a small college. The school took composition skills seriously, and thus the remedial class met for 5 hours a week, instead of the usual 3. The kids had been assigned to it because they’d bombed a test, and as I was soon to discover, this test had some flaws.

Out of a class of about 30, I found that 10% of them had just been having a bad day on the test–they were already writing at an acceptable college level. Having been the bright kid in a group of um, less stellar talents for much of my life, my heart went out to them, and they were my inspiration to keep the class from becoming as horribly boring as it might have been. (Not hard. My glory as a teacher is that I’m not boring. This is also my bete noir, as it stems from my not being as consistent as I should be.)

Anyway, I did some digging (small schools mean you get to know the students) and found that the big difference between my good writers and my awful writers was that the people with skills read. And the more they read, the better their writing was.

So for the last couple of months of class, I broke it down by letter grades. The A’s only had to attend class Monday and Tuesday. B’s got to add Wednesday, and C’s came through Thursday. This left me five or six D’s for Friday, and that was boot camp. Every day, they had to read something, and then write about it. I wasn’t too fussy about the source, as long as it wasn’t some hiphop-esque piece of trash not written in standard English.

The results were impressive: My boot campers pulled themselves up by at least a letter grade, with one guy going from a low D to a satisfactory B. Yeah, extra teacher time. But I’m telling you, it was the reading. These kids might not have been good students, but that didn’t mean they were stupid, and when exposed to the different language that is written English, they soaked it up through their pores. I was so proud, I mighta been their mama.

Now, twenty years later, I review book manuscripts, and I suspect the same pattern exists. Some of these adults–all successful and wealthy enough to afford our firm–need boot camp. And it’s not just the mechanical flaws, it’s basic structural stuff like repeating themselves (occasionally endlessly), failure to shore up their characters beyond two dimensions, and (oh ye gods) saying stuff that shouldn’t need to be said: About 75% of people who have the stirrings of a book within plop out a self-help book, and because (I suspect) all they read are self-help books, and they all take the same classes in juicing and yoga, they all sound the same.

I don’t read self-help books in my personal life, but I’m beginning to suspect that they’re not very well written. What my current boot camp candidates need is structured non-fiction, like popular science books written by scientists who have gotten their degrees from schools we’ve heard from. They also need classic novels written by people who knew how to punctuate. (Start with Angela’s Ashes–it was written by a whip-cracking English teacher.) Until there’s a matrix of written English in the brain, I believe it’s impossible to spit it back out. And I’m not being a snob: We’re talking about basic meaning. If you’re pulling down 70k in your own consulting business, writing a simple sentence that turns out to be gibberish should be a flogging offense.

Not that I’m cranky, heh. I just sweat over everything I write, grateful to my ex-husband for having cured me of comma splices in grad school. Is it wrong to expect the newbies clustering in the doorway to have a little respect for my art and profession?

Blizzards, Paychecks, and Sloth

26 Monday Jan 2015

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blizzard, cold, dollhouse, family, ferrets, fun, poverty, reading, snow, writing

My governor has shut down public transit for tomorrow, which means no work for me. Although I do have a vision of making the two mile hike over the Longfellow Bridge, pretending to be Eliza crossing the ice, or Matthew Henson, or maybe one of the Yeti who might be poking their snouts into my 2014 unfinished WriMo, I probably wouldn’t end up being paid anyway. We have a policy of being closed when the Boston public schools are, which is a pain in the sheep because the Boston public schools are wussies. Last month when we had a cold snap they closed down, which at least gave me a *quiet* day here at home, as the Cambridge schools laughed and told the kiddies to pile on another sweater–as well they should.

But tomorrow there’s no arguing from me, because we’re SUPPOSEDLY getting up to 30 inches by Wednesday morning. Even the new boots Sunny gave me this past weekend ain’t gonna cut it. I’m just hoping we’re dug out and back to quasi-normal by Wednesday, because we had two weeks of enforced “vacation” cutting into the budget this month as it is. Grrrr. I had always assumed that this was a way of balancing the department budget, but was told when I complained to the leadership committee that it was “just tradition” because “peers don’t ever take breaks.” Until my as-unwhiny-as-possible email, it apparently hadn’t really sunk in that “peers don’t really like being forced to eat ramen noodles,” and now for 2015 it’ll be only one week break. Yay!

But it is what it is, and with both spawn working, we’re hanging in there, doing much better than we have in the past, and much better than the people I serve, so I can’t really complain. (Much.) So much for blizzard, so much for paychecks, and on to the sloth!

Snow days have an American magic about them, because even the vaunted Protestant Work Ethic has to bow before Nature’s divine tantrum. I suspect we’re really supposed to clean out that closet we’ve been ignoring, but instead everybody treats it like a free Saturday, when we can’t even do errands because everything is closed. (Sort of like Christmas, only the Chinese restaurants may not make it either.) We sleep in, we read trash (which is all I ever read anyway, even though my trash has mellowed for a century or so), we eat whatever we find in our larders. (This depends on when we got to the store the night before and whether or not we staggered home in a daze, clutching only the last battered packet of toilet paper and half a box of butter.)

I myself will be doing at least some work, as I have a couple hours of graphics stuff piled up and I haven’t entirely forgotten the paycheck–and there’s always *shudder* query letters and Real Writing–unless, of course, the power goes out. But I have charged and loaded up my Kindle accordingly, and can always do the next stage of dollhouse repair, until it gets dark at teatime. Then all bets are off, and I don’t know what will happen. We might even play a board game by candlelight–at least until the cold drives us to huddle under our blankets in defeat. I’m almost looking forward to it, because it always makes our usual impoverished prosperity so shiny and valuable by contrast.

All in all, I’m a lucky girl. Even if Amaterasu the ferret did drag the insoles out of my new boots.

Update: Boss called and informed me that Boston schools are closed Wednesday too. Sigh.

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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