Good News!

This upcoming Wednesday is the first session of my writing class, and as before any endeavor like this, the kind where you set yourself up as the embodiment of all knowledge on a subject and other people have to accept that knowledge from you, I'm very afraid that I'm not credentialed enough to make an impression on these high school students.

Oh, did I mention? I have fourteen people signed up for my class! FOURTEEN! So that's exciting.

Anyway, returning to my lack of credentials. College degree? Working on it. Published? Only in school literary magazines. Nominated for any awards? Nothing anyone else has heard of.

I've only got small feathers in my hat, but even so, sometimes adding another feather helps, even if it's just another small one. Today I got the news that my Percy Jackson story A Goddess's Lament has been nominated for The Veritas Award in the General category.

Yeah, you read that right. I've now been nominated TWICE, once last voting cycle and once this voting cycle. I'm the first person up on that page.  See? Here I am!

Nifty, huh? Here's what my 'anonymous nominator' had to say about why my story deserved to be nominated.

It has this nostalgic reminiscing tone that adds a special feel to the story, and unlike many PJO fanfics, their is no character-bashing or anything like that. The words flow smoothly, and Amphitrite is a very realistic character.

My last nomination said "It puts characters in a new perspective and also shines a light on Amphitrite." Two different nominations with a bit of different reasoning behind them! Excellent!

So just when I was afraid I couldn't write, someone comes along and reassures me that they think I can. It's a good day to be me.


(Oh, and if you want, you can vote for the story by visiting http://fanmortals.webs.com/general.htm after the fall equinox. Or you could just go to fanfiction.net and review it -- I accept anonymous reviews as well as those from people with ff.net accounts)

The Mind in Summer, Idling Along

Having just recently discovered the simultaneous joy and curse that is social gaming on FaceBook (Hello, FrontierVille!) I am ashamed to admit that I haven't had a lot to write about this past week. I also just completed my first week of work, and as kindergarteners are not the most literate of audiences, the most word-based thing I've done in the past week and a half is read a few books (none of them knock-out-of-the-park brilliant) and emcee my library's Poetry Slam, which turned out be a resounding failure because a) someone is telling today's youth that poetry isn't cool and b) the Slam was at 3pm on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, the three kids that did show up had a great time reading stuff out of books and I think good fun was had by all.

Since feeding my pigs and harvesting my apple trees has been taking up most of my idle time, I haven't been paying very close attention to my feed reader, which I've set to alert me every time FF.net gets a new submission in about ten different categories, among other things. Many of these posts are coming from the Percy Jackson section, and I think that's another reason why I'm breezing through and skipping over a lot of them. There's nothing there that really stands out, nothing that I want to read. I'm also getting a lot of posts from Flamespots, which I've also added to the feedreader just to see how much lag time there is between the story getting posted and someone putting it up as flamable. It's also interesting because occasionally the Flamespots posters will add comments that they've gotten back from the authors, and those are ALWAYS worth a read.

Reading these replies, you get the sense that there seems to be an idea of entitlement in the writing world -- I wrote it, I worked on it, it must therefore be good, and if you don't agree with me, I  have the right and possibly the duty to shout at you. I know this exists because I feel it sometimes. No one is entitled to be recognized as good -- you have to earn that right, through practice, through revision, and through listening to critique. But everyone is entitled to know what they did right and wrong, and it is a duty of owning that right that you must listen to all your supporters and detractors with good grace, and not shout back in your author's comments.

I actually got talking with the three teens at the poetry slam about online reviews, and their response was clear -- everyone needs to get bad reviews once in a while. But one of the teens said something very interesting on the subject of non-complimentary reviews -- "Everyone needs constructive criticism."

Very true, everyone does need concrit. Concrit is what makes the writing world go round. I endeavored to explain to him that in the online writing world there is such a thing as a non-complimentary review that offers very little basis for improvement, which shocked him and my other two audience members (I was at this point doing a little lecture/Q&A on fanfiction).

Does such a thing exist in the face-to-face world? Is it easier to deal with there? Or are the social situations in which writing is shared so exclusive (or so friend- or kinship based) that baseless criticism is seldom found there?

Summer Reading

Ah, the glorious month of June. Home to the beginning of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, the Glorious First of June and at my local library the beginning of Summer Reading Programs. This year's theme, rather lamely, is BANK ON YOUR LIBRARY, just to hammer home to the rest of the community who hasn't heard about their budget troubles. I think it needs to be given a rest, but hey, I go to the library at least once a week, so maybe it just seems like overkill to me.

Anyway, I've made several goals for this summer -- one of them is to finish summer reading, another is to learn how to roll sushi, and the third is to read the last three Stephanie Meyer books. So, yesterday, with great trepidation, I spent a good five minutes in front of the bookshelf at the library contemplating why it was again I wanted to bring these books home. My sister walks up, looks from me to the bookshelf and back again, and says "No. Don't do it."

Not even kidding. That's my sister -- always looking out for me and my continued mental stability. I respond "Well, I know they're terrible...but if I read it then I'll have something to write a blog post about!"

I could just feel the awful leaking out of the book as I went to go check it out.  I'd make a big deal of blogging how bad it is, but someone else is doing that -- if you haven't already heard about it, go check out Alex Reads Twilight, an absolutely hilarious series of YouTube videos done by Alex Day where he reads Twilight and makes fun of how bad it is. (The rate of posts on this subject on his YouTube Channel is a testament to just how difficult Twilight is to get through when you don't want to read it.)

Maybe the little sister and I will watch the Twilight movies and make fun of them while we're at it. Dunno if that will happen, though... To give you some idea of the movies we enjoy, right now we're in the middle of a cracking PBS series called Colonial House. It's reality TV as only PBS and your history teacher can provide, and it's wonderful!

New Moon is sitting next to me as I write this blog post, so obviously it did make it home, but I realized something about reading and books when I put my library books away.

If you need to rationalize why you're getting the book, chances are it's not a good choice for you at the moment.