Oh yes! Fourth corollary, which Mom reminds me to ask:

Do you like poetry? If so, what kind of poetry? Do you read it for pleasure? If you're an imaging reader, does poetry work for you? Tell me, tell me! (I'm really enjoying this discussion. Heehee.)

So last week, Emily and Ted and I were sitting around talking, and Emily said something about the radio drama in her head while she was reading. Ted said, "You only get a radio drama?" and she said, "Oh, no, I get pictures, too."

Now, Ted has said this before, but I always thought he was exaggerating, so it sort of threw me, and I said, "You really see *pictures* while you're reading?" And they both insisted that yes, they did. Rather like being the camera in a movie, in fact.

It took me rather some time to believe them. I don't *get* pictures in my head when I'm reading. If I think back on a scene, I can see it play out, but it doesn't play out in my head while I'm reading it. Nor does it play out in my head while I'm writing it. I have, at best, stills. I can call images and scenes up, but they don't naturally play out in my head.

So we went to my parents' house and asked them, because this was so fascinating and weird to all three of us (for me, that they see pictures; for them, that I don't!). My parents don't see pictures when they read.

Ted's parents and brother do.

Shaun does.

Ellen does.

The random waitress we asked at Tony Roma's does.

Do *you*?

And, corollary to that: if I tell you to think of, oh, Tom Cruise, do you see a 3-D sort of image of him in your mind? Or a photograph? Or... what? I *can* call up an image in my mind, but I can't hold it. I *know* what Tom Cruise looks like, but I don't *see* it. So... what happens when you, my gentle readers, read?

Further corollary, for writers: what happens to you when you're writing? Do you see what's happening, or do you ... *know* what's happening (I more or less do), or do you (struggle to?) hold images in your head to describe them (I do), or something else entirely?

Third corollary (I've just learned how to spell corollary and I'm very excited about it, can you tell?): how fast do you read? We've determined thus far that the seeing pictures aspect isn't, as we thought it might be, related to reading speed, as Dad, who reads slowly, doesn't see pictures, and Ellen and Ted, who read very fast, do, and Shaun and Emily, who read slowly, do, and Mom and I, who read very fast indeed, don't. But I'm curious anyway!

Please! Discuss! :)

Romantic SF&F website has A Look at Luna.

RotK rocked. *beam*

GPA meeting this morning, that was fun. Tired me, but it was fun. :)

Jenn posted today asking if her LJ readers considered writing an escape or a pursuit. Because her postings keep inspiring me to mini-essays, I shall share with you what I said to her. :)

I write because I want to know what happens next. I have general ideas, sure, but the devil is in the details and that's what I'm after. That's my pursuit. I want to know what happens next, and I want to be able to tell other people what happens next. That's the base level of it for me.

On other levels: I write because I want to see what can be done, or more specifically, what *I* can do. I want to see what happens when I write Beauty and the Beast; I want to see if I can achieve the elegance of language that makes it hard for me to breathe when I read Guy Gavriel Kay. I want to explore what makes my characters, and, at least in theory, thereby people, tick. I want to make someone laugh; I want to make someone cry. I want to make someone say, "*Yeah*!" because she's been in that moment that she's just read--maybe not that *actual* moment, but I want to evoke a memory of passion, or create one. I want to suddenly catch my reader realizing that he's reading a jazz piece, like happened to me when I read (I believe it was) "Sonny's Blues", by James Baldwin. I want to make my reader notice he's leaning forward in his seat and holding his breath to get through to the end of the scene, because the action has got him in its grip. I pursue feeling, when I write.

I write because I want to be better at writing. There are standards to which I aspire. To make people think; to make them react, to make them angry or happy; to make them want to ban what I have to say, or to laud it. I want to tell stories that have some kind of basic truth to them. I don't, perhaps, need to change the world with a single book, but I would like, when I'm dead, to have a body of work that someone can look back on and say, "These are the things she wrote about; these are the things that made her feel so strongly that she had to make stories of them to share with the world. These are the ideas that were her passion," and maybe have something learned from them. Maybe have a faith in love, or redemption, or truth, or anguish, restored. These are my pursuits, in writing.

This is me, totally losing my train of thought because my editor called to ask me why I chose the name I chose to write under. Erm. Where was I?

Oh yes.

My *escape*, in writing, is that--God. I love it. I just love it. I love telling stories. I love going into these worlds inside my mind and finding out what happens next. It *is* another world; I see why people say "real life" and "writing life" as if they're different, because... writers are a little weird, you know? I keep telling my mom that it's not *exactly* that I have voices in my head, but there's no better way to describe it. (And she assures me that she has no voices in her head, whether they're described that way or not, at all, and gives me funny looks.) It's not that I go in to writing *because* it's an escape, but it unquestionably *is* one. The world that goes on outside of my head ceases to be the one with which I am involved for the period of time that I'm writing, and...

Okay, Mom's right, that's weird. Maybe it's better not to think about this stuff too deeply. :) But, hm. I think that overall my answer is that I consider writing a pursuit, and that it's an escape is for me an inevitable (and awesome) side effect.

A writerly what's your story meme, taken from this discussion on witchqueen's lj. Sarah and I got a particular kick out of it because it's a topic we've discussed in some depth before.

My fairy tale? Beauty and the Beast. My story? Redemption.

A few days ago I read an article that said 'The Last Samauri, like all Tom Cruise movies, is a story of redemption', and I went, "Oh, well, no wonder I like Tom Cruise movies so much." I'm a sucker for a good redemption story, whether it's individual, familial, societal, whatever. I love the heartbreak that comes with a good redemption story, and looking at the half dozen novels I've written, yep. Big ol' theme there. Flashing, and stuff. (I'd use the blink tag, but as a web designer by trade, I'd have to go kill myself afterwards.) I've known that for a while, and knowing it doesn't seem to change my inclination to write stories that are on some level redemption stories, nor my ability to do so.

Neither does my awareness of BatB as 'my' fairy tale. I often see threads of it in my writing (sometimes much more deliberately than others!), and I'm pretty content with that. There are other stories that I know about that I like, thematically (I think I won't go into them too deeply right now, no point in showing all my cards!), and other stories I like to tell, but on a flat level? Redemption. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :)

Ok, Laura's going to kill me, because there's been no walking, but I did finish the QB chapter, and it's 7300 words long. My brain is going to explode. I wrote 3800 words today. *collapses*

ytd wordcount: 233,700

Okay, ch. 9 is rewritten. 'Rewritten' in this case includes copious use of cut and paste, but the final wordcount is 400 words more than the original chapter, and I did rather more than that in actual new words. I'm giving this chapter Edit Credit, which is 50% of the final number of words (since many of them *weren't* rewritten), for 1500 words this morning. Tomorrow I will have to look at ch. 10 and see what kind of shape it's in.

The other goal for today: finish the first damned chapter of TQB. -.-

Ok, well, Trip logged in this evening and mumbled about writing and I said I'd write some more if he did and he went off to write so I wrote some more and erm, managed another 900 words, which puts me at 3K for the day, and which puts this damned chapter at five. thousand. words. And I'm NOT DONE YET. Although the end is in sight. Although, again, I was thinking 900 words ago that it was in sight within 12-1500 words, and now I'm thinking another 1000, so... damn, this is gonna be a long chapter. o.o

ytd wordcount: 229,900

(See how strong I am in not writing just another 100 words to make it a nice even 230K this year? o.o)

At about 5:15 this morning I woke up (my alarm's set for 5:30) and thought, "nnngh. Maybe I don't wanna get up, even if I'm awake. Nngh. 'course, I gotta pee. Maybe I can ignore it. (three minutes pass) Nope. Can't ignore it. Might as well get up." So up I got. The decent thing about getting up that early is that I don't feel in the slightest bit bad for sitting there in the shower until I decide I feel functional enough to get out and face the day. So I sat in the shower for quite a while and eventually staggered out and got to writing at about 6:20. I was aiming for 1000 words on TB.

At 7:30, I had 1800. SO HAPPY! Sarah said some magic words last week when I wailed about how broken it was, and now with the rewrites I'm getting onto much more solid footing thanks to her insights. And! And, best of all, I think I can salvage most of chapter 9! It'll need some rewriting, but I think I can use probably 80% of it! Yay!

Good writing day today. I didn't get up early enough to make 1K on TB, but I made 1200 on TQB, so it was a good writing day. I'm going to hit 5K on this QB chapter before I even /fix/ it. I'm at like 3800 words already. Sheesh!

Also, I broke 225K written this year, today! Yay!

ytd wordcount: 226,900

Got up at about 6 this morning, somewhat later than I might've, but still early enough to get 800 words of re-writing on chapter 8 done. Just in case "re-writing" gives an implication of "fixing words that are already there", let me assure you that these are all-new words. Chapter 8 had to be thrown out entirely. Complete. Whoosh. A visit to the circular file. And ... well. Some parts of chapter 9 might be salvageable, after 8 is re-written, and after that... I haven't even looked at the chapters, so I'm not in a position yet to think about it. Much rewriting going on, though. It'll be a much better story for it, though.

I seem to have a tendency--and thanks to Trip, I'm aware of it--to put enabelers into the Walker Paper books. Things that make Jo's life easier. Things that shouldn't be there for just that reason. That's the sort of flaw that's making me throw out the entirety of ch. 8 and rewrite significant chunks of other chapters. I've also set some stuff up badly and those things need to be re-setup, but the rewriting I'm doing in ch. 8 oughta help with that. Perhaps I won't make this same mistake in the 3rd book, when I get to it....

Isn't that nice and cryptic? :)

FINALLY. I've gotten some writing done. I did, well, ok, 200 words, on TB this morning, before needing to do research, so I'll probably throw most of them out, but hey, at least I did them, and I got another 1200 words written on TQB. They are very, very *bad* words and are going to need serious editing (like, I'm thinkin' that there's at least one page of telling that needs to be turned into about 3 pages of showing, and ... I think that's true in at least two or three places, gah), but I can't fix it if I don't at least have the bones down, so I'm gonna work with this 'telling' thing for this chapter, at least, and go back and do rewrites.

However, that's the "work on it catch-as-catch-can" project. TB is the big guns, and I'm feeling pretty confident of being able to make some real headway into ch. 8 tomorrow.

Ha cha cha!

*V.* sleepy now. Off to bed with me!

ytd wordcount: 224,900

Good news: I got up at about 5:15 to write. Bad news: I got my new ch. 8 started and realized I just plain didn't have enough idea of where Jo was working out of to write what I now need to write. So I turned off the laptop and came upstairs and started poking around the SPD website.

Now I know that Jo works in the North Precinct, which is also where she lives (I knew where she lived before, I just didn't know it was in the North Precinct), and what area it covers and where its main building is. I know for a certainty now that she can patrol University Way.

I also know that the North Precinct building is 14,000 square feet and horribly overcrowded, that detectives work out of a separate building rented from the city of Seattle, that they're trying to figure out a way to expand and that the possibility of splitting the North Precinct into the Northwest and Northeast Precincts has come up (the North Precinct is huge, 32 square miles), and that if I don't go get some breakfast now I shall perish of the starvation. :)

Luna author Deborah Hale has a list of the upcoming (through August 2004) Luna titles here! I think the covers thus far are gorgeous.

*LAUGH* I have the very best friends in the WHOLE WORLD.

Saturday I checked the mail and there was a package! It was from Las Vegas! I brought it inside and tore it open! There was another package inside it! I tore that open too! There was a card! I opened it! It said:

To one C.E. Murphy
To be used for autographing
with much love

I thought: it must be a pen!

There was a box! I opened that!

Inside was a *stunningly* beautiful glass fountain pen.

Then I thought, "Oh, crap! What if this is the present Emily said she was sending me that I wasn't supposed to open?"

Then I thought, "But it's from Las VEGAS. Maybe it's from Angie! She was just there!"

Then I gazed at the pen in stunned admiration some more.

Then I thought, "EMILY'S GOING TO KILL ME!"

Then I thought, "Unless it's from Angie. Ack! I can't ask Angie until Monday! I will feel SO GUILTY if this is the present from Emily! Ack! Ack!"

Then I admired the pen some more.

This behavior went on all weekend.

This morning I looked horribly guilty at Emily, and said, "Um. Was that gift you were sending me coming from Las Vegas?" Which caused her to look perplexed and to say, "Amazon, not Las Vegas."

WHEW! It must be from Angie! I haven't been a bad human!

So when Angie showed up I eyed her suspiciously and said, "Is this thing from you?" And she said, "Thing? Don't think so, no."

And then Sarah went O.O

And it was from SARAH. But the shipping peoples didn't write her NAME on it! So I've been wondering all WEEKEND about it, and she's been chewing through her lip wondering if it GOT here, and I didnt want to say anything to anybody about it until I found out whether it was from EMILY and I'd opened it too early, but it's NOT! It's from SARAH! And it's *so* *beautiful*!

I have the *best* friends!