This afternoon, I went to Barnes and Noble to see if a book I ordered three weeks ago, Panel One: Comic Scripts by Top Writers, was in yet. It turns out I’d never received the email notification, and the book had been pulled yesterday to be sent back to the warehouse…except it hadn’t been put away correctly, and the woman trying to locate it for me had to call the woman who manages holds to find the book for me.
When I went to check out, the woman who manages the holds happened to be at the register. She never said anything, but her eyes widened when she saw the book. She rang it up, and then politely asked me if I needed a gift receipt.
I was furious. Absolutely furious.
Fortunately, I’m still sick. I couldn’t manage much more than a snarky smile and confidently told her it wasn’t a gift. Again, she said nothing, but her face held such a look of surprise.
By the time we got to the house, I was fuming. My partner in all crimes of the geeky girl persuasion (otherwise known as artist Dena Neal) happened to be walking out as we were walking in, and I told her the whole story.
Now, you have to understand…Dena is a fellow manga fan, the illustrator for two of my future projects, and she’s working on launching her web comic. And she was just as irritated as I was. (Another girl was walking up as I told Dena what had happened, and she couldn’t believe it, either.)
To make matters worse, all of the contributing authors are listed on the front of the book, and one of them is Trina Robbins.
I honetly didn’t think I still lived in a world where it was completely unheard of for a woman to write comic books (or graphic novels). Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve just lived in the Geek Underworld for too long.
Oh, well. It turns out there’s a Panel Two, so I think I’ll just order it from Amazon.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
It sometimes amazes me that I’ve spent so many Novembers participating in National Novel Writing Month. I never wanted to become a novel writer. I did it on a whim in 2002 because it sounded like an interesting challenge (and a good break from the thesis that was driving me crazy). It never occurred to me that I would make some sort of attempt evrey year after that.
And it never occurred to me that I’d ever want to do more than just give the resulting manuscripts more than a brief clean-up to make them presentable enough to share online. But most of the stories really affected me, and they all wanted to be something shiner.
Now, I’m working on my second favorite manuscript of the bunch, and it’s been painful. Jath (an early revision can be seen here) was my second NaNovel, and the first one I tried to plan out before I ever started. I laid out all of the characters and settings. I carefully outlined the events of the novel.
And I created a massive problem that only started to show up when I started using John Hewitt’s suggestions for revising a novel.
Now, I’m pulling the original notes from EverNote and dumping them into Writer’s Cafe, where I plan on laying out what exists of the story, and then filling in the gaps. I’d already tried using index cards to fix the flow, but I think being able to see things laid out in Writer’s Cafe is really going to help me see where I fell short of my initial goal, and help me close the gaps.
Plus, working on Jath is a great way to work on catching up my word count for Writing Year 2009!
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
You may notice there’s now a word count meter in the sidebar. Hopefully, by the time this year is over, that meter will be a solid shade of blue.
To help keep me focused and moving forward on my various projects, I’ve joined Writing Year 2009. I’ve set my goal at 75,000 words, which feels a bit low given that NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words, but my project list is primarily made up of instructional media at the moment, so it makes sense to not expect many words from those.
I also have not decided yet whether or not to attempt NaNoWriMo this year, and that will affect the word count, too.
So, keep an eye on that meter. Feel free to leave me encouraging comments. And wish me luck!
Bad Behavior has blocked 72 access attempts in the last 7 days.
