http://www.money.co.uk/article/1000
A 13 year old boy from Texas is convicted of fraud after using his Father's credit cards to hire escorts.
A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad's credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.
Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing "Halo" on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.
The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.
--------------
Too funny.
A 13 year old boy from Texas is convicted of fraud after using his Father's credit cards to hire escorts.
A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad's credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.
Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing "Halo" on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.
The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.
--------------
Too funny.
- emotion:
amused
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
What Does Your Taste in Music Say About You? - What kind of music do you like... and what does it say about your personality?
What Element is Your Body? - Is your body watery and relaxed? Or fiery and passionate? Take this quiz to find out.
As long-time readers already know, I’m a practicing Hindu. (No, I don’t wear saris or bindis, but mostly because Westerners who do so always come off like pretentious assholes or wannabes, IMO. If I thought I could get away with it, I would rock saris every day of my life.) My faith is my own, and my relationship with God is between me and Her.
Except.
When I’m told that by merely choosing to be a Hindu rather than a Christian, I am “hostile” to both Jesus Christ and His followers. I truly don’t understand how or why people who presumably believe a God capable of infinite love and forgiveness and Who is infinite in His own Being is not capable of giving us all different paths to Him.
There’s an old Hindu saying, “God’s House has many doors.” The God in Whom I believe is truly infinite and presents many faces to many people. She simply wants for us to find our way to Him by whatever path we can. (I’m mixing pronouns on purpose, kids, I promise.) She realizes that while we are trapped in maya, we cannot always clearly see Him, and so He’s given us many different, valid paths to find Her.
Is that really any harder to believe than a virgin giving birth? Or a Man resurrecting after being dead three days? (I say this with utmost respect to Christian beliefs, as I happen to believe that Christ was, in fact, God Incarnate and the many stories about Him are absolutely true. I just don’t happen to believe that Christ was the only incarnation of God.)
I’m not hostile to Jesus Christ. I’m not hostile to Christianity itself or most Christians. But for those of you who ignore your Savior’s admonition to judge not, you bet your ass I’m a little hostile to you, but it has nothing to do with your faith and everything to do with you being a smug, self-righteous jackass.
Sorry no update for a while. I was told recently my dad's been diagnosed as having cancer. The doctors are going to try to carve it out of him, and things are being arranged for the surgery/recovery.
My mom and sister are pretty much a wreck, and my father seems to have turned to me for help in keeping the family together.
Through surprisingly little effort on my own part I've managed to extend my adolescence to a truly heroic point. I'm like the Achilles of Peter-Pans in that sense. My sense of adult responsibility extends as far as paying my bills on time and saving as close to 10% of my income as possible (so I can retire early - in a sense the only things I do that are "responsible" are things that are directed toward being even more irresponsible later in life). I'm not really sure I'm ready to keep things together for the family if my dad doesn't recover. I do know I'm un-prepared.
Anyways, updates from here on out will be irregular at best.
My mom and sister are pretty much a wreck, and my father seems to have turned to me for help in keeping the family together.
Through surprisingly little effort on my own part I've managed to extend my adolescence to a truly heroic point. I'm like the Achilles of Peter-Pans in that sense. My sense of adult responsibility extends as far as paying my bills on time and saving as close to 10% of my income as possible (so I can retire early - in a sense the only things I do that are "responsible" are things that are directed toward being even more irresponsible later in life). I'm not really sure I'm ready to keep things together for the family if my dad doesn't recover. I do know I'm un-prepared.
Anyways, updates from here on out will be irregular at best.
- emotion:
discontent - sounds:Nat King Cole ~ To the end of years
Since the voting for week 1 at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
thebrenljidol has closed, I feel safe in posting this entry here now. It's not my best writing, nor is it my worst. I believe it earned me enough votes to stay in the running, although I'm not sure how long that will last. For those of you in the contest who might be wondering, my entry was number 17 and earned 14 votes. The entry with the highest number of votes had 30 and the entry with the lowest had only 2. I think we're dropping five writers from this round, but I'm not entirely certain about that.
( I will always have my dreams... )
thebrenljidol has closed, I feel safe in posting this entry here now. It's not my best writing, nor is it my worst. I believe it earned me enough votes to stay in the running, although I'm not sure how long that will last. For those of you in the contest who might be wondering, my entry was number 17 and earned 14 votes. The entry with the highest number of votes had 30 and the entry with the lowest had only 2. I think we're dropping five writers from this round, but I'm not entirely certain about that.( I will always have my dreams... )
- emotion:
sick and coughing my fool head off
I’m pretty sure you’re gay. I’m also pretty sure you’ll never come out because of your family’s fundamentalist Christianity. I’d feel sorry for you, but you’re an adult. Put on your big boy boxers already.
I got back from Australia and realised that the Waterstones story cards were meant to have been completed and returned by last Friday. They were sent out on April 14th, but, due to human error, mine didn't reach me until I was in Melbourne last week, and I didn't even look at the date, just read it hastily, went "Well, that can wait until I'm not touring Australia any longer and I'll have lots of time to think about it...".
But, I discovered, I didn't have lots of time. I have about 24 hours, as it has to be in London at the end of the week. I looked at the card, guessed that I could fit about 250 words on it, and wrote a 250 word story (using the Pelikan flexnib that Henry Selick gave me from http://www.richardspens.com/. I'd been waiting for something to write with it, and this seemed perfect). I have two more cards, in case of disaster, and I might do a second draft tomorrow before FedEx comes. Or I may not. But I find myself, for the first time, a bit envious of Margaret Atwood and her Long Pen...
In response to your bee picture, my eleven year-old daughter said "It looks like an angry penguin." (Me)"Are you sure it doesn't look like an angry bee?" (Her)"Nope, an angry penguin."
Take care!
Gina
I love my job.
Hi!
I have a question about writing. I read your advice, and the thing is, I don't do it like that at all.
For one thing, I don't write a first draft completely, then edit it several times. I work with scenes. I write a scene, I correct it, a re-correct it, I edit it and so on. I usually have a story planned out in my head entirely, so I end up writing the scenes in any order, really, although it's mostly chronological.
I'm guessing your advice would probably be "whatever works for you", but the thing is, I don't know if it works for me. I've never finished a novel yet. Actually, my first novel (which is uncomplete) is resting right now because I met my husband, who's Canadian and couldn't speak French, and I stopped writing in French. I just though, what's the point of writing if the person I love the most can't even read it? I want him to read it /before/ everyone else, not years later.
So I started writing in English, and man is it hard. You think you're fluent in a language, and next thing you know you're struggling to find synonyms or words that have the right connotation, and your characters all speak the same way, because that's they only way /you/ speak. So I'm extremely slow.
I'm just worried that my approach might just be plain wrong, and lead me to never finish anything. I don't know who to ask for advice so I'm turning to you.
I guess my question really is, should I make sure to finish a first draft as soon as possible, even if what I write is crap and has to be rewritten later, or can I polish each piece, put them all together, then polish the result? Is it very important to have a whole to work with, and can that whole be in your head rather than written? (I always spend several months just thinking about a story for hours every day before writing it. By which I mean, that's the way I did it for the only two "real" novels I've started)
Sorry I wrote that much. Feel free to take an aspirin.
The biggest problem I can see with the way you're doing it is that it doesn't seem to give you anything finished. (If it was working for you I'd have no suggestions. There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right, after all.) The second biggest problem is that if you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing together.
If you're being forced by the nature of what you're doing (episodic comics or serial television, or even writing a novel at 200 words a day online or in a newspaper) to just write and hope it all works out, that's one thing. But if you're writing a novel determined to make each scene perfect before you go on to the next, and you're writing the scenes out of order, then you're making something that's either going to work or not work when you put it all together. (That's still "write the first draft any which way".)
But it won't excuse you from doing a second draft, because you'll get to the end, and put all the scenes together, and then you'll still have to do a second draft, if only because when you read it you notice that you've got two Wednesdays coming together, and someone's name or eye-colour changes between scenes. Or your heroine seems like a bitch, although that wasn't your intention, because you don't have a scene there that shows her humanity. Or a great scene you wrote and rewrote and honed and rewrote and polished till it shone just doesn't fit anywhere because the thing that's happening at the same time loses all vitality if you cut away from it.
I guess that's one reason I like things like NaNoWriMo -- it makes people write and finish things, helter-skelter and however. And once something's finished, you can always fix it. (The first draft of Good Omens took about 9 weeks. The second draft took MONTHS. And it wasn't until we came to rework it a little after that for the US edition that we realised that we had indeed, without noticing, created a week with two Wednesdays in it.)
Incidentally, I'm in awe of anyone who would even attempt to try to write fiction in a language not her own.
As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But -- and I wish it were otherwise -- books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.
So think all you like, but don't mistake the thinking for the writing.
...
Remember the National Doodle Day doodles? (I talked about them at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/q-w
The National Doodle Day auction has begun. Proceeds will benefit Neurofibromatosis, Inc. (nfinc.org). Gillian Anderson's (Scully of The X-Files) brother suffers from NF. Click here (http://www.gilliananderson.ws/charities/n
We have 175 doodles on the auction block including many from The X-Files "gang": David Duchovny, Chris Carter, Annabeth Gish, Mark Snow (composer of the well-known X-Files theme music), Mitch Pileggi, and various XF Alumni.
You can easily check out all the available doodles by looking at our Doodle Guide at:
www.gilliananderson.ws.
And it's a family affair for Gillian. We have doodles by her sister, Zoë, her 13 year old daughter, Piper, and Piper's Dad, Clyde Klotz who also used to work for The X-Files.
To immediately access the eBay auction --
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnfincch
Direct Links to Neil Gaiman's doodles plus his fave doodles on the auction block:
Ebay link to doodle #1
Ebay link to number 2
Kendra Stout: Ebay link here
Cat Mihos: Ebay link here
Fred Hembeck: Ebay link here
Sergio Aragones: Ebay link here
Gahan Wilson: ebay link here
There are some other pretty nifty ones as well I'd not seen the last time I posted about it (Simon Pegg! Robin Williams!). I was vaguely happy to notice that my first doodle, of something vaguely ifritish, seemed to be attracting more voters than the sort-of-Sandman I did next (thinking, they probably expect a Sandman).
...
This is cool, and I can't wait to read it: http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bios.c
...
And finally, from the Sandman 20th anniversary poster, P. Craig Russell's Lucifer and Mazikeen...
But, I discovered, I didn't have lots of time. I have about 24 hours, as it has to be in London at the end of the week. I looked at the card, guessed that I could fit about 250 words on it, and wrote a 250 word story (using the Pelikan flexnib that Henry Selick gave me from http://www.richardspens.com/. I'd been waiting for something to write with it, and this seemed perfect). I have two more cards, in case of disaster, and I might do a second draft tomorrow before FedEx comes. Or I may not. But I find myself, for the first time, a bit envious of Margaret Atwood and her Long Pen...
In response to your bee picture, my eleven year-old daughter said "It looks like an angry penguin." (Me)"Are you sure it doesn't look like an angry bee?" (Her)"Nope, an angry penguin."
Take care!
Gina
I love my job.
Hi!
I have a question about writing. I read your advice, and the thing is, I don't do it like that at all.
For one thing, I don't write a first draft completely, then edit it several times. I work with scenes. I write a scene, I correct it, a re-correct it, I edit it and so on. I usually have a story planned out in my head entirely, so I end up writing the scenes in any order, really, although it's mostly chronological.
I'm guessing your advice would probably be "whatever works for you", but the thing is, I don't know if it works for me. I've never finished a novel yet. Actually, my first novel (which is uncomplete) is resting right now because I met my husband, who's Canadian and couldn't speak French, and I stopped writing in French. I just though, what's the point of writing if the person I love the most can't even read it? I want him to read it /before/ everyone else, not years later.
So I started writing in English, and man is it hard. You think you're fluent in a language, and next thing you know you're struggling to find synonyms or words that have the right connotation, and your characters all speak the same way, because that's they only way /you/ speak. So I'm extremely slow.
I'm just worried that my approach might just be plain wrong, and lead me to never finish anything. I don't know who to ask for advice so I'm turning to you.
I guess my question really is, should I make sure to finish a first draft as soon as possible, even if what I write is crap and has to be rewritten later, or can I polish each piece, put them all together, then polish the result? Is it very important to have a whole to work with, and can that whole be in your head rather than written? (I always spend several months just thinking about a story for hours every day before writing it. By which I mean, that's the way I did it for the only two "real" novels I've started)
Sorry I wrote that much. Feel free to take an aspirin.
The biggest problem I can see with the way you're doing it is that it doesn't seem to give you anything finished. (If it was working for you I'd have no suggestions. There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right, after all.) The second biggest problem is that if you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing together.
If you're being forced by the nature of what you're doing (episodic comics or serial television, or even writing a novel at 200 words a day online or in a newspaper) to just write and hope it all works out, that's one thing. But if you're writing a novel determined to make each scene perfect before you go on to the next, and you're writing the scenes out of order, then you're making something that's either going to work or not work when you put it all together. (That's still "write the first draft any which way".)
But it won't excuse you from doing a second draft, because you'll get to the end, and put all the scenes together, and then you'll still have to do a second draft, if only because when you read it you notice that you've got two Wednesdays coming together, and someone's name or eye-colour changes between scenes. Or your heroine seems like a bitch, although that wasn't your intention, because you don't have a scene there that shows her humanity. Or a great scene you wrote and rewrote and honed and rewrote and polished till it shone just doesn't fit anywhere because the thing that's happening at the same time loses all vitality if you cut away from it.
I guess that's one reason I like things like NaNoWriMo -- it makes people write and finish things, helter-skelter and however. And once something's finished, you can always fix it. (The first draft of Good Omens took about 9 weeks. The second draft took MONTHS. And it wasn't until we came to rework it a little after that for the US edition that we realised that we had indeed, without noticing, created a week with two Wednesdays in it.)
Incidentally, I'm in awe of anyone who would even attempt to try to write fiction in a language not her own.
As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But -- and I wish it were otherwise -- books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.
So think all you like, but don't mistake the thinking for the writing.
...
Remember the National Doodle Day doodles? (I talked about them at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/q-w
The National Doodle Day auction has begun. Proceeds will benefit Neurofibromatosis, Inc. (nfinc.org). Gillian Anderson's (Scully of The X-Files) brother suffers from NF. Click here (http://www.gilliananderson.ws/charities/n
We have 175 doodles on the auction block including many from The X-Files "gang": David Duchovny, Chris Carter, Annabeth Gish, Mark Snow (composer of the well-known X-Files theme music), Mitch Pileggi, and various XF Alumni.
You can easily check out all the available doodles by looking at our Doodle Guide at:
www.gilliananderson.ws.
And it's a family affair for Gillian. We have doodles by her sister, Zoë, her 13 year old daughter, Piper, and Piper's Dad, Clyde Klotz who also used to work for The X-Files.
To immediately access the eBay auction --
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnfincch
Direct Links to Neil Gaiman's doodles plus his fave doodles on the auction block:
Ebay link to doodle #1
Ebay link to number 2
Kendra Stout: Ebay link here
Cat Mihos: Ebay link here
Fred Hembeck: Ebay link here
Sergio Aragones: Ebay link here
Gahan Wilson: ebay link here
There are some other pretty nifty ones as well I'd not seen the last time I posted about it (Simon Pegg! Robin Williams!). I was vaguely happy to notice that my first doodle, of something vaguely ifritish, seemed to be attracting more voters than the sort-of-Sandman I did next (thinking, they probably expect a Sandman).
...
This is cool, and I can't wait to read it: http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bios.c
...
And finally, from the Sandman 20th anniversary poster, P. Craig Russell's Lucifer and Mazikeen...
But who had any idea that Brian May was an astrophysicist as well? He got his doctorate.
Listen to the NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor
Listen to the NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor
Over at Sara Benincasa's YouTube channel, you can see lots of videos made by Sara as she zoomed around in tunnels and behind the scenes in New York for the CBLDF a few weeks ago...
This is Why I Support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (the lighting means you can't see the black eye, I'm afraid). (If all four videos don't show up on your feed, then go to the original post.) (This one doesn't contain any swearing...)
Why Frank Miller supports the CBLDF:
(I think Frank's reply is my favourite. It's simple, personal and direct.)
Why Jeff Smith does:
and why Bill Hader does:
Feel very free to spread them around. (I hope that after San Diego this year we'll have a lot more of them to put up and spread around.)
Finally, here's me announcing the conclusion of the Gordon Lee case, at the New York Comic-con CBLDF event (I like the way the camera finishes on Magnetic Field and Future Bible Hero Claudia Gonson):
This is Why I Support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (the lighting means you can't see the black eye, I'm afraid). (If all four videos don't show up on your feed, then go to the original post.) (This one doesn't contain any swearing...)
Why Frank Miller supports the CBLDF:
(I think Frank's reply is my favourite. It's simple, personal and direct.)
Why Jeff Smith does:
and why Bill Hader does:
Feel very free to spread them around. (I hope that after San Diego this year we'll have a lot more of them to put up and spread around.)
Finally, here's me announcing the conclusion of the Gordon Lee case, at the New York Comic-con CBLDF event (I like the way the camera finishes on Magnetic Field and Future Bible Hero Claudia Gonson):
Except not really. It always catches up with me, and it always seems to catch up with me on Mondays, for the love of Mike.
So, in typical Monday fashion, I have a million things to do today that all have to be done pretty much today. You’d think at some point I’d stop procrastinating. But no, not me. Because really, putting off ’til tomorrow what I can do today is just my style.
In other pointless rambling news, I had a fabulous Mother’s Day. Lenna made the cutest freaking book out of all her school projects this year. Matt didn’t cop attitude at all (yes, I consider that a gift). Tricia decided that I’m “Mama” instead of “Bob”. (I have mixed feelings about this.) Bill made breakfast and took me to Starbuck’s. (He’s maybe a keeper.)
All in all, a lovely day - how was your Mother’s Day?
You thought you were so cool wearing nylons. I thought you were a dorky bitch, and I said so in a note. Which promptly made the rounds of our class. God, I hated seventh grade.
the intruder is bullying me, wearing me down. About an hour ago it came in. I met it in the hallway and this time it came right up to me and let me stroke it and then pleaded with me for food.
I feel so sorry for the poor thing. I've tried to keep it away from me but her ( think by the rear end she was a she) persistence is slowly breaking me down.
A cat who was being looked after and fed regular would not be behaving like this, or not as persistently at any rate. Cats are cheeky and they will wonder in to other peoples homes but this is something different all together. Take last night, I'd opened a pouch of tuna for Oscar but he doesn't seem to like fishy cat food as much as meaty stuff so he wasn't that keen on it. I wasn't going to throw it away knowing that there's a hungry cat out there what would love it. I placed the bowl in the hallway just by the cat flap and sure enough about 10 minutes later the intruder comes in and shnaffles the food but it doesn't just eat the food, it binges it down just like Oscar was doing when he came here.
If the cat does live local then I'm saying that it isn't looked after. For what ever reason, it's not being fed or it isn't going home to be fed. If it had a home, or a home where it wanted to be, it would return home for food. It's a fact that if a cat has food, it'll come home. If this cat had food it would not be eating Oscar's food and it wouldn't be as persistent as it is.
I'm going to test the water with Oscar. I already told him this morning that he's the important one and so if he definitely shows a dislike for the cat being in his home then that will be the final answer and I will feed the cat outdoors and investigate if at all it does have an official home. If it doesn't then I'll get someone to rescue it.
If I'm honest, I'm hoping Oscar takes to it because it is a sweet little thing and would make someone a lovely cat and I'm sure that with someone as placid as Oscar it would make him a good companion too.
**edit**
having written all this out and read it back I now realise I'm happy with just me and Oscar. I don't want another cat.
I feel so sorry for the poor thing. I've tried to keep it away from me but her ( think by the rear end she was a she) persistence is slowly breaking me down.
A cat who was being looked after and fed regular would not be behaving like this, or not as persistently at any rate. Cats are cheeky and they will wonder in to other peoples homes but this is something different all together. Take last night, I'd opened a pouch of tuna for Oscar but he doesn't seem to like fishy cat food as much as meaty stuff so he wasn't that keen on it. I wasn't going to throw it away knowing that there's a hungry cat out there what would love it. I placed the bowl in the hallway just by the cat flap and sure enough about 10 minutes later the intruder comes in and shnaffles the food but it doesn't just eat the food, it binges it down just like Oscar was doing when he came here.
If the cat does live local then I'm saying that it isn't looked after. For what ever reason, it's not being fed or it isn't going home to be fed. If it had a home, or a home where it wanted to be, it would return home for food. It's a fact that if a cat has food, it'll come home. If this cat had food it would not be eating Oscar's food and it wouldn't be as persistent as it is.
I'm going to test the water with Oscar. I already told him this morning that he's the important one and so if he definitely shows a dislike for the cat being in his home then that will be the final answer and I will feed the cat outdoors and investigate if at all it does have an official home. If it doesn't then I'll get someone to rescue it.
If I'm honest, I'm hoping Oscar takes to it because it is a sweet little thing and would make someone a lovely cat and I'm sure that with someone as placid as Oscar it would make him a good companion too.
**edit**
having written all this out and read it back I now realise I'm happy with just me and Oscar. I don't want another cat.
- Location:barbara cartland's toolshed
- emotion:
concerned
Resistance back on the air!
It's been almost a year since my last entry and many in the movement have expressed concern over the state of things. Is the Resistance done for? Has Tatsuya fled to another country with no extradition laws? And what's up with those Scientology ads on the main page? Has Xenu the Wicked Overlord of the Galactic Confederacy finally captured your dear leader? Calm your fretting, my friends. The Revolution is alive and well. This past year of radio silence was a necessary strategic maneuver to lull the enemy into a false sense of security. It was all planned out. I've got them exactly where I want them. They may think I'm a lazy slacker/loser/buttclown with negligent updating habits and no social skills whatsoever, but OH NO! I've been lying in wait for many a moon, plotting my glorious return. I leap into action now and catch them completely unawares! And I unveil the new Project Wonderful ad auction banner thing, which they may interpret as a desperate attempt to finance my five bags a day Skittles addiction, but OH NO! It's a bold and daring foray into experimental online business models. I've got it all planned out. Woop, the red phone is ringing. Probably Hillary again. Gotta go.
Viva la Resistance!
-T.
So, this just came in from Geoffrey Long, Communications Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies :
Hey, Neil --
Just saw the note on your blog about the tickets to the Schwartz event:
Alas, no -- it doesn't look like there will be tickets available at the door after all, due to their selling like hotcakes at the local shops like Million Year Picnic. ...I'm afraid when the tickets are gone, they're gone, and many of the local shops are already sold out.
The microsite for the event is here: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/
Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you soon!
Cheers,
Geoff
Which seemed a bit daunting, given that the hall seats 1226 people, and I'm taking it as a good omen for the first Julie Schwartz Lecture (who was Julie Schwartz? you ask. You can read about him here and you can read what Alan Moore wrote and I read at Julie's memorial here).
I've asked Geoffrey to let me know where any tickets may still be found for any of you, at MIT or in the Boston area, who want to come, and if there are any out there he'll let me know.
The Birdchick and her team won the Birding World Series, which is good news, and "Platypus" Bill Stiteler blogs yesterday's bee stuff along with what he did today (while I slept like a large, moss-covered, jet-lagged log) over at http://www.birdchick.com/2008/05/simple-p
Neil,
Thank you for signing my books after the literary dinner in Melbourne, I get a sense that you were tired, but I appreciate how generous you were with your time. It is always a treat to meet you (that was the second time I have met you the first was a few years ago at comics r us in Melbourne) though I get a bit nervous, don't know why but I do.
The episode of "I should be writing" where they list one of the three pieces of advice is to find Neil Gaiman and he will look into your soul and tell you what you need to hear is Episode dated 9/04/08 the third piece of advice.
Your advice was "keep doing what you are doing" and that was exactly what I needed cos I had not been writing very much up until a couple of weeks ago so that helped me keep faith.
I really wish that I could find more advice on second drafts I mean I got a lot information on how to complete a first draft and now I have to get a second draft finished.
What is the best advice can you give a writer about the second draft of a novel. I mean you spend months on the first draft and you finish it and let it lie for a while, and now you have to work with this thing that is a rough lump of clay, how do you form the book out of this mass of intention and thought.
Thank you for your time.
Karl
The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.
So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before -- clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I'd suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. )
When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn't know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that's a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)
And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things. 1) You fix the things that didn't work as best you can (if you don't like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse). 2) You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes. 3) You worry about the title. 4) At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn't you get on with the next thing now?
Does that help?
Hey, Neil --
Just saw the note on your blog about the tickets to the Schwartz event:
It looks like tickets for the MIT talk on the 23rd are going fast -- http://community.livejournal.com/millionyear/34688.html -- although I believe that MIT are keeping tickets back to sell on the day.
Alas, no -- it doesn't look like there will be tickets available at the door after all, due to their selling like hotcakes at the local shops like Million Year Picnic. ...I'm afraid when the tickets are gone, they're gone, and many of the local shops are already sold out.
The microsite for the event is here: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/
Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you soon!
Cheers,
Geoff
Which seemed a bit daunting, given that the hall seats 1226 people, and I'm taking it as a good omen for the first Julie Schwartz Lecture (who was Julie Schwartz? you ask. You can read about him here and you can read what Alan Moore wrote and I read at Julie's memorial here).
I've asked Geoffrey to let me know where any tickets may still be found for any of you, at MIT or in the Boston area, who want to come, and if there are any out there he'll let me know.
The Birdchick and her team won the Birding World Series, which is good news, and "Platypus" Bill Stiteler blogs yesterday's bee stuff along with what he did today (while I slept like a large, moss-covered, jet-lagged log) over at http://www.birdchick.com/2008/05/simple-p
Neil,
Thank you for signing my books after the literary dinner in Melbourne, I get a sense that you were tired, but I appreciate how generous you were with your time. It is always a treat to meet you (that was the second time I have met you the first was a few years ago at comics r us in Melbourne) though I get a bit nervous, don't know why but I do.
The episode of "I should be writing" where they list one of the three pieces of advice is to find Neil Gaiman and he will look into your soul and tell you what you need to hear is Episode dated 9/04/08 the third piece of advice.
Your advice was "keep doing what you are doing" and that was exactly what I needed cos I had not been writing very much up until a couple of weeks ago so that helped me keep faith.
I really wish that I could find more advice on second drafts I mean I got a lot information on how to complete a first draft and now I have to get a second draft finished.
What is the best advice can you give a writer about the second draft of a novel. I mean you spend months on the first draft and you finish it and let it lie for a while, and now you have to work with this thing that is a rough lump of clay, how do you form the book out of this mass of intention and thought.
Thank you for your time.
Karl
The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.
So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before -- clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I'd suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. )
When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn't know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that's a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)
And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things. 1) You fix the things that didn't work as best you can (if you don't like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse). 2) You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes. 3) You worry about the title. 4) At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn't you get on with the next thing now?
Does that help?
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