tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19111384.post2762176494981358798..comments2024-03-24T17:06:47.135-04:00Comments on Story Bones: How can it be Spring when I feel so sprung already?Steve Buchheithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12999709767641212586noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19111384.post-53330373629828041462012-03-22T23:05:59.003-04:002012-03-22T23:05:59.003-04:00Eric, I loved Night Shift. My brother thought I wa...Eric, I loved <i>Night Shift.</i> My brother thought I was weird because I would laugh at the funny parts. I haven't read <i>Dangerous Visions,</i> but yeah I hear it's very ambitious. <br /><br />Tonight I'm dealing with the rejections coming in. And today was exceptionally stressful at work and at class. <br /><br />And, I'm feeling that line. I'm getting stuck in the "once the centipede thought about how it walks, it couldn't" conundrum.Steve Buchheithttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12999709767641212586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19111384.post-29428204815976206522012-03-22T13:00:34.632-04:002012-03-22T13:00:34.632-04:00I think I'm sort of sharing your pain.
I'...I think I'm sort of sharing your pain.<br /><br />I'm particularly upset at myself right now, writing wise, because of a number I've done on myself: I recently re-read Stephen King's <i>Night Shift</i> and was enthused to rediscover, <i>Hey! Stories can just be short, brutal, balls-out fun and don't have to make a lot of sense if the <b>story</b> clicks!</i> And that was good, but then I started reading Harlan Ellison's <i>Dangerous Visions</i> for the first time (though I've run into some of the stories before over the years, e.g. PKD's "Faith Of Our Fathers" and Sturgeon's "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"), and am devastated by my lack of <i>"ambition"</i>--the stories in <i>DV</i> being full of <i>"ambition"</i>, even pretty lousy ones like Lester del Rey's "Evensong". So now I'm torn between wondering if I should aim higher (even though I kinda don't want to and am not sure if I can) or if I want to aim squarely low but try to max out everybody's (mine, the putative readers') good times. Which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, we all know, but then there are plenty of stories in <i>DV</i>, for instance, that are quite good but not really "enjoyable"; e.g. Robert Silverberg's "Flies" is seriously fucking brilliant but I don't know if it's a story I'd ever recommend to anyone who isn't a writer.<br /><br />Do we come back, yet again, to Mann's line, "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people"?Erichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18275812152895151542noreply@blogger.com