With the help of Chris Miller, I discovered that Feedburner and Libsyn are no longer speaking to each other (regarding my feed, anyway). So I’ve send requests to Feedburner to look into it, and Farpoint Media (who deals with libsyn on my behalf) to talk to Libsyn. Now we hope.

And wait.

In other news, I’ll be recording a new ISBW tonight.

Thanks for your patience.

Sorry for you guys who haven’t been able to download the last two shows, I screwed up the feed. It should be fixed now (thanks to Command Line!)

…watch this video.

Thanks to Grant Baciocco from Throwing Toasters and The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd!

This morning I woke up - literally - with an anxiety attack. I realized that I’d been formatting my manuscript incorrectly… seriously. All that crap I tell you guys, and I’d been formatting MY mss incorrectly.

I’d been so careful to make my cover letter have all the important info. But not the cover page of the mss itself. Gah.

Oh well. I’m fixing it, laughing at myself, and hoping that if it’s good enough, I’m Google-able enough to be found if they want me.

Robert J. Sawyer’s Mss Guidelines (what I used to fix my novel)

(THIS is why I’m still a wannabe…)

(Oh yeah, new ISBW today, too)

I haven’t done just a plain old blog post here in a while, but I am feeling in the mood.

I am desperately trying to take Miss Snark’s advice. I sent out the last of the agent queries - I don’t know who else to query. Now I’m impatient. Some agents have had these queries for months. Instead of fretting, (say it with me) I should be writing.

~
Tee Morris of the Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy recently interviewed Rob Sawyer at Ravencon, and they touched on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

~
Speaking of IPSTD, I promised I’d link to my Lulu TV Vidcast about it. So here it is.

The interview with Steven Gould was corrupted, so I have to re-record. I’ll have it soon. Promise.

My ISP’s server did bad things yesterday, and it’s still not up. This means Geek Fu as well as the ISBW forums are kaput.

I’m assured that things will be fixed “ASAP” - this was told to me eight hours ago.

I am not happy. But I am sorry for you guys.

Greg London was a classmate of mine in Viable Paradise X, and a very smart man. This essay is under a Creative Commons Attribution license:

Author: Greg London
Title: “The Zen of Nanowrimo”

Writing is a weird skill.

It is, at least at the moment, a skill that is far
more Zen like in nature than, oh, say, engineering.
The reason there are so many damn writing books
is because it isn’t a skill that can be boiled down
like a complete set of instructions on how to fold
a paper airplane.

On top of all the weird, almost alien skills you must
develop as a writer, such as “Point Of View”, plot,
characterization, and world, you must also, at several
stages of your education in writing, overcome an even
more powerful issue:

Yourself.

Fear of rejection, fear of judgement, fear of failure,
fear of starting but never finishing, fear of finishing
and never publishing, fear of publishing but never
publishing again, fear, fear, fear, fear of criticism
from previous fans of your work.

No instruction on writing can really get very far if
it does not address in some way the writer’s fear.

The thing is that fear is handled differently by different
people. This is probably one of the reasons that there
are a whole section in the bookstore about how to write,
because on some level each one addresses fear in a different
way.

Another thing is that the same person might handle fear
differently at different times, so they may end up buying
and reading a book that did nothing for there fear, but
then may end up reading that same book again years later
and smack their forehead with a big “Aha!”.

I haven’t done nanowrimo myself, but what I’ve read from
it and heard about it, it is first and foremost a tool
for dealing with lots of fear. The end result of coming out
the other end of nanowrimo is, if nothing else, the notion
that you CAN actually write a novel. It will be a rough draft
novel, but the approach of DEMANDING that you write 50k words
in 30 days is a tool for dealing with the fears that stop
writers.

Coming out on the other side of nanowrimo, you may be
extremely surprised of what you really are capable of
as far as writing rates and cranking something out.

Now, the tools and approaches needed to address
point of view, plot, character, world, and other issues,
those remain. But I view nanowrimo as providing people
with the fear equivalent of skydiving for writers.

If you can overcome that fear, you’ve gone a long way
to put a lot of that fear permanently behind you.

But writing, to me at least, is like Zen.
You do the zen koans, you meditate, you do exercises,
and then one day, you’re washing your bowl, exactly
like you’ve done a million times before, and suddenly,
BLAM!
You finally grok satori. You finally “grok” writing.

And there are many koans for the writing monks.
Nanowrimo is one of them.
That everyone doesn’t get enlightenment after doing
nanowrimo is missing the ineffability of zen koans
and writing.

(end rant)

I’ve been gratified to see how many people have emailed me to say, “We don’t pay you and we love the show, so update whenever the heck you want.”

Of course, I’m paraphrasing. But I’m still very pleased.

I came across another link that I think is quite important to people who listen to this podcast: Jeff Vandermeer (or rather, his doppleganger, Evil Monkey) posted the introduction to the book The Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing. Essentially it says most writing advice is crap… and this is the intro to a writing book. I’m interested to see what else he has to say in the book.

But what I got out of it is to take any writing advice with a grain of salt. Writing - like any art - is so damn personal that there really isn’t a right way to do it. You do what works for you; what matters is getting the words on the paper. Sure, if you hear advice, and it works, then that’s excellent. BUT if it doesn’t, you have to realize that perhaps nothing is wrong with you. You just don’t jive with the advice given.

I have a bad habit of reading blogs through RSS, starring something to read later, and never getting back to it. So now I’m going through all the saved blog posts since July and linking the best writing ones:

• Writer Beware Blog: Write in November, Get Scammed in December…
• Slushpile.net: Pile Up Pages While Not Peeing
• Neil Gaiman via Boing Boing: HOWTO Create a Literary Will
• Beetlegrass via Lifehacker: Seventeen Things Every Freelancer Should Know
• Pub Rants: Reading the Fine Print
• Writer Beware: Some Writing Problems To Avoid
• Writer Beware: A Little-Known Resource for Agent-Hunters
• John Scalzi: Some Perspective on being a “New” Writer

There. That should keep you busy till January. Happy New Year!