Tell a story…
Posts By More Interesting And Enlightened Individuals
Let's see how long I can keep this shit up until I give up...
Ahuva missing her laptop dearly
How would you advertise Second Life? - Until they get retention and onboarding smoothed out, why bother?
Writer's Dash : 1972
Oh boy. Another Fluffee adventure.
Please explain to me how a "man of the people" holds $30,000-a-plate campaign dinners... they're ALL frauds
ART Plays Around @ 5PM SLT
Oh. Hell. Yes. This shit's gonna be funny.
(New Girl Genius, too... Monday/Wednesday/Friday!)
Botgirl reads the tea leaves
Try not to get too excited when you get linked... it's either this or robbing gas stations.
Oh, and if you want something you wrote to get linked here, well, um... IM me? Drop me a GTalk with the link? I dunno.. I mean, I'm rebuilding my blogroll, right, and it's not like I don't read sstuff, but I get kinda lazy... or busy... but feel free to get all I WILL DIE IF YOU DON'T LINK THIS if you wanna, ok?
Shit. Now things are, like, heavy, man.
*hrm*
(I prefer Menubar's tears to these newfangled Mesh tears, eh. There's no competing with a classic. Available at Watermoon Breeze and on Marketplace. Menu-driven, animal-tested... go for it.)
One of the many cool things about storytelling at Seanchai Library is the effort they put into building a scene and a mood in which to tell the stories.
Costuming and set are key:
If you haven't experienced this yet, fire up Voice and head over there Monday through Thursday at 7PM SLT.
(Unless I'm doing my monthly story gig. Then run like hell to the safest place you know.)
Okay, one more writing archive for the blogroll: Danny Dwyer.
Give him a big hello hello! and drop by his place on Corona Cay... maybe you'll catch Bubbles over there.
(Yes, he's one of the 100 word stories regulars. Yes, I'm being a pimp. Yes, I like yogurt. Yes, I'll pimp more writers for a while, unless someone posts some kind of whizbang article I need to divert attention to.)
How's Nardo?
Not great, but doing his usual yo-yo routine.
It's really grinding me up.
Got a shrimp ring on the way home, squished them up, he snapped and sniffed and howled for them and... nothing.
(Myst ate them all.)
I woke up this morning with him sleeping on top of me.
I stared at him. He stared at me.
Just like old times. (But I know he's on a long slow fall, and hope is just the setup for having your heart crushed later.)
My leg locked up this morning.
Had to knead it out to be able to limp to work.
Forgot treats for the park kitties.
Picked up a ham kolache and tore out the ham, giving the bits to the orangeboy, tortie, and stripey.
They enjoyed it.
Life is a series of moments.
Happy Friday, everyone.
I've been thinking about an incident on the poetry circuit for a while now.
The phrase that comes to mind is: Same shit, same shitters, different SLURL.
Only rarely does someone pull out a new piece for people to look over, a reworked piece to ponder and rework yet again, react to, and sometimes make suggestions.
That kind of crowdsourcing and workshopping - man, that's cool to experience.
But then there's the opposite extreme... recently, an individual who's known for reading the same pieces over and over again asked to read something, and they did so.
You want names?
Fine. Sabreman.
Unlike his usual slow and deliberate sing-songy read ("from memory") of Sonnet 118, he rushed through it.
Without meaning.
Without feeling.
Without passion.
I could not help but think "No. Really. What was the fucking point of that, dude?"
It was torture.
It's not possible to mute and derender them like a common nuisance, since he's a host and posts occasional useful announcements here and there, so I just put the headphones down and waited for the applause and claps to pass before unmuting the sound.
Then, reminding myself I'm not holier crap than thou, I turned the criticism on myself and looked at my own standards:
- This is why I don't read when I'm not in the mood for it. This is why SecondLie doesn't appear at Lauren's every week, and there are times at Clocktree Park where I'll let the inventory-sorters and the chatter eat up the clock more than usual.
- This is why I try to prepare for reading a piece instead of doing a cold read, even though I've written my pieces myself and recorded them once or twice already. I want to get the voices... the pace... the words just right. Practice makes less imperfect.
- This is why I don't read things I don't think are any good. I've written a lot of shit and garbage over the years, and they may not be gems I pick out, but they're not turds, either. The turds, I flag them and leave them for the crows.
- This is why I don't read the same pieces over and over and over. I get just as bored of the same old shit, too. Plus, if you read something over and over, it loses its meaning, and you just rattle it off all sing-songy and without any purpose. And I've got seven years of material, so there's plenty to dip into and stir around.
So, if I hear him pull a soul-less rattle-it-off mechanical read again, yeah, I'm going to call him on it.
"That was bullshit. Read it again with feeling, man. If you love that piece so much, and love the person you're reading it for so much, show it the respect it deserves. Now."
When I read "Notes" - I want to feel that same pain I felt when I was walking home from the grocery store and heard Delinda had died. The scream of agony when the demo tape of her playing again after so many years... when that got corrupted and lost, and I couldn't get it back because she's DEAD DEAD DEAD! If I don't choke up and stop during reading that one, I'm not reading it right and I've become as soul-less as the robot I present myself as.
When I read "A Night At The Beach" - I want people to hear the emptiness I felt after Piper died, and how badly I want to bring her back... anyone and everyone I've ever lost. I want to feel the weight of the gun in my hand again and hear that click of a misfire.
When I read "Hammered Shit" - You'd better hear that chirpy happy mechanical manservant come through, the exhausted owner grumbling about his day, his who gives a fuckness about the world, and the utter confusion when the punchline hits: "Where do I get the shit?"
Every piece I've written that failed to suck and might, just might be good for something beyond time-filler as people sort their inventories and pass acres around and bitch about the lag... I will treat them with the respect they deserve and honor whatever source of inspiration that caused me of all people to capture them out of nothing and put them to paper.
If you catch me rattling something off like a goddamned machine or as simple as a player piano, I want you to hammer the shit out of me for it, and hammer me harder if I bitch.
Even ketchup has its standards.
No, Second Life isn't the Met or Carnegie Hall or Kennedy Center... we aren't Poet Laureates and Morgan Freemans and James Earl Joneses and Maya Angelous...
We can do better than that.
About The Author
Thanks for the Thumb-boy update.
@plum - He's been up and down, yarking and snarking. Still not letting us know it's time yet, but that's how he's been for a while. Not exactly suffering, but not doing great, either.
-ls/cm
Good post, Crap. Food for thought. Please pass the ketchup.
-JJ