Sam Downing

Dear everyone who’s not into Twitter: please stop bashing Twitter.

Or at least stop bashing it via lazy criticisms which everyone’s sick of hearing, such as:

“I don’t know what Twitter is ‘for’.” You sound like an ignoramus when you say this. It’s like boasting that you don’t know what the internet is “for”.

“I don’t need to know what strangers are eating for breakfast.” If you’re following people who only tweet about what they ate for breakfast, you’re following the wrong people.

“140 characters isn’t enough to say anything substantial.” Sure it is. Try using the site.

“Hey, did you know that ‘Twitter’ sounds like ‘twit’ and ‘twat’? Let’s make puns based on this observation!” Oh ho ho. Important: The “twit”/”twat” jokes stopped being funny when vaudeville did. Joke about Twitter, but come up with  new material please. The existing stuff is as insightful as comparing Sarah Jessica Parker to a horse¹.

And when you write patronising articles like this, which treat Twitter’s users (in particular, Twitter’s female users) as superficial airheads who use the site  to gush about the trivial high-school details of their life, you sound foolish and deserved to be mocked by the internet.

Okay, sure, Twitter is a great place to gush about the trivial details of your life. But that’s not its only purpose. Much has been made about Twitter’s big-picture usefulness. But it’s a handy thing for everyday people to have in their everyday lives, too. For example: when I was slogging through the final chapters of My Book, it was nice to check into #amwriting and see that, hey, there are a lot of people working at this too, even if I don’t know any of them.

I think that’s kind of rad.

But after all these years I’m still reading articles in the MSM about “novelties” like online dating and adults who play video games – somehow I doubt the Twitter-bashing will end anytime soon.

1. Not that I think SJP is especially equine, but “She looks like a horse, hur hur” is a gag made about her that needs to be put out to pasture, pun intended. [↩]

I never really feel as if I’ve achieved much in any given year. 2009 is not an exception: these last 12 months have been enjoyable, but they also feel rather uneventful. Though that isn’t quite true. Here’s a list of stuff I’ve achieved in 2009:

I did a triathlon. My first one! I plan to do a second in 2010.

I completed the City 2 Surf. An epic (so-called) fun run from Sydney’s CBD (the “city”) to Bondi Beach (the “surf”). It is 14 kilometres, or 8.6 miles. My knees weren’t the same for days afterwards.

I moved house. From the west side of Sydney (the inner west, my inner snob wants to clarify) to the east. I consider this an achievement because we moved all our furniture ourselves. Tip: do not do this.

I travelled overseas for work. In 2008 I went on my very first business trip, but it was “merely” interstate. But in 2009 I jetted all the way to Los Angeles. For work!

And…

I finished My Book. I consider this the big one, given that I started writing (what has become the “final” version of) the thing in about 2005. While I’m still revising it, it’s complete from A to Z, in a polished enough form that I have been able to present it to other readers. This makes me Happy.

Of course, it’s the end of the 00s (notice how I used numbers there, so as to cleverly avoid using a daggy name like the Noughties, which I’ve never liked, or the Aughts, which never really caught on¹), though since a list of my personal achievements in the last 10 years would pretty much encompass all the important growing up experiences, it seems pointess to post it here.

And some things I hope to achieve in 2010:

Find an agent. A good one, I hope! (“Land a book deal” is also something I hope to achieve in 2010, though I’m focusing on short-term goals for the moment.)

Get a tattoo. Just a l’il one. I’ve been insisting for years that I’m going to get a tattoo, so I should probably get around to doing it. After all, who doesn’t want permanent ink painfully inserted into their skin?

Look like this. Likelihood of achieving this goal: not very likely. (At least I’m realistic.)

1. We’re calling the next decade the Teenies, right? [↩]

Elaine (aka the greatest female sitcom character OF ALL TIME) flirts with third-person aficionado The Jimmy

You know what strikes me as weird? That referring to yourself in the third person is generally considered douchey, yet Facebook statuses force you to write this way. (At least, traditionally formatted Facebook statuses do.) Facebook: making d-bags of us all since 2004.

My Book is written almost exclusively in the third person – sometimes omniscient, sometimes dipping into my MC’s POV (wow, bit of AO there¹) – with a bit of second-person stuff thrown in when I feel like giving you a more intimate perspective on what’s going on. (See what I did there?) Most of my fiction is written like this – I enjoy first-person, but if the Flying Spaghetti Monster descended from heaven and demanded that I choose only one narrative mode to use for the rest of my life, I’d pick third.

Most of what I read is third person too. A trend emerges!

Not sure why I prefer third, though it’s probably because it offers a bit more freedom – it allows me to duck out of a character’s perspective and insert broader information about the world I’m writing in.

1. That’s Acronym Overload, natch [↩]

This is the first image that came up when I googled "Chapter 12". Um.

Dear Chapter 12 of My Book,

Remember when you were just a scrappy little first draft? All cute l’il mismatched sentences just waiting to be polished up into nice shiny paragraphs. And remember when you had that exciting new subplot injected into you? Gosh, was that an exciting time!

Not so long ago I thought you were cool, Chapter 12. That there was no way you could possibly be more awesome. How wrong I was! Closer inspection reveals that you need some work. Boy oh boy, do you need some work. Did you realise that your sentences are awkward? Your dialogue weirdly leaden? Your pace strangely disjointed?

Not to mention all those adverbs you’ve scoffed.

Because I’m your pal, Chapter 12, I want to help you. What say we spent the next couple of days whipping you into shape? You’ll be as slim and trim as your writerly brethren in no time!

Yours sincerely,
Sam Downing

If My Book was¹ a shower, and if working on My Book was soaping up, I would be pretty filthy right about now.

Not pee-yew stinky, but a little on the ripe side.

The trouble with working full-time as a writer is that, when I come home at the end of the day, it’s hard to get excited about spending another several hours tapping away at a keyboard. Especially when I have tonnes of unread Google Reader subscriptions and unwatched television shows waiting to be consumed. And especially now that it’s summer – even on the weekends it’s hard to muster up writerly enthusiasm when bright sunshiney days are singing their Siren songs.

I suppose every fiction writer with a full-time job grapples with this dilemma. And I suppose that working on My Book for just 15 minutes a day is better than not working on it at all.

On an unrelated note, I walked by two magpies the other day, and they both glared at me very sternly with their beady black eyes. And, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but, like, magpies are really big, and super creepy, and stuff. (Two for mirth? I ain’t laughing.) So I ran the rest of the way home².

1. Yes, I am aware that technically this should be “were”, thank you grammar Nazis. But I am not a fan of the subjunctive when used in this fashion. It’s so – awkward. [↩]
2. This really happened. [↩]

Here’s a cheeseball-fabulous video I make a point of watching on the first day of summer each year, because I’m a huge lame-o. (But not as big a lame-o as you guys in the snowy, wintry, gloomy Northern hemisphere!):

December 1 marks the end of Nanorevismo for 2009. (Ditto Nanowrimo. Kudos to those who had a go – you have my respect, and my sympathy.) But just because the month has finished doesn’t mean my revisions have!

Last night, on the final evening in November, I pulled My Book’s word count back under 100,000 to a not-much-smaller-yet-somehow-more-manageable 99,919. Now I know how dieters feel when they manage to squeeze back into a pair of old jeans.

Let the wild rumpus countdown to 95k words start!

(Yeah, I saw Where the Wild Things Are last night.)

Today I was chatting about our various writing projects to my friend Rachel, and she suggested that I don’t seem to be very fond of the actual book thing that I’ve written.

Fair enough. I admit to being a tad negative about it at times. (I may have even declared that “I. HATE. IT” at one point. Erm. I guess I felt dramatic that day.)

Part of that negativity comes from the fact that I’m revising it at the moment (well, not so much this week, but only because I’m working on a short story I’ve been plugging away at since, like, the 17th century), so I’m hypersensitive to everything that needs to be fixed; I need to be critical to improve it.

And yes, sometimes I have “dramatic moods” where I’m convinced it’s the worst 95,000(ish) words of drivel ever committed to paper a hard drive, and I’m tempted to drag it into the trash and permanently delete it. (However, I read today that a grumpy writer is a better writer, so maybe dramatic moods are a good thing?)

But you know what? Ultimately, I’m proud of what I’ve written. I’m proud that it’s complete, in the sense that I can give it to someone to read from A to Z and there aren’t any gaps in the storyline. And at the risk of sounding masturbatory, I enjoy reading it. There are bits that make me chuckle, and I like the characters. It’s not that I’m not fond of the thing – my book is like a sibling who I’m either comfortably close to or furiously frustrated with, but I always like that it’s there.

Even if it never ever gets published (which, let’s be realistic, is an uncomfortable possibility), at least I can say I’ve written something that I like. I assume (I hope) this sort of love/hate attitude is common among writerly types?

No, not the song from Hairspray.

This week my mum finished reading My Book. Which is rad (though it does make me feel strangely exposed, like she’s seen me in my underpants). She said she enjoyed it, but added it’s “no A.K. Rowling”.

Thanks?

I supplied Mum with a PDF which she printed out to read. Which is terrible for the environment, but I’ve now inherited this physical copy of My Book, the first time I’ve seen it printed and bound. I can hold it in my hands!

Unfortunately having the words there on an actual page makes every awkward sentence, every bloated stretch of text, stand out like it’s been highlighted in fluroescent blood. The thing still needs an arseload of polishing before it’s ready to send out. I already knew this (I didn’t spent the last several weeks revising it just for fun) (even though it has been kinda fun), but having a physical copy of Book holds it to a galactically higher standard than if I were just reading it on my Macbook’s screen.

One the bright side there are a lot of bits in there I’m really happy with – proud of, even! The less-than-spectacular bits will one day, fingers crossed, be equally rad. Head down; revise, polish, edit. I’ll get there. (more…)