So, everyone wants to know why I’m never at AHA anymore. I’m not there because my membership was suspended at my request. Why would I make a request like that at the site I’d poured my energies into for the last year? Well, the admin team and I had a long set of differences about the direction of AHA, leading to my removal from the MLS Board of Directors and from my tech functions at AHA, as well as AI leaving AHA and MLS. It was unpleasant and bitter, but I was willing to put it behind me and be a regular member at AHA.

Then the AHA team took away my ability to send and receive PMs and made it so that I couldn’t post anything on the board unless it was pre-approved by a moderator. They were angry at me because of the previous conflict, yes, but I didn’t feel those actions were appropriate. It was also rather silly, since I just went to another site and sent my PMs there. I gave them a few days to cool down, hoping they’d realize their actions weren’t warranted (not to mention that it was a bad precedent to set), and communicated to them via another team member that I wanted my privileges restored. It didn’t happen, and I got no explanation for why it didn’t happen or whether it ever would happen, or even why my privileges had been suspended in the first place. None of the due process that we’d set up for when there were troubles with a member was used. I still haven’t gotten an explanation for those actions.
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My muse dropped by briefly, took one look at the scenes I posted a few days ago and sniffed. So today I have a rewritten version of the scene with Charlie, plus another new scene which may or may not stay around. I needed a break from the long series of scenes of X talks to Y in Meryton – it gets dull after a while. We’re a lull in the action at the moment. I struggle with stepping back from a plot to see what its problem is – or rather I can usually see what the problem is, but my muse is notoriously uncooperative with my attempts to fix anything based on an intellectual decision. It’s writing from the gut or not at all. But at least I got something this time, and I’m happier with the Charlie scene now. Read the rest of this entry »

Uh, oh. I seem to have been outed. Either somebody posted a link to this blog somewhere, or there was a sudden influx of curious people to the experimental AI blog. In any case, to new readers, welcome! I’d tell you all about what I’m doing with this blog… if I happened to know myself, but I don’t. I’m experimenting with this and that. It’s a general writing blog, and while I’ll probably post snippets here, it won’t be a story-posting blog. At some point I may do that as well. The snippets are a way to deal with my difficulties writing when I’m not posting anything (yes, I know, this makes it hard since I also have trouble writing when I am posting something, but I’ve never claimed to be consistent!). My goal is to make it to the end of my current three projects (Bounds of Decorum, Morning Light, and a nameless short story) so I can take on something new. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a dilemma — having decided to start blogging about my writing, I immediately hit one of those icy patches where I can’t write at all. I told my friend Elaine about this, and she said I should blog about not being able to write. It’s just paradoxical enough that I decided it was worth a try. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I took out a half-written story I hadn’t looked at in a year or so, hoping it would inspire me to start writing again. Scenes from it have stuck in my head, so I was hoping to get caught up in it again. But what I found was that overall it was… boring. Well, maybe not boring, but certainly lacking something to make it come alive to me, something to make me really want to spend time with the characters. So then I asked the question – what’s wrong with it? I like the characters, the scenario is interesting, the setting is good, the theme is fundamentally sound, but it doesn’t gel.

The problem, I realized, is that I like the characters. I don’t love them. I don’t feel like my life is poorer for not knowing them. They’re interesting enough, but what they’re basically doing is living their lives. They fall in love, deeply and passionately in love, but they don’t have passion for life. They have jobs – the heroine likes her work as a freelance computer repair person, and the hero doesn’t like his office job working for his father, but he knows more about what he doesn’t want to do with his life than what he does want. Read the rest of this entry »

To those who have encouraged me to continue Bounds of Decorum, your kind words have brightened my day and reminded me that my writing may indeed benefit someone. My muse is more susceptible to reasoning like that than “Well, I ought to be writing!”

This is just the latest in the delays on Bounds of Decorum. It would have been done months ago if I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to write to someone else’s dictates. My publisher is only interested in publishing my stories if they have sex scenes in them, and Bounds of Decorum doesn’t. Now, I have no problem about writing sex scenes (you may have noticed that), but I just can’t write gratuitous sex scenes to save my life. BoD has plenty of mushy, romantic, and I hope provocative moments, but sex scenes just don’t belong in it by the nature of the story.

So I’ve been stuck on the question of whether to try to make myself write something that doesn’t come naturally (a big source of writer’s block) or to write something that’s destined to be rejected (also not a muse-friendly activity). What I need is to get back to the place where I feel it’s safe to write, and to remind myself that I write for the sake of writing, not to please a particular person or for a particular outcome.

I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long!

A couple of days ago I was reading an article on Wikipedia and I wasn’t sure what an icon meant, so I went looking for it in the Help section. Naturally, I never found the icon because I got distracted looking at all the other interesting things under Help. See, I’m such a geek that I not only read the encyclopedia, but I read the rules of the encyclopedia!

Anyway, one of the things I found was the Etiquette section, which, given the events of the last couple of months, struck me as being filled with incredible wisdom. It made me so happy I decided to post a condensed version here, not as rules for etiquette in this blog, but to think about how different the world would be if we followed them everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I tried to write a traditional Thanksgiving post. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling particularly thankful at the time, more focused on unfortunate things than good ones. It wouldn’t be particularly interesting for someone to read about how, while lots of good things had happened to me this year, there were also these bad things that made it hard for me to celebrate the good, so I gave up part way through. Fortunately for me, that mood didn’t last long, but my attempted post has stayed with me because it’s an interesting example of one of the writing issues that I puzzle over the most, which is where to end a story. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been stuck in writer’s block for longer than I ever have before, and I’ve been trying all sorts of ways to get out of it. Today I made a promise to a reader that I would finish a scene of it and post it here as proof. I don’t particularly recommend reading it unless you happen to be fond of random unimportant scenes completely out of context, but at least I wrote something. Not much – part of this was completed before my Muse decided that a tour of the South Pole was just the thing for her – but some of it is new. Read the rest of this entry »