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Man, having an actual sleep schedule is weird... my body revolted on me and flipped back to sleeping at night last night. Oh well. That'll make the rest of this week a tad inconvenient for me, but there are worse things in life than being well-rested, right?
I have one thing to say about the murder of Dr. Tiller, and it isn't about the right or wrong of abortion or whether it's ironic that somebody who's pro-life killed someone or whatever. It's addressed to the pro-life politicians and money-raising preachers: if you keep telling people that doctors are murdering millions of babies, that it's a new Holocaust, that this is the single most important issue facing America today... you don't get to act all surprised and distressed when people take you at your word. Blogger slacktivist (himself an evangelical Christian) has a longer and more in-depth dissection of the issue from an inside view, here.
My microwave is broken. I think I need to get it out of the kitchen before the urge to troubleshoot it becomes too great. :P
When I restarted Jamie's Tale in MoarMU, I made the decision to skip ahead rather than showing the immediate aftermath of the match, and I now realize as a result I skipped something that should, continuity-wise, be an issue. It's a pretty easy fix but it's a good reminder of the difference between MU's usual minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow (no comments from the penis gallery, please) style and a more time-compressed style. I can do both, as 3 Seas and Star Harbor are both more prone to skippage and compression in places, but it's shifting gears when it comes to MU. I almost tried to fix it by retconning the meal they're having to breakfast (and considered doing just that), but that would ruin the "salad" exchange, and would also represent a shift back to the minute-by-minute focus. Better to move forward, even if it means that the next chapter includes a little more of the "remember that stuff that totally happened even though the audience wasn't here?" exposition I tried to dispense with in the previous one.
...
The specific issue is that Jamie and Iason had papers due for Professor Swain on Monday morning... whose classes Jamie would have been in before the lunch depicted in the latest chapter... and at no point on the weekend did they actually do them. I was going to have a whole thing explaining that I don't require helpful suggestions on how to deal with this as I have a solution in mind and writing's not a collaborative process for me, but I realized that... as so often happens with me... in anticipating a response and trying to prevent it, I was working myself up as much or more than the actual response would have. That's always detrimental to my ability to write, and... as my urge to pick apart my microwave and figure out what's going on proves... it's a very human response to try to come up with a solution when presented with a problem.
So, I'll consider this a writerly/creative exercise for anyone who's reading: how would you resolve it? When you write a traditional novel of the "don't publish anything until everything is finished", problems like these can be caught and smoothed over before the public reads them. Serial writing is a slightly different beast (hence the old Marvel "No Prize", where readers could win exactly what it says on the tin for figuring out how a seeming continuity contradiction actually worked out), but in either case the same sort of situation can come up. Sometimes you need A to happen as much as you need B to happen, but they seem to be mutually exclusionary until you come up with a suitable C to bridge them or resolve the conflict.
On a semi-related subject, after the latest comment about the person who fixed the wall after Belinda and Mackenzie's fight, I went back and added his name as a tag. :P Take it as you will.
Anyway, I've got to finish the chapter of Tribe I was in the middle of when I conked out (that should give you an idea just how tired I was... I couldn't finish a 333 word story) and then actually write that MoarMU chapter. Man, considering that I started Monday's stories at like one o'clock in the morning Tuesday, I made it pretty close to finishing Tuesday's stories on Tuesday. Oh, well. C'est la vie. I can shake my fist angrily at my bed or I can be grateful for the fact that I'm sleeping and having actual dreams instead of terrifying half-conscious hallucinations while I'm stuck paralyzed in my bed (you get that kind of terror often enough and you can recognize what's happening while it's happening, but that only makes it slightly less terrifying), or I can push on.
Oh, one more thing I've meant to but forgotten to mention in about the last twenty consecutive blog postings: the MU fan community set up by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
popelizbet does still exist at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fans_of_mu. It's been fairly inactive but it's there, and it can be a place to hold discussions of ongoing things that don't really tie into one particular chapter.
I wonder if my memory's improving now that I'm not perpetually sleep deprived.
I have one thing to say about the murder of Dr. Tiller, and it isn't about the right or wrong of abortion or whether it's ironic that somebody who's pro-life killed someone or whatever. It's addressed to the pro-life politicians and money-raising preachers: if you keep telling people that doctors are murdering millions of babies, that it's a new Holocaust, that this is the single most important issue facing America today... you don't get to act all surprised and distressed when people take you at your word. Blogger slacktivist (himself an evangelical Christian) has a longer and more in-depth dissection of the issue from an inside view, here.
My microwave is broken. I think I need to get it out of the kitchen before the urge to troubleshoot it becomes too great. :P
When I restarted Jamie's Tale in MoarMU, I made the decision to skip ahead rather than showing the immediate aftermath of the match, and I now realize as a result I skipped something that should, continuity-wise, be an issue. It's a pretty easy fix but it's a good reminder of the difference between MU's usual minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow (no comments from the penis gallery, please) style and a more time-compressed style. I can do both, as 3 Seas and Star Harbor are both more prone to skippage and compression in places, but it's shifting gears when it comes to MU. I almost tried to fix it by retconning the meal they're having to breakfast (and considered doing just that), but that would ruin the "salad" exchange, and would also represent a shift back to the minute-by-minute focus. Better to move forward, even if it means that the next chapter includes a little more of the "remember that stuff that totally happened even though the audience wasn't here?" exposition I tried to dispense with in the previous one.
...
The specific issue is that Jamie and Iason had papers due for Professor Swain on Monday morning... whose classes Jamie would have been in before the lunch depicted in the latest chapter... and at no point on the weekend did they actually do them. I was going to have a whole thing explaining that I don't require helpful suggestions on how to deal with this as I have a solution in mind and writing's not a collaborative process for me, but I realized that... as so often happens with me... in anticipating a response and trying to prevent it, I was working myself up as much or more than the actual response would have. That's always detrimental to my ability to write, and... as my urge to pick apart my microwave and figure out what's going on proves... it's a very human response to try to come up with a solution when presented with a problem.
So, I'll consider this a writerly/creative exercise for anyone who's reading: how would you resolve it? When you write a traditional novel of the "don't publish anything until everything is finished", problems like these can be caught and smoothed over before the public reads them. Serial writing is a slightly different beast (hence the old Marvel "No Prize", where readers could win exactly what it says on the tin for figuring out how a seeming continuity contradiction actually worked out), but in either case the same sort of situation can come up. Sometimes you need A to happen as much as you need B to happen, but they seem to be mutually exclusionary until you come up with a suitable C to bridge them or resolve the conflict.
On a semi-related subject, after the latest comment about the person who fixed the wall after Belinda and Mackenzie's fight, I went back and added his name as a tag. :P Take it as you will.
Anyway, I've got to finish the chapter of Tribe I was in the middle of when I conked out (that should give you an idea just how tired I was... I couldn't finish a 333 word story) and then actually write that MoarMU chapter. Man, considering that I started Monday's stories at like one o'clock in the morning Tuesday, I made it pretty close to finishing Tuesday's stories on Tuesday. Oh, well. C'est la vie. I can shake my fist angrily at my bed or I can be grateful for the fact that I'm sleeping and having actual dreams instead of terrifying half-conscious hallucinations while I'm stuck paralyzed in my bed (you get that kind of terror often enough and you can recognize what's happening while it's happening, but that only makes it slightly less terrifying), or I can push on.
Oh, one more thing I've meant to but forgotten to mention in about the last twenty consecutive blog postings: the MU fan community set up by
popelizbet does still exist at fans_of_mu. It's been fairly inactive but it's there, and it can be a place to hold discussions of ongoing things that don't really tie into one particular chapter. I wonder if my memory's improving now that I'm not perpetually sleep deprived.