- A profile of Brent Hartinger and his new fantasy Dreamquest.
- Was talking about intuitive writing vs. more planned stuff with Haddayr and behold! there are links of interest popping up everywhere: see Janni Simner’s post, Kris Reisz’s follow-up, and the WashPost on Michael Ondaatje’s process.
- Betsy reviews Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (great title), which sounds intriguing.
- Slate polls some writers and most compose in good old Courier, or some variation thereon. I recently attempted composing in a different font as an experiment and turned out some terrible pages. Coincidence? I’m taking no chances: back to Courier.
- Callie on Natalie Angier’s latest, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.
- J.L. Bell on distinctive dialogue.
- The Ratbastards, aka Velocity Press, are launching a new novella series.
- Read Roger has an excellent post and discussion on overused review phrases, jumping off a Daily Telegraph piece.
- I forgot to mention in the big huge Wiscon post that even though the dogs apparently did great at Dogtown, the delicate flower that is Emma picked up an eye irritation in both eyes (the vet says probably from cleaners and such there, possibly dust outside, etc). Pet ownership is the pricey, huh? $180 later, she’ll be just fine (in her defense, the bulk of the bill was actually for their summer flea treatments). Hopefully, Puck and Emma will make the photos page of Dogtown, at least. The sigh.
- But I’m not going to complain too much, because Terrible Mother has an amazing post about the reality of a single working mother trying to make ends meet. Seriously, one of the best posts I’ve read in a long, long time.
- Ysabeau has a thoughtful reaction to Octavian Nothing. I’m curious to know how kids are reacting to it too.
- Go party with my LBC cohorts at the BEA party tonight at Kettle of Fish in Greenwich Village.
5 thoughts on “Thursday Hangovers”
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Chock full of information. Did you get to meet the friends of Dorothy brigade at Wiscon (Schimel & Berman)?
I did indeed. We managed to have a quick Thai dinner with Lawrence one night, and I got to hear Steve giving Rick a hard time.
Can’t stand Courier, myself. Used the classic typewriter fonts from Vintage Type for a while, but they didn’t work all that well on a modern Mac and besides I could never settle on which one to use. These days I use Prestige Elite Bold, which has a nice retro-typewritery feel and more weight than Courier.
What did you try? A lot of writers, including many of my friends, use Times New Roman set 12 on 24, which I gather produces about the same number of words per page as Courier, but much as I love them I think they’re on crack and/or blind, and I hate trying to read those when they turn up in a slushpile.
Of course I usually compose longhand, too, which means I don’t spend as much time looking at the MS on the screen, just on paper. For a while I tried using a more “finished book” layout (wide margins, 12-point proportional font like Caslon or Garamond on 16-point leading), which was nice for composition and casual reading but no fun to mark up because there wasn’t enough white space. And of course the word count per page goes out the window.
I actually tried Palatino, I think, because a good friend composes in that and it does make her manuscripts easy reading.
The experiment was to see if using the same font I used for writing scripts was making me leave out certain beats in a scene — this is going to get too complicated to go into here, but Tim called me out on not spelling out sometimes things in a scene that you have to in books, but that in movies it’s assumed would be handled by the actors so you don’t. Reaction time, the beats that give the reader a sense of emotional believability.
(In many ways, learning to write books for me has been a process of negotiating which parts of what I learned writing scripts are useful and which aren’t, and it’s often pretty surprising.)
It turns out though that I’m way more inclined to wander and digress and let the characters chit chat when I use a different font. Not a trade-off I’m willing to make. So back to Courier it was and instead I’m just concentrating on making sure the “beats” are there.
What did you try? A lot of writers, including many of my friends, use Times New Roman set 12 on 24, which I gather produces about the same number of words per page as Courier, but much as I love them I think they’re on crack and/or blind, and I hate trying to read those when they turn up in a slushpile.