The big news: The "Rufus" piece passed muster, got me to the second round of the writing contest. While I'm not going to vouch for my abilities in that thing, I will say that the final round naturally happened during the same day of the grand Nor'easter that hit, meaning I was tired, exhausted, needing some grand amounts of sleep meanwhile a storm raged on and I wrote under fear of life and power outage. Something like that could take the wind out of anybody's sails. But the end result, the piece, the story, the genre: Zatoichi, a romance involving blindness. Yeah. Just. My. Wheelhouse.
What I learned: writing under 24 hour deadlines sucks. i need to go back and reread everything here, rewrite from the ground up (essentially, read a graph or section, type it in again, adding what's necessary while in process). Three hours of sleep on a daylight savings weekend means I will probably be sick. Yay for me, for all the banalities that involves.
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Other thoughts: first off, the Slate Culture Gabfest. I know, not what most people associate with this, but I've been an avid listener for awhile. And frankly, this most recent edition has one of the more depressing moments for if not the adaptability of the creatives -- and no, I don't mean the bobo graphic artists or even simple bloggers like, well, what I'm guilty of being right now -- but the real types, the writers, even the critics. Let's face it, without critics (barring of course the bullshit category that have all the breadth of an old man with formaldehyde in his veins), there'd be no reason to improve, no reason to fine-tune and advance some type of culture, even if it's a pop culture. The cue for this is the Variety story of them firing their critics -- basically, paid staff writers. The culprit: Marketers and marketing.
Years ago, a friend of mine complained that Advertisers were the biggest evil on the face of the earth. I guess she never met or understood marketers. It happens. I'm going to hold off on a rant here.
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What else? I'm still feeling like somewhat ass. But I'm going to attempt to run errands tomorrow. Wish me luck, kids. Next stop: probably Bay Ridge.
Oh, and I'm going to stop sucking.
To contribute to said writer's funk, spiel, cautionary tale, angst, or your said schadenfreude,vicarious enjoyment, etc., don't. Don't do anything. Continue reading. Send him a note. feel free to laugh. Or respond. And watch out for the fur flying.
