{"id":41,"date":"2007-08-07T05:04:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-07T13:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=41"},"modified":"2007-08-07T05:04:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-07T13:04:00","slug":"im-not-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"I’m not dead yet."},"content":{"rendered":"

Just another couple of placeholders while I shovel sand against the tide. <\/span><\/p>\n

Placeholder #1: <\/span>the observation of a certain correlation in the skiffy community:<\/o:p><\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

Group A: <\/span>“Blindsight would definitely be my choice for the Hugo, if I were voting. <\/span>Which I’m not.”<\/p>\n

Group B: <\/span>“Blindsight is good\/crappy\/great for wrapping fish, but it didn’t get my vote.”<\/p>\n

I suppose I should take some pride in the evident fact that my biggest fans tend to not be joiners. <\/span>I like having independent readers. (‘Course, I wouldn’t’ve minded having the Hugo either…)<\/p>\n

Placeholder #2: <\/span>the observation of a certain brick-shittingly scary page on Amazon:<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

Right here<\/a>. <\/span>The new anthology from Solaris<\/i><\/i>. Click on the cover image, and — oh, look. There’s my name.<\/span><\/p>\n

These guys haven’t even seen my story yet. <\/span>I was supposed to send it yesterday, but they gave me until Friday because I told them it was 7K’s worth of steaming crap. <\/span>(Which was marginally better than the 9K’s worth of steaming crap it had been two days earlier, but still.) <\/span>And I’m still so unhappy with the way it reads — you ever write a story where each individual scene works fine, but the overall result looks like disjointed fragments of “Red Dwarf”, “Law and Order”, and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” jammed haphazardly together like fortune cookies in a wood chipper? — that I’m thinking now the only way to salvage this mess is to jettison two thirds of it and reduce the narrative to a single stream-of-consciousness unfolding as the protagonist waits in a checkout line to buy chicken bullion cubes. <\/span>(Yes. <\/span>You read that right. <\/span>That would be a massive<\/i><\/i> improvement.)<\/p>\n

As for the Solaris<\/span> guys, their faith in my abilities is either so great it borders on religious mania, or so small that they’ve faked up an Amazon cover just to light a fire under my ass. What are they gonna do if I hand in something completely unusable?<\/p>\n

In fact, what am I writing this for? <\/span>I gotta get started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just another couple of placeholders while I shovel sand against the tide. Placeholder #1: the observation of a certain correlation in the skiffy community: Group A: “Blindsight would definitely be my choice for the Hugo, if I were voting. Which I’m not.” Group B: “Blindsight is good\/crappy\/great for wrapping fish, but it didn’t get my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whinge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}