mystics and madmen

Okay, so I have a theory about the novel-revision thing. This theory goes as follows: part of the reason why I can't seem to get my head around it is because I have only been looking at it on the screen.

However, it seems silly to print out 320 pages of novel if I'm just going to change a bunch of them.

(On the other hand, if it would be a useful exercise, it'd probably be worth it.)

So here's the question.

When you're revising a novel, do you print it all out? When? To what purpose? If I were to print it out, would you advise me to print out 320 full-sized pages, or cramp it in eight-point single-spaced two-pages-on-one-sheet to save paper?

(I realize that at least some of this, and probably all, is deeply personal--maybe one writer has to have it printed out double-spaced in Courier, and someone else can do it six-point font four pages on one sheet so they do--but I thought I'd get an idea of the range out there anyway, and an idea of where to start.)

A two-parted post.

First of all: My show went up this weekend! Is going up. (Verb tenses?) Today was the first day, and tomorrow is the second and last day. I have not fallen over. Yet. --Actually, it's quite fun, and people seem to be enjoying it, so all is well.

Secondly: Okay, so at the beginning of November I was all "Okay, I'm going to skip NaNoWriMo this year and edit the novel I wrote this summer instead!". Unfortunately, I have done exactly zero hours of work on it so far this month. Which, all right, I've been busy, and all my creative energy has been going toward the play.

Part of it, though, is that I just have no idea how to go at revising a novel. I have this novel--thing--draft-- and I know that it's not perfect, I can see at least some of the flaws. But I've never revised a novel before. And while learning to rewrite novels might in the end be very similar to learning to rewrite short stories, my process of learning to rewrite short stories involved rather a lot of trial and error. Which is a legitimate strategy with novels too, I suppose, it just seems like it would take rather a lot of time.

On the other hand, a certain amount of mistakes are probably to be expected, and I should probably just roll up my sleeves and try something, already.

I keep intending to reply to peoples' comments on that philosophical-type post, but somehow never quite get to it. (Maybe after the philosophy midterm on Thursday.)

In the meantime: I've been rereading a lot of books so far in college, but I've also scooped up a few new ones. From the library, mainly, though it's difficult to browse LC for fiction.

The most recent book I read in this fashion is The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

I had never read this before, and in a way I'm glad I didn't. My experience of it would have been much different if I'd been younger, though not necessarily worse. As it was, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and am a little sad to see it go back to the library.

(Such a nice plain red library binding, too. The covers I saw on it when I was a child were definitely at least half to blame for me never picking it up.)

And now I know where all those quotes come from.

So all in all, a very satisfactory reading experience. If I can find a copy of it as nice as the one I got from the library, I will definitely buy it.

Woosh. What a day.

( Because this has to be recorded somewhere )
Life is good.

The reading for my sociology class today was a guy named Goffman, who has this theory about how the "self" is performative. That is, everyone is performing some "front" for some audience all the time, and we use settings and props and mannerisms in our performances to make them more convincing.

And according to him, life is performance. If you stop performing one role, you're just performing a different one. If you strip away all the performance, there quite literally is nothing left.

Which just strikes me as an ultimately sort of sad way to look at life. Maybe it's me being naive or not cynical enough, but--if we can never stop performing? If we always are faking it, on some level? That's sort of depressing.

I feel like there's a true me. Sometimes it's hidden, maybe most of the time some part of it is hidden in one way or the other, but with friends that I really connect to, I feel like I can be every bit of me. I can express every bit of the reactions that pop up in my brain without censoring myself--"she won't appreciate that joke", "they wouldn't think that was interesting", "he'd just look at me like, 'what?'".

At one point or another when I was auditioning for play after play in high school and not getting into any of them, I came up with the theory that maybe the reason no one cast me in shows was that I'm not very good at not being me. I've spent so much time becoming as much me as I can that when I'm acting I can never really forget that me. Being cast in this play in college means that that probably isn't in fact the case (at least, I hope against hope that I wasn't typecast in this part), but the ideas slot into one another.

Maybe I'm deluding myself, that my self exists. Maybe "my really me" is just a different performance I put on. But I don't think so. Sociology is all about distrusting things--distrusting thoughts, distrusting impulses and initial reactions--but if I can't trust me, trust my self, then when I'm thinking about sociology, what am I standing on?

Okay, so that whole "oh no I have no time to write in college" thing?

Apparently, if I go to bed at 10, I can wake up at 6 fully rested. Which gives me a full hour before the dining hall even opens for breakfast, which still gives me an hour and a bit to eat breakfast before an 8:35 class.

Also, dressing gowns are very handy things for sitting around in the common room in one's pajamas because one doesn't feel like getting dressed at six in the morning.

Now if I can just a) remember this trick and b) hopefully get into the creative writing class I want to for next semester, I should be all set.

Via aliseadae, a post of the signal-boosting variety:

It's the usual story. Friend-of-a-friend faeriemaiden is trying to raise money to pay off debt and to move from her town to a bigger city. She wants to use her art to help her, so she's posting song MP3s at come_all_ye. She's got music, she's got donate buttons. Go on, have a listen.

I got cast in a play!

It's a comedy, ten minutes long. There are two characters. My character is pretentious and a terrible person. It rocks.

The really nice thing? In all of high school, I probably auditioned for almost 20 shows. I got two callbacks, both of which I'm pretty sure were sympathy callbacks. (It was a nice feeling, but really I could never quite picture myself in Grease.)

In college so far, I've auditioned for two shows. I've gotten callbacks for both shows. One of them cast me.

(Overall, I haven't gotten picked for a role since seventh/eighth grade, when I was Oliver in Oliver! because they didn't have any boys who could sing. Yeah, I totally rocked that part. I don't think I've ever really auditioned directly for a cast and gotten in.)

Okay, so my college isn't a theater college the way that my highschool was a theater high school. Okay, so probably the show won't be as high-quality as the ones we did at my high school. (Though quality is, as always, debatable.) But mostly, I just want to have fun on stage and be silly and perform. And for the first time in years, someone's saying that they want me in their show. That? Is awesome.

Tonight at my college there is going to be a geek dance.

Once upon a time, one of my LJ interests was "dressing like Chrestomanci". (Still is, on facebook.) Chrestomanci in this case meaning Christopher Chant.

People are encouraged to go to the geek dance in costume.

You can probably see where this is going.

I already owned fancy vest and pants and shirt; I'm borrowing/stealing a piece of cloth for a cravat. (Even though it's from a different book, I fully intend to say "I call it the way I tie my cravat" at least once this evening.)

However, I had no dressing gown, and a good dressing gown really is the piece de resistance for any Chrestomanci outfit. I considered and discarded my bathrobe; it's lovely, but too simple for Christopher.

Thus, today, a trip to the Salvation Army, which turned up two gowns-for-over-pajamas. (Is there a simpler word for that concept? If there is, I am unaware of it.) Both are shiny. One is egregiously mint and the other is fuchsia with flowers in relief.

Unfortunately, there were no dragons to be had, either there or at the fabric store.

Thanks to the good offices of the same friend who drove me to Salvation Army, I now have a mint dressing gown with a fuchsia lining.

I assure you: there will be pictures.

A question:

When you leave your place of residence, what is absolutely essential? When was the last time this changed, and how did it?

( my thoughts )

By which I still mean college. Still not too much writing; intermittent sprinkles of it, which is enough for now in a busy life.

I am going to have to get out my camera one of these days, because my pocketwatch came today and it is awesome. I may not have mentioned it here before. If not, I got it because of my workstudy job, which requires me to sit in a rare book room and stare at books for hours and not get completely lost and forget to, say, go to class. Having a watch seemed like a good idea. I've never been one for wearing things on my wrists--just not my style--and, I mean, come on. Pocket watch! It arrived today. I immediately began showing it to everyone I know. I may have missed some people, but I will get to them. (That is a promise! Not a threat! I swear!)

(As a side note, both a geeky dance and Halloween are approaching. Given my pocket watch and potentially bringing my haircut into consideration, please suggest costumes.)

Very busy lately: week of the first papers. I had a sociology paper due and a physics test today, both of which went smoothly. I have a philosophy paper due tomorrow, which I am still sort of sidling up on--I have most of it, but it's still eluding me a little. Taking sociology and philosophy together is intriguing, and something I fully intend to write more about, one of these days.

One immediate contrast is that while writing a sociology essay mostly felt like writing a history essay (potentially I have been writing sociology essays all along, which would account for a few of the essay grades I got in high school), writing a philosophy essay doesn't really feel like anything else.

It's taken me several days to get this far; all I really need now is a lead-in to the conclusion, a conclusion, and another pass over it to check for logical inconsistencies, etc. Somehow, even though the rest of the essay is written, I can't come up with a way to get to the conclusion. Something's missing there, and I'm not sure how to find it.

On the other hand, I keep having to tell myself that I don't have to prove everything ever about philosophy in this 2-3 page paper. I keep having stylistic flights of fancy and half-quoting Dylan Thomas.

Does this mean that I should take more philosophy classes? Major in philosophy? Who knows. There are some things about it I don't like, or that I don't find enjoyable. There are some things about writing this essay that I don't find enjoyable. On the other hand, it's working my brain in ways my brain hasn't been worked before, which in my opinion can only be good.

Yesterday I lay on a rock in the sun with my friends on the top of a mountain. (Only 900 or so feet tall, but you take what you can get.) Today I spent three hours reading shelves, making sure all the books were in the right order. Some were not, and I had to shift things.

Tomorrow I am going to work again, although probably not reading shelves. Then I have calc III (glee! Except for drawing 3-D graphs, which I still loathe with a fiery something or other), and lunch, and philosophy class with our ridiculous professor. After that I get a little time to myself, and then it's time for callbacks for a bit cast/crew part in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. Later on, after dinner, I might go over and watch SF/F TV with Bellatrix, the campus SF/F/anime group.

This weekend, my responsibilities include taking a calc III exam, going to an honors tutorial in number theory, writing a philosophy essay, slushing for Ideomancer, and perhaps working on something writing-related. (Unless I write the philosophy essay before the weekend, which I might do.)

This? This is, if not the good life, a reasonable approximation of same.

One could call that an outline of the rough draft of that novel I wrote this summer. Ten pages, each chapter divided into scenes and noted for content, time, characters, setting. It's a little amazing how many new things I saw while going through it this way. Things like where the major events fall, both within chapters and within the structure of the novel. ("Chapter endings being major turns" starts happening near the end of the novel.) Things like how many scenes it takes for a specific character to fall in with Our Heroes (less than one, in some cases), how many scenes a particular character is in overall... there's a lot of stuff in here that I wouldn't have seen otherwise, that it'll take me a while to sort out and recalibrate.

So far, this month in college, my writing work has been pretty scattershot--I'll spend a day and a half one weekend revising a short story, not do anything for several days to a week, poke at the novel-in-progress to the tune of a few hundred words some day, do the last ten chapters of my novel outline the next evening.

After the ritualistic write-some-on-the-novel-every-day of this summer, it takes some adjusting to. I still would like to get back into the habit of writing every day, but some concession has to be made for various things. (Like having classes and homework and friends to hang out with, none of which were particularly urgent points this summer.)

In other news, I discovered in my first day of the Awesome Job that I need a watch to keep time with while I'm sitting in the rare book room (or I'll just stay there all day). Therefore, I will soon be the proud owner of a pocket watch.

My life runs in these cycles--I suppose everyone's must. Sometimes LJ is where I go to say whatever's on my mind, where I go to put my thoughts out into the world. Other times, my thoughts and energy go other times, there isn't really anything I feel like putting on the Internet, and once in a while I think guiltily about how few posts I've been making.

So, in typical Alena fashion, I am posting about not knowing quite what to post. There are all these little gems that drop daily into my lap--things my professors say, realizations I have, moments shared with my friends. I treasure them, and yet they don't feel like things to be processed and put into LJ posts as some things in my life do. I haven't been running everything through my mind as through a sieve, straining out the finest grains of experience.

Even the writing-related things I do (finishing a first draft, working on a revision, writing a little bit on the new novel) don't seem to merit posts here at the moment.

Probably the correct answer is, "So don't update your LJ. Just live your life." Which is wise advice, and I know that probably not many people do notice when I don't update for a while. But part of what makes LJ appealing to me is the community here, and I haven't been participating much in that community lately. I've been keeping up with reading my friends page, to a certain extent, but I haven't been commenting, haven't been posting. I don't want to let my position as a member of this community slip just because I've recently entered into this whole new community that is college.

(Also, I really do enjoy having this space to introspect generally, think about what my life means, talk about whatever's on my mind.)

This post, then, is to say (to myself and to anyone who's reading) that I will return eventually and I know I'll be the better for having taken this time just to live. That I'm aware of this step I'm taking away from using LJ as a main vehicle for my thoughts into the world, and I'm okay with that. But that I will, in turn, try to remember to participate in the community when I can. To try to work out that balance between communities. Because both of them are part of who I am.

So, ah, this is where I'll be working for the next year.

Let me highlight a few key points for you:
"...over 200 illustrated editions of the Divina commedia of Dante Aligheiri (1265-1321) representing artists from 1481 to the present. The artists range from anonymous engravers to well-known artists such as Salvador Dali, William Blake and Sandro Botticelli."

"The [juvenile books] collection now consists of over 1,600 volumes, spanning 1797-present."

"The [Renaissance Science] collection features a selection of important herbals and mathematical writings from ca. 1540 to ca. 1680."

As well as the college founder's papers, clippings related to alumns going back almost to the beginning of the college...

They have those shelves that move to store more books in a smaller amount of space. (They still have the hand-crank ones.) They have things that aren't really books, and things that aren't books at all, and books still cataloged under the Cutter classification system.

I think I'm going to like this job--no, scratch that. I am going to love this job.

Now I have 5000 words on the new novel. Still fun to write. It feels a lot like a lot of things I've read, but I am definitely putting some new plot twists into it, at the very least, and the style is easy to write at least.

I keep not having homework in the evenings. It's disconcerting, because a bunch of my friends do have homework and so it's difficult to figure out who's around to hang out with. However, it gives me time to write, which I am all for.

Also, my classes continue to be good. My calculus professor explained vector properties much more clearly than my math teacher last year did; my sociology professor talked to us for a while about what we would do if he threw a chair at us; in philosophy class we debated about virtue; in physics it's still review, but still interesting.

I finally got my calculus textbook off reserve from the library to do my homework, only to receive the copy I'd ordered online the same day. At least I have it now? It's a very pretty textbook, slim with a nice-feeling binding and some tasteful violins on the cover. Physics textbook still not here, but I can deal with that.

Hanging out with one's college friends is an entirely different matter once classes start than during orientation is entirely different from during pre-orientation, I've discovered. I keep having to wander across campus to see if people are in, and have a backup plan (usually a book to read) if they aren't. Also, uncertainties about if they are trying to do homework. I'm sure I'll get used to this way of life, but it's something new to get used to.

I procured a hat just before leaving for college, and have assimilated it thoroughly into my wardrobe. I have learned that hats are handy for keeping the sun out of one's eyes. Sometimes I forget I'm wearing it.

...yes, this is my random updates post for tonight.

Okay, so that other novel I was talking about in August? Has tripped me up and demanded to be written.

I now have 3300 words (not all of which were written tonight) and much excitement for continuing on.

Of course, I haven't finished the outline of the draft of the last novel yet. Um. So I should do that at some point. But it feels good just to write.

Things! Lots and lots of things.

Classes started! I have sociology and philosophy and calculus III and physics. All of my classes seem good, so far--admittedly, I've only had each of them once--but still. On a related note, no one told me that I would want the textbooks on the first day of class. I have weekend homework in all my classes. As half of my textbooks are winging their way toward me across the country, well... I'll be spending some time in the library tomorrow.

Today I auditioned for a couple of a cappella groups. (Singing Build Me Up Buttercup, hence the post title.) I would be well pleased to get into either of them. Felt like the auditions went well, but you never really do know.

Other things that happened today were my sociology and philosophy readings. Have discovered that Plato demands stops to go and stare at a game of internet solitaire and not think about philosophy for a while. Early 20th century sociologists are also difficult to read. However, the ideas are intriguing, and I'm looking forward to the class.

My friends rock. This makes me very happy.

Also, I am writing again, poking my way through a new story. So far I have a girl, a hilltop, some mist... we'll see where I go with this. For now I am just pleased to have time to put down a few new words on a document.

Having "moved in" on Thursday, I finally picked up my boxes today and brought them back to my room. Now I have all of my books out of the box, shelved, and alphabetized. (I enjoy alphabetizing my books. It's a soothing activity.) All of my books fit on two shelves of my bookcase (well, except for nonfiction/my planner/course book), leaving an entire shelf and the top of the bookcase for textbooks. Score!

Also, I have a full twenty minutes left before I have to do anything else--which, in this case, will be "have dinner with friends". Which is an awesome thing to have to go and do. This may be the longest time I've had to myself since Thursday. Except for leaving and going to bed, but that doesn't really count because I pretty much just crashed on my bed.

College is exhausting. Who knew? I'm getting the same amount of sleep I usually do at home, I think I'm sleeping well, and yet so much is going on that I am worn out by the end of the day.

... yeah. That's about it for me. It's good to be here.