The Journal of Evan Not Writing

I spent 15 hours doing work things for money, counting transit time. There were lots of times in there that I could have written stuff, and I didn't, because I was exhausted. I promise this will not always be The Journal of Evan Not Writing. Eventually you will get to see me persevere and write stuff anyway, but this week you get to see me not writing and not beating myself up over it.
I did get a little reading done. With my eyeballs. It's been slow going on The Gathering Storm, despite Sanderson's prose reading faster than Jordan's, 'cause it's just harder to care. I don't have any nifty writerly thoughts about it right now.
I'm listening to White Night, but I don't have a lotta insights there either other than that it's courageous to be messing with the "several seemingly unrelated threads somehow come together" formula this far into a series, although he was sorta half-assing that part in Dead Beat and Proven Guilty anyway. And also that I wish we saw more of Molly's training, because I like apprenticeship narratives.

Making Connections

You get two posts today because I didn't get one done last night. This is actually yesterday's post; today's will come later tonight.
I don't network. I don't really understand the concept, honestly. It seems to mostly consist of pretending to find people interesting until you've interacted enough to start a Facebook message conversation with them without it being weird, and if that's different from how you get to know people normally, without networking, then I have questions about how other people interact. Maybe knowing someone well enough to strike up a conversation doesn't translate as smoothly into actually finding them interesting?
Anyway, networking is Very Important in the writing world, but like, it doesn't actually have to be a Thing, provided you're willing to make the dreaded small-talk on the way. Making actual friends is probably better for your career anyway.
My fiancee and I spent like 40 minutes talking to a random guy we met outside the cat cafe. This was very cool because we don't have many friends locally yet. New Guy, whose first name I can't remember in any case, is a filmmaker, so that's sort of cool. (Advice for all artists: be friends with other artists outside your medium. They Understand, but are way less likely to get on your nerves than people in your own medium.)
Then we volunteered to get very involved in a nonprofit for speculative writers, doing stuff that will probably let us make even more friends in the area, this time with other writers. The whole thing happened on the public internet so I could probably go into detail about it but I'm not going to yet.
Then I rather forcefully corrected someone's misconceptions about what editors actually think about the word "said", on Tumblr. And then someone reblogged it saying "yes wreck that bitch", and positive attention from strangers is always nice.
And then I spent a bunch of time reading blog posts and webcomics and watching videos on my RSS feed. My RSS feed is actually very important to my writing, and not just because some of the things I follow on it are writing related. It's also a way of keeping up with what's going on in the world without completely inundating myself in the awfulness, hearing the thoughts of people whose thoughts I like, and taking in some serial narratives at the pace a person is meant to take in serial narratives, rather than vast chunks all at once on Netflix. Oh, and it lets me get some news and facts on non-writing topics I care about, without setting myself projects I lack the time or initiative to actually do. The lack-of-initiative thing is important. It all just kinda shows up in my feed, so I don't have to remember to check 4 different webcomics two of which don't have a regular update schedule. It's also a jumble of different topics and mediums, which makes it easier to focus and sometimes creates interesting juxtapositions.
Nothing I got done this weekend was actually writing. But all of it's important to being a writer. I should be doing more of the actual writing part, but I'm not here to agonize about my writing process, because that helps no one. I don't write every day. Not everyone does. Interacting with people; just regular people who are not Useful and might not be Interesting. Being active in your local and digital writing communities. Reading different kinds of things. Learning stuff outside your field, stuff that isn't research. None of that is as important to being a writer as actually getting words on the page, but it's pretty damn important. It's really hard to be a good writer if you're not actually living in the world.

I spent most of today walking

It's very difficult to read or write while walking, so today hasn't been very productive on those fronts. I listened to some of White Night while backtracking for a pack of cigarettes I dropped, and read a little bit of a story I'm reading for my writing group. It provided a possible explanation for a thing I'd been wondering about for a few chapters, so that was nice, and an important reminder of why you read something all the way through once before providing more than sentence level feedback.
Also I smoke, and I walk most places because I don't have a car and in any case don't know how to drive. I'm just hoping those things balance each other out. I've also had a headache all day.

Shhhh.... don't tell anyone!

Hi, my name is Evan and I have a history of starting blogs and then abandoning them. I'm taking another shot at it here, but I'm just not going to tell anyone until I've managed a month or so of regular updates. That way I don't disappoint anyone if I can't actually do the thing.
I'm a writer, a publisher, and a person who reads a lot, and this blog is just going to be updates and thoughts on those things. I like hearing about other writers' processes, and their thoughts about they things they read, and I think everyone and especially writers like to hear about what goes on in publishers' heads. I'm at different spots in working on two very different novels, so probably I'll talk a lot about what and how I'm doing with those. Also, y'know, full time job, chronic illness, two adorable and amazing cats, something about balancing writing and real life.
I re-read books as audiobooks a lot, so probably I'll have stuff to say about that even if all there is to say on the writing and publishing fronts is "I accomplished nothing today."
Anyway, I finished re-listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban today. Something that's struck me listening to it, and to Chamber of Secrets, is how technically transparent they are. In a good way, like one of those penny-squishing machines that's encased in clear plastic so you can see all the gears. In CoS, people are described as being, seeming, or feeling petrified about 10 times before anyone actually gets petrified by the basilisk. It's not subtle. In PoA, there's a bit where Harry goes into the post office in Hogsmead as far as I can tell just to foreshadow the fact that tiny owls are a thing that exist? Tiny owls are not what you might call a critical plot development, but another one shows up at the very end and PoA takes the trouble to prepare us for it. In 3, 4, and I think 5 and 6 as well, we see adult wizards using spells in the first few chapters that are going to be especially important for Our Heroes in the course of that book. I could do a detailed technical analysis of how well put together the third book is, and at some point I might, but my thing here is just how easy it is to see the moving parts. And that's great because almost my entire age group, writers included, has read them. In a field with a remarkable dearth of common technical vocabulary and in the way of coherent pedagogy, the simplicity and transparency of the Harry Potter books gives us a shared thing we can learn from and point to. There's value in reading things that do this stuff more complexly, certainly, but a developing writer can't actually skip steps by reading and analyzing harder books, and not everything has to be done as subtly or minimally as possible. Gus laughing before Hazel hears the joke in The Fault in Our Stars is a harder kind of thing to know how to do than the "petrified" thing, but it's not necessarily better writing. It's not worse writing either, of course. Bad writing is a real thing, but what constitutes good writing depends on context and audience. This will likely be a Theme. That was even less subtle foreshadowing than what Harry Potter uses. I really want to teach a writing class.
Anyway two other things I did today we're vaguebooking about someone's lack of professionalism (not in the writing world), and emailing someone else to let them know that I had barely started something I said would be done two months ago and I had no idea when it would actually be done. Everyone is doing their best with limited resources. This will likely also be a Theme.