Betas ain't shit but hos and tricks.

[x_los]

Have beta'd 3 (soon to be 4! fics today). Feel v. smirkily self-congratulatory. Bring it.

And by it I mean the Kareinina final tomorrow. shitfuck. At least the Professor likes my thinkingstuffs, my grade on the last final was as unfathomably sweet as it was undeserved. I thought I'd flunked it. I was tired when I took it and wandered off into a diatribe about behaviorism, and then stumbled into a ravine of hardcore Freudian analysis of Underground Man for no. good. reason. I don't even like Freudian analysis. Still, her tolerance for my bullshit bodes well. I think she grades me highly b/c the essays are so batshit and she must be somewhat entertained by my Sudden Urgent NEED to compare Tolstoy to Shakespearian romantic comedies in terms of cultural models in societies with high divorce rates mid-exam (I LOVE Shakespeare with every ounce of my sad nrd heart, but he, or actually? the genre he sometimes worked in, really could stop rom-com representing marriage as absolute completion and thus as death, thx). Everything I turn in for her is so 'My crack, let me show u et! Let me show you my crack!'

PLAY FEST TONIGHT! Everyone I know ever is acting or directing or producing or running around screaming just to feel included. Thank god I'm not committed to doing a damn thing for it , I'd be srs ded of busy. Though acting such epic lines as 'Um. Chickezie has AIDS." in years past will live forever in treasured memory. Nature's first suck is gold. Its hardest hue to hold, apparently, as Eli writes like, really good plays now, according to friends who have class with him? Wtf? How do you move from That Play With The Basketball Player to rocking work about clockwork marionette builders and existentialism in the space of three years? Hats off to Eli, I guess.

Comments

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

When I write tight third person like I do (or I think I do, anyway), it just feels right to add the spellings in. Oh, and speaking of pet peeves - English professors who maintain that if you're writing in a tight third person, you really might as well just be writing in first person. Fuck you, it's different to me - even if I just need the third-person pronouns to separate me from the characters.

Well, I guess it assumes that if you're going to be writing in British English, you'll have the spellchecker/dictionary set to British English. (The same goes for the different dialects of Spanish?) Though you'd think it would be simple enough to account for dialectic differences like that.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

if you're writing in a tight third person, you really might as well just be writing in first person.

PFFFT. Honestly? who /says/ that? Eugh! There's an obvious difference of narrative effect (voice of narration, narrator reliability, ability to have a slightly-detached view of the narrator without committing to omniscient third head jumping or first-person putting blinders on, etc.), and the narrative's saturation level in that character shifts when that observed person assumes the burden of narration. Wow. Also are they plugging writing in first over writing in close third? Um. why?

Yeah, I just wan a pan-English dictionary that lets me use British and American words and spelling with impunity. Word is always all up on my case for British wordchoice too, and I don't feel like dictionary-hopping just b/c in like, original fic or something I wanted a British word or two despite writing story with generally American spelling/words.

So yeah: I guess I want the American option, the British option and the Pan-English option, which sounds anal, but surely just /layering/ the dictionaries on top of each other or something can't be impossible?

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

You know, my writing's gotten better in leaps and bounds over the past four years, but I'm not sure how much of that can actually be attributed to the Knox creative writing department. And I believe they were plugging writing in omniscient third over close third, but I'm not sure - I obviously tried to block it out, and it was a few years ago. I know that I almost exclusively write in close third because I'm a characterization girl, and it gives me a comfortable place in the narrator's head - I don't think that first person allows me the level of observation I prefer, and I don't think my stories would be the same if I just changed the pronouns to "I".

Yet another reason why I don't write original fiction, I guess. *sigh* Nobody ever tells me to change my point of view when I write nonfiction. (And I think my fic wound up being so damn long just to secretly prove to my portfolio professor that I can do well in longer pieces, not that she'll ever see it.)

You'd think it wouldn't be too difficult - even just combining them should be perfectly feasible, though I'm admittedly not a computer programmer. I don't see why they wouldn't program Word to load more than one dictionary at the same time, anyway. What if you're writing in two languages? I mean, okay, so the vast majority of people using it don't, but how hard could it be to tack the added functionality on?

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Wtf? Can't those people make up their minds?! When I was in school, it was all "Ooo, third person omniscient is wrong-bad, and if you do it your ears will rot off and you will FAIL. LIMITED ONLY!" Which I also thought was jackass.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

I mean not that you're jackass for using it, but the idea that it's the only way anyone is allowed to write is.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

No, I have the same experience wherein I keep getting told third omniscient is diiiirty diiiiiirty head-jumping and that I should never ever do it again.

I even get fic readers who are like, 'lulz I hate third omniscient 4eva, why are you writing in it?' And okay, so if there's a big chunk that's confusing, I can work on /that/ or fix it? But is it just me or is it entirely invalid to negate an entire perspective choice? I really don't think I can/don't want to write in anything but om-3rd: it just does more work for me, I want in everybody at all times, both as a reader and a writer.

No dis to Megan's limited third, it really IS great for characterization, I'm just not in love with it for a /long/ narrative? Esp. if the genre is romance or something of that nature, wherein you need all parties emotions both to fill up the story or to give depth to both sides of the story. Otherwise you've written Jane Eyre. And I love that book, but there's been like, a century. Things happen with opaque characterization in that which you'd get called on today. Move the fuck on, lit establishment.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

It does seem pretty dumb to reject an entire perspective. After all, if it were all that useless, it wouldn't exist in the first place, now would it? Just because the going fad is away from this or that doesn't mean that it's wrong.

I've seen those POV complaints myself, and they're hilarious! I've gotten "OMG 1st person is inherently unreadable!" and "3rd person is boring and lame and it's impossible to do anything new or good with it," and "2nd person = HATE," (granted I find it the hardest to work with, but I've seen good work done in it). At a certain point, you wonder if it's actually possible to write in any POV at all, or if they're all useless crap. ;)