How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

see more Lolcats and funny pictures Via LOLcat, of course. NaNoWriMo Word Count: 7,484

1. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year in an attempt to get a first draft of my current project firing on all cylinders. It should be interesting, since I'm a fast writer, but I'm not typically 1667 words a day fast. If I can figure out how to get the word counter widget thing working on Blogger, I'll post it here. 2. Writer Beware has an excellent post here on copyright and what it means to writers. Most important to my mind is Victoria's last point: if it's not in writing, it didn't happen . I don't care how nice your agent or editor is; I don't care what they promised you. I don't care if they've "never" done something or "always" do something. I don't care if they're related to you. If it's not in writing, it didn't happen. 3. Ann Aguirre talks over at Fangs, Fur, and Fey about her attitude toward phone calls (namely, she doesn't make them). While I'm not quite as Victorian as she is,* I ...

Happy Halloween! In honor of this auspicious holiday, I would like to talk about a song that sounds like late autumn to me -- "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. This particular Jay Hears A Song is brought to you by Anonymous,* who reminded me of this song one day, and now it's on my iPod all the time. So thank you, Anonymous (I think :) ). The thing about "The Wreck" is that it is a song that, by all rights, I should not like, but because of my own personal history with it, I do. In case you haven't heard it, it's a folk song about the wreck of a boat called the Edmund Fitzgerald**, which sank in 1975 in Lake Superior. The events surrounding the sinking are semi-mysterious*** and this mystery is what I think led in part to the song's longevity (at least to me). Let's face it--there's not much drama in "there was a big storm and a boat sank." Also, as much as I personally enjoy it, "The Wreck"?...

One of my new favorite shows this season is Glee , the Fox show about the misfit members of a down and out high school glee club and their teacher. It was created by Ryan Murphy, one of the creators of Nip/Tuck , and has a lot of musical numbers in it, and it's a pretty awesome show. But it's not totally awesome, and since it's been on my mind for a while, I wanted to talk about why Glee isn't living up to its potential. Short answer? Characters. The pilot episode set the characters up very well, giving us an idea of who each of the glee club members were in a nutshell, and most of the people I know who were excited about the pilot were excited to learn more about those characters. But the show has taken some odd twists and turns with regard to the characters that don't really make sense, and its making the characters hard to understand. An example: Finn Hudson is the football quarterback who is coerced into joining the glee club* and ends up staying because (a) ...

1. Am I the only one appalled by the DirecTV commercial in which David Spade tells us we should get DirecTV while his dead friend Chris Farley cavorts in the foreground? Don't get me wrong -- the other incarnations of this commercial (Bill Pullman in a scene from Twister , Naomi Watts from King Kong , Sigourney Weaver from Aliens *) were also pandering of the cheapest sort, but dude. C'mon. Chris Farley is dead . Not cool, David Spade. NOT. COOL. 2. I went on a walk this weekend and took my camera with me. I live in a suburb of Cleveland, which was built in the early 1900s, so there's some pretty interesting architecture.** These people have a moat! 3. I watched the pilot episode of White Collar on the USA channel recently--and it was pretty entertaining. Just like FX is the cable channel for hard core, strange, gritty shows, USA seems to be carving out a niche for itself with snappy, charming, buddy comedies. 4. In case you care, the brightly colored knee s...

In my free time, I teach.* I work for the Princeton Review, teaching people how to get better scores on their LSAT and GMAT tests so that they can get into law school or business school, respectively. I do it because I like to teach, because it's rewarding to me to help students learn and achieve their goals.** Recently, Maya Reynolds did a post about newbie writers who email her asking questions about how they get started in the business, and I have to say that I'm really looking forward to that aspect of being published.*** It seems like another form of teaching to me, and I always like that. What I'm not looking forward to, however, is the inevitable situation that arose for Maya recently, where she helped a new writer out by using her valuable time to provide feedback, and then got basically a "thanks for nothing" response.**** I hate that response, because it means that you've gone out of your way for someone, and they are essentially telling you that ...

I just realized that I've been talking a lot about agent Nathan Bransford on this blog and not a lot about my own representation Upstart Crow Literary, and that sort of sounds like I think that Nathan's advice is more interesting or relevant than that of my own personal Agent Ted. Neither of those things is the case. The reason I haven't spoken more about Upstart Crow is two-fold: (1) they are relatively new (both in existence and to me) and (2) I thought I had them on my Google reader feed and that they weren't publishing anything, but I totally didn't because, apparently, even Google is too hard for me to operate. So now that I've corrected that error, I wanted to talk about something that Michael over at Upstart Crow said in his post " Lies My Workshop Told Me ." I've spoken about my writing group before, and about how awesome they are, but I think there are some things you should think about before, during, and after you join a group. A goo...