Work Room - Week 16

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

The new topic is up: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/764463.html

Which just leads us to "What are you going to do with it????"

I was just reading a description of "How to pitch" to professional markets that I thought was quite interesting. (Completely paraphrasing) She said to find an angle that fits with a current need of the publication, and work the story you want to tell into that angle.

That's pretty much what happens with Idol topics! I put out a request for a specific concept, and then you figure out how to make it work with something you want to write about! :)

Comments

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

I want to do fiction. I am displeased with the shorter time frame. I am drawing a blank on what to do with this topic. Too many possibilities!

[favoritebean.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo, you're first again.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

Sleeping on it usually helps me.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

The topic made me think of "A Great and Terrible Beauty" by Libba Bray.

Not sure where I'm going yet but it will likely be fiction.

[eska818.livejournal.com]

I read that book ages ago, and I believe it was possibly a trilogy? But I never read past the first book for some reason.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

It's ages since I've read it too - I read at least two of the books, but yes as far as I can recall it is a trilogy.

[anyonesghost.livejournal.com]

Thoughts, in order:
1. Yeats. ("The Second Coming.")
2. M. Shelley.
3. R. Browning.
4. The above thoughts are really obvious.
5. Coleridge. ("Christabel.")
6. Gaiman. (Brief lives.)
7. I need to try harder.
8. The Wright Brothers.
Hmmm.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

Dang! That's a short deadline this time!

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Hope nobody byes-out due to lack of attention.

[waltzmatildah.livejournal.com]

Which could easily have been me if I didn't pop in here and read these replies! Oops. Going back to check now...

[reckless-blues.livejournal.com]

For those of you interested in pitching books, look up the Query Shark blog. I'm not interested in the publishing industry myself, but the blog is fun to read. Though it's frustrating when somebody has a really cool query and you can't read the book yet because it hasn't even been printed.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

IIRC, there's an LJ feed? http://queryshark.livejournal.com/ But it's not posted in ages, so I don't know if it's working.

P.S. If someone were to compliment your writing, what pronoun would you prefer that they use in reference to you?

[reckless-blues.livejournal.com]

Couldn't care less. I reject all categories that restrict the freedom of people, including male and female. I feel more like a wild animal than a human being, so gender isn't interesting to me. But in real life I just live as a man, I'm a masculine person, it's convenient. (Though sometimes it's more convenient to be a woman, isn't it? Women's strength is valuable. And, for instance, sometimes you love a man like a woman, which is different from how you feel when you love a man as another man ... all these things are too complicated for me.)

Anyway, I spend all my time squishing around internal organs, studying deformities, and learning surgical correction of broken bones, but if somebody even thinks the phrase "testicular torsion" I have to go sit down for a minute, so that should tell you a thing or two about where my sympathies lie.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry -- it should have occurred to me that it was a restriction. Thank you for answering, it's very nice of you. :)

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

I think it always confuses me a bit when someone consistently uses an icon that is gender specific - one therefore associates - for example - a feminine icon with that specific user and thus refers to them as "she" (or vice versa).

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Is it gender-specific? I've been wondering what it was all season.

(I was asking because someone asked me, and I thought I'd better make sure before I said something. I pointed them here instead -- it seemed prudent!)

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

It's a woman with her head thrown back wearing a red bikini top (or similar) with a strand of red fabric hdraped around her, floating in space. The icon is titled something like "there is no death in the void." But it is a female form, so that's how I interpreted it.

To be fair there are also a lot of females here who primarily use a male-centric icon (that represent characters or fandoms mostly) and that throws me off too.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you. That's much nicer than either of my guesses. :)

I've gotten to where I just assume anything I don't recognize is probably a fandom, but then I still catch myself starting to think of people as being whoever in their icon if it's just a face or really photo-like. *shrug* I think because we're trained to make these connections?

[reckless-blues.livejournal.com]

It's one of the Sisters - can't really tell who, I want to say Ire, but it looks like Sister Death's chamber - from the cover of one of the Russian versions of The Void. It's a video game that I like. Full version (http://www.gamestor.org/uploads/posts/2012-04/1334564410_thumbnail1.png)

It's just a nice piece of art.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

The blog over at blogspot still posts regularly - Query Shark is agent Janet Reid, who also blogs at jetreid.blogspot.com, and both of those are WONDERFUL.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

I know, I'm just super lazy and don't like having to track actual blogs down if I can make a feed do all the work. :)

[joyfulfeather.livejournal.com]

All I know is, I love the topic, and I look forward to seeing what people do with it! We'll see if it knocks something loose for me for home game...

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

First thoughts are apocalyptical, something like the birth of the mother of Antichrist. And also any inventions hat were created to help people, but ended as weapons or worse instead, like dynamite.

[jexia]

YIKES that's a short deadline! Especially today / this weekend - the first anniversary of my grandmother's death, my husband just got a vasectomy, this morning our washing machine flooded the house and basement, every single towel in the house was used containing the disaster but of course I can't wash them until we get our new washing machine which arrives on Monday and used all of our savings and then some....

Yikes.

Topic makes me think of Imraith-Nimphais in the Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy.

[lapis-lazuli615.livejournal.com]

I love that this made you think of Imraith-Nimphais! :)

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Wow, what a day.

[jexia]

It really was.

I was completely wrung out and out of "cope" by the end.

Luckily hubby woke up today finally absolutely fine and has even cooked breakfast and dinner, come to swimming lessons and swept the kitchen! A big part of my overwhelm was expecting to have to be getting all the clean-up done by myself, along with swimming and everything.

[zhent.livejournal.com]

Usually I get some kind of idea when I first read the topic. I don't always go with my first thought, but it usually allows me to work my way around the topic and find my own voice with it. This one isn't ringing any of the creative bells yet. I'm going to have to sleep on it.

As for the deadline, that is the one part of this I'm not worried about. I've been looking forward to speeding this train up again. So fasten your seat belts, I think this train might have just become a roller coaster!

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Gary, was capitalizing "Terrible" intentional?

[waltzmatildah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wondered the same thing. For the first time since... well, for the first time ever in Idol, I've got ideas up the wha-zoo, but they're all based on the notion of this as a general topic, rather than a quote, title, etc.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

I know, I don't much want to reference the poem either. It's lovely as a phrase, though.

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

It wasn't. So I changed it.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Yay. :)

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

Except for the verb tense, it's a line from a poem about a war. Having read the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter,_1916) about it, for a reason known only to the back of my brain, it makes me think of the song "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday.

That said, I have no ideas.

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the Wikipedia article, but I did read an article from the Poetry Foundation which breaks down the poem stanza by stanza. It's right here (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/247616).

What strikes me is the "reluctantly political" stance Yeats supposedly took on the situation. There's also meta in the sense that he talks about certain people involved but conceals their identities within the poem.

My first thought is still something so violent it's beautiful. There's quite a few options within that.

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

My first thought is still something so violent it's beautiful.

Or something that is both beautiful and violent. Like that image of River after battling the Reevers in Serenity.

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

Or those magnificent photos stormchasers manage to take right before it wreaks havoc...and I suddenly got an image of Life magazine...

Other thoughts:

rural ruin
wild animals attacking
imagining what a trip down the river Styx might be like
fire
scars/injuries

Now I just have to budget my time since I return to work tomorrow :p

[anyonesghost.livejournal.com]

I'm a few days behind on this, of course, but

<soapbox>
Yeats was something of a late-comer to the revolutionary mind-set. While I don't think it was exclusively because of Maud Gonne, the proposition that poets can use words to catalyse a modern moment instead of engaging in a past pastoral and elegaic prompted a tonal shift in his work. He was never much of a fighter, but his words became far more pointed over time.
</soapbox>

[yachiru]

All I can think about for the topic is something atomic bomb related. I've had a weird response to prompts this year.

[gratefuladdict.livejournal.com]

Icon love!

[yachiru]

Love the IT Crowd!

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought about that too!

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

Huh. I think that's an interesting direction to go in.

[yachiru]

Thanks! Though somehow I ended up with a boylove fairy tale instead.

[eternal-ot.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what to do with the prompt..*wails*..:/

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

Me, too.

Given what I normally write about.., I'm not sure where to turn.

[eternal-ot.livejournal.com]

Love?..that came to my mind last night..you could write about love that can be terrible yet beautiful..:)..could suit you I guess..since you write personal story with humor.

[aimercat.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking about the "terrible" beauty of the love of the steroid-induced long ball in the post-strike era of Major League Baseball, & how Bud Selig turned a blind eye. those who are not sports-inclined individuals should be able to understand it as well so fear not if you're not sporty spice