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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Monday, June 16, 2014

Old and Unimproved

[Note: this entry will soon become the latest menu in The Reliquary, so all the text here in the brackets will disappear in a couple of weeks.]

Well, I'll TRY to Google free-to-use images for
 "Old and Unimproved" but I'm sure there won't be anything useful...
Oh.  Um.  Okay, that works!
As of this writing, I've been blogging at Writing About Writing for almost two and a half years, and some of my earliest articles are showing their age.

They need sprucing up–a few more jokes, more inappropriate sexual humor, more stock images with hilarious captions, reformatting in some cases, and some of them were from a time before I fully realized that internet attention spans mean that a twenty page article should be at least ten separate posts.

Like anyone is going to still be awake after the third paragraph unless there's some werewolf on vampire erotica going on.

As I go through and repost these crusty old relics, most will simply be revised with a new coat of paint–the changes made right on the old article. Some, however, will be changed so drastically that they basically become entirely new articles. Their friends won't recognize them at the store and will say "Oh my God it IS you!" in that way that people who've been to the gym love and people who've had kids hate.

I'd like Writing About Writing to remain, among other things, a real-time demonstration of the writing process. In the same way that I hope people are noticing that I've been at this for years and still make less than a Malaysian sweatshop worker hour per hour (so that they never think it was overnight success should I achieve something more notable), I would also like to be transparent about the power of revision and how much a writer can improve with daily practice. So if ever I alter an article fundamentally, I'll put the original version here, that people might be able to take a look at it.  I'll also put the New and Improved version next to it.

If you don't think writing daily will make you better, take a look at the shit I was putting out just a few hundred days ago. And speaketh: "Lo! Verily thou wast most shittacular! Yea, but behold, thou art now slightly less shittacular."


O&U: The Trouble With Writing Short Stories  N&I: The Trouble With Short Stories
O&U: One Book To Rule them All      N&I: One Book to Rule Them All 
O&U: A Writer Goes to Burning Man  N&I: A Writer Goes to Burning Man
O&U: No Apologies                              N&I: No Apologies: A Defense of Speculative Fiction

1 comment:

  1. What a great idea!

    I love this line: "Their friends won't recognize them at the store and will say "Oh my God it IS you!" in that way that people who've been to the gym love and people who've had kids hate."

    Been there, lived that!

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