Nothing very important to say today, but I just had to go and look up what tense the Jewel was written in. It always strikes me as very strange how easy it is to forget when writing a story, and how easy it is to suddenly start writing in another tense. Does anyone find that this happens at a particular moment--like if a character is thinking of something back in time--or is it usually absentmindedness? I have the biggest trouble when I sit down to write after a break, and I never seem to gravitate to one tense over the other--just infallibly the tense that the story is not supposed to be written in. Sigh.

Um. Ahem. I was originally pushed by a friend into the idea of writing a daily blog, but unfortunately "me" and "daily task" go together about as well as "techno" and "fourteenth century monks". (You should see my dishes. Or, better, not.) My apologies.
But onto an entirely new subject, I picked up an amazing writing book yesterday: Samuel R. Delany's About Writing. I don't read writing books, as a rule, because--well, I've never given any thought to doing so. I am the type of person who, when I encounter an instruction manual, throw it away immediately and set to making whatever I have been given more interesting, or at least more horse-shaped. I picked up this book because I am also the type of person who, when I approach research, goes to the library and checks out every book on the subject. My local library is now devoid of EVERY Delany book (wonderful scifi, especially if you like post modernism and even if you don't), and this pile just happened to include his About Writing, which I decided to read because it was sitting at the top of the pile.
To summarize it briefly: if someone had handed this book to me ever, I would be a much better writer that I am today. Since I got it yesterday, I have some amazing catching up to do. If you got it, you would also be a better writer. Now, go and get it.
Much of what the book says is so obvious I don't understand why I've never realized it before, something that the author himself comments on for a while. For instance, he includes a quote from another author (I can annotate this better on request) on the merits of stories: a good story is only one that makes a reader want to see what happens next, and a bad story is one that makes a reader not want to see what happens next. My jaw dropped when I read that. It's so obvious--but I didn't know it, and now that I do, I read what I've written before and beat my head against the wall. There is so much I have written without that in mind, and I have done readers a disservice.
He also mentioned something that perfectly resonated with the new story I've been working on (more about this later) what struck me, again with its obviousness but also its perfection: experience must be noticed before it can be judged. For experience to be noticed, it must be in some way worthy of notice.
For an author to say anything of note, therefore, they must 1. notice things (something stressed heavily in any writing class), 2. record what is worthy of notice (something abused often in the other direction), and 3. have it judged appropriately by the characters to give them, uh, character.
Basically, all of his advice is wonderful, and he also advises on where else to get wonderful advice. Seriously, go and read this book.