#coffee-iv

[jami-c]

coffee-iv replied to your post:trying to be cute but your floor has clothes...

why upside down

I DONT KNOW thats just how it came out

[jami-c]

highly complex esports drama

i hope “video sports” becomes a term

[kaleidostrophico]

coffee-iv replied to your post “my xkit keeps on trying to install and says it can’t connect to the...”

it's stopped being updated - you need to uninstall and install 'new xkit' from the chrome web store. Soz!

ah thanks niall, i did it!

[alexandra-erin]

hiya! I was wondering if you would mind tagging your nasty anons with something specific so that people can blacklist them? I like your blog but you get some particularly shitty-teenage-boy anons and it'd be nice if I could erase them from my dash. Thaaaaaanks

Sure. I will henceforth tag them with “blacklist this tag”.

[annleckie]

Also, why is your blog title 'no good at titles' when it COULD be one of the following totally free and high-quality suggestions: 'Ancillary Blog', 'Blog-esk-nineteen', 'Ancillary Justice Warrior', 'Blog of Toren'? These suggestions are royalty-free although I will require credit on the front page of all future publications

Hah, awesome! I’ve actually thought of one or two others lately (”Easily reheated in the microwave of evil” and to steal one from vassraptor, which I still admire every now and then, “Overwrought prose-poems about soldiers stepping on flowers”). Maybe I’ll have to start rotating titles!

But the truth is, I’m genuinely no good at titles. Sometimes I’ll start with one, but by the time I’m finished the title will be inapplicable. More often, I’ll have a really boring working title, or none at all, and then there’ll be a desperate scramble for something to type across the top of the manuscript before I hand it in. I’m actually doing edits for a short story right now that had no title all the way through but I was hard up against a deadline so I didn’t have a week to ponder or ask people or search up poetry (I got “Night’s Slow Poison” from that sort of process, but I was super lucky to find a poem that sort of hit some of the I guess emotional content of the story). A friend of mine suggested I scroll through Elise Matheson’s jewelry, which she always gives awesome titles to. I grabbed “Everything a World Can Hold,” which is nice and evocative but of course not really the right title for the story. Bought the earrings. Let Elise know I was snurching her lovely title. Sent the story in, said to the editor “the title’s kind of random, suggest others if you like,” and he was like, “But that’s a lovely title!” And it totally is!

Edits came back yesterday. “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”

Me and titles. Yeah.

[annleckie]

Both Radch novels have an interesting structure, where there seems to be a couple of early climactic action sequences (the fall & the separation of self in AJ, the surgery & the shooting in AS), followed by long periods of thoughtful, slow progression before a sudden climax near the end (the confrontation and battle in AJ, the bomb and the standoff in AS). What do you think about when you plot this out? Do you think in terms of Acts - do you deliberately limit the pace between climaxes? Thanks!

I’m very much a pantser, so I don’t outline or think in terms of Acts. I don’t doubt that I’m working with subconscious models--that particular next moves feel right or wrong because they match (or don’t) some set of assumptions I have about how narratives can or should go.

So then the question is, what model or shape I’m working from for these books and I’m not a hundred percent sure, actually, but I would not be surprised to find Cherryh lurking there.