(no subject)

This is why you shouldn't stick slavishly to various bits of writing advice*. I've just finished Tim Moore's Travels with my Donkey, his account of walking the pilgrimage routs to Santiago de Compostela with a donkey, and this is a sentence that is highly appropriate:

A farmer's wife with a basket of eggs strode past us and into the last house of the last hamlet, and thereafter, first with gentle stealth and then with callous indifference, the path began to climb.

Personifying the path like that is a perfect example of the mindset you get on long, dreary journeys when you're tired and cranky and start taking every little setback or obstacle personally. Plus, it's funny. But I've seen just one too many things telling writers not to personify inanimate objects, as if the reader was too stupid to realize that no, the path was not actually animate.**


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* Not that I really need to tell any of you that, actually. Mostly making conversation.

** Yes, yes, I know, there's doing it badly and doing it well, plus things like that are guidelines and not rules, but by God I AM GOING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING TODAY.

TERRIBLY DEEP INSIGHT

Earlier today I left a series of way-too-damn-long comments on someone's LJ, speculating as to why their stuff wasn't popular at a con they recently sold at. (No details here, unless they want to bring it up).

My DEEP INSIGHT[tm] while writing it all out isn't a realization of something I didn't know, it's basically something I already knew that managed to collapse into words. And it has to do with portrait-style pictures, that feature a character or two looking out at the viewer. This is what I posted there:

I really do want to emphasize that YOU are a character in the scene in the portrait pictures. The character is interacting with you the viewer, not just posing.

Yeah, not the most earth-shattering of insights, but well worth keeping in mind - that a successful portrait also tells a story, only the story is what's occurring between YOU and the character, not what's going on between the character and another one, or between the character and the setting.

Note to self:

When feeling randomly existentially cranky and weepy*, ( cut for dealing with Yuuko box )

* Not hormonally related, thankyouverymuch. You can't actually chart my moods that way. :D

YUUKO BOX...

...is now packed and ready to be shipped.

I can't tell you what's in it, until the recipient gets it (and as she's in Canada, it might take a while to make it through Customs. :D)

I can, however, tell you what's not in it.

( Right this way... )

Kyou Kara Maoh...

Tonight I watched the last ep on disc 4 of season 2, the end of the 2-parter where they go into Big Cimarron...

...does anyone else find Adelbert as deeply creepy as I do?