Moved to Chat because of topic drift. At 09:14 PM 8/18/04 -0400, Tamara P. Duvall wrote:
>And, contrary to the impression I must give here (when't the last time >I wrote a message under 5KB? <g>), I'd much rather draw a diagram than >explain things verbally; it's writing the instructions for a pattern >that's about to be published, which sometimes pushes me into >housecleaning - *anything* is better than writing instructions :) I You're in good company. One of the professional writers who hang out on rec.arts.sf.composition wrote an essay on procrastination (presumably when she should have been writing a story) that began with sensible things such as organizing her files, straightening her desk, sharpening every pencil in the house just in case she wanted to write something longhand, through getting every last speck of dust out from under all the beds, eventually to ". . . and how long *has* it been since I waxed the cat?" Somehow that morphed into "vacuum the cat", except across the pond where it's "hoover the cat", and became shorthand for stuff you do when you are supposed to be doing something else -- a discussion that begins as a serious discussion of writing technique and wanders far into pointlessness is apt to be ended by someone saying "I think this cat is bald." The SF writers do so much cat vacuuming that they recently had a pin made, with a picture of a cat and a vacuum-cleaner nozzle on it, to identify themselves to each other at conventions. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/LINKS/KITTEN.HTM (brushed, never hoovered) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's warm with scattered clouds. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
