House Cleaning

Whew, I am at last back at home and resting from my adventures in Tennesse and Georgia and it's darn good to be back. Most of the week was spent trying to regain a proper sleep cycle with little success. All in all it was a slow week, one spent reading, writing and cleaning. While it may have been slow it was not without activity, at last I have unpacked my last box and placed my last nicknack and am fully moved into my apartment. I still have pictures to hang but I am waiting for the job thing to pan out before I get to comfy here. Aside from that there is not much to tell. I spent the weekend finishing up my unpacking and doing a bit of swimming with friends. All in all a lazy, wonderful weekend.

I think I have finally reached a point where the new site (on my testing server) is working as it should and is halfway useable. Now begins the task of making it look nice and then uploading everything to my rental space here on these servers. I think it will be a big and beneficial change to everyone who visits the site and there are more than a few unexpected changes coming up (hopefully) soon. It will probably be about a week until you see changes begin to show up.

So, one of the reasons for traveling to Georgia was to talk with my friends who first got me into the whole writing thing. Somehow we got on the topic of recognizing good writing, as in sentence structure and composition. However, while I am someone who has read a lot of books (just come to the apartment!) I read more for content than anything else. If a book works for me its more often because the story worked and that can be accomplished without good writing. While I do notice a well formed metaphor or an overly flowery description every now and again, I don't pick up on good writing unless its top class. I don't think it's to much of a detriment to me as a writer though, I enjoy reading for the stories. It's like this, I can tell you all about the technical side of a movie; color theory, camera moments, shot composition and what it all means. Do you as a viewer need to know all of that to appreciate a film? Does it add to the experience? At times it can, as long as its done right. Yet all of those things are important to film making, all of them need to be done right to make a truly great film. These things are picked up subconsciously by audiences, you know when something looks wrong in a film even if you don't know exactly what it is. Much the same can be said of sentence structure, I can make a good plot and write a good yard but if I can't write a good sentence then the whole thing is for naught. Of course like film I have read enough to pick up on things subconsciously, I know when a sentence doesn't flow or when it just looks wrong. Unfortunately I don't have the knowledge to identify and fix the problems. (For example read the paragraph above.) This means that I just need to learn my craft better, learning the nuts and bolts of writing a sentence. It's not a put down nor a discouragement on my part just a fact, you wouldn't film a movie without knowing shot composition and you wouldn't want to be a writer without knowing the basics of sentence structure.

Well that's all from this end. Next week I will be working hard on finding new jobs and getting that mythical new site working. Until next time folks! Sayonara.