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| Photo Credit: PDClipart.org |
It’s been a busier week than usual, both with my writing projects and other aspects of my life, so I’m going to keep this post short. A lot of things piled up on me especially during this weekend.
One of those things occurred just this morning: Google
announced that European Union laws now require blogs to display a notice that
explains to EU blog visitors how cookies are used. Even though Google is nice
enough to provide us bloggers this notice, it’s very basic and general. So I
have to rewrite the cookie policy for my blog so it can account for its use of
social media tools. Because this is high technical matter for lay computer
geeks like myself, I have to take the extra time to look over the policies and
advice on how to rewrite the notice which I’ll be doing throughout the week.
It’s a setback. One that I support. I understand that the EU
has laws that better protect the privacy of users than our own U.S.’s do. I’m
sorry to say, but our country is far behind in many aspects of its social
institutions when compared to nations like the U.K. People come before money, so
I’m more than willing to make the sacrifice to comply.
Would I rather be writing about speculative fiction,
including my own? To be honest, yes. But I keep in mind that science fiction
brought us miraculous technology such as the Internet. So I feel it’s time to
make responsible use of that technology and so to “give back” what science
fiction gave us. I say this even when I was hoping to finish my latest science
fiction short story by this weekend. Although even without the new requirement
for my blog, that probably would not have happened.
During the week I found out that I needed to rewrite my
story. It happened when I made a plot outline for it. I always make my outlines
for my short stories after I write the first draft. If I make them before, my
creativity is stunted and so an outline becomes even more cause for writer’s
block which I already get enough of. The exception is if I’m writing a longer
piece such as a novel or novella, in which I’ve only attempted but never
finished (yet). Longer works cause too much wandering if an outline isn’t used
before writing the first draft, making rewrites much harder. And so the outline
showed me that I had to restructure the story including re-ordering the events.
In order to do that, I have to rewrite the whole thing. Hopefully it will be
easier to do since I’ve already got a rough draft, though the rewrite is
turning out to be a rough draft within itself.
Before I found out about all these last minute changes for
my weekend, I had wanted to discuss minorities in horror and in other
speculative fiction. But it looks like that will have to wait until next week.
But I’ll leave you with a link to a great article that talks about people of
colour in horror so you can prepare to read more about it here next week.
Does outlining for your story work better if done before or
after your rough draft? Let me know in the box below.
Until next time . . .
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