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| Sunday, January 16, 2005 |
| No one should brave the underworld alone |
I am sitting here fiending like you wouldn't believe for my MP3's. They're all stuck on my old little hard drive that is apparently useless, so hopefully my parents will get me a new one soon. :::Hint::: The insane humming of the eMachine isn't very musical at all. When my computer semi-died earlier this year, I actually got all of my music (at the time) onto CD-R's, and I could play them on my stereo or TV, but I refuse to give in.
Yesterday I attempted to watch an episode of "Sex and the City", because Dean Winters is in it. I'm only mildly obsessed, right? SATC went over even worse than "Hellraiser: Hellseeker" did last week or whenever it was. I believe I made it through 7 minutes of a half-hour episode before feeling the need to stab my face off at the boringness and inanity of the lives of Carrie and her friends. So much for that experiment.
I turned that off and instead watched this movie "Shattered Glass", which was really fascinating. It's a true story about Stephen Glass, a reporter for this Washington DC-based magazine, The New Republic. He's probably one of the best-liked writers at this magazine, even considering how stressed out he is because he's also attending law school to please his parents. Everything is dandy, or close as it could get, when a writer at the online magazine Forbes starts doing a little research on a piece Glass had written about computer hackers, and can't locate anyone or anything mentioned in the article.
It was just amazing how this movie showed the entire article, and pretty much Glass' life and career, completely fall apart. His editor even drives him out to where all these events (including a hackers convention) supposedly happened, and every single one of them can be easily disproved. At the very end, you learn that more than half of the articles Stephen Glass wrote for TNR were partially or totally falsified.
It made me think a lot about writing in general and why I do it, and why I write fiction. When I went to college I worked on the student newspaper for a semester, and I liked it quite a bit better than I thought I would. What I loved was the writing and editing part, but I was definitely not the best interviewer on staff. To me it was just too much work to find out the truth. Which sure isn't to say that I would have gone the way Stephen Glass did if I was in his position - he had a harder time making things up than he would have talking about things that actually happened. He had to fake up notes of interviews, phone numbers - as for the story about hackers that got him caught, he even made a mock website for a company that did not exist, and had his brother in Palo Alto pose as the head of that company over the phone.
My local newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, has like a weekly "Real Life" column where readers can send in a story about something that went on with them, and I've thought about doing that myself. Whenever I sit down to think about it, I can never think of a good story to tell. It's not as if nothing good or bad or thought-provoking has ever happened to me, but I wouldn't know where to begin to make it come together as a good story that people would want to read. I can only come up with good (sometimes not so good) stories about people who don't exist outside of a name on a piece of paper.
That's not to say I consider that a bad thing. I like being able to do that very, very much.
As for my novel, I seem to be moving forward at a more normal rate, finally. Right now, I have 7 or 8 handwritten pages (both sides, even) to add onto my file, who knows when I'll be able to access it because the eMachine doesn't have a zip drive (of course, of course). The way I write is usually starting off something by hand, then moving onto the computer to put that in and continue as far as I can. I've noticed that the longer I wait between writing something by hand and then typing it, the harder it is for me to be able to correctly deciper a word. My handwriting is really bad. I'm looking at a page right now, and it's only out of context that I know that what looks like "bitch" is actually "bottom".
I need to go back to kindergarten.
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posted by Yvonne Hernandez @ 4:05 PM
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| About Me |
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Name: Yvonne Hernandez
Home: California, US
About Me: I hate numbers, but I'll throw some at you: 24 years old, 30 purses, 100 lip glosses, 200 books, 1 new celeb crush a week, 2 much procrastination, 2 dogs, and 2 blogs where I obsess over all these things. This, is one of them.
See my complete profile
Or, you can go all stalker-style and also see my MySpace profile.
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