Gung Hay Fat Choy - with beads

I know, I know! It's Chinese New Year and Fat Tuesday all rolled into one!

Everybody's eating chicken! Everybody's celebrating! It's the Year of the Rooster, which I'm told is less self-obsessed than the monkey, but I doubt anyone finds it as cute. I have no idea what number year this is, or how it compares with other ancient calendars (Jewish comes to mind), but I think it's safe to say it's somewhere up there.

I will be celebrating this New Year by entering a period of deprivation. Although my only association with Catholicism is having some Catholic friends, I like the idea of giving something up in the hopes that it will do something positive. No, I don't think it will, but it's good to want.

I want quite a bit, sometimes.

This year is no exception, and to aid my acquisition of love and money, I'm giving up whale blubber. For forty long days and nights I will let no blubber pass my lips, not even a taste. At the end, I expect much.



I've been rambling in my Wiki about writing, and continuing to work on TRE. It's a slow process, to coin a phrase, but an enjoyable one.

One thing that disturbs me about my writing is how frequently I fail to make myself understood. I have this notion that good writers can get their points across without obfuscation, and this is something I see myself failing at.

No, I have no desire to write a bestseller. One of the earlier quotations that I tried to memorize was this one of Wilde's, which is perhaps incorrectly remembered: "Art should never try to popular. The public should try to become artistic."

I do think that what I enjoy most about writing, what I most enjoy writing, is something that many or most don't care for. That's cool, I think some people appreciate my humor or whatever, and those are the people I try to entertain. I find that a dry humor is one I enjoy, and that's what I attempt to create. I know it's not everyone's taste, and that's fine, too.

The world needs sophomore humor and fart jokes, but I don't know why. It seems to need stereotypical characters, too, the ones from central casting, but I'd never be happy writing a story that uses them. While I don't feel obligated to follow the old conflict-climax-resolution thing, I shun trying to write stories like many I've seen (none by anyone who's likely to look at this), those "character studies" where the existence of the character is somehow felt compelling enough to carry a story.

I've read too many of those in manuscript form, ones where the character never changes, never gets tested, never gets revealed. Someone who is posited and explored, but never goes through a journey. *Those* are the stories I see as failing to follow a formula to their detriment, and I find them boring. If the character is never tested, I have no indication that all their pronouncements are all that real.