Tag Archives: kill me

PowerPointapalooza!

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 7 comments

I’m heading off to the Firm’s partners’ conference in sunny Florida today! So excited! I’ll miss the Shamrock Shuffle (moved to April this year to avoid the blizzards), but in its place I’ll have two full days of PowerPoint presentations on firm finances, large AND small group sessions on strategic initiatives, and of course, inter-office and cross-disciplinary networking opportunities! Slide shows and spreadsheets, with a chaser of mingling and small talk – the word “awesomesauce” was created for weekends like this.

On the upside, there’s a fair amount of socially acceptable drinking, and the Saturday afternoon group activities are a heck of a lot more varied and interesting than the first one of these things I went to (at the Old Firm), when the choices were (a) golf, and (b) spa day! (for the lady partners — this was 2005, so they had to be progressive). I think I went for a long run that afternoon instead. Maybe I’ll do the same thing this time, when I start to lose my mind after 7 hours straight of synergistic paradigm-shifting bullet-point riddled slide shows.

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Revising Meet the Larssons, Day 1: The Horror, The Horror.

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 7 comments

Tonight, I began the Holly Lisle One-Pass Revision Process on Meet the Larssons.  I’ve got my spiral notebook, my pens, and my hard copy of the manuscript.  I’m 90 minutes into the process, and my brain hurts.

I’ve heard or read about Holly’s method from a few sources, most recently fellow Absolute Write forum denizen Amy at The Purple Patch, who just finished revising her novel using this method.  In a little over two weeks.  With surgery in the middle.  I looked for some indication on her blog that the “novel” she was revising was a 24-page picture book, but the descriptions — and the photographs she posted — suggest an ordinary length adult novel.  Darn it.

I can promise you that I won’t finish revising MTL in two weeks; my goal is more like two months.  I have the manuscript printed out and sitting on the desk in the study.  It’s 500 pages even, more than five centimeters thick (the only ruler I could find is a metric-only High Sch001 Musica1 ruler, which someone must have given my daughter; I’m surprised it’s still in one piece, because she hates HSM). It is somewhat daunting.

Tonight, I did the steps that come before tackling the manuscript itself.  The first step was writing down a brief theme for the novel.

Yeah.  Because in high school English class, my favorite part was finding the theme of whatever book we were supposed to be reading.

But since I’m the one who wrote the damn book, I ought to be able to tell you what the theme is without having to work at it.  This part should be easy, right?

Heh.  It took me half an hour, although some of that was wasted looking for a Shakespeare quote that might have been my theme (but isn’t).

I also wrote down several sub-themes (including the Shakespeare quote, so that wasn’t entirely wasted effort), a one-sentence statement of what the book is about, a one-sentence story arc for the main character, and one very bad paragraph describing the story (or at least describing what I expect the story to be by the time I’m done with the revisions).

Enough dithering.  I finished the first draft on October 8, 2008.  Time to hack it to pieces.  This weekend, I start what Holly so aptly calls “The Manuscript Slog.”  Hooray.

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