Of course, most people just read, which is fine. That's the main reason it's there...
Slightly harried morning, but hopefully not too bad. I had to get up early to wash my hair. This sounds like such a girl-y thing that I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it's true, but what can you do? Because I have long hair (which I admit, is somewhat girl-y, but I know studly guys with long hair too), it takes a while to dry. Because hair dryers tend to turn your hair to straw (okay, vanity), I usually just let my hair air-dry...and in fact, I don't own a hair dryer. Which means that if I want to go outside without a wet head (advisable), I need to allow at least a couple of hours after the time I wash my hair. And if I wash my hair before I go to bed, I tend to wake up with a cold. Don't ask me why. Since I need to go to campus at 9 to pick up Susan's fax with her ID info and take it to Wells Fargo to establish her as a signer on the SH account -- and be back home by 11, when my cab arrives to take me to the airport...I needed to get up at 7 to wash my hair. There you go. More than you ever wanted to know about my personal bathing rituals. (Not the fun stuff, either. :-)
After all this hurrying, I'll probably whiz through the airport and have two hours of just sitting there. But I can't be sure of that, especially since the place was flooded with departing olympians and arriving paraolympians on Monday. Is okay -- I have a recommendation to write today and a POD book to edit, and those can both be worked on at the airport. I also have a survey editorial to write, but for that, I need the net. I suspect I'll be pushing that off to tomorrow.
I should go pack, but I wanted to tell you about one cool thing from workshop last night. We were talking about various literary styles -- specifically, the Naturalist style (very bare bones) and a more ornate style (think Dreiser vs. Nabokov). And Francois (teacher) was saying that one of the problems of reading/critiquing was that if a reader is familiar with/expecting one style, they may find the other approach incomprehensible -- and specifically, that they'll often think it's not doing as much. He compared it to taking a basketball fan to a baseball game -- that the basketball dude will be sitting there saying, "What's going on? When's something going to *happen*? It's been ten minutes, and nothing's happened!" Whereas in fact, something *is* happening -- lots is happening. The baseball game is just as densely packed with activity as the basketball game; it's just a radically different kind of activity, and a lot of it is going to be invisible to someone who isn't trained in reading it. (Just as if you took a baseball fan to a basketball game, she might say something like, "Okay, you're running back and forth and back and forth, but there's not much actually *happening*." Though maybe it doesn't happen so often in that direction. Maybe baseball is a little harder for people to grasp as an exciting sport, just as naturalistic writing is a little harder to see as a deliberately and skillfully constructed art.)
Anyway, I thought the whole metaphor was interesting, and useful also as applied to something like spec fic readers vs. lit fic readers. There's just as much going on with good spec fic as good lit fic, and vice versa. But try convincing a die-hard fan of one (or the other) of that!