Are you wasting your time or not by writing? It would be impossible to tell by looking at something that you've written. The best that could be assessed by doing that, would be how your writing skills currently stand and what your weak points are right now . Talent is severely over-rated. Bad writing can be fixed in revision. Good writing can be learned. Any writing, good or bad, is worthwhile if it helps a person feel better about themselves. If you mean, "Do I have the potential to make it as a professional writer" the answer is "probably not." The odds are against anyone making it as a pro, at least, when it comes to writing fiction. And even if you do make it as a pro, you will probably be paid very little. This may sound off-putting... and it is. Because if you CAN be discouraged from writing, you should be discourged. As a business proposition fiction stinks, people do it because they love it, not because they get a reasonable financial return from it. That said, I am attempting to become a pro fiction writer. Why? Because I can't not write. So I would spend a great deal of time writing anyway. And I would want to make it the best it could be anyway, and once those two factors are a given, the step from that to "attempt to be a pro" just takes a certain amount of stubborness and an ability to withstand constant rejection. As a writer aquaintence of mine says (after getting his 'break' after fifteen years of persistant effort) "if you lean against a wall hard enough it will eventually fall down." I've been leaning on that wall for 11 years, and I've removed maybe one brick (two short sales for pro rates.) But it doesn't matter if it takes me thirty years, because I have stories in my head that need to be told, and so I write them down and I polish them up, and I send out another round of query letters. If I'm standing right next to the wall, anyhow, I might as well keep leaning on it. I would probably be willing to look at your stuff, btw, but if by a "more graphic depction of Genesis" you are talking about a high sex content, you are better off finding someone else. I tend not to like sex-scenes, and that makes it hard for me to be impartial.

I have been trying really hard NOT to let anything distract me from writing, but I ended up taking all of October off so I could get ready to do children's activities at a filk convention, anyway. [helpless shrug] But whether letting things get in the way of your writing is a problem, is all a matter of where your priorities are, right? If writing is something you do "just for fun" then where is the harm in letting something else that you also do "just for fun" happen instead? I have umpteen zillion hobbies (okay, maybe only a dozen or so) and I used to happily let any one interfere with any of the others, but I've finally bit the bullet and decided that writing isn't a hobby for me, it's a career. and that's why I've been really strict with myself over writing quotas and so forth, and why after taking a vaction for all of October, I am not taking a vacation this week. But even after spending most of the morning writing, I still had a lovely Thanksgiving, and I'm thankful for this group, for your good wishes, and for a husband who does all the cooking when he's home (because he's so much better at it than I am.) :) PS. Vue sounds like a lot of fun, but I really think I'd rather have a copy of Mojoworld Generator. I find that program just way too cool. So Vue is going to have to accept second place on my wish -list.

I thought it would be a better idea to take up the thank-you note thingy here, than in the gallery comments. :) Any editor who is willing to put their name on a rejection slip rather than a generic "The Editors" gets a brief thank-you note from me. Editors aren't the enemy. It isn't their fault that they're overworked, underpaid, and indunuated with completely unpublishible trash that they must deal with on top of making the truly difficult decision of which of the good stuff to send their limited budget on. It makes it hard for them to spend time helping out writers. Even the ones who send out anonymous rejection slips probably deserve the courtesy of a thank you, but by not identifying themselves they make it pretty impossible for me to follow through on that. The ones that send me personalized rejections saying that they almost bought it, good luck with someone else, and by the way you have two typos... those definately require some kind of appreciative response.

Very poetic, Mestophales! Although I think it sounds more like a song lyric than a T-shirt slogan. I keep hearing it with an electric guitar back up though, which is a little innapropriate considering that it talks about being accoustic. Obviously I need to work on that.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=539547

Hmm, I guess I need to head over there, I just started working on a comic book thingy on my wimpy computer using Little Dragon's Furrette. (She's cute, and low enough res not to kill my whimpy computer, and everyone in the family wants the good computer, so I don't have much time on it. )

Ooh, I like that one dialyn. I think I'm going with that. Thanks! And thank you to everyone else who commented, your help was very much appreciated.

Yes, FILK. Precisely so. Filk music does not have a specific style or sound. Although much of it is accoustic, for the simple reason that most filk activities are of the "lets get together, bring our instruments and sing" variety. However with the event of programmable midi keyboards and other electronic musical aids, other styles are becoming more and more common. There is also at least one filk rock band, and a couple filk chiors. Filk music is associated with fantasy, amoung other things, so the elves are appropriate. I'll be posting the beta version of the picture soon, and I'll post a link so you can tell me if it would be off-putting to adults. I don't consider it particularly cutesy, but then I have six children, so my views might be skewed. Songs about the mating habits of vampiric space ghosts are probably not suitable for children (okay, so songs about the mating habits of were-wolves are a little more common,) but many filk songs are kid suitable. It isn't a "kid" genre though, no. Filk music started out as folk music as done at science fiction conventions way back when folk music was having it's come-back. As you might imagine considering the venue, this quickly became folk music with a decidedly unusual slant. The new name came from a typo, and people said, "Well we're different enough from the regular folky crowd that we needed our own name anyway. Let's keep it." Filkdom grew beyond the sf convention scene, and is now a community in its own right.. There are 8-10 filk conventions held anually worldwide. The music is hard to describe, but the community isn't. At filk events people gather and sing. Singing along is generally encouraged. Making up your own songs to sing is also encouraged. If you find writing tunes difficult, then you can borrow tunes from anywhere you feel like, and just do words. If you find words difficult, you can borrow words (Tolkien and Kipling being two favorite sources), and just do tunes. If you have no gift for either, that's okay too. People will be singing about TV-shows, and their favorite books, and the movie they saw two weeks ago, and history, and dinosaurs, and greek mythology, and food, and computers, and quantum physics, and roleplaying games, and politics... and strange combinations of the above... Just about anything goes, but if you insist on singing covers of pop love songs, we will wonder what you are doing hanging around with us. "Curiosity, Creativity, Imagination and Participation" is something I've just recently come up with in an attempt to describe what filking is about. Conventional defintions don't seem to work very well. If you would like to hear actual filk music, I recommend visiting filk.com and listen to their webcast music station, filk-radio. (My connection is too slow to listen to web-radio myself.) Doing a websearch for filk and mp3 will also turn up bunches of hits, and there are a number of filk artists on mp3.com (although they aren't all labled as such, interesting.) The quality of the recordings will be widely variable. Filk is primarily a "live" genre, and only a few artists have put out top quality studio recordings. Most recorded filk on the web is available to allow other filkers to learn the songs, not to promote sales, and the production values are correspondingly low.

Thank you for your quick response, and during one of Renderosity's horrible slow downs, no less. What wonderful service! I have pondered on the question of other names. This is a international community, and the term "Refridgerator Art" doesn't seem to be familiar to everyone. I considered "Kids' Art" and then worried that people would think it was for pictures of kids, or for kids, rather than by kids. So I would tenatively like to proffer the suggestion of naming it "Young Artists". My kids would certainly prefer to identify themselves as young artists, rather than identify their works as "refridgerator art" anyways. (rueful grin).

A lot of them don't seem to apply to me. So, here's a few more... :) You carry on conversations in your head with imaginary people, and complain bitterly to your friends about how the imaginary characters always seem to win. Instead of weightlifting, your workout schedule includes a visit to the local library. You read out of date text books because you are curious about what people used to think was true. (For fantasy/sf writers) You know more about the workings of your imaginary countries than you do about the one you actually live in. (For historical writers) You despise fashion in general, but you know what points are and why they need tying, and can explain all the major fashion trends for one or more specific 100 year period spans. You have a folding keyboard and fully functional wordprocessor for your PDA Any more?

I don't have to write. I could create webpages, or videogames, or art, or songs instead... Oh, wait, I do create webpages, and art and songs and I'm working on a video game... :) As I say when the submission game gets particularly depresssing, "as long as I'm going to be writing the things down anyway, I might as well continue trying to make them good enough to get published." But my true goal is to get famous. Because my husband and I devided theobligatory quest for fame and fortune up, and his job is fortune and mine is fame. As long as we remain as poor as churchmice, he can't claim I'm not doing my share around the house. ;)

I published an article in Dragon Magazine, and forever signed away all rights to it by so doing. Didn't really bother me much, but I'd hate to have to do that with my fiction. I suspect it wouldn't bother me as much if I was actually working in their worlds though, but even without all my world building being handed over to them to do with as they wish, just handing my characters over would be painful enough. shudder Tracy Hickman wasn't very happy with what happenned to Dragonlance after he created it, IIRC, and that was a major aspect of why he and Margaret went independant.

Oops. Struggling with 3 and 7. 6 I'm mostly good on, I think, but sometimes when I've fallen into the dumps due to my difficulties with 7, I lose grasp of 6 for a while too.

I think I would have to agree. Personally I'm really good at 1, 4 and 5, but I'm still struggling with 3 and 6. :)

Fun to read/write is a different issue, and obviously it depends on the readers and writers in question. What I was objecting to was the apparent claim that you couldn't file the serial numbers off your story. "Drow" ->take file -> "dark elf" (It's even a descriptor you are already using.) Dark Elf is a traditional term, used to describe both the Scandinavian dosalfar (sp?), and the celtic bean sidhe (not certain how to spell that one, either, alas!), and therefore impossible to object to on legal grounds. It is, of course, less specific than Drow, so you would have to describe the creature in question, as well as provided a little more backgound -- either as a well written infodump from your narrator, or, as I demonstrated, some dialog between your pirates. But I really don't think either of those changes would have hurt your story any. But you might be relieved to learn that you can't be faulted on not learning how to write like this in school. I've yet to discover a school that teaches this stuff. :/ (You probably would be aware of this, if you had actually paid attention in class, but who am I to complain? I am guilty of spending most of my school hours, from eighth grade onward, scribbling stories down in the back of my subject notebooks.) :)