A Boring Day

Massively boring day. Yes, this is what it's like when I'm in front of the damn computer all day.

I did writing today. Then, I did reading of screenplays. Then, when I couldn't handle the hilarity any more, I went in the backyard and did some gardening. Mostly I did that in order to get out in the sun and air (fresh or otherwise) at some point during the day.

Last night Darin went to bed around 10. He was so tired he forgot to get undressed. I went to bed around 12. We both woke up at 9, but I have no excuse, as I slept for 4 hours yesterday afternoon.

So, I've been using the big 'puter in the upstairs office to surf the Web, because it's got a large screen and I don't want to hand over the RAM real estate to a browser now that I've installed OS 8, which among other things is a slightly larger memory hog. (It's also a pretty cool operating system.)

I can't exactly move all of my bookmarks over to the Office 'puter -- okay, I could, but I'm not -- so I've been slowly but surely rebuilding them. And I started using Open Pages again as the main portal to reach the vast majority of journals out there.

There are 205 journals on Open Pages now.

In case you're wondering, I'm OP member #2. Ophelia, who started Open Pages, is #1.

I used to try to keep a list of all the journals out there. I've stopped, because most weren't worth it, most can't keep it up, and a lot keep changing their names. Open Pages will have to serve as the almost-but-not-quite total guide to all online journals. The list I've put on the web, Still At It, is a list of the journalers who've managed to keep it up for at least a year.

That's my public list. At one point, I tried to have a comprehensive private list, taking every link I found and checking it into one or another category:

• The Good Ones (my favorites, the ones I read every day)
• The Guilty Pleasures (ones that I read mostly for their car crash qualities)
• The Worthy (ones I thought are probably good, but I wasn't hooked)
• The Possibly Worthy (almost good enough to be in The Worthy)
• The Boring (by far and away the largest category, despite the other categories)
• The Depressives (I'm not going there again, trust me)
• The High Schoolers and College Freshmen (way too young)
• The Annoying and Obscure
• The Great Unwashed (ones I hadn't had to get a chance to look at yet)

Now, managing to fit in one category (say, The High Schoolers and College Freshmen) did not preclude one from being put instead into another category (say, The Worthy). And I moved journals around with some frequency, mainly based on recommendations from other journals that I enjoyed.

I knew I was in trouble when my Great Unwashed list got to 100. Now, if I were to take all the new ones from Open Pages, I'd have a list of 150 or more to go through.

And they're crap. Why are people doing this? I shouldn't complain: most of them stop right after starting, right after they find out that it's not a path to international fame and fortune, they don't necessarily gets thousands of hits a day, and no one gives a good goddamn about them, unless they write in excessive detail about their sex lives, which usually isn't as interesting as most people think anyhow.

No thank you. Sturgeon's Law most definitely applies: 94% of everything is crap, and finding really fun journals has been tough going. So I'm tossing my private list, keeping only a list of the ones I know I'm going to read. I'm changing it only when I come across one in the Theatre of Blood list that I review, or on recommendation. (The only catch, remember, is that to belong to Theatre of Blood you have to have an online journal and you have to critique others.)

You know, writing is just not that hard. Or at least, not as hard as the Great Unwashed would make it seem, with their acres of tortured prose and boring stories.

I'm happy that Ophelia has started putting us old fogies back at the top of the Open Pages list again.

This is why everything in Hollywood is done on recommendation. There's too much crap to wade through for someone to have to go through each new submission cold. You just have to get seen by enough people to start moving up the food chain.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I wrote 6 pages of my Buffy today. I stopped only because I was feeling ill (as I described in some detail to Darin; his reaction was: "Gee, thanks, honey"), so I read two screenplays by a friend of mine.

No running. Tomorrow there will be running. Also, brunch with Tiffany and IKEA shopping with some GSPers.

My nails are too long! I need a manicure.