The Contradictory Feelings Thread

[Izambri]

IKEA cookies. kakor havreflarn in particular.
That's all.

[Radius Solis]

A cousin of mine has colorectal cancer. 2 - 6 months to live.

This is the cousin who, 15+ years back, started a company to make and sell an invention his friend came up with, and who solicited family members for investment and got it. A total somewhere around $60k, as best they could figure later. Three uncles invested, and a few others; my uncles are no fools and I trusted them. They'd seen the device prototypes and all the paperwork and legally speaking it was all legit, so I put money in too, a bit less than $2k (a very big chunk of what I had at the time). At first everything looked rosy, but the company's progress was slow and eventually it became clear that it was going to go nowhere.

Later still, we learned he had snorted most of the money. We learned this when he stabbed his dealer and landed in prison. He's been out on probation for a few years now, claiming to be a reformed man and swearing he'll repay everyone somehow, but has made no moves toward actually doing that.

So it's not that the cancer is good news, but at the same time I have basically none of the sympathy I'd have for most people.

[Izambri]

Game of Thrones' 3rd season's penultimate episode, The Rains of Castamere.

Nuff said.

[Ars Lande]

After a long hiatus, I'm finally starting a new novel; one that promises to be a large improvement over the fifteen-parallel-plots abomination that was the last one or, rather, attempt at one.
The bad part: why am I so slow? I used to be able to write 2000 words on a bad day, 4000 on a good one.
Now I'm struggling to reach 1000 words a day.

[Torco]

dude, its not a race. i could probably produce a 31 thousand word story in a day probably anyone could, but it would be a) hideous and b) you'd have a shitty time doing it <tired and uninspired and just making people with guns walk into the room over and over and over and over again>. not that i've written any novels, mind you, but I figure quality and actually enjoying what you do are p important, amirite ?

[Ars Lande]

dude, its not a race. i could probably produce a 31 thousand word story in a day probably anyone could, but it would be a) hideous and b) you'd have a shitty time doing it <tired and uninspired and just making people with guns walk into the room over and over and over and over again>. not that i've written any novels, mind you, but I figure quality and actually enjoying what you do are p important, amirite ?

I don't know, maybe I'm writing better stuff, even if it's sort of slow.
But I rather enjoyed doing 4000 words a day!

[Drydic]

dude, its not a race. i could probably produce a 31 thousand word story in a day probably anyone could, but it would be a) hideous and b) you'd have a shitty time doing it <tired and uninspired and just making people with guns walk into the room over and over and over and over again>. not that i've written any novels, mind you, but I figure quality and actually enjoying what you do are p important, amirite ?

I don't know, maybe I'm writing better stuff, even if it's sort of slow.
But I rather enjoyed doing 4000 words a day!

How is babby formed x1000

Not saying that's what your writing was or is, of course.

[Salmoneus]

In general, I find that the fluency with which you write (and hence the wordcount, given the same time to write in) tends to be pretty proportional to the quality. Maybe for other people it's different.

[Radius Solis]

I can write with quality, but not in quantity. This does reflect a certain type of nonfluency on my part, but rather than merely being bad, it lies in the fact that I'm pathologically dissatisfied with everything I write and constantly edit and re-edit and re-re-re-re-edit, sometimes taking ten minutes or more for individual sentences or paragraphs.

It's a shame, really, because I have a lot I'd like to say.

[Salmoneus]

I can write with quality, but not in quantity. This does reflect a certain type of nonfluency on my part, but rather than merely being bad, it lies in the fact that I'm pathologically dissatisfied with everything I write and constantly edit and re-edit and re-re-re-re-edit, sometimes taking ten minutes or more for individual sentences or paragraphs.

It's a shame, really, because I have a lot I'd like to say.

The Wildean approach. When asked once what he'd done one day, he said that he'd spent the morning putting in a comma, and spent the afternoon taking it out.

(Given his famously quick wit and generally ridiculous speed of linguistic thought (he read books by flipping through the pages, but didn't miss a single line...), I strongly suspect he was, as usual, lying.)

[Torco]

In general, I find that the fluency with which you write (and hence the wordcount, given the same time to write in) tends to be pretty proportional to the quality. Maybe for other people it's different.

sure, this happens in all fields of praxis because they're both correlated to mastery, but people generally have an intuition that mastery being equal one must perform some sort of tradeoff between celerity and precision.

[Salmoneus]

In general, I find that the fluency with which you write (and hence the wordcount, given the same time to write in) tends to be pretty proportional to the quality. Maybe for other people it's different.

sure, this happens in all fields of praxis because they're both correlated to mastery, but people generally have an intuition that mastery being equal one must perform some sort of tradeoff between celerity and precision.

No, you misunderstand. I didn't mean 'the fluency with which you write' to mean 'how fluently you personally write in general, as a personal attribute', but 'how fluently one is writing on a particular occasion'.

What I meant is that when I find myself writing paragraph after paragraph without trouble, and hence writing a lot very quickly, the quality is usually (by my standards) high, whereas when i find myself pecking at keys one at a time and extruding one word after another in a slow and deliberate way, the quality is usually (even) low(er). I do not find that the trade-off you suggest seems to apply. [...to writing. It certainly applies to editing - again, for me]

[Torco]

Indeed. mastery is not only a general attribute, as in the ability with which you write, but also a specific atribute as relates to, for example, subject matter: as one might be a passable driver in general but a better one of small citycars than one is of larger contraptions, therefore being able to conduct oneself with both celerity and precision aboard a chevrolet spark but having to choose either one or the other at the wheel of a dodge ram, so the writer with a certain degree of skill will be both rapid and proficient in writing about a subject he masters but will have to exercise the tradeoff when writing about something he isn't quite a master of. similar modifiers to skill, as it were, might apply to style or format as it pertains to writing, or to positions in football, or to levels of formality in the mastery of a language.

[Astraios]

one must perform some sort of tradeoff between celerity and precision.

Who else read this as 'celery'?

[Salmoneus]

Indeed. mastery is not only a general attribute, as in the ability with which you write, but also a specific atribute as relates to, for example, subject matter: as one might be a passable driver in general but a better one of small citycars than one is of larger contraptions, therefore being able to conduct oneself with both celerity and precision aboard a chevrolet spark but having to choose either one or the other at the wheel of a dodge ram, so the writer with a certain degree of skill will be both rapid and proficient in writing about a subject he masters but will have to exercise the tradeoff when writing about something he isn't quite a master of. similar modifiers to skill, as it were, might apply to style or format as it pertains to writing, or to positions in football, or to levels of formality in the mastery of a language.

No, you still aren't getting it. I don't mean that I write quicker when I'm writing the sort of thing I can write well. Fluency in this case is not dependent upon subject matter, format, style (mostly), or whatever. It is an independent variable. Sometimes you're able to write fluently, sometimes you're not. The OP was saying they were writing more slowly than they were used to - they didn't say "because I'm unfamiliar with this format" or anything. So the trade-off you're insisting upon does not, in my experience, apply.

[Torco]

they didn't say "because I'm unfamiliar with this format" or anything

He did say something to the effect of

After a long hiatus, I'm finally starting a new novel; one that promises to be a large improvement over the fifteen-parallel-plots abomination that was the last one or, rather, attempt at one.
The bad part: why am I so slow?

so this is why i mention this tradeoff... he tell us he used to be able to write much faster when he was writing something that was bad, and now that he's writing something he thinks is better he's doing it slower; I guess <it can well be not the case> because writing something that doesn't suck is harder and more time-consuming per amount of writing that writing something that is does suck.

Now, yes, what i'm thinking of as mastery <quickness times quality if you will> also varies randomly, according to how you feel at the time and probably a million other factors so it is independent, to a degree. sure sometimes you're able to write fast and well and other you can't, i was mentioning factors that have to do with that variation.

[Ars Lande]

For that matter, I believe that this current slowness is at least partly due to a general unfamiliarity with the setting and characters.
An unfamiliar setting means that I have to look stuff up constantly; unfamiliar characters mean that I have to figure out constantly if they're acting in a consistent fashion. Of course I'm putting a lot more work into characterization this time.

I do get the idea about fluency, though, and that's why this current slowness bothers me.

[Salmoneus]

There's something really weirdly rewarding/frustrating about IElanging.

You spend ten minutes working out likely roots for a given meaning, and then you spend ten minutes more deriving them through thousands of years of sound-changes... and you end up with something that is the same as the English word (or the Latin, or every now and then I recognise the Greek. I assume a bunch of other words look Slavic or Indo-Aryan, but those aren't familiar to me).

[Herr Dunkel]

Example?

[Thry]

There's something really weirdly rewarding/frustrating about IElanging.

You spend ten minutes working out likely roots for a given meaning, and then you spend ten minutes more deriving them through thousands of years of sound-changes... and you end up with something that is the same as the English word (or the Latin, or every now and then I recognise the Greek. I assume a bunch of other words look Slavic or Indo-Aryan, but those aren't familiar to me).

Though isn't that only logical; since after all, your available reconstructed root and meaning pools are those that haven't been lost to the tides of time and so survived at least in one descendant branch?

[Izambri]

According to a motion issued by the Popular Party to the Valencian Courts, Valencian is directly descended from the Iberian language and is written since the 6th century BC.

Lapao... Iberian Valencian... What's next? I'll make popcorn.

[Hallow XIII]

spoilers: it's all descended from Basque

The ETA said so!

[Izambri]

spoilers: it's all descended from Basque

It's all the same, according to some people XD

[Ever Lurker]

I used to drink my coffee creamy and very sweet. Now my coffee is black and unsweetened. I don't like it, but I LOVE it!

[Astraios]

Coffee is a mortal sin unless it's creamy and sweet.