GIP and a PLEA

Increasingly frustrated at my inability to get into Uru Live (especially since Until Uru has obviously closed its doors, and having had a bad half-hour when I thought even my stand-alone version wasn't going to let me in), I've been having some fun pasting my avatar into some non-Uru backgrounds. These will emerge as and when I feel like showing them. :)

General plea: if anyone out there knows anyone in the UK who is playing Uru Live over a Virgin Media (ex-Telewet) cable connection, please, please, please find out from them how they managed it (what speed their connection is, are they on a router, did they have to involve tech support at a pound a minute, that kind of thing) and let me know. I've tried calling VM customer service (in India, of course) and as a result of that our entire connection went south till I put everything back the way it was before. I need help here...

Stephen King: On Writing

I've been meaning to read this one for a while, and now I am.

It's a good read. (I could have done without the bit about the maggots, but then I can always do without them, and I should really have been braced for something like that in a King book.) A lot of what he says makes excellent sense to me. Other things I disagree with, not because I think he's wrong (he isn't), but because I have my own way of writing and it's different from his. Not as good as, certainly, but it's the way I enjoy doing it and I want to continue to enjoy doing it.

For instance, I like adverbs. I find them useful. My characters find them useful. They're the stage directions that tell them how to play a given action or line. Often they aren't necessary, but I'm damned if I'm going to fight shy of them when I feel they are. I also like alternatives to "said." I read the James Blish Star Trek novelisations one after the other when they first came out over here, and even at that age I got so sick of the endless, affectless Kirk-said-Spock-said-Kirk-said-Spock-said that I was inwardly screaming at the characters to *act*, for gods' sake. (That's another thing: King would have me write "gods's." That just looks *wrong.*) So, my characters shout, cry, snarl, growl, exclaim, explain and whisper (but never pole-vault) when the occasion calls for it, and sometimes they do it testily, tensely, breathlessly, harshly, sweetly and all the other Lees of West Virginia. I like to write that way.

And as for rule 17 of Strunk and White...well, if I followed that one I'd never write a line. :)