Last friendly Twilight jab for a while, I promise. I fear that if we keep this up, we'll wind up looking back on this particular arc as the equivalent of one long Penny Arcade-executed John Romero joke (that is to say, something that will embarrass us when we're older and wiser). Really, Twilight's fanbase has suffered enough, so they don't need our additional fun-poking on top of the general hiss of literary critics and Anne Rice enthusiasts.

I'm feeling too lazy to plug links into this newspost, so if you don't recognize something I pitch your direction today, Google it. I find that the solution to a great number of the world's problems can be solved with a simple Google search. At least the computer-based problems, anyway. I can't imagine that Google will be solving Third World hunger anytime soon. I hear they're working on it, though.

Now on to something completely different.

The process I employed for teaching myself how to write creatively consisted primarily of blatantly ripping other authors off in the name of learning the craft. Basically, everything I wrote until partway through high school was either accidentally or intentionally aping some other author's work. I honest-to-God didn't produce anything purely extempore from my mother wit until that point. I started off by stealing wholesale from R.L. Stine, then I had a period where I tried to write like Michael Crichton (may he rest in peace). ...My Crichton period was when I was about eleven or so, which made for some very odd stories indeed. There was the time when I made my very own Star Trek analogue, another period where I tried Brian Jacques's style on for size, the obligatory "I want to be J.R.R. Tolkien" phase that I think most fantasy/sci-fi authors go through, and so on and so forth. And as horrific as the results were, I think it does a writer a lot of good to be able to mimic (if not precisely reproduce) the styles and devices of other authors. It lets you find out what does and doesn't work on a personal level, so you can keep the useful stuff and discard the chaff. And it's a continuous process. As soon as I discovered H.P. Lovecraft at university I wrote a story in his style (which actually turned out more like an Edgar Allan Poe piece, but let's not be picky, here).

Nowadays, I'm better at simply seeing elements in other authors' writing that I like and then assimilating those elements into my own personal style without having to compose an entire piece in homage to them. And I think that's because I only found my writing voice good and proper about three years ago, the style that fits me most comfortably and conforms best to the sort of material I deal with on a regular basis.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, except to say that I've started writing things that aren't comic scripts regularly again, and it feels pretty good to do so. A lot of that positive energy comes from all the arduous work that I have put in (and continue to put in) to this whole writing shindig, I'm pretty sure. Also, I think the grad-school burnout may have worn off at long last. And that is, undeniably, a good thing.