Good analogy, this

“Writing is kind of like having a poo, basically. It’s really hard if you don’t want to go, but there’s a time when you have to go. And that’s what it should be like. You’ve just put so much stuff in your subconcious, you’re just so excited about writing it that you have to sit down and get going. And that’s really the secret, that’s why people falter, because they start writing too soon.”
— Graham Linehan

This is me procrastinating

A section from The Empty Book turned into that, for fun.

Writing tip of the $timeperiodthatisnow

If you are unable to afford an editor for your work, do the following:


leave every typo in, add a few amusing ones, and sell the results as post-internet literature.  

And the not-so-easy-part progresses...

Edited  more pages, realized the editing was sub-par and redid it, altering and removing things. As entire sections need to be re-thoughts and -written I am not sure sure to what extent this truly qualifies as editing ... mostly because I will have to re-write the edited sections presumably at some point as well.

That I go over what I just edited to edit it again each time I open the file is going to make this very slow.

But hopefully also make it work :)


From this morning's output of ... 15 lines:

"You didn't need to hit me."

Bess stepped forward, only to stop as Boy flinched back, the wariness in his eyes matching her own. "I had to be certain: assassins have certain skills they can't hide."

"Why would assassins be hunting you?" Boy asked, then rubbed his stomach, his pain answer enough. "I bet you make enemies like other people make friends."

Surgery before anesthesia

(via)
 It would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. Despite the advantages of anesthesia, Liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. Spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. The butler's operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure.
(Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant's fingers along with a patient's leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)

One reason why all fantasy novels include healing magic, this.

And the easy part is done....

Edited the first 8 pages (until Bess shows up); removed and clarified a few things, got rid of some words. From here on in it is going to be much harder .... Also working on notes for the Story That Died early in June; planning for 2-3 pov characters but plan to let it ferment in my mind while I work on editing Boy & Fox into a proper shape.

I think most of the extraneous characters will be removed to try and pare the secondary characters down, but shall see how it all goes ....

facebook & google+ status updates part XIII

 Noise to signal: aliens secretly pay humans to create crop circles in order to hide their real ones from the world.

When will we measure a nation's Dreams Per Capita?

The truth of the myth about vampires and barriers is that they can only enter places with bad feng shui.

The question hung in the air between them unanswered. Unanswerable. Sometimes, he reflected, silence could seem a lot like sin.

Thought of the evening: If wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge, so Wikipedia then set bounds to facts?

A story to write eventually:

A ghost trying to keep itself up to date with the modern world. being dead may change your perspective on the world, but if you haunt one place how to do further your education or keep up with modern slang or jargon?

"The court would like to know why you entered the playboy mansion and then attempted suicide?"

"Well, your honour, I thought that we become ghosts after we die so it would be the best place to haunt."

‎"That one cannot find until one ceases to seek only applies to philosophical concepts, not to a rash."

She let out a sigh, smile slipping away to leave something far older and more worn behind. "I don't care that people hate me. I just wish they hated me over things I can control, not who I love or why."

They say that if you love something, you should set it free. If it doesn't come back, that's what GPS is for.

Title for a horror story:

The Man Who Couldn't Hate

The modern priest with his stethoscope in hand is, at the end of your days, as useless as those who held crosses.

They smoked in front of their children, held together by a common goal: insurance-acceptable murder via secondhand smoke.

The fast food giant executive stared at the as of a smiling family, the caption below them reading: 'This shit will kill you, but so will everything else.'

The presenter smiled weakly. "You said you wanted honesty? We could remove 'shit', if you like?"

"How can you be sad when the world is full of free porn on the internet?"
"I'm sad because it's free."

"You claim to be tweeting," the bird said to the man. "With respect, I think you are confused."

So spake the angry commuter: "I ran to a bus stop to miss a bus that didn't show."

The bus company's customer service representative offered: "Consider it a free metaphor."

Viscous dog free to a bad home.

Status update: Viscous dog NO LONGER free to a bad home. Has been bought by a cat and puréed.

zombie cops: the thin dead line.

The tree that ate kites turned out to eat red-headed little girls as well.

When I die, I want to see a giant sign reading: Game Over. Play Again? (Y/N)

"The rumours of my undeath are greatly exaggerated."

Since i have not slept, it is making perfect sense to wonder what happens when the tooth fairy gets drunk. What if she takes an eye instead, or a tongue?

And, perhaps more importantly, does she give more money because of that? Is she insured?

What is murder if not the work of an artist who prefers realism over abstraction?

The only thing worse than having flashbacks of the war was having flashforwards of the next.

Thought of the morning: A horror story about the Oxford Comma would prove interesting, or perhaps not, and then what?

"What is he talking about?"

"He is referring to carnal pleasures"

"Oh, like the ferris wheel!"

"Yes...like the ferris wheel."

For 1 easy payment of 29.95, we will send you patent-pending Bedroom Eyes! With guaranteed Hypnotic Power! Get away with murder!

(Only don't. Really.)

(Our lawyers insisted we put that in even though you can.)

(I did.)

From current WIP:

A wise king needs no jester, knowing himself to be fool enough.

An update I did not expect to have ...

Managed to hit 50K last night on Boy & Fox, largely because the story is almost done. I have to figure out the final major scene, which -- along with the scene after it -- should be about 5K. I know a few things to change in the next draft, namely that Tychus has to show up more often and Do More Stuff, but I shall finally have a finished first draft to build onto for this story. The scaffolding works, the plot works pretty well though I need Reynard to be wrong about things more often and will need beta readers to figure out if the one secret is as obvious to the reader as I think it is.

(Essentially, there is a secret about Boy that the reader should figure out long before Boy does, and probably before some of the characters in the novel do. While it seems obvious to me, I'm well aware I wrote the story with that secret behind it so my view on 'obvious' is, frankly, skewed.)

I plan to wait on it a month or so, print it off, and then do the second draft after that -- which, unlike all my second drafts of late, will  NOT be a rewrite from scratch -- and then lob the result at the writing group and see what they turn it into :)

A Boy, a Fox, and an Update.

Closing in on 40K, to my surprise. The plot is finally reaching the second/third act. I suspect at least half of what I have written so far will be deleted in the next draft to pare down dialogue and trim unnecessary scenes from the story and one plot thread will be removed entirely as it doesn't fit the story.

On the plus side, Boy now has a mission to find a rogue Baron and is even getting paid to do it. He's being used, naturally, but he does know he's being used -- even if not why -- so I guess that counts for something. I have no idea HOW Boy is going to go about finding the missing Baron but I suspect the end story will be a damn sight longer than 80K at this rate.

Fun bit from tonight's writing:

"What do you know of wizards?"

"I don't think wizards exist where I come from."

"And witches?" Enzo asked.

"I'm not sure. I get echoes of memories sometimes, like reading a line of a book without knowing the title or anything else about the book. I don't think witches were real where I'm from but we also burned them alive."

In which my brain refuses to leave me alone

Way back at the start of June I began Bird & Jester, intended to be a YA story about two twins born to different parents dealing with a renegade member of their own family, fairies, and sasquatches living in a trailer park. Unfortunately, the MCs voice just never came together properly and the project died on the page. It happens.

Unfortunately earlier this week my brain began revising the setting, altering characters, shoving their ages up a decade and giving thought to using 2-3 POVs for the story instead. The vague plot running through my head in involves a town's Christmas In July idea gone horribly wrong and will also involve using a character from a short story begun at least 10 years ago and never finished. 

Naturally, the entire thing needs a  new title -- not that I much liked the Bird/Jester one anyway -- so I shall have to work on that and figure out how much of the setting and my notes I can salvage from the last iteration of the matrix.