Some Quick Thoughts

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Drink. Drank. Drunk.

When I started at my current job, there was a girl who worked with me who obviously had turned 21 shortly before I joined.  Every day, those of us gathered around the smoking station at break would hear about just how silly she had gotten the night before.  What other age do we get to do this?  Not that I did it.  Or you did it.  Or anyone should do it.  But when else do we get to overindulge and be so proud?

At 18, we don’t say, “I smoked myself stupid last night on Marlboros and Virginia Slims” or “I voted the shit outta me last night!  Whoo!”  At 65, we don’t say, “I retired myself so raw this weekend, it’s sick.”  Only at 21.  Only with alcohol.

Your Punctuation Is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

As I was shopping with the wife last weekend, I kept seeing copies of And Another Thing…, Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer’s attempt to continue the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.  Upon the third store I was in with it on sale, I figured it was a sign I should pick it up.  Wow.  What a godawful mess.  I love the first Hitchhiker novel, of course, with the rest going in a steady decline, but this… I didn’t expect much.  As long as it was better than So Long…, then I would’ve been happy.

Is it?  Don’t know.  The story may be fabulous.  The punctuation in it and the needlessly resoundingly repeatedly dreadful use of adverbs in it made me stop after ten minutes.  I got through a prologue and the first few pages of Chapter One before I had to close it.  When my wife saw me put it back on our shelf after the short reading period, I told her, “Burning it would be a waste of a match.”

If the Artemis series is that terrible, then I weep for the children influenced by its writings.

An Experiment In KDPing

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Creative Writing News Week of March 12

Quick & Dirty Version

Coincidence: A Novel (ebook version) will be available for free from June 22, 2012 to June 26, 2012.  Download it.  Enjoy it.  And, more importantly, review it.

Longer Version

I planned on opting out of Amazon’s KDP Select once the original 90 days were up.  I mean, sure, it’s fun to watch your book climb the charts, wearing out the F5 button in the process.  The first weekend I tried it was awesome; the second was while the wife and I got married on the open seas, so I didn’t get to see the peaks and valleys.  The last day was my grandfather’s, aunt’s, and best friend’s birthday.  That best friend is part of the inspiration for Coincidence’s protagonist Chris Acker.  That one day was marginal.  I really think you need more than one day at a shot with the promo days, especially if you don’t have a name yet.

Writing A Blog Post

Something nagged at me, though.  I always enjoy tweaking and experimenting, so I figured I’d stay in KDP for one more stint and for one more experiment:  I want to blow all my promo days at once and see where it gets me.  So I figured June 22, Josh Williamson’s 21st birthday, would be as good a time as any.  Josh is, of course, the…well, a sleeper character.  I don’t want to say whether he’s a villain or hero.  He’s there.  He affects people.  And we leave him with a lot of blood on his hands, some of it his own.

I wonder where he is.  He’s not someone I want to return to for now.  I don’t think I’m a strong enough writer to do him justice (yet).  After all he’s witnessed, he’d certainly be an interesting character.  “Tormented” might be the best description.  But aren’t we all?  What makes the horror behind his eyelids any more entertaining?  Of course, I’m assuming he’s survived thus far.  We’ll see.  Levittown’s not going anywhere.  And, for now, neither is Josh Williamson.

Don’t worry; you’re safe.

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The wife finally got sick of the bunny ears and decided we’re getting cable for the first time since moving to this apartment.  (We’ll be switching internet providers and getting a home phone for the first time in four years too.)  The package’ll be installed this weekend, and I’ve been trying to figure out what I need to catch up on.

Seeing as how we’re not getting premium channels, Game of Thrones is out of the question.  Fallen Skies sounds promising (moreso the upcoming second season).  And then there’s The Walking Dead.  The fact that friends of mine created a podcast solely to discuss this show seems like a ringing endorsement.

One problem: I don’t “get” zombies.  My brain can’t wrap around the pseudo-science of reanimating corpses.  I think I’d rather consume Xena’d entertainment (blame wizards) than sit through another jarring explanation of viruses targeting the cerebral blahblahblah.  You want to voodoo up some undead?  Bring ’em on.  Magic up an army of followers?  Magic your rump off.  But one half-assed “Well, you see, Jane, the brain stem controls base motor movements, so the recently dead are…” and my brain calls shenanigans.

I’ve read of worlds where over-population led to government promotion of homosexuality.  Mormon vampires have chewed their way through wombs.  Boy wizards have turned villains to ash with the “old magic” of love?  Fine.  But brain-eating creepy crawlies?

I just don’t get it.

Digging Out

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I haven’t been blogging or much of anything else for what’s apparently been weeks.  I got some coding done on the various sites on Black-Ring.net (except Philly G/I, which wound up being an epic failure), but the rest of life has been rather stagnant.  I blame this on being buried deep within some fictional worlds, ensnared like a prisoner in gods, heavens, and the profound disappointment in the 60s.

I think I mentioned on here or Twitter that Mur Lafferty released all her writing for free a little while back, so I’ve been using her Afterlife series as something of a palate cleanser.  The series isn’t especially long, and I’d like to prolong my stay in that universe as much as possible.  For a while there, I switched between the third in the series on my Fire and the paperback I was reading until, at the delicious point of no return, the hooks of the paperback’s story dug in.

The paperback in question is King’s Hearts In Atlantis.  My wife saw me eyeing it at a thrift store, grabbing it out of my hand and saying, “I’ll buy it for you.  C’mon, it’s only a dollar.”  (What can I say?  I’ve growing to be a frugal young man.)  I’m somewhat obsessed about the Dark Tower series, and now that it’s completed, I’m slowly making my way through the secondary stories that touch upon Roland’s universe.  No matter how boring I find the beginning of a story, my mind perks up at the first mention of the Crimson King or low men.

The odd thing is that the book is really a collection of loosely connected short stories with only the first having anything to do with the Tower.  But somewhere between the feverish hunts for the bitch and the meticulous design of Willie Shearman’s begging, the barbs of King’s attack on the flower generation sunk in and dragged me along to the end.  And, just like most stories, I hated when it came to an end…and hated the end.  I know it’s supposed to be melancholic, but it seemed to be too far close to the happy side of melancholia.

But leave it to King to write a fairly realistic story with just a touch of metaphysics.  No grand wizards having battles that devastate the surrounding cities.  Just some random oddness that affect a handful of people, who go about the rest of their lives wondering if what they saw really happened.  Sound familiar…

05/17/12 – Voice Punch

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I don’t know where I am.  I mean, I know I’m in my office in my small northwestern Phillyburb apartment.  But I’m on my who-knows-what-number drink of the evening, listening to the fourth? fifth? rendition of “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” (the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme song, if that helps) on Youtube.  I’m trying my best to stick to this song and not go off into J-pop.  That way leads only to darkness.  I really can’t stand J-pop, if only because of the mastering.  All the songs sound like something from Disney made-for-TV movie OSTs in the sense that they’re all moderately polished, overly compressed, and scooped in the mids for the vocals, as if trying to present every voice as a potential “star.”

Coincidence is currently #50 in Amazon’s Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Literary Fiction.  It doesn’t take much to rise through Literary Fiction.  Today (May 17th) is my grandfather’s, brother’s, and aunt’s birthdays.  Only two thirds of them are still breathing.  And only a half of those do I care about.  So in honor of my brother’s 31st, the man who inspired Chris Acker a.k.a. Chris Robins in Coincidence, the ebook is having its last free KDP day.  After these 90 days are up, I’m dropping the KDP and putting it up on Smashbooks again.  I don’t expect much from there, but the option will be available.

So I’m reading the nonfiction book One Red Paperclip, based on the story of Kyle MacDonald and his trades from a paperclip to a house.  Someone left a stolen library copy in the cafeteria at work, so I figured what the hell, eh?  The story itself is amazing.  The places the project takes Kyle blows my mind.  But two things are constantly in my mind when this book’s open:  First off, Kyle repeatedly presents himself as an unreliable narrator.  But second…Christ, I hate this guy’s voice.  If ever I met Kyle MacDonald, I have the strong inclination that I’d want to punch him in the face.  I’m not normally a violent man, but just the thought that this man exists…and speaks…and no one’s trying to stop this?  It hurts me.  This level of hippie douchebaggery is simply unacceptable.

So the whole thing is making me paranoid about my own voice.  I’m already iffy on Candy’s voice in Project: Temperance.  Alpha’s going to be fun.  He’s basically an everyman, but he’s a little more on the edge of things, where people like to read (but not necessarily go).  The wannabe killer’s psychotic, and who doesn’t like a psycho from first person perspective?  But Candy?  Candy’s a middle-aged mom who’s lost her job and she’s…well, she’s just there.  Things happen to her; she’s not really doing much.  I keep thinking there’s got to be a twist for her.  There has to be an angle.  But I haven’t seen it.

Since I’m more of a pantser, I’m thinking maybe (just maybe) an angle will appear when I’m actually elbow-deep in Candy’s world.  But now I’m second-guessing whether she should even be included.  I mean, she’s central to the rest of the story, but her personality isn’t.  It’s more her placement than anything else.  Anyone else can fill that void.  There’s still time.  There’s still hope.  There’s still a chance to get to sleep and receive enough rest to feel adequate for Friday.  Just sayin’.  Ugh.

“And I never wanted anything from you except everything you had and what was left after that too” – Florence & the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over”