I Talk Funny

I talk funny, but that's OK.

My syntax is flawed natural. I don't oft say the "t" in don't. I use the past tense of the verb with the past perfect when I use the contraction. I've ate dog in China. I make up words on the fly and define them in the same context. We've got the unabridged OED for a reason, and that's Shakespeare.

I pronounce words the way they sound and feel instead of the way everybody talks on the news. I create voices, I collect accents, I speak from simple English and simple grammar to complex English and gnomic.

Because I've worked places where people dain't English speakers (including the United States), I up and down and around my English level to match the audience, instead of expecting the audience to match me. Unless they're supposed to be trying, in which case we'll make it hard correct.

Nobody wins when nobody communicates, and nobody has fun when we all communicate the same way. Play with a language and it'll play with you.

We haven't got no prescriptivists 'round here.

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Book covers, people. Horrible book covers. Where are the artists come publishing time? I'm not just talking about Fantasy chain-mail bikinis, I'm talking Science Fiction books without matching covers. Any publishable genre book will have a Hook Image tailor-made for the cover.

Here's a good cover. I can't find the book (if it even exists), but I can imagine it's my type of book.

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2000 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long To Die" - in progress (~1/18)

Lived Too Long To Die

Today I began "Lived Too Long To Die", a science fiction book, with a bang of productivity. My output goals for this project are 2000 words a day, each day, until I hit 90,000 words or the plot ends, whichever comes second.

It doesn't have to be Perfect, it just has to be Good. And I write Good. As that last sentence just proved.

Captain Frank Evers leads an eclectic survey team to break the Quarantine around Earth after generations of silence. Can the mission succeed after what they discover on the surface, or will they be trapped amongst the Sol remnants of humanity forever? More importantly, can Professor Kelly Qu draw the taciturn captain out of his shell long enough to find Love against the backdrop of a ruined planet?

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"Mr. Toob, it's hard for me to say this..."

"Give it to me straight, Doc! Don't sugarcoat it."

"Your problem is that you're a tiny man who breathes water and can't sit up in your own tube habitat."

"Oh no!"

"Also I'm not a doctor, I'm a chef. And those flowers? Garnish."

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3000 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long To Die" - in progress (~1/30)

Bitsy Pollo

There's a folder I have labelled simply "Bitsy Pollo" and inside are all the most inane of my many ideas. Today, let's reach into the folder and display a few.

It was the first day of the vernal equinox and Bitsy Pollo was scared.

"The Mystery of the Ghost and How He Died: A Mystery Short Story in Two Acts. Also the Ghost Tells a Werewolf Story."

Billy was tall and handsome, with one eye for the ladies and the other eye for himself. Cross-eye Billy, they called him.

"Darling Simony, why'd you have to go and pet the lion? Why?"

Will she be able to use her economics degree for Good this time, instead of Evil? And then find LOVE?!?

Hey-a-lou, in the day: I jazz while I write, and then rock the night.

An agoraphobia monster: it's a monster that takes up the entire outside world. And is made of a breathable jello material ("The Wobbling, THE WOBBLING"). It's like being snowed in...by monsters.

A butterfly kicking a dolphin. The full moon is in the background. Were-butterflies came to mind. 

A planet where butterflies evolved from men?!?

That is all.

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Finished up the Tree Spirit story and sent it into the aether. I like how it turned out, dark without being gloomy and with a firm sense of place. Classy. In other submission news, I'm making an exception to my Pro Rates Only policy in submitting a story to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Who wouldn't want that name amongst their writing credits? You'd never have to explain that you were an SF writer ever again.

The sexy conclusion.

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2000 words? OK
Short Story "Moving In, Moving On" - finished, submitted

Writing in Heat

I've writ this erotic scene, the first of two in this short story. I had to take it slow, building up the tension until he's about ready to and then she and finally...fizzle.

This is Character Development intercourse, which is like sex but with a lot more foreplay. In this case, it's important for the reader's understanding of the viewpoint character's mental situation.

Besides that, though, the tree spirit is a character in her own right (even if she's never the viewpoint character). I want to craft her motivations and then conceal them in ambiguous cluelets throughout the story for the careful reader. This scene sets off the first two and sets up the final two.

No, her name is not Ms. Tree.

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The Tree Spirit Story will be finished tomorrow. It's a pretty leisurely plot, but I haven't got in the zone with it. It's all for the good though, because it's a story that required a little real world research for me to be intellectually satisfied. I want to recruit a couple Alpha Readers to read this and the Gonzo Futurism story. Both will already have been sent out to markets when you read them, but they were experiments...

This girl isn't my tree spirit, but she could be?

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500 words? Yes
Short Story "Moving In, Moving On" - in progress (~2/3)

Fast, Complex, Instrumental

There are many tricks I have for sustained continuous creative typing, but the most portable is fast complex  instrumental jazz. For example, "Inside & Out" played by David Jones:

This piece in particular has several advantages besides speed and complexity:
-a driving rhythm, but not a continuous beat.
-a short pause for breath, followed by a more frenetic section.
-it becomes more focused near the end.
-applause.

All of these mirror the rhythm and style of writing I need to have in the back of my mind

In my quest to roll out my Next Better Million, I have to keep my three hours of active writing a day intense, and my goal is to regularly be typing that whole time, instead of only when I'm on a roll.

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This is the most realistic story I've ever written, and probably the most literary.  I consider Literary Fiction to be a genre that focuses on modern characters, real world settings, and Feelings. It is about exploring Descriptive Language as opposed to Concepts. Leave aside the tree spirit and this one is on the cusp of Literary Fiction. Leave in the tree spirit and we're still talking Magical Realism as opposed to Fantasy.

This could be the short story art.

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500 words? Yes
Short Story "Moving In, Moving On" - in progress (~1/2)

All Coming Together

A "Big Plot" is coming together piece by piece in my mind as I slam words out of my keyboard. Several former ideas and abandoned stories are merging together in a roiling Big Crunch of Good, which will soon blast out in a Novel Big Bang, exploding into the universe that is quality genre fiction, all the while kidnapping the promising characters trapped in half-baked stories, subsuming their half-remembered plots of old into a glorious tapestry of tapestrontaneity.

I'm going to steal my own comment on Alex J. Kane's blog post because it applies to the remainder:

/My theory goes as follows:

Bam! The Singularity occurs. That is, humans can shed their bodies for more immortal coils. It’s very expensive so only the very rich can afford it at first.

So, there’d be rich immortals, middle class techs, and poor laborers for a while. The Singularity continues, becoming cheaper and cheaper at a faster and faster rate until everybody can afford it.

And since the technology also improves, it’s possible that the late adopters might be the best off in the eternity that lies ahead.

Ah, but is not delayed poetic future social justice future poetic social justice denied?/

After I finish this ghost story, I'm going to settle into writing the book-provisional title "The Apocalypse of Frank Evers"-taking off from the cast of characters I wrote in a novelette that failed to satisfy me. I'm calling this the expansion of what was Meant To Be.

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Here's the highlights: Independent Space Scouts, the Singularity "Incomplete Utopia" Revolution, Clipper Ships, Fast Zombies, Post-post-Apocalypse, Persistent Virtual World, Romance?!?

Combining my love of the Singularity with my love of clipper ships is my idea of a good time. Also, both concepts have a small carbon footprint.

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500 words? Yes
Short Story "Moving In, Moving On" - slow but steady, in progress (~2/5?)

Upping the Ante

I've upped the ante on the story I want to tell.

The skeleton story is: lonely guy finds a ghost girl living in his house, becomes more confident dealing with the outside, the ghost moves on. Everybody called, they want their plot back.

Ante! The protagonist is a man recovering from a Major Depressive Episode. He has an enervating mental illness that isolates him from the world. I can describe that.

The trick and the challenge and the bluff is whether I can write it so that anybody will care, whether at the end of the set-up the reader thinks: "This guy needs help, but he's got nobody because he's isolated in a vicious cycle."

Needless to say: heavy stuff, but worth the high risk of failure.

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The Girl is not a classic ghost but a tree spirit. This not only better fits the setting, but also allows me to neatly pull a reversal on the classic ghost story plot wherein the protagonist tries to find out what the ghost needs to move on. I'm shocked-Shocked!-that searching for "Girl Spirit" on the Internet produces results the majority of which are in the prurient interest. And don't even bother searching "Dryad". That's even worse.

Ignore the wings...and everything else.

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1000 words? Yes
Short Story "Moving In, Moving On" - discovery, in progress (~1/5)