The Big City, Day Two

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I'm still in the capital, going crazy. At this point I've probably had a little bit too much fun and want to go somewhere less congested so I can think straight. My question for you is: You're an adventurer, a highly skilled wizard even. You've traveled the length and breadth and a good portion of the depth of the worlds accessible to you, and you know that nobody you knew before your travels will ever understand. Can you go home again, or has home become wherever you are that day?

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long To Die"

- - - -

Reading - ?

*120

The Big City, Day One

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I'm off to the metropolis for a bit of adventure. Whether I'm lost at this very moment is up to your imagination. Also up to your imagination is this question: You're the first interstellar transport company, shuttling supplies and goods between the three Human colony systems and Earth. What's your most profitable trade route and cargo?

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long To Die"

- - - -

Reading - ?

*119

The Artless Dodger

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I apologize for nothing! Could this webcomic o' mine be the xkcd killer we've all been waiting for?

Except the goofy format. I forgot that Blogger doesn't like images and I wanted to keep the regular post layout, so I chopped up the comic strip and made it work. Later templates will improve on that so it doesn't look so ugly.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long To Die"

- - - -

Reading - ?

*118

The Littlest Barnacle

There's a certain joy to be had in making a silly title for a story and just rolling with it. In my newest short story "The Littlest Barnacle", an orphan boy stows away on a succession of spaceships and has adventures throughout the galaxy. It's very picaresque.

Unique, as far as I can tell, for the fact that the boy has no special powers or mechanical prodigy or really any skills of any use to anybody aside from being sneaky and a thief. He's an orphan, it's not like they have schools.

Can Jules avoid languishing on the Planet of Slaves? Find out whenever it gets published!

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116 Posts
42 with 0 Comments (i.e. Boring)
Post Failure Rate 36%

I want to bring that down to 20%. That's probably a good benchmark for a daily blog.

Most Commented Post: Vegetables. Probably because vegetables are awesome.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long To Die"
Short Story "The Littlest Barnacle"

- - - -

Reading - ?

*117

Impatience

(Note to the e-published: It's not actually necessary to check your sales stats every day. Or at all, ever, really. So don't do it. Take the various Dashboards out of your favorites and ignore them except for once every three months or so. Get back to writing.)

My theory of writing and, indeed, life is that if you do it enough, you'll eventually get better or you'll quit or, indeed, die. I intend to be as productive as possible. A major goal of mine is to have one-hundred short stories e-published ASAP, and since nowhere near all of my stories are even in the epub box, that means I've got to write at least two-hundred short stories.

It's doable! Once I get my brain in the right groove, I can knock out a short story in a day, know whether it's any good upon waking up, and if it's good proofread it the next day. I just need to keep that up for days on end. Or at least every weekend if I want to take the long view. I mean, c'mon: You throw enough stuff out there, and there'll be something for everybody.

Success will smile on you if you just let it roll free and proliferate. Just like nuclear weapons.



"What can we do to increase the destructive effect...?"

Get to it, writers.

Link

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Aww, she's reading in the park. It's been a long time since I've seen anybody sitting down and reading in public, besides newspapers. It's also been a long time since I've been to a proper park. Reading in the jungle is a different experience.  

(Note: I haven't actually read the eBook I've linked to there, this was just the first image that popped up on a search for "Smashwords" that wasn't the logo or dirty. It's free, though, for what it's worth.)

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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long To Die"
- - - -
Reading - ?

*116

You Don't Have to Believe

You don't have to believe in what you write, you just have to suspend your disbelief that your characters believe it, and you have to ignore your own personal beliefs when you're writing a Story. When you're writing Biting Satire (good) or a Political Tract (bad, or at least lame), disregard this message.

I don't like to spend a lot of time reading fiction guessing the writer's political affiliation. If I do know, I will ignore it. If it's impossible to ignore, I will consult the Biting Satire vs. Political Tract paradigm to see if I can continue reading.

Lit Crit approaching its worst devolves into a discussion of the writer's autobiography rather than the writer's literature. That's the realm of History/Political Science (or more likely Pop Psychology) and is great fun, but not really about Writing.

Speaking of Literature, I need to write something really pretentious just to get it out of my system. Here's an excerpt of something I've started writing. Recorded in the middle of the night whilst drunk.

115 - Dreams, Loss, Loneliness

This is going to be awesome! It might even count as "slipstream".

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I have a friend who deliberately pronounces "manga" as "mango". Just to be weird. Fine by me, it's a silly word anyways, and mango are delicious.

Here's my new rule, comics from Japan: What?

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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long To Die"
Short Story "Dreams, Loss, Loneliness"
- - - -
Reading - ?

*115

Don't Quit Your Day Job

It's annoying, but I can't justify becoming a full-time writer yet. It's not the money, it's that I still can't trust myself to do...well, this:

Kevin J. Anderson's Mathematics of Productivity. Essentially, his 2600 hours of writing a year boils down to a 50 hour work-week. And that's just on books.

Frankly, I'm a lightweight. I piss away my free time, and it's unacceptable.

The Acceptable Uses of David's Time: Reading every article on The New York Times, Arts & Letters Daily and SciTech Daily every day counts as research, that's an hour per day max. Reading the Harvard Business Review? 2 hours a month. Updating the blog daily is good tech practice and focuses my Writing thoughts, that's on average half an hour. Complex posts like Lazy Writer Cooks push the average up. Catching up on my blogroll? 30 minutes. My monthly flurry of critiques at Critters? 6 hours a month.

That's about it. Everything else is a waste of time if I want to be a real Writer. So...


David's Goal: Double my writing workweek from 20 hours to 40 hours and maintain that through 2011. Mostly by not watching TV and turning off the Internet. I shall procure a kitchen timer that goes "ding".

Of course, I like my day job. But that's not the point.

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An update on the posts A Writer's Tools and Cover Art! For color palette tools, try Eclipse Palette. It's small, convenient, and doesn't get in the way.

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Apropos of nothing, here's a sample of the horrors that I encounter during my day job:


Ah, jeez. That was just mean. I promise never to inflict that on you again.

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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
- - - -
Reading - ?

*114