Iconoclast

No talking of writing today, other than to say it’s coming along.  I awoke today realizing that yesterday I worked on writing things all day.  First I edited, then I blogged, then I worked on buildings, then I worked on my Camp Story.  As the song says, same as it ever was.

But I have something else to chat about today.

I want to talk Time Ladies.

If you are a bit of a geek like me, you know about the upcoming Changing of the Time Guard on Doctor Who.  Matt Smith, aka He’s One More, He’s Eleven, is leaving to find gold at the end of the movie rainbow.  As has happens many times before, there is not only the search for the next actor who would be The Doctor, but a lot of betting and speculating, including who the fans would love to see take over the TARDIS.

Sure, people would like to see someone high profiled take over, but there’s this thing called “money” that prevents that from happening.  That means having to go with actors who are not going to break the budget, and you’re seeing names on the short list like Julian Rhind-Tutt, Emun Elliott, Richard Coyle, Burn Gorman, and the person who has been tipped as the favorite for the while, Rory Kinnear.

Yesterday another name popped up on the short list, and if you listen to some of the report, the name is close to, if not at the top of the short list.  And that name is Sheridan Smith.  If this were true, then for the first time the producers of the show are considering an actress for the role, and for the first time in fifty years (okay, not fifty in a row, but you know what I mean), we might have a Time Lady running her fingers over the TARDIS console whispering, “Hello, Sexy.”

Me and a few of my fangirl friends were like, “Yes, bring it!”, when the news came out.  Since the show was revived there’s been a lot of changes that couldn’t have happened during the first three decades.  And now that we know regenerating means not only getting a new body, but perhaps a new gender (blame Neil Gaiman for that one, folks), some of us are like, “Hey, isn’t it time we had a lady at the controls?”

However . . .

I’ve seen a couple of people indicate they wouldn’t like this drastic a change, that they might have a problem with gender switching, that the show doesn’t do well when it’s experimenting, that such a move would turn fans off and hurt ratings.  Now, I don’t want to stereotype, but of the people who’ve said these things to me, how many of those comments came from guys?  Strangely enough, the answer is all.  I know:  I’m shocked.

As a long-time viewer–and by that I mean I’ve seen every episode two or three times–I have to look at the show and think:  when hasn’t the show had change that could turn fans off?  I mean, lets forget for a moment the the First Doctor considered killing one of his companions with a rock, but lets look at change:

Every time there’s a regeneration, there’s change and experimentation.  After the First became the Second, and then the Third, the producers could have said, “Hey, play it like the first guy,” but they didn’t.  They went from being an old pain in the ass (which the First Doctor was), to “a Dandy and a Clown,” to quote the old pain in the ass.  Then he went all, what was the phrase?  ”Teeth and Hair”, as the Third Doctor said.  Then he was some punk kid in a cricket outfit, and who thought some guy under thirty could do the role justice?

Then we go to the U-boat Captain and Doctor Emo and The Bow tie Hispster, and you get the idea:  there’s change, and with change you get something different than what came before.  The show runners are experimenting, and either the fans adapt, or they leave.  Most people who still pine for the Tenth Doctor Fjords have no idea what it was like when Tom Baker left and that new kid, Peter, took over.  I mean, what did he ever do for the show?  (Note:  that last was sarcasm.  I know what he has done.)

Companions.  Lets talk change and experimenting.  First couple of doctors had some good companions, some bad, and some who got chucked out an airlock because no one knew what to do with them.  Then the Third comes along and what do you get?  First you get the Lady Scientist, which totally raised the bar for companions.  Then you get the Doctor Who version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, aka Jo Grant–and why the hell she isn’t getting pulled into the Fiftieth shows I don’t know, but that’s another post.  Jo was a smart, cut, mini skirt go-go boots wearing lady, and had no problem using Beatles lyrics to describe the Doctor.  (She also posed naked with a Dalek, but that’s also another post.)

And who replaced Jo?  Why, one of those . . . Feminists!  Which was exactly what Sarah Jane was.  Don’t believe me?  Go back and check.  As popular as she became, producers found that she was scaring off the 25-45 male demographic, so when Sarah Jane said bye-bye, they replaced her with a Savage in a Loincloth and Leather Boots.  Hellloooo, Leela.

Every time there’s a new companion, there’s change, there’s experimentation.  Some good, some bad, some you kill with fire so hard their take out dinosaurs.  And some you love because they blow shit up with home made explosives.

Those were the old ways, however.  Today, we have–

Interracial couples.  Interspecies couples.  Gay couples.  Interspecies lesbian couples.  Bisexual con men (RTD’s description of Captain Jack, not mine.)  Werewolf royalty.  Human Daleks.  An episode considered the best of the revival that hardly has the Doctor in it.  Chav companions.  People of Color companions.  Annoying companions that saw death threats sent to the producers.  Horny companions.  A somewhat horny TARDIS.  Married companions.  Worst of all, you have The Doctor snogging!  Sometimes in the TARDIS!  And not only that . . . you have companions making TARDIS babies!  Does no one remember the First Rule of Doctor Who:  ”No hanky panky inside the TARDIS.”  We won’t mention that the TARDIS baby ends up marrying the Doctor after making friends with her much younger parents, who she originally got to start dating, but only after we first saw her die . . .

It could be said that since 2005 the show has been . . . experimenting.  How’s it doing, you say?  Pretty good, if the fans are any indication.

If after all of that one might say that having The Doctor turn into a woman for their eleventh regeneration (or is it their eleventh?  Dun, du, duuuuuu!) could be a mistake, that it might turn fans off, that it might hurt the show because it’s a little to experimental . . . the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but may lie somewhere inside.

The great thing about science fiction, the thing that sets it apart for most other fiction, is that it you can take chances, you can push things, you can experiment.  Look at every great science fiction story, and you’ll see where the writer took things and turned them beyond eleven, and not only said, “What if?” they considered “if” a bit too mundane, and went further.

Maybe it’s just me, though.  Maybe the idea of swapping genders isn’t that big of a deal to me–and trust me, it isn’t.  I’ve seen that in games, I’ve seen that in stories–I’ve written stories where it happens.  I could see how it could open up a whole new side to The Doctor, and not because she’d get to wear a frilly dress now and then.

I mean, there are so many ways one could take that . . .

If only I had Stephen’s number, I’d be musing him out right now.

The Great Gates of Kiev

First off I have to say:  the WordPress make over is a bit strange, slipping into some Art Deco style black and white craziness that, for some, has been a bit off-putting.  But I am used to the strange and unusual, so I’m not nearly as bothered by this as some.  I’ve been in the software trade for some time, so change is both expected and dreaded.  In the end, I’ve had worse things happen, so move along.

Now that Welcome to the Fishbowl is something of a reality, I’ve started the task of bringing it together.  The world is so-so there–and by that I mean I have a majority of the basics down, it’s the little things that remain that will bring things into sharp clarity.  Yesterday I show the hospital wing from the main hall of my school, and after the post went up I spent some more time putting things together.  By the afternoon I’d arrived at the following conclusions:  one, because I was moving my story from a universe that wasn’t really of my making (yes, these things happen), and into my own private universe, there were things that were never in the building that I was now needing to add–like, say, an office for the head of school security, and a place from which to monitor everything.  And two . . . this damn place is huge.

Let us gander upon what I have so far.  As you can see, I’ve maybe half the second floor in place, and I’ve started putting in the library, which is going to be beyond that wall in the back of the building.  From the doors in the lower right hand corner, to the wall all the way towards the top, the building is one hundred and sixty meters long.  If you don’t do metric, that’s about five hundred and twenty-five feet.  To put that into some kind of perspective, I could fit this building inside Indiana’s own Lucas Oil Stadium, which is about two hundred and seventy meters long by my careful Google Map measuring.  Except my Great Hall will never seat sixty thousand people, nor require a tax on food so millionaire owners can keep the lights on.  It’s a world all unto itself.

My characters are developing as well.  The story has a huge cast, though maybe a half-dozen of them will get any sort of face time.  Still, when I think about the characters that do have a spoken part, and who end up becoming important to the main characters–I’m looking at over a dozen.  Easy.

Where do I get names?  Scrivener has a name generator that allows you to randomly generate first and last names based upon gender, nationality, and even letters of the alphabet, so when you need the name of a German woman whose last name starts with an E, no problems.  Then once you see something you like, move the name to your short list and copy it off for later use.

Or do as I did this morning.  I needed the names of three people who are part of the Foundation, and whom play a part in the story.  In the process of setting up their cards in Scrivener, I came up with Mr. Mayhew, Ms. Rutherford, and Mr. Gabriel.  If you know me, you know where those names came from.

The gates of the story are ahead, and I’m approaching slowly.  Won’t be long before I enter the city proper.

Or the school for that matter.

From the Beginning

When I start a new story, it seems as if I go through this intense period of “What the Hell Am I Going to Do?” thinking that can, at times, be a little madding.  I can have a title for my story, and still not have any idea where the story is going to head.  Or I’ll have a concept, but no characters and no title.  Worse yet, I’ll know the characters and concept, and even a good direction for a story, but I have no title.

Camp NaNo put me in the position of thinking about a project.  I had an idea; I had characters; I even had the story.  What I lacked was a title.  I know this sounds strange, but I almost never start writing until I have a title.  This is a habit I got into a long time ago, picked up from a couple of writers that I read quite often in my early years.

That’s where I was last night, up until about seven PM.  That was when inspiration hit me, and the “Putting the Project Together Rag” began playing.  And when I was through, maybe around nine-thirty, I’d created what you see to your right.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Fishbowl.

I know what you’re thinking:  Fishbowl?  And what is this thing at the top:  The Foundation Chronicles?  There’s a reason for this, so sit back and listen up.

The Foundation (yeah, I know, it’s original, move along) is something I started playing with months ago:  an organization that sorts of started out as a club for super scientist, and eventually evolved into something else more . . . paranormally.  Is that a real word?  It is now.

So I have my organization that looks for strange young minds to bring into their fold, and once I knew who they were, then it became a matter of figuring out what to do with them.  And then I remembered something from real life . . .

When my daughter started 6^th Grade–or middle school, take your pick–the administration, and the kids, refereed to the experience as “being in the fishbowl”.  While they were in the same school as 7^th and 8^th graders, they were kept as segregated from them as possible.  The idea was to get them as used to middle school, and the transition of going from class to class, as easily as possible, without having to deal with a lot of interaction from the other grades.

When I applied that idea to my new student, it made sense.  In my story you have thirty-two kids out of thirty-three coming into a school not knowing anything about the world they’re entering, and the transition will be hard enough without upper class kids getting in their way.  Ergo . . . they get fishbowled.

This is my project, this is my story.  My goal is thirty-five thousand words for July, and then I’ll shut the story down, work on something else–at this moment I think I’m going to edit Couples Dance and get it ready for publishing–then when the Big NaNo Dance starts up in November, I’ll pull The Foundation Chronicles out again and add my fifty thousand plus words to finish the story.

Oh, and did you notice the folder “Book Two”?

Yeah, I love Scrivener.

 

Many Too Many

There are things that will be said below that some may find a little too distasteful to enjoy, so here is the obligatory warning that you may want to bail and find something else to read today.  I have no suggestions for you this morning:  just like NATO troops stuck in Poland at the beginning of the game Twilight 2000, you’re on your own.

The other day I posted a link to the blog of Chuck Wendig, Terrible Minds.  Chuck is a writer, and a damn good one.  He is famous for his, “25 Things–” posts where he’ll give you twenty-five reasons why . . . well, fill in the blanks.  As I said, Chuck is a writer, a damn good one, but in the course of his writing, Chuck can get a little profane.  It’s his style.  I’m used to it, as I grew into my teens reading New Wave science fiction, and you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a f-bomb or a sex scene.

That’s not always the case with everyone, and there was one person who posted in the Facebook comment, “I’d love to share this, but there’s too much swearing.  A true wordsmith doesn’t need to talk like that; it’s lazy writing.”  Yes, I’ve heard this one before; I even had the same rap laid on me after my 4 May, 2011, blog post, simple because I said something along the lines of “Shit got real,” and a few other things.

First off, lets look at the definition of the word, “wordsmith”.  Here you go:  1.  A fluent and prolific writer, especially one who writes professionally.  2.  An expert on words.  3.  (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) A person skilled in using words.  4.  An expert in the use of words, esp. a professional writer.  Okay, then.  That’s pretty much Chuck to a “T”.  Professional writer; expert on words; person skilled in using words, especially a professional writer.

So where does it say they can’t swear?

One of the writers I’ve followed most of my life–one of the writers whose words I grew up admiring–is Harlan Ellison.  While opinions vary wildly about his personal life, as a writer there were few who could match him story for story.  He used to write about writing, and I tried to take to heart the things he said.  He also swore a lot, but there was a reason for that.

One of the things he stated was, and I’m paraphrasing, “I’m a fan of the King’s English, and one must adhere to those rules when writing.  I’m also a fan of the People’s English, and if you want to make your characters believable, you must capture they way they speak perfectly.”  In other words, if you want your characters to sound like, you know, real people, you need to have them speak the way a real person speak.  If they are a “good” person, then they’ll probably be somewhat circumspect in their dictation.  If not, there may be a good chance they’re gonna swear like a son of a bitch.

It’s hardly lazy writer, either.  Seriously.  Try to write a story where you have a character who swears, who throws around “fuck you” like they’re picking lint from their jacket, and construct their dialog in a way that they don’t sound like a six-year old who’s just discovered the word “shit”.  If you’re not a person who’s been exposed to this manor of speakings–or you don’t have a potty mouth like me–then you’re going to find writing believable dialog for someone like that difficult.  And before you say, “I’d never write anything like that,” sit down a make a list of, say, twenty-five professions that your characters might possess at some point in a story.  I can tell you, without looking at your list, there’ll probably be a third of the jobs on that list that’ll have characters who find themselves clutching the foreheads at some point and mumbling, “Fuck this job.”  Trust me; I’ve probably had that job.

Watch Glengarry Glen Ross and marvel at the construction of Mamet’s dialog.  Watch the “Coffee is for closers” monologue, and listen not to the words, but the emotion and feelings behind the words.  When Blake turns on Dave Moss and yells, “Fuck you!  That’s my name!”, his disdain for Moss couldn’t be more evident, and it becomes the set up for him to really put Moss in his place.  Then take Trainspotting, and watch how the foul-mouthed Scottish junkies and roughens (who are played by Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dr. Nicholas Rush, Moaning Myrtle, and the voice of Merida) are able to express themselves so eloquently.  I mean, “The Scottish are shite!” is pure bloody poetry.

Then go watch any movie where someone say fuck and shit every minute, where the thought is, “Ooooh, edgy!”, and you’re right back to the six-year old who’s now discovered “bastard” and is going to use it every thirty seconds.

Think it’s lazy writing?  Go ahead:  write up some paragraphs with people swearing.  You can send them to me.  I’ll tell you what I think.

And I won’t even swear back at you.

Counting Out Time

If you don’t write, but you spend all your time thinking about what you’re going to write, is there a word count?  A great philosophical question, if you ask me.  But you don’t have to ask me, because I’m telling you–

Not really.  But it certainly feels that way.

I’m in the next phase of writing, which is doing a lot of thinking about what I want to write.  Camp NaNo is looming, and I’m working out the plot in my head.  It’s not easy, ’cause even if I do have a good start, I’m nowhere near where I need to be to start on a story.  But give me a few more days and I’ll have something.  I know I will–

Maybe I’ll even have a title.  Damn you, creativity.  Damn you.

So yesterday was a lot of thinking and playing.  I’m going over 747 designs, because I love doing that stuff, and I never realize just how many different layouts there are–and how few airlines actually use them these days.  But an Airbus 380–oh, jeez, those things are incredible!  Too bad I can’t use one, because . . . oh, I totally could, since they were around before 2011.  But I don’t want to go there, because I have my big airplane, and I’m going to stick with that.  Don’t get greedy just because you want something that’s going to look fantastic.

Then again . . .

(There’s a simple reason for using a 747 and not something like an A340-600.  It’s called, “Having a dramatic scene,” and there is only one way to pull it off.  Though . . . never mind.  I’ll figure it out.)

No matter:  I’m in design phase.  I’ve got my brain cooking and I’m coming up with things.  Next comes the writing down of things, and that will probably take a full two weeks of my times.

Then comes the writing.  Oi.

I’ve set my goal as twenty-five thousand words this time.  I’m thinking to do this as a start, then maybe finish things off come November, cause adding fifty thousand words and bringing my novel to seventy-five or eighty thousand words would be a good novel.  Yes, I know:  NaNoWriMo is suppose to be for “new work”, but in the words of one crazy person I used to know, “I make my own rules, NaNo!  You can’t tell me what to do!”  At least I write . . .

I have a condo to design today as well, and maybe work on another building.  I’m finding it easy to figure out how to write scenes if I can actually see something on my screen, and not necessarily just in my head.  I have Annie to blame for that, because she made me do that!

Speaking of Annie . . . last night my dreams were insane.  I was wandering about Paris looking to assassinate someone–no, really, I Was a Teenage Hitgirl.  Wearing Gothic Lolita outfits, too, which didn’t make me stand out too much, but apparently no one seemed to care, because I wandered the street and looked cute as hell–and ended up smoking someone, not sure who, but I totally did.

What was different about all this was at the start of my adventure I sent off a message to someone, and when I got back to my computer they replied to me, not in the handled I’d sent my message to, but with their real name.

The reply?  ”Our love must be unbound.”

Sometimes my dreams surprise the hell out of me.

 

Land of Confusion

Put another tick in the “completed” column.  Fantasies in Harmonie pulled into First Draft City, found a good hotel, and decided to shack up for a while, ’cause the diner across the street has damn good coffee.

It was a good afternoon of writing, and since I said I was gonna finish that story, I was for sure gonna finish the sucker.  Two thousand, six hundred words later I was finished, and it was a good thing.  Not because it was finished, but because my mindset had changed drastically over the last week, and where I had been pretty down on both myself and the story, as I wrote the final chapter I returned to the conclusion that while the story might not be down and dirty, smoking hot dirty porn, it was pretty good fantasy erotica, and I could give myself a pat on the back for completing another story.

‘Cause if you don’t know, completing a story is pretty much as important–if not more–than starting one.  And if you’re gonna start one, you better finish it, love.

Fantasies in Harmonie is not only finished, but I’ve got it out to a couple of beta readers already.  Yes, Cassie is quick on this one, because it’s a pretty clean story–you know what I mean–and after a couple of edits and a cover, I can work the world of smut with this beauty.  Maybe it’s not as good as a story about programming the girl next door to be your perfect sex slave, but it’ll be good.

With that out of the way, it means I got–let me check the big clock . . . a little more than nineteen days before Camp NaNo is in session.  Which means I need do to research.  It means I need to build my world.

I means I need a title.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me right now.  Not that I need to spec out the school, or the teachers, or the students, or the curriculum, or . . . well, any number of things.  No, the thing that bothers me now is that I don’t have a title.  I have an idea and the bare bones of a plot, but I don’t have a title, and just like Harlan, I’m strange about starting without a title.  I did that with Kuntilanak, because I really had no idea what to call it before I got all original and named it after a creature in the story.  Since then I always have a title so I don’t have to go and rename the Scrivener file once I’m about ten thousand words into this thing.

However!  Part of the story takes place aboard a 747-400, and while doing one of those magical things called a “Google Search”, I found the Seat Guru site.  While my plane will be a charter flight, I have an idea of what a current 747-400 looks like, and I can–what’s that word again?  Oh, yeah:  Imagine.  I can imagine what the inside of my place will look like.

If I get too crazy I may just model my plane in 3D–

I’ve done worse.

Deep in the Motherlode

There are a number of things happening today, not the least of which is finally getting to this blog post.  I was going to start writing about eight; it’s now ten-thirty, and I have only myself to blame.  Part of it is due to looking at bad book covers.  Part of is due to being pulled away by every shiny thing that happens to cross my path.  Part of it is that it’s sticky outside today, and I feel it in my writing space.

But I’m here now.  All Hail the Great One!

When I crawled out of bed today I had Fantasies in Harmonie on my mind, because my life is pretty much like that.  No one else in bed with me, so wake up with my story.  Last night I finished all the sexy encounters that happened in the aftermath of one big event, so all that is left is to have the girls say goodbye and close it out, just as a story should.

While putting the story together in Scrivener I set up the chapters and gave each a little tag, as I always do.  For my last part, Part Four, where I am now, I had two chapters:  one of goodbyes, and one of followups.  And while getting up today, I thought about the writing I had ahead of me and went, “I don’t need that last chapter.  It’s going to take away from the story and and end up becoming superfluous.”

Which means the last chapter is dead.  Something I was going to do in the old last chapter gets done in the new last chapter, and that’s that.  End of story, write “The End”, move onto the next project, my Fantasies are over.  Sit on my twenty thousand words of erotica, it it later, and submit it to the big smut stand on the Internet.

Speaking of what’s next . . .

I’m off to camp again:  Camp NaNo July, that is.  I’ve already sent out my notices about who I want in my cabin, and I’m getting stuff ready for smores for those moments at night when we’re not writing.  It’s going to be fun, I tell ya–fun!

Then again, I have to come up with something to write in the next few weeks, don’t I?

I’ve a few ideas that I could do, all of which sound like–here it comes, I’m going to say it . . . novels.  I have lots of ideas that could be turned into novels, but if I write a novel now, does that mean I’ll be able to write another novel come November and the Big Party?  I even had another one pop up this morning and I need to get it written down before my mind completely spaces away.

I also have one particular story I could do that would make this a great Camp NaNo.  I’ve even been nudged in that direction by someone who knows me well, and knows the sort of stuff I write.  They even had a couple of words of inspiration for me:  ”Two witches”.

Hot lesbian witches . . . wait, sorry:  I’m not Charlie Sheen.

I need to get this erotica behind me today.  Then I can get my witch’s hat on and start thinking right.

 

Entanglement

The difference in a day or two does wonders for a person.  Because?  Well, sit tight, ’cause I’m going to tell you.

After yesterday’s post my mind was in, what I felt, the right place.  It’s been lovely here in the nether-lands of Chicago, and the windows are open, the sun is shinning, the breeze is lovely, and I got to call the cops on some smart ass kids who think when they tell you, “Go ahead, call the cops,” you won’t act upon their request.  Threat + Internet lookup + mobile phone = cops telling you to drag your crap out of the street, punk.

But that’s beside the point . . . I was writing again yesterday.  Yes, it came slowly, in fifty to one hundred word bursts.  Something I never realized until now, but finding the right words to describe emotions and sensation related to sex is hard work–it’s hard!  It’s one of the things that helps bring my writing to a crawl, because I don’t want to go back over my stuff later and rewrite everything.  I try to get it all right the first time.  Arthur Hailey, the author of Hotel and Airport, used to write five hundred words in an eight hour day, but that was his first, second, final, and polished draft, because he’d go over and over what he wrote until he got it right.  I don’t claim to be him, but I do enjoy getting it as right as possible before I start editing.

I kept at it, though, and by the time I’d reached my just over nine hundred word limit before heading to bed, I had a pretty good scene going.  So good that I’ll finish it up today and make sure I get started on the penultimate section today.  I stopped just short of the border of Novella, so I’ll get my passport ready and head on into the country today.

But something else happened.  Something . . . well, not wonderful, but it made me feel good.

My current Work in Progress, Fantasies in Harmonie, was going to be a Camp NaNo story.  The tale is actually taking place during Camp NaNo July, and I’d taken the idea of writing in virtual cabins into real life, and having a group of lady writers getting together for a week of pajama time fun as only writers can have fun.  Obviously that didn’t happen, because here it is the end of the first week in June, and I’m close to closing this particular cabin.  My intention, therefore, was to pass on the Camp this year.  I’ve never done one, and I figured I’d save my time and energy for the Big One in November.

That was before I ran into someone I know and love–

I was hanging out on Facebook yesterday, and I spied a message from a friend–one who pretty much got me crazy on writing.  She was the one who helped me edit Kuntilanak, she was the one who more or less talked me into doing my first NaNo, which produced Her Demonic Majesty . . . we’re talkin’ Trusty Editor^tm.  And her message:  ”I’m doing Camp NaNo, wish me luck!”

Hold on there.  You’re going to camp and you’re going without . . . me?  I felt great for her, but at the same time my mind is flashing on sitting around in our shorts and take tops tapping away at our computers, and when the night comes we’re going over plot points while doing each other’s nails with mood polish.  (That exists:  I looked.  RESEARCH!)

Since I figured she need to hang out with at least one loser, I went and did it–I signed up for Camp.

What am I going to write?  I have no freakin’ idea.  Maybe I’m polish Couples Dance and get it ready for publication, because camp is looser and you can do that sort of thing.  Or maybe I’ll write something original.  Or maybe I’ll break into the cabin next to ours and do something naughty.

I don’t know.  I’ve never been to camp in my life.

I hear you’re suppose to have a good time . . .

Sound and Vision

It’s early afternoon, and I can’t believe I’m getting to my writing now.  Usually by this time I’ve had my saying of the day saved to the Internets, and I’m kicked back with lunch and/or some other insanity.  Today I’m running late because–why not?  Due to having to get out and pick up a few things?  Because of an annoying  ?  On account of pedantic discussion on Star Trek?  Or maybe . . . bacon?

Only time will tell.  Or not, ’cause timey whimy, you know?

In thousand words leaps Fantasies in Harmonie moves forward.  It was only suppose to be some quickie porn that I’d rip out and post in no time:  instead, it’s become of War and Peace of fetish fiction.  She now sits just short of sixteen thousand words, and in another fifteen hundred I’ll have to get out my passport and entered the Country of Novella, and I hear the greasy chuckle from here.

If you wonder what I’m talking about, read the afterword to Stephen King’s Different Seasons collection, where three of the four included stories have become some of King’s best adapted movie.  One of the lines he uses is, “Now, artistically speaking, there’s nothing at all wrong with the novella.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with circus freaks, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus.”  You get the point.

At the time King wrote those words (1982 or there about), finding a market for novellas was damn near impossible.  There were only a hand full of magazines that would tackle those stories, and by the end of the 1980′s they pretty much went the way of the dinosaur.  Or did they?  Just wait . . .

So rather than eight thousand words of hotness, I’m more like double that pleasure, and it’s likely I’ll start tripping into the twenty thousand lane before everything is over.  Been there, done that:  in fact, some fetish fiction I sold a couple of years back went the same way.  They were fantasy stories that ended up being long novelettes or short novellas, and after four of them I stopped because, at the time, I figured no one was ever going to read them outside of a few people who were into that sort of thing.

Now, about that place to publish . . .

So many publishing outlets dried up in the late Twentieth Century, but fast forward to the end of the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, and one sees self publishing taking off.  I remember people saying, “I ain’t buying one of those new fangled ebooks–only the real thing for me!” and emotions ran pretty high on both sides–but I knew that tech is one of those things that tend to stick around if they’re good, and ebooks were good.  I even bought one, and though I don’t use it much these days–I need a new battery–there are enormous advantages to having one–

Liking being able to take your kid to their soccer meet and sit in the stands reading Daddy’s Little Milk Maid and not worry in the least that you’re going to skev out everyone sitting around you.

It was Penn Jillette who pointed out that all new technology leads to porn.  After the Gutenberg Bible came a printing of the Karma Sutra; after the first movies came Le Coucher de la Mariée, a seven minute movie of a women doing a strip tease in a bathhouse, filmed in 1896, followed by El Sartorio, the first film to show sex acts, filmed in Argentina in 1907.  We have the Internet and . . . you really need to know?

With ebooks came eporn, and big or small, it sells.

Will my fantasy story sell.  Only time will tell.  Or not–

That timey whimy crap, I tell you.

It’s No Game

There has been a lot of playing around the last couple of days, and some yelling on the phone as well.  Why would one be yelling on the phone?  Because there’s someone on the other end who isn’t listening, that’s why.  That’s all short-term nonsense, however, and I expect things to go back to some semblance of normal by the end of the week.

Or a black hole will open and suck me into another dimension.  Anything’s possible at this point.

There’s been a lot of thinking going on between writing.  Most of said thinking isn’t about the new story, because I know what’s happening with that, and since I’ve mind mapped the story and I know the ending, all that is required is getting the middle parts written.  I’m into the sexy bits now, and while I’m only doing a thousand words a night, it’s fun getting into that stuff.  Right now I don’t feel like doing more than a thousand a day, but the end is already in my head, and I’m guessing that the totally erotic stuff happening now is going to be good for another three, four thousand words.

There’s the nagging feeling that I want to get into another story, a different story, soon.  I know I want to edit Replacements so I can get it ready for publishing, because the writing’s complete, it only needs a cover and some polishing and then it’s off to be self-published for fame and glory.  Sure, that’s why I’m a starving artist, don’t you know?

Beyond that–well, I’m thinking of getting Couples Dance out and starting the work on that as well.  Despite my emails I’ve heard nothing from the publisher that wanted a look at the manuscript, and I have to guess they’re either not interested, or they’ve went belly up.  Now that story, it’s a strange one.  If I can get that published alongside Replacements and Her Demonic Majesty, that’s three out of the four titles I set as a goal for this year, and it means there is still the possibility I can make Number Four happen before the end of the year.

There is the feeling, though–I want to do something science fictiony again.  Yes, I have science fiction stories that I could either write or edit for publishing, but I want to get back out into space.  I want to do something that is adventurous.  I don’t know why I’ve had this feeling kicking me about the back of my mind of late, but when I’m looking at the desktop of my computer I see my 3D rendering programs, and I want to get into one and start playing about with ship designs and the such.

I want to jump back into the sci fi game.  I want to do something that’s fun–maybe a bit of space opera wrapped up in some seriousness.  I want to do it and keep it “short” and see if it touches my mind.  I even have a character that would be perfect for this sort of story–

Maybe it’s time to pull her out and give her a run at the readers.

 

Moonage Daydream

The weather has cooled and isn’t as muggy as it was yesterday.  I know that sounds a ridiculous thing to say, given the way weather has lost it’s mind of late–though it’s not something I haven’t seen coming for a while.  But that’s a discussion for another time.  Right now it’s cool outside, and it’s going to say this way for a few days.  Cloudy, cool, rainy.

Perfect weather for writing.

I’m well into novelette territory now with Fantasies in Harmonie.  After watching Iron Man 2 with my daughter last night, I hit the Scrivener bricks about ten PM and wrote for an hour.  A thousand words later I found a good point to leave off until today, stared at the final word count, and proclaimed myself the worst smut writer in the world.

Lets define that, shall we?  I don’t mean “worse” as in I can’t write.  I can.  I write good, as some might say.  What I mean by “worse” is that this story is double the size of other stories I’ve seen, like The Boss, My Slut or Daddy’s Horny Step Daughter.  Then again, I’m not writing those stories:  I’m writing mine.

As one person told me, it’s gonna be a real story, not just get off sex.  Though there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s strange for me is my sleeping patterns these days.  When I go to bed I’m usually thinking of some story that I want to write, and when I wake up I find myself going over a scene from the current work in progress–usually as I lay there gathering my strength and wits.

That happened this morning.  I started coming awake in the dim light of this cloudy, gray morning, and here I have something bouncing around my head concerning one of my characters.  Now, I don’t know if it’s something that would fit her for this current story, but it’s damn sure something that could work for her in another story.  Yes, I think that way:  I’m always figuring in another story angle for characters even when I’m working on their current story.  (About the only one I haven’t done that with is Couples Dance because, damn . . .)

The images that assault me during that time–oh, my.  It’s an interesting time, since I have these ideas and scenes and feelings that enrapture me while I lay there, eyes half-closed, taking it all in.  Sometimes I feel like this is the best time for me to get my ideas in order, because things are coming at me fast and furiously, and I’ve had some of my best scenes hit me during the waking hours.

They can also be a little overwhelming at times, because my mind is wide open, and just about anything can happen during these moments.  These things wash over me and I lay there and take it in and take it apart.  I see what works and what doesn’t.  I think about what I want to keep and use and what I want to discard–

Sometimes I even get a story idea.

If only my day was this productive.

Whispered Conversations of Nothingness

Made it through the long weekend without incident.  Weather was cool and rainy, and there wasn’t a lot of eating.  I don’t have relatives in the area, so I stayed home.  The new week continues onward, as does life.

I was going to write yesterday, but you know how you get distracted by one thing, and you can’t walk away from it because it’s so shiny?  Yeah, it was like that yesterday afternoon.  I was working on a design for this school that will play a major part in a story I’m developing, and the more I put things on the map, the more real the place became.  Not to mention it takes a long time to put walls in place, and set up and model buildings, and lay down paths . . .

You get the idea.  Getting a world built is a lot of work, and there are times when that work gets in the way of something else you should do.

Still, there’s always time to write, and I was going to–until my right eye started burning about seven-thirty last night–

I get this every so often, where my eye will get irritated by something (still have no idea what I did), and then it waters and burns, then it starts to gunk up, at which point I have to clean it out, only to have it enter the same cycle about fifteen minutes later.  I’ve tried to write before when that happens, and it’s harder than hell to do anything when you’re wiping at your eye every two minutes, or you can’t even see out of it because it’s nearly closed up with something leaking out of one corner.

So I gave up trying to write.  I really gave up trying to do anything, because it was far too hard with my eye as it was.  Therefore it was time for bed . . .

I shouldn’t say I gave up on everything, because I was running a scene through my head, and I wanted to work out what a couple of characters were saying.  This is something I do, taking the part of my characters and working out dialog which, in turn, will help me with a scene and with what’s happening at some point in the story.

But this scene wasn’t for something that would appear in a hypothetical story a year from now.  Oh, no:  this was something from a few years down the line in the history of a couple of characters.  This was a talk between two women, in private, sitting in a pavilion on the edge of a small meadow as the sun is sinking behind them.  It’s quiet, they’re alone, and they’re discussing a subject one of them knows well–

Death.  And how one must sometimes kill.

I sat there in the dark, on the bed, feeling the cool outside air trickle into the room, hearing the light patter of rain on the stones in the back yard, and I worked out their conversation.  I spent maybe fifteen minutes taking their parts, talking out their feelings, their ideas, their concerns.  I knew who their were as I spoke, and as I started to lay back, I was still speaking one of the character’s parts, my voice growing softer as my eyes started to close . . .

It’s not every night you can take your characters to bed with you.  At least you’re never really alone at night when you’re a writer.