Category Archives: Kerfluffle
If I Could Have One Superpower…
Warning: Total comic-book-inspired geekery ahead. Like, full-on nerdgasm alert. Don’t judge me.
It’s 8 o’clock PM. I am getting ready for bed (yes, I go to bed at an hour that your grandparents would envy. The alarm clock starts going off at 4:30 every weekday morning so we can try to get up and exercise before work. No, it isn’t fun.). My wife is washing her face. She turns to look at me in the mirror, brow furrowed and face intense. “I have a question,” she says, using the tone that I know marks the beginning of a serious discussion. I put on my serious face, ready for a deep and thoughtful interaction. She pauses, then says, “If you could only have ONE superpower, what would it be?”
Whoa. This is heavy shit right before bed.
Holy Shit, Do I Need a Vacation
Hidey ho. For the past few days, I’ve been contemplating new blog posts. My last one, though, is a hard one to follow. I’ve struggled with writing some pointless angry rant about flip-flops or some other equally stupid shit when the last thing I wrote here was a heartfelt and painful goodbye to a friend I wasn’t ready to lose just yet. It just didn’t feel right to me. I’m sure if Carl was here, he’d insist that I write some stupid piece of shit drivel because that’s what I do, and he wouldn’t want me to change.
So I’m trying. It’ll be drivel, no doubt, and useless, but it’ll be something, at least. Read the rest of this entry
Title Contest WINNER Announcement!
The pulse-pounding excitement surrounding my Name a Book, Get Devoured contest has come to an end! After compiling close to a THOUSAND entries (uh, roughly estimated. It’s either 1,012 or 7, but it’s hard to say) they have been whittled down, mulled over, masticated, ruminated, regurgitated, and shifted to different stomach chambers for the final decision. Now, I am pleased to announce the lucky winner:
Yeah, I Said I Wasn’t Gonna Do This, But…
As you may know (or may not now but will have full knowledge of the facts that others have at their disposal by the time you finish the sentence that continues just after the closing parenthesis here), I’ve been struggling to finish the sequel to The Curse of Troius. I’ve been wrestling with it for over a year now and it’s mostly done but the last bit is going to really take every shred of skill I have as a writer and I’m just not good enough to do it right now.
While I’ve been engaged in mentally grappling with it, I’ve gotten an idea for my next project. I’m really excited by it. If you like my blog, then I think you’ll probably love it, since it takes the things that seem to mostly work here and puts them in a novel. Yes, it’s a zombie story.
Happy Birthday, Blog
Mmmm moustache cake.
It was two years ago today that my first blog post went up. Lady Aravan read it. She’s a tremendous supporter that way. For several months I wrote, whatever random shit I could, just trying to train myself to get words on “paper” again, to an audience of one (then two, after a Peruvian farmer with bad English skills thought this was a gardening website). It had been so long since I’d written anything beyond a grocery list or vague jottings for a tabletop game that I wanted to see if I had what it took to write an actual story. I’d gotten an idea, see, and I wanted to see if I could make it work, if I could capture the thing that was in my brain.
That was two years ago. That idea has been published for just over a year now, for better or worse. My blog has soldiered on, sometimes neglected, other times ignored outright, but it’s been here, mostly unread (and much of it deserves that honor), but serving its purpose: keeping me in the habit of expressing myself through the magic of hunt-and-peck typing. In the last two or three weeks, my blog has seen an influx of people, some fellow writers, some friends, who have been kind and generous to me. The support you have all shown me here, from Lady Aravan on Day 1 to the latest person who foolishly clicks the link I post on Twitter or Facebook, means more than I can say. The problem with being a person known for sarcasm and jadedness (if it’s not a word, it is now) is the difficulty of communicating sincere and heartfelt emotion. But here it is: To the people that come here and read my words, Thank You. I love you all, because you help keep me sane, and keep that hope buried deep inside me that one day I could peck out stories and sell them for a living – that hope that keeps me in my dingy Matrix office every day, hoping towards tomorrow – you help keep that hope alive, and I am forever in your debt for it.
Later today I’ll put up a real post, something besides the blog-navel-gazing that I find tedious. But it’s a special occasion. So come on, blog, blow out the fucking candles already. You’re ruining my reputation.
I Am Apparently the World’s Least Organized Writer Ever
One of the many cool side effects of coming into contact with a whole slew of authors, indie and otherwise, is being able to hear about the writing process from other perspectives. It’s fascinating (to me) to hear about how people go through the creative process and what they do to keep on track and plot and plan and gather information and organize themselves and all the work that goes into the long painful birthing process. I’ve read about the outlines people put together. I’ve seen in-depth analysis (with pictures!) about the creation of character cards that detail each person’s description, personality, traits, and their connection to the other major and minor figures in the novel all charted on a huge whiteboard. Notebooks, scribblings, collages, all part of an organized approach to writing a novel.
I see this stuff, and all I can think of is: Holy shit, I am the least organized writer of all time. Read the rest of this entry
Winter in Derenemyn 