Guess I’m not un-blocked yet, because I allowed the evil Lyn Cash to distract me with her wonderful links — primarily the Brokeback Mountain Happy Meal video, through which I discovered the LA sketch comedy group Fries on the Side.
I’ve filed them under “food.” Had to watch every one of their videos. Had to. My favorites: Default Date, Walken & Walken, and She’s Special.
Then I got sidetracked onto banned commercials at Google Video, like this Mastercard commercial. Damn it. Another 90 minutes down the tube, watching every funny commercial video I could find. Here’s another one, double damn it.
Back to Lyn. Top o’ the blog at the moment is a photo of a leucistic peacock. For those of you not into critters, leucistic animals are starkly white, unlike albino animals, which often retain some pigment. Leucistics have pigmented eyes, while albinos have pink eyes due to a lack of pigment.
Follow the links for examples of a leucistic ball python, albino ball python, and a normal ball python. Just to mix things up, here’s a piebald ball python, part leucistic, part wildtype pigmentation.
I couldn’t find much detail on the biology of leucism — just this brief Wikipedia article. The biology of albinism is well understood, however.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see how many different leucistic animal pictures I could find on the web. Here are some good ones:
I have no excuse for not working on my book today, none at all. I need a good kick in the ass, that’s what I need.
D.
If Balls and Walnuts doesn’t seem particularly ballsy this week, and if the nuts just ain’t nutty enough for you, there’s a reason. Patients. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them, nasty bitter evil people whose lives are not complete if they fail to ruin mine. Old-timers here will remember that I call these people brainsuckers: think vampires, minus the sex appeal. It only takes one a day to make me miserable, and this week it seems I’ve had three or four times that many.
But the week is over, I have a martini well in hand, and I’m ready to snark.
. . . you, too, can be a gamma reader for my novel, Nest, book #1 of my trilogy.
Before I get to the details — how about Colbert tonight! Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann ripping on Bill O’Reilly. Does television get any better? Olbermann called O’Reilly an idiot several times, and called him a bully who only picks on little people like Janeane Garofalo and Billy Barty. Yee haw!
Anyway.
Here are the details. Nest is an 89,400-word science fiction novel featuring hyperevolved birds with arms and hands instead of wings, an invisible ninja bird with a wicked sense of humor, a scheming giant fly with an addiction to caffeine and doggy porn, big-headed blue aliens with sharp pointy teeth, and a little girl who just wants to keep her daddy safe from harm. Here’s the first scene. (more…)
. . . and it feels good. I wrote the opening to Flight this morning. As I mentioned previously, even though Flight is all written, I have a good deal of scene addition/scene subtraction to do. Flight needed a punchy opening, and I think I managed it. See what you think of the first two paragraphs:
The odor came from his grandson’s duffel bag. Ankh knelt beside it, worrying the lock with his talon. What sort of nine-year-old locked his luggage? He smelled something musty in there, something long dead.
Dirty laundry. Ankh hopped from his study to the kitchen closet where he kept his tools. He snipped off a length of stiff brass wire, then used his beak and hands to shape it. That’s all it is. Dirty laundry. The way Jeryn and Kord rushed off this morning, it’s a wonder they got the boy here with any of his things.
Ankh gets a panicky phone call. While figuring out that his world has changed forever, he also manages to unlock his grandson’s duffel bag and discover what’s inside.
Maybe it’s a cheap trick, but I thought it worked well.
D.
Don’t know about you, but I’ve had a productive day.
After a satisfying bit of Technorati whoring (see post below), I spent the morning shuffling scenes and chapters in order to create a Book Two. Working title: Flight. The trilogy will be Nest, Flight, and Shrike. Book Two will pack even more of a cliffhanger than Book One, I’m afraid, but I suspect if folks stick with me that far, they’re in it for the long haul.
Flight will be a tougher edit than Nest, with more scenes to add and subtract (maybe I will work in some ‘rithmatic yet!) and quite a bit of gruntwork with regard to one of my major storylines. I’ve fixed some problems in my head, but I still need to fix them on paper. Or, as we used to say in med school, “in computero.” What fun.
Next, I reviewed a cool story for Tangent, “Different Flesh” by Claude Lalumière. If you don’t want to wait for my review to show up at Tangent, I give high marks to “Different Flesh”. Go. Read it. Enjoy.
Good, you’re back. I finished up some laundry, then burned a box of Nature magazines from ’97. Slowly but surely, I’m cleaning out our garage. Charged up by my pyromania, I finished my other assignment for Tangent, Amityville House of Pancakes. Now I just have to write the reviews. Verdict: of the four stories, one is meh, one is godawful, one is good, and one is so great I went online and bought the author’s first novel.
Her name is Adrienne Jones, and her novella for AHP, Gypsies Stole My Tequila, rawked. I read lines out loud to Karen, that’s how good it was. For more details, you’ll have to wait for my review. But Tequila was so good I bought Jones’s Oral Vices, and paid hardcover prices for a paperback (what’s up with that?), so you can bet I’m going to review it here, good or bad.
And since I can’t order only one book from Barnes and Noble, I also bought Mel Helitzer’s Comedy Writing Secrets. Because, you know, making y’all spray your monitors with coffee isn’t good enough for me. I want you to piss your pants, too.
D.
Stay with me to the end — you’ll be glad you did.
***
I have a devil of a time inventing fresh ways of saying the same old thing. How many different ways can I say, “Nemara took flight”? After a while, it gets to be a real challenge, especially when I exclude passive constructions (“. . . and Nemara was airborne”).
More troubling still is the challenge of coming up with eye-poppingly fresh word combinations. Hard enough to avoid trite phrasing, but innovation? That’s work. And yet, that’s just the sort of thing which makes readers (and, I hope, agents, editors, and publishers) love a writer. How do I make my brain do that?
I predicted it in my trilogy-in-progress.
Sure, in my version it wasn’t the Vice-President involved, but the President, his sons, and some security guys. And they weren’t human, but birds. With, um, arms instead of wings. And they weren’t hunting birds (not intentionally, anyway) but giant killer centipedes. And the outcome was quite a bit bloodier than what happened to Harry Whittington.
Other than that, I nailed it, nailed it cold. Life imitates art.
D.
Technorati tag: cheney
Callou, callay, it’s Smart Bitches Day!
Casting about for motivation for your main character? Is she looking for wit, wealth, or wicked good looks in her man?
Nope. What she really wants is a top-notch gene donor. Brains and beauty are indicators of high quality DNA, and wealth should improve the chances that their many babies will survive and breed unto the next generation.
So goes the theory of daddy-daughter team David and Nanelle Barash, who last year released their sociobiological interpretation of literature, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries. Sexual selection, a key element of Darwinism and a centerpiece of the Barashes’ thesis, refers to traits which may not necessarily be adaptive but help to attract mates. Think about a peacock’s iridescent tail feathers, which attract peahens and predators alike. Think about Porsches and Beamers and big fat gold chains hanging on the necks of certain rappers.
Not that any of you would be that shallow.
In some instances, the Barash method yields fresh ways of looking at things. From Denis Dutton’s Washington Post review:
. . . discriminating human females are central to the world of Jane Austen, whom the Barashes call “the poet laureate of female choice.†Selecting a good mate is Austen’s major theme. She is particularly adept at bringing out, against the vast intricacies of a social milieu, the basic values women seek in men, and men tend to want in women (shortlist: good looks, health, money, status, IQ, courage, dependability and a pleasant personality — in many different weightings and orderings). Not being a peacock, Mr. Darcy does not have iridescent feathers, but for human females his commanding personality, solid income, intelligence, generosity, and the magnificent Pemberley estate do very nicely.
Madame Bovary’s Ovaries has its flaws, which Dutton’s review illuminates nicely. I encourage you to read the whole thing. But it occurred to me that, flawed or not, the premise of Darwinian motivation for literary characters has, at the very least, comic merit.
A few ideas:
What’s that? No romance in that last one? Well, how about this. Our perp has been at it for the last 25 years. Unbeknownst to her, her handsome young defense lawyer is actually her son! And she falls for him! We’ll call it Oedipus 2020.
Yeah, you’re right. I don’t understand the romance genre at all.
D.
I finished seeing patients at 4:30, then popped over to St. Mammon to see a patient and leave a note. By 5:20, I’m home — far earlier than usual, so I thought for sure I’d get some worthwhile editing in this evening, or at least a big chunk of blogging time.
Don’t forget the Number 500 Giveaway! I hope to see several more entries before the evening is over.
I’m happy — not about the state of the world, of course, but about my trilogy. In the last few hours, I did a bit of cosmetic surgery on the first novel, and the current word count stands at just under 90,000 words. Ideal! Not only that, but this first novel is one tight sumbitch, and I think anyone who finished it would have to buy the next book. But that’s just me.
I’m chucking the working title (The Brakan Correspondent) because it put the main character’s father front and center. I want to keep Cree (the correspondent’s daughter) center stage. All of the titles below refer to her, although they also have double meanings that spread to a few of the other characters as well.
Tell me whether any one of these grabs your eye better than its neighbors:
Nest
Out of the Nest
Fallen from the Nest
Fledge
Fledgling
Thanks!
D.