Maundering

1. To talk incoherently or aimlessly.
2. To move or act aimlessly or vaguely; wander.

At some point in my daily blogsurf, I found a place where the host features a word-of-the-day (or was it a word-of-the-week?) Hopefully, she’ll stop by, because I can’t remember how I found her.

As you all know, there are way too few blogs in the world, so I’ve been thinking about inaugurating another. More on that later.

You’ll notice a few changes around Shatter:

• New favorites! Yeah, I keep meaning to update these every week . . .
• Shameless self-promotion gives links to the two stories of mine that are available on the ‘net. They also happen to be two that I’m proud of, or at least, I don’t cringe when I reread them. “The Mechanic,” in particular, is worth a quick check.
• A new image for my better half’s occasional blog, Chelicera. I figure I’ve broken down Beth’s phobia enough to put up a really tiny and really, really cute REAL spider. Really!
• New meters for The Brakan Correspondent edit and my NaNoWriMo NiP, Get Well Soon.
• Linkage to new pal Blue Gal.

By the way: if you’d like me to link to you, drop me a line (a reply to this post will do).

I have blog envy. It’s the Type A in me. I’m envious of the group blogs that attract huge followings . . . I mean, look at Boing Boing. Why are they so popular? And why can’t I do the same thing?

We. Think Group. We.

If any of my regulars are interested in brainstorming this in email-space, please kick off a discussion in the comments, or just plain email me. I even thought up a great name for the blog:

What do you think? It has a mellifluous Crooks and Liars feel to it. (God and Consequences does too, but that one’s taken ;o) Naturally, once we all team up, we’ll choose a name all democratic-like.

As for theme . . . how about a political blog? I don’t see too many of those around. I think it may be an unfilled niche!

D.

NaNoWrapUp

What I learned after 50,000+ words:

1. It took me 47,000 words to figure out what my story was about,

2. 32,000 words (or so) to realize I had no villain, and

3. the first 1,666 words to see that this whole thing was, indeed, possible.

On the one hand, I increased my average productivity fourfold. On the other, the quality isn’t comparable to The Brakan Correspondent . . . but Get Well Soon isn’t total crap, either.

My favorite bit so far: when my villain asks my protagonist the rhetorical question, “Do I look like an asshole?” my protagonist (who isn’t human, but has a fondness for synthetic human prostitutes — cyborgs, essentially) thinks to himself that he had seen his share of assholes, they really were quite cute, and, no, this fellow wasn’t half as goodlooking as your average asshole.

That should give you an idea of the overall caliber of this story ;o)

A fun, clever, and exciting finish eludes me, but even with TBC, I didn’t have all the details worked out until the very end.

D.

NaNoSchlomo

I had a distant cousin Schlomo, long dead, who was such a bastard that all his kids left the farm and the religion. Seems he drove them a wee bit too hard. NaNoWriMo has become my Schlomo. Some thoughts:

1. Yes, I think I’m going to make it to 50,000. 7000 words in five days? Piece of cake. But that’s not the point. The point is,

2. When you emphasize quantity over quality, you get trite material. My muse keeps falling back on stock images and characters. I’ve tried to compensate for this by setting my story in a make believe society that yearns to be like Earth, Hollywood-style, but the lack of originality is really starting to gall me. Muse, are you listening? Give me something really weird tomorrow, or . . . or . . . I’m airing all your dirty laundry on this blog. I mean it. And another thing,

3. Why must you make the plot ever more tortuous? How am I going to unknot this beast? I purposefully chose a single first person POV to keep your smorgasbord tendencies in check. And what do you do? You keep wrapping my protag in ever more layers of intrigue. This would be fine if the intrigue were truly intriguing, but see #2.

Grrr. No, it’s not crap, but I have serious doubts as to whether it will be publishable in any form. TBC, my numero uno NiP — that’s a keeper, provided I can find someone willing to do a Golden Age on it. (John C. Wright gave his publisher a whopping HUGE first novel. They chopped it into three separate books and marketed each one separately.) But, Get Well Soon? It’ll be one of those novels that gets released when I’m as prolific and well sold as Stephen King, and my publisher says, “Oh, please oh please oh please, give us anything, even your funkiest piece of crap.”

So. NaNoScrewYou is a good thing why?

D.

Technorati tag:
NaNoWriMo

The Gorjun is . . . um . . . riding a giant vibrator?

Boo-yah (or, as my ten-year-old says whenever he wins a game of chess*, “Huzzah!”) My first non-electronic publication, which is to say PRINT publication, is in PRINT, in Continuum Science Fiction, a PRINT science fiction magazine.

“The Gorjun is Free” is a story about a dysfunctional family, an alien artifact that looks like speckled poop, and several not-so-random changes to the fundamental constants of the universe. Former title, “All Change”, which no one liked but me.

So I’m leafing through, admiring the speckled poop illustration**, when I noticed this eye-popping breach of Strunk and White:

Like any true wonder, I couldn’t take my eyes away.

The opening phrase refers not to the sentence’s subject, but to the object of the narrator’s gaze. Well, you can bet I’m not going to read any further.

Other neat stuff: Editor Bill Rupp put my story first, wham, right there on page 2. In the table of contents, my story and byline are in larger font than the other stories. You would think I had a hand in the editing.

D.

*Yes, we are all geeks in the Hoffman household.

**In fairness, I did describe the artifact that way . . . but, did the artist have to take me so seriously?