Endgame Viable

Hrm.. something wonky is happening with comments. I am investigating. UPDATE: Okay it’s working again. It was not displaying any comments, even though they were there in the system. The Facebook plugin was the culprit, so I have disabled it. (40 words.)

In a fit of inspiration, I wrote out a “pitch” for Kubak Outpost, in case I wanted to write a query letter for it. This is what I wrote: Fen, a man who has lost his love and his livelihood, enlists in the army to fight in the war against magic-wielding kaanfar warriors encroaching on the border. Along the way, he meets The Demon Hunter, who has to drink the blood of his victims to power his own form of magic. Together they must find a way to stop the kaanfar from summoning a powerful ancient foe before the king’s defenses are overwhelmed. (133 words.)

I am sure you have all seen this photo by now. https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/269785942326398976/photo/1 I am SO glad that this picture came to light, so I can ask this vitally important question: WHAT IS THIS EXPRESSION CALLED?? Preferably in a past tense verb form. The president _____ ed for the photo. Here is the context in which I would like to use this word. (277 words.)

I started out writing Airworld as a sort of light-hearted adventure. Despite a somewhat serious premise (the home town is dying!), I didn’t intend for anyone to get into any real trouble. But somewhere along the way, things got pretty serious. People are getting their throats cut. People are getting their heads smashed on stone walls. People are getting framed and tortured. People are coming face-to-face with their worst nightmares, and doubting their own convictions, and having to make life-altering decisions. (99 words.)

Okay so I’m a little bit ahead in writing today, so I thought I would finally sit down and watch the first episode of Walking Dead Season 2 on Netflix. I thought the first season was “okay” but I didn’t see where it deserved all the nerd praise it got. I guess it’s a generational thing. Zombies are “cool” with the kids and whatnot. But since Walking Dead is now in it’s third season and everyone is still raving about it, I thought I should give it another chance. (651 words.)

You may notice some changes in Airworld’s writing style now that NaNoWriMo is starting up. Until now, I have made some small efforts to write grammatically correct sentences, avoid too much repetition within a paragraph, find the right words to describe things, put events in the right sequence, etc. With the start of NaNoWriMo, all of that is going out the window. I will need to roughly double my daily output, so I will have to go into a more stream-of-consciousness sort of a writing mode and discard all filters. I will at least try to keep the story in order, although I can’t guarantee I won’t put in a “flashback” chapter to events in Rorco, if I find myself stuck. And I will try to avoid writing parts that have nothing to do with anything, like a unicorn charging in from nowhere and stabbing people, or a squad of WWII bombers flying overhead, or a hole dropping the characters into an alternate universe. (164 words.)

Consider this contemporary engraving of a woman by Wenceslaus Hollar, from around the mid-1700s: From here, btw. Sadly, I am a complete moron when it comes to clothing. If I look at that picture, I see a woman wearing an old-timey dress thingy, with a hat thingy on her head. But for some reason, that description wouldn’t go over very well in a published work of fiction. So, what the heck are these things called? (219 words.)

Drumroll, please! I have decided to go Rebel for NaNoWriMo this year and continue my current WiP, instead of starting a new one. Possibly as many as 2 people could like this news. I finally decided to drop my previous story idea (which I had sort of dubbed Mixtime - for mixing up people from different times.. get it?). I just couldn’t think of a goal for these disparate characters from different times to work toward once they were together. Every plot idea I wrote down sounded ridiculous, so I would have been writing 50k of pointless nonsense. (128 words.)

I have re-published my first novel Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon and CreateSpace. I disabled it a while back because … well, I don’t actually remember why. Possibly because I thought it might hurt my “career” as an author (such as it is). Perhaps I thought that if I ever did submit that novel to a publisher, they might Google it, find it on Amazon, see that only four people have read it, and drop my manuscript in the trash. However the odds of me submitting that manuscript to a publisher without significant alterations is pretty slim. (169 words.)

NaNoWriMo is flying closer with every second, and I’m terribly unprepared. Last year, I spent months worldbuilding beforehand (and then used almost none of it). This year, I have a story seed that’s been in my head for quite some time, but I’m starting to have second thoughts about it. Mainly because this “seed” is not much of a story. It’s just a collection of ill-defined characters and the barest thread of an excuse for them to come together. It doesn’t feel “ready.” (281 words.)