Bloggin, bloggin, bloggin right along... did a short story over 2,500 words yesterday on my day off...

And it came out neat, it came out genuinely G rated without losing its punch, its twist ending or its point. It's now destined for a YA market because it may slip under the Censors!

Still working on backstory for Nomad Novel and tonight's Sheila Viehl World Building Workshop helped immensely - because now I've got to look at my future history as a series of headlines I can jot in sixty seconds. To get a grip on what happened. On what was important and what affects the characters that profoundly. So when the next minute ticks on my computer's clock, I'll begin just typing them in. Sixty second exercise. Everything I can remember in 60 seconds...

AI discovered.
AI rebels
AIs all killed in Cyberwars.
AI rediscovered.
AI all killed (repeat endlessly and dates are weird in the Cyberwars)
Colonies founded on Alpha Centauri and other planets.
Colony transports program works, ships built in deep space out of asteroids by robot labor.
AI permitted under strict programming guidelines.
AI illegal
AI legalized under restrictions
Earth unites when FTL discovered.
Rebel starships form Nomad Alliance to fight Terran Empire
Terran Empire smaashed by Nomads and colonial resistance
NOmad Alliance documents formalized by full consensus democratic vote.
Ophiuchi Colony attacks Earth
One ship escapes to rally Nomad Alliance to save Earth
USA signatory to Nomad ALliance

Leads right on up to this book! And I didn't even have time to type in anything about the vampires or the mutants or all - but then that's tough typing that fast!

So now I do have to rewrite more of the characters' motivations in and continue to recognize the real hero of the run died in the first chapter. But he set it all up...

Robert and Ari >^..^<

Finished A Sense of Magic, 4,944 words. I needed a story, I needed it to have a sound ending that's really just an internal change, a decision, a commitment renewed.

For the sake of literary professors such as those a few of my friends are trying to satisfy with poetry interpretations, at least in my view that represented renewed commitment. This is what I do and I do it out of love and I get along pretty well with my writing even if occasionally we have an argument, like yesterday when it just would not hand me LeechQuest to finish up.

Hm. Maybe it means there's a better twisted high fantasy than LeechQuest lurking around the corner... could be that's not so bad a little story but not the one I want to post as that. Could be LeechQuest is a kid story and that would be fun, and, some other Twisted will come up. LeechQuest did break a cliche or two but it isn't that twisted, just the story it is.

I'll have to see what I can do tomorrow!

Robert and Ari >^..^<

But at the end of the day something's accomplished. I took my Grinchy mood in which new prose absolutely refused to come out (scary!) and got annoyed and rewrote High Goth.

At least the day wasn't a total wash. If anything, getting a rewrite out of the way is probably something more important and useful than bashing out yet another rough short story. But oh, did I wind up so self conscious. It's not a good place for me to hang my head. It's a much better place for me to just relax and do it and get it done to the best of today's ability and move on into doing something else!

And the next thing resembling an idea that I'm actually excited about, I will plow right back into it. I need a break from worrying about whether it's any good. It is, and polishing is what you do when something's been sawed, hammered and nailed into its proximate condition.

Robert and Ari >^..^<

He has been learning to bite softer and softer. I say 'ouch' so he tries playing Sabre Tooth again - but more gently. Till he got it perfect this afternoon playing and just gently grabbed foot with teeth, enough I could tell I was having cat teeth dragged across my foot. I love this kitten!

arrrgh!

This has not been a good writing day. This day, so far, LeechQuest is on a nasty choke. The basic idea is good. The story's about 3,400 words long so far and he's just gotten into the swamp proper, stood on an anthill to get stung, found a snake when he tried to catch a leech and unknown to him, gotten lost.

Laugh as hard as you want to, but I get more self conscious about light or humorous material than I do about anything else that I write. If I'm not actually in that silly 'delivering the schtick' frame of mind, it falls flat. Comedy takes pacing, energy and delivery. LeechQuest lost its quick snappy mood. It's mildly parodical and also just a story. It falls somewhere between outright parody of conventional fantasy and just a little fantasy story with some humorous elements.

And if I'm not in that mood, I get miserably self conscious and embarrassed about it. I don't know why my comedy is the embarrassing point, but it is. I need to break out of this and get myself into it again - or just let it go and do a different one. At any rate, let it go and work on something else so that I can see that I got something done today besides chewing on myself.

Ari is rumpled and sleepy in the sink, he's very cute and just blinked muzzily at me. I love that cat.

Robert and Ari >^..^<

Cool, been getting things done. Rewrote and sent off my Vision article, did some critiques, did a new article for http://www.selfhelpforwriters.com and also sent out a newsletter for it today. Fiction's coming slowly but I'm getting things done. I have to remind myself that time spent organizing, rewriting, outlining and otherwise doing things other than generating rough draft of new fiction is actually writing. It is part of the whole of writing. So are queries and printouts and mailing and all the rest of it. Pro attitude.

If I'm in that kind of mood, maybe this is a good night to tackle a story rewrite and see if I can get another of those shoveled into the mail where it might do me some good. I'm remembering a wonderful quote from Coach, my former therapist.

"What you need to do is prostitute your art some more. You're not the prostitute. You're more the pimp. Get those stories out there walking the streets for you, tell them to bring home some money! They look good! Send them out there!"

Words to live by. I am not prostituting myself, it's the stories that get accepted or rejected. My friends like me and people who don't are people I don't hang out with much. In that I'm like a writer or a plumber or anyone else on the planet, but, I want to see my stories go to the people who like them. They won't get there if I don't at least drop them off on the corner where they can wave at the cars...

Robert and Ari >^..^< {Daddy, do they have lady cats at the cathouse? Cute ones?}

Weird day on Forward Motion, the boards didn't really go down that long but the Chat's doing odd things so I spent much of the afternoon hanging out on Deedlit's chat, a British member who has a fella who actually writes his own chat rooms. Amazing that. Programmers boggle me.

Wrote a story this morning, sort of middling one not really as great a stunner as "Coproliths Impact on Coolant Systems at the K/T Boundary" but not all that bad either. "Not Bilbo's Birthday Speech" probably needs more of a rewrite. But it's a story, and it's a story with a little bit of a twist at the end. Loosely set in my Nomad universe, at least the colony period stuff.

I keep getting distracted by discussions on fantasy topics to want to write a "Nature wants to kill you" hike and I've left all my characters in deep space with a ship that's falling apart around them, possible biohazard contamination and three crew at least clinically dead and one in a coma who might as well be, plus a broken leg on another one and some burns. This is a fairly exciting situation to throw them into. This should give them a lot of serious problems and a few hilarious ones, like the food supply being reduced to tubed emergency rations. I'm warming up again to it. Need to switch tracks and not think about how amusing tramping across a countryside that's got local icky variations of poison ivy, poison oak, stinging insects, mud, leeches, parasites and assorted tropical diseases would be to write.

Though there is always the Twisted High Fantasy story to write...

LeechQuest! A serving boy enters the enchanted swamp with a bucket to seek the magical leeches needed to cure the plague, along the way he runs into everything disgusting that Mother Nature and a few really twisted magicians can set to make it unlikely to find that right pond, but, the cat in the castle really likes chasing leeches and manages to make it through the whole quest without losing a whisker of dignity...

Oh right, there'd have to be crocodilians and very large snakes and lizards, some poison frogs, the usual sorts of things.

Oh, now that works... if I decide to slam the ship's systems, all of them, with tricking intermittent electronic problems that they can't really track down what's causing them, without killing all of them, that would make it a real war of nerves. Not to mention constant scares about things like medical equipment going out, not to mention that intermittent failure hitting air pumps and other important elements of life support... that won't kill them. Turning the fan off for five minutes will not asphyxiate everyone in the room. But the passengers will panic and the experienced spacehands will have their adrenalin moments *every* annoying time it happens... especialy when the EnviroTech was hired more as a master chef and left more of the maintenance scutwork to his now injured assistant...

hehehe... I think I've rebooted the Nomad Novel. Onward!

Robert and Ari >^..^<