Fiddling with WordPress again, and trying to figure out how to domain map one of my other domains onto a WordPress blog without having to pay them money. Is this possible, interwebs?
I swear I'm going to learn HTML this year. I've just been busy, you know, writing.
Also, if I were to start regularly embedding video, would those of you who pull the RSS prefer it to be before or after the jump?
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Elephant Words - 6 Week Roundup
Andrew Cheverton is a fellow writer on EW, and he has this thing where he does a commentary track on his pieces after each 6 week period is over. I'll be emulating him now:
Long-Sigh Anxiety: I feel like I weaved drunkenly across the line of humor and melancholy with this piece, and it's weaker for it. I'm enamored with the idea of a city where every piece of graffiti is a memorial, but I lose the thread bitching about procedural television (my least favorite genre, because nothing new has been introduced to it since the early 1990s). If I could trim this one down to about half it's length, I think I'd find something quite nice.
Things My Father Told Me When I Was Young: I had three different half-stories for this image, all written out longhand in a notebook while sitting under a tree by the apartment I was living in near Pittsburgh at the time. As the sun was setting, I looked up and saw the moon was almost full. Ever since I was a child, I've had two fears: Wolves, as a result of a kid's book, Donald Cries Wolf (Disney used to draw wolves lean and hungry, with slavering jaws and yellow eyes), and foxes, because of my father. He's told me the story of The Bloody Eyed Fox many times over the years, and I wanted to do a spin on it, presenting it from the perspective of the son of one of the bad guys rather than the usual viewpoint of the boy who owned the fox. My father claims to have seen the Bloody-Eyed Fox, lurking around Ten-Mile Creek in Mississippi, and I don't doubt him. I've spent the night there many times, and spent days digging up arrowheads. Rest assured, it's prime haunting territory.
A Rivalry With Andrew Cheverton That's Not Based On Looks: The week prior, Andrew had written a six-word short story in Hemingway fashion. I wanted to do the same. Alan commented that it seemed as if I had started with four pages of story and trimmed until I settled on one upsetting sentence. He was pretty much right. I hadn't written a four-page story, but I had a ton of notes: a history of what had happened, a list of survivors, the equipment and rations they were down to; basically, the kinds of things that keep me up at night worrying about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Then, I realized it would just seem like horror-babble-genre fluff, and took it high-concept.
Another Low Lit Memory: This is just something that's been in my head for ages, ever since I found out the world turned and was a little bit tilted. Granted, I didn't have much of a solid understanding of science then, but when has that ever stopped a kid, or an author, from having some fun? My regrets with this piece are of the stylistic variety. I actually wanted to have no names, and write it more in the style of an Italo Calvino folktale, but I was a Monday poster, and had no time to go back through and rework it. As it is, it's still cute, but it's not quite timeless. I'm going to redo it someday, and try to pass it off as a folktale of the 22nd Century.
By Way Of An Apology: It was my week to post the picture, so I feel I can tell you my mom took this picture, while visiting friends in France. The man who did this sculpture apparently has dozens more all over his farm. I can't imagine he's able to sell them, much less figure out how he's able to build them. The statue struck me as kind of sad, unless of course you look at it up close. Its teeth are very sharp and nasty and obviously designed for meat, but barring that detail, I'd be terrified to see something punished like that. The idea was in my head almost as soon as I decided on the picture, and when everyone started writing melancholic stories that week, I became worried. Fortunately, nobody touched on my theme, and I got to write my story. This is another one that would benefit from a folk-tale style, though I like my first-person narrator.
Was This Last Month?: I'm big on costume parties. I'm also big on innovation at costume parties. I'm not big on people who half-ass them, and I'm not big on people who over-do them and then have to explain their costumes. I like the voice of this piece, though I recognize it's just a dialogue scene, and has no actual plot to it. That's okay. It's getting a feel for character. You're allowed to do that in short fiction. I hope.
Long-Sigh Anxiety: I feel like I weaved drunkenly across the line of humor and melancholy with this piece, and it's weaker for it. I'm enamored with the idea of a city where every piece of graffiti is a memorial, but I lose the thread bitching about procedural television (my least favorite genre, because nothing new has been introduced to it since the early 1990s). If I could trim this one down to about half it's length, I think I'd find something quite nice.
Things My Father Told Me When I Was Young: I had three different half-stories for this image, all written out longhand in a notebook while sitting under a tree by the apartment I was living in near Pittsburgh at the time. As the sun was setting, I looked up and saw the moon was almost full. Ever since I was a child, I've had two fears: Wolves, as a result of a kid's book, Donald Cries Wolf (Disney used to draw wolves lean and hungry, with slavering jaws and yellow eyes), and foxes, because of my father. He's told me the story of The Bloody Eyed Fox many times over the years, and I wanted to do a spin on it, presenting it from the perspective of the son of one of the bad guys rather than the usual viewpoint of the boy who owned the fox. My father claims to have seen the Bloody-Eyed Fox, lurking around Ten-Mile Creek in Mississippi, and I don't doubt him. I've spent the night there many times, and spent days digging up arrowheads. Rest assured, it's prime haunting territory.
A Rivalry With Andrew Cheverton That's Not Based On Looks: The week prior, Andrew had written a six-word short story in Hemingway fashion. I wanted to do the same. Alan commented that it seemed as if I had started with four pages of story and trimmed until I settled on one upsetting sentence. He was pretty much right. I hadn't written a four-page story, but I had a ton of notes: a history of what had happened, a list of survivors, the equipment and rations they were down to; basically, the kinds of things that keep me up at night worrying about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Then, I realized it would just seem like horror-babble-genre fluff, and took it high-concept. Another Low Lit Memory: This is just something that's been in my head for ages, ever since I found out the world turned and was a little bit tilted. Granted, I didn't have much of a solid understanding of science then, but when has that ever stopped a kid, or an author, from having some fun? My regrets with this piece are of the stylistic variety. I actually wanted to have no names, and write it more in the style of an Italo Calvino folktale, but I was a Monday poster, and had no time to go back through and rework it. As it is, it's still cute, but it's not quite timeless. I'm going to redo it someday, and try to pass it off as a folktale of the 22nd Century. By Way Of An Apology: It was my week to post the picture, so I feel I can tell you my mom took this picture, while visiting friends in France. The man who did this sculpture apparently has dozens more all over his farm. I can't imagine he's able to sell them, much less figure out how he's able to build them. The statue struck me as kind of sad, unless of course you look at it up close. Its teeth are very sharp and nasty and obviously designed for meat, but barring that detail, I'd be terrified to see something punished like that. The idea was in my head almost as soon as I decided on the picture, and when everyone started writing melancholic stories that week, I became worried. Fortunately, nobody touched on my theme, and I got to write my story. This is another one that would benefit from a folk-tale style, though I like my first-person narrator. Was This Last Month?: I'm big on costume parties. I'm also big on innovation at costume parties. I'm not big on people who half-ass them, and I'm not big on people who over-do them and then have to explain their costumes. I like the voice of this piece, though I recognize it's just a dialogue scene, and has no actual plot to it. That's okay. It's getting a feel for character. You're allowed to do that in short fiction. I hope.
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