not falling down

The main side effect of the Penny Arcade bump for Ommatidia has been a notification avalanche–via email or Technorati–of other people who have started (or were already doing) tiny story blogs in a similar vein. I think this is awesome, but honestly I lose track of which site is which, and even I can only read so much blink fiction in a day.

So here’s an offer: if you’re doing tiny stories on some sort of schedule, email me with a link and a little summary and I’ll add you to the directory page I’m putting together now. I am not promising to subscribe to all of them, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will go through once a month to check them all, maybe make a recommendation, and clean out the dead ones. (If you have emailed me about your story blog, and it’s still going, and you want it to be on the list, I would appreciate it if you’d email me again.)

Besides the obvious, I’ll start it off with just such a recommendation: The Two Minutes Project, comprising Two Minutes Less a Third and Chasing Concordia. Very short stories and very short songs! Read The Eternal Question if you need convincing, which you shouldn’t, dammit you have got to start TRUSTING me someday.

And, Cosette fans, Stephen made a cool thing for you.

Item! After a last-minute sprint, I have now scribbled in and shipped out all the remaining personalized books that were ordered in May. This means that, despite a surprise spate of orders this week, I can finally announce that

Item! The Ommatidia Author Edition book is back in stock! Not that it seems to have stopped people from ordering anyway; I should have been resupplied weeks ago, but I’m not exactly getting them in bulk and the trickle of orders was consistently just enough to eat them up before I could edit the store page. Don’t think I am ungrateful, order-tricklers! I have invested your beautiful money by purchasing other people’s Lulu books, thus continuing the endless Circle of Paypal™. But this whole thing coincides neatly with

Item! The last Cosette story, which goes up online tomorrow morning and marks more than one sort of closure; I wrote it for the book two years ago, so it’s been languishing in the drafts folder for a very long time. Fans of the storyline might wish to reopen the wound today in preparation for its salting.

Oh, I almost forgot! Item! Don’t forget that the newest Hour of Knowledge went up yesterday, and that new ones will continue going up on all Wednesdays, forever. I won’t keep reminding you here every week, since the CHK has all kinds of its own feeds, including iTunes and LJ. But I will give you one last disclaimer: none of them are ever going to last an hour.

Stephen and I have a new podcast! It’s called The Children’s Hour of Knowledge and as you might expect from that title, it a) is not for children and b) contains almost no knowledge. But it is getting better every week! The first two episodes are up now, and the third will go up Wednesday, after which there will be a new one every Wednesday from now until forever.

We really hope you like it! It has a funny beep-beep sound!

Kara and I are simultanublogging. It is a race to see who can post their entry first, and I am about to win it. Because Kara is not aware that it is a race.

This is ideally the only kind of race I would ever be in.

What are some of the brightest lights in webcomics saying about Brendan Adkins and Ommatidia?

“I didn’t know about it.”

–Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade

“Asshole.”

–Scott Kurtz of PvP, at the Emerald City Comicon

“Pretty slick, but my shout-out is not without motive.”

–Kristofer Straub of Starslip Crisis*

* Kristofer Straub was paid $50 during book creation for unrelated reasons

Which means all my lovely readers in the UK are back from taking off St. Crispin’s Day or whatever, and all my lovely other readers are yawning and clicking idly on Digg as the work week slowly grinds into gear, and so it is the perfect time, my friends, to tell you that Ommatidia is for sale.

A couple sharp-eyed readers (from the old school of “actually checking the front page”) have already noticed that it was up over the weekend while I poked at it for bugs, but so far everything seems fine. Some things have changed since I made the original tentative announcement–most notably that the limited edition is now signed and numbered and includes a story written just for you, but is also the same softcover binding as the now-less-cheap viral edition (it is actually insane to bind a book this size in hardcover). And yes, it took me over two years to assemble a 133-page book. Turns out autodidactic self-publishing is sort of hard!

But I’m really proud of the result and I hope you’ll be satisfied. You can check out a preview at Lulu and see one of the fourteen all-new illustrations, and if you order soon you’ll be able to get your copy and read the last Cosette story before it goes up online next month. Finally, if you get your book, take a picture! If you send it to me or put it on Flickr and tag it “ommatidia book,” it’ll get pulled into the little badge I’m putting together now for the Ommatidia front page, and I’ll send you a copy of the “Welch” toon I hastily drew for buyers at my Stumptown booth.

Finally, some of you have probably already noticed that I’m linking to ommatidia.org in this post, rather than xorph.com/anacrusis–either URL scheme works almost exactly the same, because if there’s one poor web practice in which I want to engage, it’s duplicated content and split Pagerank. Seriously, think of Ommatidia as a web site for the book that happens to display a feed from Anacrusis. Both sites now include the other new toy I built this weekend: the “all names” page, which is not perfectly accurate, but is pretty close to an ongoing list of every name I’ve scrounged up for a story title. See why I have to steal from Leonard all the time?

I keep the Moleskine and the Micron next to my bed so I can write down story ideas I have while falling asleep, and on mornings after they usually turn out about half useful and half dumb. But even in their hastiness and abbreviation, I can almost always follow the signifying notes back to the image or twist that precipitated them.

I had two last night. One was a Chosen Ones story that I’ll probably do up for next week. The other?

“Six big diapers.”

I offer this to the world.

I live in Portland now. I had some exceedingly mild adventures in San Francisco, and took a lot of pictures that you will see sometime around 2018. Maria came to visit and that was really nice. Hugner is fine.

I’ve been in a self-imposed sweatshop lockbox all this week, trying to prepare for the big show: Stumptown Comics Fest, where I will be exhibiting with free microcomics and a six-word story completion marathon and, yes, Ommatidia, the first Anacrusis book. No, you can’t buy it online yet, not until I finish setting up the storefront. I am planning to have that up by my birthday (a week from tomorrow).

I realize that I have announced this far too late for anyone who wasn’t already planning to come to Stumptown to show up; trust me, that is all part of a strategy. Eventually I may even figure out what the strategy is. But on the off chance that there are any Anacrusis fans in the PDX, show up! There are a lot more reasons to do so than just me and my tablemates (”Cinema Sewer”).

Know what I read about on hypallage? Wikipedia!

See?!

Hypallage is a thing where you can switch the order of words and it doesn’t matter because: poetry. They should make you get a license for this stuff! You can tell it’s very respectable because Virgil did it (he’s the airplanes rich guy, with the crazy). Some of his examples:

• “Hers was the launch that shipped a thousand faces.”
• “Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
  then another second, then a hundred thousand,
  then yet a more thousand hundred, then a whole thousand nother.
  Hold on, let me get a calculator.”
• “Thad’s heart stared as he musked at Gloria, pounding deeply to mixture the taste of his delicate with her breath fragrance.”
• “A plan, a can, a canal, a man–Panama!”

How can this help you as a wirter? It’s more than just a boring to sheen a gloss poetry the give of clause–it can contently produce the increase at which you significant rate. For instance, you could paste the sentence of the just in an order, then copy words and change. Alternatively, you could change the order of the words in a sentence, then just copy and paste! Trust me when I say that no editor is going to spend the time necessary to tease out that tangle. Ocne you get rlaely good, you wn’ot eevn have to ceorrct tyops!

There’s a special form of hypallage called “transferred epithet,” which refers specifically to moving an adjective to the wrong word. Or the word to the wrong adjective! You see this a lot when people refer to “J. D. Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye.” I’m not sure what the “classic” is actually supposed to apply to, I think it just depends.

Today’s Nut in a Fuckshell: Or syndered hacktax!

A limited word count is a great way to inspire creativity. But don’t let that turn you off to it! It also makes for an excellent back-cover hook.

First, pick an arbitrary number and cling to it with the focus of a brain-damaged pit bull. Second, write! Having trouble? Apply our patented methods to shave back your flow:

• Avoid topics you know anything about.
• Skip the beginning, end, and, preferably, the middle.
• Utilize compoundwords and contraction’s!
• Or just entirely!

Above all, don’t be too strict with yourself. Nobody’s going to fucking count them.

Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Tdyshcknantshll!