Oh, I know Baz Luhrmann, all right.
Ain’t nobody marking that motherfucker safe.
Category: Mild Lunacy
Story Hacks: Eighth in a Series
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!
Story Hacks: Seventh in a Series
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!
Space Paris has robots with moustaches
Look why are you not reading The Fabian Society? If what we had in Space Paris meant anything you’d read The Fabian Society every day and even on days when he (Quintus) (or possibly Henry) doesn’t update you’d be all up in his archives reading the older stuff you missed. I know I already told you to read it back in 2006, but obviously you weren’t listening, and anyway since then he’s been developing the kind of effortless grace in prose that makes me stomp around in jealous anger. I am so angry that you are not reading The Goddamn Fabian Society! What! Yes! Don’t impose your human consistency on me! We already had this fight in Space Paris!
Start with Petra, Endless Frank, Fishbowls and Ptolemy I, and if you’re not hooked by the third one you’re doing it wrong.
Because obviously I’ve never ripped them off
I did that gag THREE YEARS AGO, THE ONION.
There is another thing some do to moustache and it costs, I am told, a nickel
Can you believe Sam Elliott’s IMDB photo shows him without a moustache? I mean, it doesn’t even look like him!
Ian and I typed almost simultaneously today that his only real job in Tombstone (which I finally saw, and did anyone else realize that Ben Foster was doing a Val Kilmer imitation throughout 3:10 to Yuma?) was to grow a moustache, which is also what he did in The Big Lebowski and (apparently) Ghost Rider. Looks like he’ll be reprising that role in The Golden Compass. You can’t argue with success.
I guess it’s like they say: some are born to moustache, some achieve moustache, and some have moustache thrust upon them.
I’m willing to bet that anyone who meets Sam Elliott quickly becomes the latter.
Half an hour later, via text message: Brendan: “Best phone conversation ever!” Ian: “lol.”
When Ian and I talk on the phone it is for express and efficient reasons, so we don’t really bother with greeting protocols. When I called Ian earlier this evening to determine the provenance of one of Yale’s expletives, I forgot that he wouldn’t have my new cell number, and I was already on edge in a feverish Halo match. Thus:
Ian: Hello?
Brendan: DO YOU SAY FUCK BEANS!
Ian: … Who is this?