Category: Writing

Story Hacks: Fifth in a Series

April 14, 2007 /

There’s one thing every writer agrees on: child abuse is great!

Not real child abuse, of course. Real child abuse is tragic, and people who don’t love all its victims unconditionally are hideous monsters and probably pederasts themselves. This makes it very easy to find abusers in real life. Haven’t you ever asked your friends whether they’d spank their kids? Trick question! Good writers have no friends.

The thing that makes child abuse great in fiction, though, is that it’s worth infinity points on the badness-goodness scale. Is your hero not sympathetic enough? Do your readers say she’s “selfish” or “disturbingly violent” or “clearly you with your name spelled differently?” Reveal a history of abuse to explain everything forever! Or maybe you have an antagonist who just isn’t sufficiently evil–“I don’t think Wicca is that bad,” your readers might say, or “you psychopath, stop reading this garbage and let me go.” But make your villain a pedophile and watch their eyes glimmer with hate!

Aren’t you glad we’ve discovered this technique together? It’s like our own special secret! Just remember not to let anyone else know about it.

Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Black and white is one color too many!

April 13, 2007 /

Ride the flavor horns. Dammit! I knew there was a better joke than the “hyperspace” thing in the last entry, I just couldn’t get the bat off my shoulder. Oh well. There’s always next year.

Thanks to all the people who have offered further sandwich suggestions in the comments. More! More! I should clarify that I am quite familiar with the unholy power of bacon, but will generally not eat sharp or nontoasted cheese.

April 11, 2007 /

I’m a twit now. I have an extremely small justification for this, as follows.

Part of the Anacrusis FAQ says “I’ll get to long-form when I’m ready for it,” and I’m ready for it, so I’m writing long-form–specifically, the South book. I hate it when people announce on their blogs that they are Writing A Novel, with slight exception for that one thing in November. But the fact is that my only successful projects are done a) with at least the appearance of rigorous scheduling and b) in the public eye, so I’m going to start microposting my daily page count. With luck this will keep me from going back and polishing the first chapter over and over. Seriously, guys, the first chapter is really good.

The twi–ugh, microblog is now a sidebar on the main NFD page, and it’s got its own feed, of course.

March 20, 2007 /

When Leigh sent me my copies of The Little Book [etc], she addressed me as “Catfish,” with reason, and which I liked. That probably contributed to my writing Kentucky over a year ago. I was looking for a penny to pick up today, and read that again, and was glad that it had come true after all.

January 6, 2007 /

Tonight I got an email from Mr. Munson. He’s teaching his first Creative Writing course this semester, and he wants to use Anacrusis as a (positive) example.

Maybe someday I’ll sell a story or a novel and be inducted into the ranks of the print-published; maybe not. Either way I’m going to look back at January 5, 2007, as the day I Made It.

January 4, 2007 /

In 2006 I wrote 255 stories, making it two years in a row without missing an update. Even if a couple of those updates were on Pacific time. Ahem.

This year, barring catastrophic brain injury, we’ll hit 1000 stories (and, even less meaningfully, 1001). We’ll also see the debut of the Anacrusis book, Ommatidia, although our impending move isn’t going to make that any easier to finish than the hecticity of the past six months. Tomorrow morning I’ll post the last completed six-word story from the initial round of submissions. More about that in the next paragraph.

The six-word stories were fun! Since Anacrusis has apparently outlasted Constrained.org and now I need a new paragraph for the FAQ, I’m going to make the offer permanent. Send me a six-word story, and I’ll probably write the other ninety-five, for as long as I’m doing Anacrusis. No guarantees on when and I probably won’t mess with the pennies, but you will get credit in the popup text. I really can’t think of a smaller thank-you for doing my work for me. Wait, no! Let’s talk about pennies again.

People have talked about an Anacrusis wiki. I’ve talked about a blink-fiction community. I’ve also talked about my general distaste for authoritative canon, then put the lie to that by refusing to finish six-word stories about my canon characters. Finally, I’ve got ommatidia.org just sitting around right now.

What if I started a new wiki, as a host for both information on recurring characters and new 101-word stories by people like you? It’s pretty arrogant for me to launch a new site and say “humans! Discuss the amazing things I have created!” It’s also silly of me to try to host stories, since I think all the Anacrusis readers interested in constrained writing of their own already have perfectly serviceable blogs or story journals.

That said, things like the stories I repost from the comment feed, timeline conjecture and the Millicent Resurrection Army suggest there’s a demand. The basic concept here is to throw open my canon and offer you tools to create new canon of your own. Given the opportunity, would you contribute?

See now it would be kind of funny if this generated another instance of the problem

December 31, 2006 /

I finally opened up an LJ support ticket for the Anacrusis LJ feed, which appeared as of last night to be resurrecting entries at a rate of one per hour. While the more vocal subscribers are very good-natured about the whole thing, I’m not. I like my friends page legible and I am fairly certain I lose a quiet reader every time this happens, and this time it is quite definitely not my fault.

Update 1242 hrs: The hourly reposts disappeared, anyway, either via some kind LJ staffer or on their own. My fury has mildly abated.