Some days you think you’re just yodeling down the pipe, and some days you get a powerful response and moving discussion and people caring and kind words.
Should have saved that one until tomorrow. Now the next story’s going to be a letdown.
Category: Writing
I finally figured out what to tell people when they ask what an anacrusis is.
For clarity: I am happy about this
According to my stats and the report they sent me, my latest ad at Blank Label got 188 clickthroughs in 20,000 views, or a little less than 1%.
If any of the original dotcom ad firms had done that well, they’d… still exist.
The sword Anne’s holding is also a guitar, and a magic wand.
It’s a sworguitwand.
“We got you surrounded, Moloney!” harshes the cop with the bullhorn. “Come out with your hands up!”
“You’ll arrest me?” Anne shouts back.
“Shit no!” The bullhorn catches the other cops laughing. “We just want an easy target!”
“This is it,” she mutters. “Live by die by, right?”
“Yea,” says Jesus grimly, unholstering his Desert Eagles. “When I was cornered, you gave me to cap.”
“Shit, Jesus.”
“Today I am your vengeance, Anne!”
They blow out the door, fire and bullets, wailing hard on high G.
Rita and the Cold Man Timeline
Because I promised Will I would. Keep in mind that this is only my personal ordering! If you find another way to arrange these that makes sense to you, that’s equally valid, and probably better.
- Part 1
- The boy who will be the Cold Man sees people he shouldn’t.
- The man who will be the Cold Man is imprisoned and tortured for information. He negotiates his temporary release.
- He presumably goes to the Numismata, becomes the Cold Man, and returns to his captors with five of his new friends.
- According to one of the Numismata, the Cold Man leaves their order at some point hereabouts.
- Part 2
- Rita joins an elite squad of operatives composed of Tina, Sandra and Mary, directed by Lou.
- On a mission, Rita meets the Cold Man and discovers a little of what he can do.
- Rita and her squad go on a different mission, in Chile. At some point, they become separated, and she meets the Cold Man again. Together they hide in a foxhole and end up in a cave. They discover that Rita can see the Cold Man, just as the Cold Man could once see the Numismata.
- The Cold Man finds that someone’s learning to counter his abilities.
- He meets with an Ad Hoc, who extracts a work agreement with threats against Rita.
- Something goes horribly wrong for him, and Rita dreams about it.
- The next day she receives a pointless surveillance tape. She investigates, solo, and an Ad Hoc warns her off. She investigates further and discovers the Numismata.
- Rita undergoes the Numismatic ritual, giving up warmth and color vision–and maybe more–in exchange for power. She wonders if it’s worth the Cold Man’s life; what she intends to do with that life is ambiguous.
- Rita returns to her HQ, which promptly blows up. She avoids death with her newfound abilities.
- Rita takes on the Ad Hocs.
- Rita kills the Cold Man.
No, Slatt and the one with the Great Zaganza don’t appear in here. Yet!
Site news that nobody cares about
Xorph.com served six hundred-odd pages to the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya yesterday, which presumably means somebody in their CS department told a bot to crawl me–I’ve never seen them in my referral logs before. Anyone else get similar hits?
Also, Dreamhost now has a thing where they up your bandwidth and disk space quotas every week. It’s not much in terms of disk space–like 20Mb a week–but the bandwidth grows by a gig a week (both for the cheapest plan). Dreamhost is pretty great.
I’m stealing the idea of the photo-caption story.
I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:
“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…
My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”
All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.
I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with
- Contractions!
- Cut out the first paragraph.
- And probably the second.
Obviously, I’ve been reading a lot of author and editor interviews and stuff about writing workshops. For a group of people who really ought to follow Orwell’s first maxim, it’s surprising how many of them declare in exactly the same words that the chief value of short fiction is to “hone your craft.”
The quote that got bastardized into that meme is actually Larry Niven’s: “Keep writing short stories. The money’s in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.” The difference in implication is substantial.