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Day 2: Birmingham

April 3, 2008 /

Let’s out with it: in a blatant bid to grab some of that hot, sexy Starslip traffic, I am taking my new Jinxlet, Hugner, with me on the road across America. Now instead of trying awkwardly to take pictures of myself in different places, I can take pictures of the stuffed animal instead! No one has ever thought of this before.

Hugner passenging.

Hugner was delivered to Louisville, so I don’t have any pictures of him from Day 0 (Winston-Salem), but there he is the passenging position which was once my purview on Day 1. Pretty cute, right! Except after that I had to stuff him in the back so I could put my giant backpack where he is.

The next two pictures are going to seem similar, but only until I explain that Hugner has a clever defense mechanism that makes all dogs think he is a chew toy. I’m… I’m not sure how the defense works. Up top he’s with the famous Brenna, and on the bottom he’s with my friend Taylor’s dog, Lizzie.

Hugner and Brenna.

Hugner and Lizzie.

Once the trip is over I’ll put together a Flickr gallery of these, but even by tomorrow we should have a VERY SPECIAL Hugner road trip update! It’s a surprise, but I will say this: the next stop on our trip involves his home planet.

Of Texas.

Day 1: Louisville

April 2, 2008 /

You have to read “Mallory,” Leonard’s newly published short story: not because it’s good (it’s very good) but because that way you can understand all the “Mallory” references I’ve been making in the over-a-year since I got to beta read it. As someone on a road trip to California that includes visiting some of my role models, I find the story perhaps a little too pat in its publication timing. I smell retcon, Richardson.

Speaking of which, The War on Clarity has been updated, due mostly to people wanting their names put on or taken off the “Lasersharking” entry. If only that could have been posted on some kind of user-editable repository.

Self-passenging

March 20, 2008 /

OKAY KIDS. On the last day of March I’m leaving my suspiciously generous hosts here in NorCar and driving across the country, with stops in Louisville, Birmingham and eventually Berkeley. After two weeks (I hope) in the latter, I’m moving up to Portland to stay from somewhere between four and nine months. Looks like the trap got me after all.

So! Are you in a southwestern state or the Bay area? Would you like to hang out? Would you like to damage local hotel revenues by letting me spend a night on your couch? These can be arranged. Other things that can be arranged: me renting a room or subletting an apartment from people you know because MAN it is hard to get people on Portland Craigslist to get back to you when you don’t live in the same city. I don’t know why!

I promise to take pictures on the trip but I can’t promise you will see them in the living future. Oh, hey, if you want to ride out with me and fly back, as I once did with Leonard, let’s talk. I should warn you that due unwise purchasing decisions on my part, you will have to ride in the glove compartment.

A Better Way Backward

March 13, 2008 /

Hey, remember QTrax? There were plenty of other sources reporting on its old-school dotcom launch party, as well as the subsequent Apollo 1-level launch disaster, which featured even their putative deal with EMI vanishing like a booth babe at midnight; I honestly felt too bad (well, apathetic) for them to join in the kicking when they were so clearly down. Today Sumana pointed out that the service is now in the annals of vaporware, just below Duke Nukem Forever. According to that article, the few songs they did try to offer were skimmed off Limewire and then DRMed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone try to start a service so completely benefit-free.

It’s 2008 now, guys. Last year half of the future’s audience didn’t buy a single CD; does anyone really think that audio media featuring any kind of encumbrance are still going to turn a profit? It’s time we started treating music delivery as a resource, not a service, and that means you have to get a lot better at it before you can make a living on the gouge.

Story Hacks: Eighth in a Series

March 9, 2008 /

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

February 29, 2008 /

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!

Jon also introduced me to Dancer in the Dark. Jon likes to hurt me.

February 18, 2008 /

Almost exactly three years after I started Sad and Happy Movie Day, Jon and Amanda finally maneuvered me into actually watching Hotel Rwanda. We didn’t even have a happy movie to chase it with, but a couple episodes of Arrested Development made do.

I could have sworn that was Julia Sawalha playing the Red Cross worker, but IMDB says I am wrong. Dang. Oh, also the world is going to burn and we all deserve it.