{"id":270,"date":"2005-09-22T15:39:03","date_gmt":"2005-09-22T20:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2005\/09\/22\/story-hacks-fourth-in-a-series\/"},"modified":"2005-09-22T15:39:03","modified_gmt":"2005-09-22T20:39:03","slug":"story-hacks-fourth-in-a-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2005\/09\/22\/story-hacks-fourth-in-a-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Story Hacks:  Fourth in a Series"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most magazines pay by the word, but sometimes even doubling up on your adverbs won&#8217;t help you break that magic-million mark.  How else can you fill the pages you&#8217;ll need to pay down that Porsche?  That, dear wreater, is why Gutenberg invented the dream sequence.<\/p>\n<p>Ooh!  Dreeeeam sequence!<\/p>\n<p>Some authors choose to &#8220;reverse-engineer&#8221;* one of the many sober, objective dream interpretation books on the market.  If one wants to symboblize a penis, for example, one could use a snake, a pencil, a toothbrush, a remote control, a key, the letter I, or any of thousands of vaguely cylindrical objects we encounter every day.  After all, our formative years were spent around lots of penises!  Am I right?  I&#8217;m right.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, interpretative books with scanty indexing may require significant work to find the right symbiology.  As we should know by now, work is the opposite of writing!  Instead, google &#8220;dream journal&#8221; and grab about two things from every result you find.  Don&#8217;t forget to change the names&#8211;unless you forget on purpose!<\/p>\n<p>To help you get started, here are some useful common elements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Uncles\n<\/li>\n<li>Running but not going anywhere (isn&#8217;t that scary?  It&#8217;s scary!)\n<\/li>\n<li>A hunchback\n<\/li>\n<li>Your mom\n<\/li>\n<li>This one house you went to but now it looks completely different\n<\/li>\n<li>Freud seriously said your mom\n<\/li>\n<li>Nudity\n<\/li>\n<li>People who are also other people\n<\/li>\n<li>Freud was like the Tupac of his generation, kids\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once you&#8217;re published, your consumers may pay a lot of attention to your dream sequences.  If they don&#8217;t like what they find there, remind them that it&#8217;s just a dream!  It doesn&#8217;t mean anything!  Except hilarity!  If they claim that you&#8217;re just writing nonsense to pad your word count, point out that it is <i>way deeper<\/i> than them, and that they just don&#8217;t get your symbliography.  It&#8217;s true.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 90%\">* Translation:  &#8220;drive backwards.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i>Today&#8217;s Hack in a Nutshell:<\/i>  Nothing you can &#8220;wrighte&#8221; is &#8220;wronge!&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most magazines pay by the word, but sometimes even doubling up on your adverbs won&#8217;t help you break that magic-million mark. How else can you fill the pages you&#8217;ll need to pay down that Porsche? That, dear wreater, is why Gutenberg invented the dream sequence. Ooh! Dreeeeam sequence! Some authors choose to &#8220;reverse-engineer&#8221;* one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mild-lunacy","category-story-hacks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}