Or House of Blog or somesuch.
Here's the list of creations: Modblog, the domain version, which won't be incorporating any of the content from this blog (officially the son of the son of modblog in my private nomenclature). That'll have the basic daily rants and screeds and fluff, and update posts like this one. I'm committed to daily posting and may well crosspost between the three blogging platforms-blogger, wordpress, and my domain. It depends on how much I have to say each day.
I'm planning at the very least to do a lot more reviews-books and cds more so than movies, which I don't watch much, and more sports content. Cubs, Bears, Blackhawks specifically. I get a lot of the Cub games on WGN, and the Bears have a few national games. The Hawks are rarely on tv, and the 160 bucks for a season's worth of streaming is ridiculous. But I digress...next on the list is :
14,481 words now in the books, as of this morning. Changing the metafictional conceit and making the mc a blogger rather than a vidcaster, and changing the setting to more-or-less present day has made a huge difference in thrust and has gotten me through a long section of infopak and dialogue, simply by breaking it up into digestible chunks.
Making each chapter a blogpost has been a masterstroke as far as the writing. I'm surprised that it took me so long, considering how much I enjoy writing flash fiction. I'd always thought of the novel as a themed-short collection. Now it's short-shorts, and I don't plan to apply any Nair as yet.
Was going to do an edit of the first 10k and throw it on here over the weekend, but I don't think so right now. I'm just going to keep chugging along. Tonight I should finally finish the musical portion of the backtrack to Dereliction of Duty, and it's entirely possible that I might get the voiceover done as well and get the whole thing wrapped up. I'm pretty mad at myself for taking so long. I think Sam is too, but he's nice enough not to say so. Will give the project extra attention as a result. Sounds pretty nice so far-Mozart-to-Metallica-in-a-minute.
I have a suspicion as to the cause of my recent lethargy, and we'll see if that bears fruit (it has to do with my O2 system, which has been sounding funny the last day or so). My unfortunate bout with insomnia continues-I'm still keeping vampire hours and sleeping a couple of hours at a time.
I've been busying myself during the midnight hours, fooling around with the templates and graphics for my Planet Moderan site, which has been moved to new servers. I'm not going to automatically transfer over the content, as I have some new things I want to try. There's no real hurry, and I'd like to give those things the best showcase I can.
In the meantime, I'm moving along with my nanonovel Fallen Earring, hovering around 7,000 words for all of the trumpeted fail ( there has to be a certain percentage of anti-fail so that the fail is that much sweeter in this hostile (or merely indifferent universe)).
Yeah...but that fail, that's a problem. The very concept of fail has so invaded things that it invaded my nanonovel last night and made me write this passage of questionable wisdom:
I'm up all night again. Can't seem to shake this bout of insomnia, and am just going to have to run with the sleep/fail and hope it ends soon. So tired. Day upon day of two-three hours of sleep at a stretch followed by exhaustion and passing out at the wrong time of day to reset the Circadian rhythms has me disoriented, and it's all I can do to distractedly type away...
Somehow I managed to record an episode of the show today. I was just watching myself on camera, and I looked like hell. Face all pouchy and dissipated.
The face of fail.
Because that's what I do. That's all we do.
Think about it.
Everything you do is ultimately bound to fail. Entropy always wins, in the end.
That isn't to say we shouldn't bother to do anything, because doing things helps us to pass the time. But the long view says that everything we accomplish is but the erection of an anthill.
Sometimes it's comforting to take that objective view, see things from the mountaintop as it were, to take in the big picture.
Because you can get too close to real sometimes too.
Jeeping jeebus! What in the name of Graham Nash was I thinking? I can see it now, Fail and Loathing In Innsmouth is my new title. Hmm. Waitaminnit. Ok, I gotta do something with that.
Onward.
I'm working at Fallen Earring. There are a lot of stops and starts but the story is starting to emerge from the ashes of the previous ten or so outlines. It's a lot more autobiographical than most of my things, even though the character isn't modeled after me. But the genesis of a lot of the incidents and happenings in the character's life occurred in my own. Not much Marty Sue, but the charge might have a smidgeon of barb.
Those sections are turning out to be the easiest to write, which leads me to a conundrum.
I'm what you call a linear writer. The flow of words is so important to me that I write things in consecutive order, the way they're laid out. It's only later that I tear that all up and rearrange it.
But I can see where I may be slogging soon. There's a slower section coming up, and the contemplative bogs me down because, well, I'm me. Much more intuitive than contemplative. I don't want to improv on it because it's an important section, but I already know it's gonna be slow and am tempted to ditch the next three thousand or so words and dig into the warping-reality stuff.
Cuz yeah, reality-warp beats fail. The premise is fruitful and I'm inventing spins already. The metafictional angle (my lead character is a blogger) works, fits my warped sensibilities, helps to subtly impress the storyline. I love researching/remembering/dreaming up the period detail. I just need to get through that passage. And I dipped into it tonight.
The Fallen Earring blog. Just in case you want to visit. You never know when I might pop up a segment.
Yep. So here it is again, nanotime, when incipient novelization is supposed to be translated into actuality at 1667 words per day. This will be my fourth attempt. I've successfully navigated the nanowaters before thrice, but have never had the particular set of challenges I face this time-namely, embarking on a novel without any preliminaries. I was originally going to work on a delayed project, Vermilion Dawn, set many years after Martian colonization. That novel needs some seed from a previous novel to work properly, though, and much rumination led to deciding upon a "rewrite" of a novel I've started several times but haven't finished, in an attempt to exorcise that ghost once and for all.
So, after much waffling, hemming, and hawing, I withdrew Vermilion Dawn in favor of Fallen Earring, dragged out my ten thousand docs and links and books and whatnot about Hendrix, and furiously began scribbling, in longhand on notebook paper, my proposed outline. That was the day before Hallowe'en.
The floor in my office became decorated with paper balls not long after that. I spent part of a mostly sleepless night shooting them through a Nerfoop I have hanging next to the door and ruminating about how to make the thing work.
Fallen Earring is a genrehopper, a rule-breaker. An altworld themed-story collection that masquerades as a novel and takes place mostly via flashback. I've been working on it on and off for a few years now-the themes and settings of the thing are burned into my brain (like some of my other unwritten or unpublished "works"), and I cannot let them go. The problem is that I hadn't arrived at the proper method of telling the story.
Still not sure that I have. I've gone from third person limited to third omniscient, from present tense to past, to first person, to having different characters tell the story. I've tried having Jimi as a character, which doesn't work at all, having him as the narrator, which really doesn't work on an extended basis, adding metafictional frameworks, turning the events of the narrative this way and that, trying semi-desperately to find a way, the right way, to GET THE DAMN STORY TOLD.
I think I have it. Now I just need to finish up several other projects so I can get at the thing. And hope against hope that I don't change my friggin mind again.
My ancient colored-pencil and smeared-marker pic has been pressed into service as the cover. I added some lettering I developed a couple of years ago, did a little photoshop sharpening, and that was that.
Now I just need to do the writing. I'm actually shooting for @75k, as that's the projected wordcount of the whole thing, and I'm still waffling over whether or not to edit what I do each day and put it up here. Very possible-I'm going to take a look at what I actually have and make that decision.
On other fronts-I'm still waiting for GoDaddy to finish the transfer of my domain to my new webhost so I can get after rebuilding my website. I was hoping that could be done before NaNoWriMo so as not to complicate things any more than they already are, but no go. That's going to be a cause for more waffling as I try to decide whether to go with a more conventionall website or to make everything wordpress. Very likely that it'll be some combination of the two like I've had before, but I just don't know. I'm pretty sore about the short shrift I got from GoDaddy and really don't want to do a whole bunch of coding. That's all up in the air for now.
I almost chickened out of Nano, but when I was established as the community leader from Writing Forums, I had to buck up and run with the ball. WF recently promoted me to global moderator from my previous position as forum mod. Have to set a good example.
Today is my 50th birthday. Or rather, the fiftieth anniversary of my birth. A lot of significance is attached to the years with zeroes...I don't know why, but I do feel that this one is significant, if only because I almost didn't have this one.
It's been a sucky year overall-the good points are far outweighed by the bad, but we'll come out of it all smelling pretty good. My long illness and recuperation will be the means by which I can switch horses and start on a new career path (or paths), and I'm all about getting creative with that.
It's been difficult to get myself into a productive schedule-my insomnia has kicked in again, and the constant state of enervation keeps my energy level pretty low.. I can lie in bed and close my eyes to my heart's content, but morpheus never overtakes me. My mind just keeps running and running, fueled apparently by some odd combination of cabin fever and artistic inspiration. I spend the endless waking moments planning, making to-do lists and plot skeletons or partial skeletons, knitting the threads that will relate those bones to other bones, playing in my mental ipod the pithy lead guitar and melody lines that will break my songs free of their formulae, and haunting the forums.
Yesterday it was made public that myself and another forum moderator were elevated to the role of global mod. A nice lady was told that she is now moderator of the Lounge and Debate sections. While I wouldn't wish that role on anyone, I'll be happy to help steer those conversations in the directions dictated by the site's bylaws. There have been a couple of mentor appointments made recently, and all of them seem to be working out.
I have a couple of projects running there, some goals to shoot for. I've developed more patience this year, probably (okay, almost certainly) the result of my hospitalization. When you can't move and have to depend on other (and rather busy) people to obtain food, water, and basic creature comforts like a urinal or bedpan, you learn to wait.
I've also developed a desire to finish things. I'm a killer starter of projects-I understand perfectly my dear lady's knitter project list. I love most of my things so much that I don't want to end them and keep starting new ones so that I don't have to.
This can lead to aberrations like the 627,448 words of Carcosa (my 2009 NaNoNovel) that I typed up between November '09 and January '11, most of which are completely useless for anything other than cannibalization but were fun to do anyway. That monstrosity grew from the 1999 short story I of the Storm, which had the unique twist of the narrator undergoing transdimensional personality transplant and liking it immensely. I still like the general idea and did a buttload of worldbuilding for it, so I may try it again. That might be a good place for one of my patented themed-short-story groups. The collection Blue Easter is going along quite well. I'm rewriting all of the principal pieces-"Green", and "Parchment", the original "Blue Easter" novella recast and repurposed, all of those fragments and linkpieces and thinkpieces, and am including the never-public rewrite of "Ghoul Picnic" entitled "The Whispering Trees", and a couple more shorts that I'll sandbag for now.
The webcomic/graphic novel Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth, which runs concurrent with that collection (it was originally intended to be part of it but has developed into a companion piece in terms of chronology), is underway at long last. I've done some of the character sketching and will be debuting that either around Xmas or just after the first of the year. Those are virtual locks for completion in the next six months, and are on the front burners, along with the blognovel Fallen Earring. That's going to be appearing on my website proper after nanowrimo. I've decided to do a complete rewrite, from scratch, and am doing it as my nanonovel. As soon as I can apply a decent edit, I'm going to put it up in sections. "It" being the version I'm happier with afterward. I'd like to put that novel to bed and get on with the next one in the series, Vermilion Dawn, which I've decided not to do for Nano this year.
I think four finished novels is a good goal to shoot for. It'd be great to post a year from now and say that I had achieved that goal, plus the musical projects. Hell, it'd be a great year.
Aforementioned musical projects: Suite Indigo, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Cyberpunk Honkytonk are the titles of the three cds I'm planning to issue. Each will have material remastered for inclusion, new tracks/new instrumental parts, and probably new cover art. I'll probably distribute them through reverbnation unless something striking catches my eye. They'll all be available after the first of the year-might stagger the releases from month to month.
I'm finishing up another promotional video project. This time I'm doing voiceover as well as backtrack. Good practice for when I put my own videos together, something I've been mulling over for quite some time.
Here are a couple of the projects I've been associated with:
One of these days I'm going to try scoring my own pieces. I still have in mind to do the narrative of "Ghost Tracks" as a podcast, spoken over the music that inspired the story. I'd just have to figure out exactly how much time it takes to read the story put loud and go from there. That could easily make the front burner for a minute since it would be quickly accomplished.
That's all for now. Lotta stuff since I haven't been posting much lately. Thanks for reading!
Modblog, the domain version, which won't be incorporating any of the content from this blog (officially the son of the son of modblog in my private nomenclature). That'll have the basic daily rants and screeds and fluff, and update posts like this one. I'm committed to daily posting and may well crosspost between the three blogging platforms-blogger, wordpress, and my domain. It depends on how much I have to say each day.
