Story on the Brain

In case anyone wondered whether I have ADHD, yes! This episode proves it, if there had ever been any doubt. Also I'd had five short nights of sleep in a row AND was having an asthma attack, which makes me panic and fear for my life what with how it can actually kill you. But no, I sat there quietly recording and then today edited out all the horrible wheezy inhalations. Jeebus. However! It's about great things! That terrible comma plus and construction that I hate so much! See this post for much more, in a much more articulate format.   It's also about the Murderbot books. I ADORE Murderbot. Just writing that makes me want to go read them. So good! Murderbot! It's mostly about connecting both grammatical thoughts and story ideas in a logical way that shows consequences, more so than just A + B + C.  We need both, this is what I'm saying. Take that nightmarishly awful but beautifully written novel I wrote about a while back. Gorgeous sentences that added up to nothi...

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline.  Oh my giddy aunt.  Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out.  Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope!  Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knoc...

Oh oh oh, I love character. I watch sports for character. I read for character. I watch television for character. And I certainly WRITE for character. I have very strong feelings about character. I recorded an episode of Sacred Cheese of Life yesterday about character and used Finn from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood as my example, even though he's the least characteristic (sorry) example I could possibly have come up with, because I built his appearance and voice on an actor from a show I was watching.  I never do that. Do you do that? I know plenty of writers do, but I'd never done it before.  It gives your character so much more life and volume and specificity. It's also somewhat creepy, I have to admit that, because here you are focusing on someone YOU DON'T KNOW in order to write something that doesn't benefit them. I mean it's not like you're writing that person a movie they can star in or anything. He got nothing from it. Except a dedication and a ...