So, I have been experimenting with a new writing style.
This is a very novel experiment for me as style, that elusive and difficult to define aspect, is something I have not tried to craft. The lecture series I purchased has given me thoughts and really courage to experiment in this way.
After the jump is a short story playing with this new style, albeit in an extreme form. Let me know what you think.
Okay I am so going to see this movie in the theaters. Come on, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Shawn of The Dead, plus aliens, plus music from Xanadu. (which is most likely just the trailer.) How can I not go. Continue reading
Last night , about 7:45 I started getting a nasty little headache. By 8:30 it had progressed into a low-level migraine and I knew that there would be no Sunday Night Movie for me. I bid goodnight to my sweetie-wife and crawled into bed. I stayed there, leaving only to call in sick to work, for the next 14 hours. (A tleast I can report that the new bed is comfortable.) Now it has throttled back to just a nasty tension headache.
For those who enjoy my Sunday Night Movie feature, I apologize sorry for the miss.
So there I was doing political blog reading the other day when I came across this posting from Instapundit:
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE: ObamaCare Repeal Would Save $1.4 Trillion.
This is a very typical type of posting from Professor Reynolds. Short, makes a dramatic point, and linking to further information. It is also an excellent example of how he prevaricates with this short pithy posts. Someone who was justing reading down the numerous posting for that day would read the slug, come away with the impression that repealing Healthcare reform would save us 1.4 trillion dollars, and move on. I followed the link because it seemed at odds with what knew of the situation. Maybe I was wrong and I wouldn’t going to dismiss the concept out of hand. Continue reading
First: Once again we have the horribly heated rhetoric in which your opponents are automatically the equivalent to Hitler and or the Nazis. This, as it was with the protest on the right, is simply absurd. While the move to break a set of public worker unions is a major political step, one certain to generate intense feelings, it is not in any way comparable to the degenerate, racist, insane positions of the NAZI party. This is a perfect example as to why I dislike extremes in nearly all its forms, it is blinding and when you are cocooned in its comfortable black-and-white world you are unreeachable by reason or rational thought. Continue reading
So Ikea, that bastion of clean elegant style, delivered our new beds today. It was a very orderly and well handled process. we were giving a time frame to expect the delivery and then 10 minutes or so before the actually arrival we got a complimentary call alerting us that the truck was on its way.
The delivery men were prompt and friendly, hauling away our old queen sized mattress and box spring, leaving the new material, packed and ready for assembly, in our living-room.
As is the case with nearly everything from Ikea, assembly was easy and quick. For the beds it really was nothing more than adding the legs to the support boxes and presto instant beds.
The mattresses were more intriguing to me. They came tightly rolled-up and sealed in plastic. (‘She’s dead, wrapped in plastic.‘) Once the plastic was sliced the mattresses unrolled and inflated. They are shipped vacuumed sealed, an aspect I particularly liked given the current fear of bedbugs out in the world, and the air rushes in, audibly, plumping up the mattresses to the full depth, a process neither fast nor dramatic, but one that fascinating to watch.
My sweetie-wife has gone out now for new linens, leaving me to a raining Saturday afternoon. I think Call Of Duty calls.
Seeing this video with my sweetie-wife I made a startling discovery. She has nearly zero knowledge of the Muppets. Aside from Kermit and Miss Piggy that virtually all unknown to her.
Trying to figure out what movie to watch this weekend as my Sunday Night Movie feature.
I torn between the following choices:
Blade Runner
Seabiscuit
Shock Treatment
1941
Little Shop Of Horrors (the Musical)
As you can my mood at this time is quite….unstable.
So it started with just a line edit to Love and Loyalty. I spotted a few sentences that were a bit on the clumsy side and decided to fix them, leading to the discovery that my sentence construction skills had advanced in the last two years and that the entire book needed a line edit. Fine, I’ve been buckling down and working my chapter by chapter on this line edit.
That lead me to discover that some chapter were incomplete, missing vital scenes I had not bothered to write, nor even think of, when I originally composed them. So I started a file listing the newt scenes to write, along with the plans for an entirely new chapter 2. The job had grown, but just a bit.
Now my list of new scenes is more than 13 scenes long, no counting the entirely new chapter 2, and while washing my hands an epiphany exploded behind my eyeballs. (Truly, it feels better than it sounds.)
Now I am going to have to move chapters around. A fairly critical even in the novel, which happened more by chance than any other agency, will now be the direct result of actions taken by Seth Jackson the protagonist of the plot. The novel is growing deeper with more points of view now required to fully explain the plot. That said, I still think this will about at most 10,000 word in total, but I could wrong. Only time and pages will tell.
So last week, Tuesday in fact, after my visit to the dentist to get five crowns put into my mouth, that was an experience let me say, I came home and banged around the condo for the rest of the day. One of the things that happened due to those hours on my hand was I scanned through a flyer/brochure that had arrived a few days earlier. This one was for college lectures as CDs, DVDs, or Downloads. I was just passing the time until I saw this course Building Great Sentences. Hmm, I had felt for sometime that was weakest in my sentence level construction and this might be of some help. The catalogue advertised a price of about $40, but I felt certain that logging into their website I would discover a much higher price awaited me.
Nope. $40 if I purchased it a a download, no physical media. Well, that didn’t bother any, so, with only a little trepidation as to what the sweetie-wife might say when she learned of this purchase, I spent the money and downloaded the 24 lectures.
Of course the final judgment will rest with the opinions of others, those readers, editors, and members of my writing community if this course has impacted, for better or for ill, on my skill as a writer. However, I am very pleased with the course and feel that I have leveled up as a writer. You can judge for yourself.
Here is the opening sentence to a new short story I am crafting.
Enkidu crossed the last measure of grass, entering the forest, his young eyes adapting quickly to the dim light barely filtering through the thick canopy of leaves, his bare feet silently crushing wet moldering leaves in his step, the sharp, sweet smell of decay filling his nose and from deeper in the forest the presence of the dead filling his thoughts with silent voices.