50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
I’m trying to figure out some stuff about traffic sources, and I feel like my stats package isn’t entirely accurate. If you don’t mind, would you please choose the option below that most accurately reflects how you found out about this post?
[poll id=”3″]
As my thank you for your time, here are my dogs, being good dogs, Brent.
Last year, a couple of weeks before Halloween, I had this idea to write a short, supernatural horror story. At the time, I was deep in the first draft of the short story that became a novella that really wants to be a novel (which has since been titled “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”), so switching tracks to work on something different was intended to be a quick detour that would give me something to release for Halloween.
Once I got into it, though, Project Ravenswood took on its own life and it went from being a short story that I expected to finish around 3500 words after a week or so, to something I worked on for several months and just finished yesterday, at a little under 14,000 words. I retitled it “Dead Trees Give No Shelter”, and now I have to decide what I’m going to do with it. Part of me wants to hold onto it and put it out as part of the short collection it was originally intended to be part of, another part of me wants to release it right away as an ebook, still another part of me wants to pitch it to a couple of editors I respect, and still another part of me wants to record and release it as an audiobook original.
So I’m not sure what happens next with this story, because I’ve never worked this long on something that’s this (relatively) short, and I’m in unfamiliar territory right now. I do know that I get to do two things:
Oh, and I get to release a new work of creative fiction for the first time in years. That’s pretty cool, and feels really good. However I get this story from me to you, I think you’ll enjoy it … or, at least, I hope you do.
My brain’s been doing this really neat thing every night between the time I shut off the light and fall asleep. I can’t recall specifically when it started, but for several weeks, now, before it begins its nightly delivery of nightmares and stress dreams, it opens up this box of memories labeled THINGS YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT, MAKE YOU SAD, OR OTHERWISE UPSET YOU AT SOME POINT that it recently found, pulls one out, and then spends as much time as it can doing a fucking power point presentation about it.
Most of the things in this memory box aren’t even recent. Most of the things in this memory box are from years, or even decades, ago, when I was still a little kid. None of them are particularly traumatic; most are things like “remember when this kid was a dick to you?” and “remember that time dad laughed at a thing you cared about?” and “you know, when you were 12, you could have been nicer to that guy…”
Last night, my brain was too tired to be a dick to me, and all I can recall from the few moments between turning off the light and going to sleep is listening to the white noise machine do its thing. My asshole brain didn’t dump a bunch of shitty dreams on me (that I can remember, anyway) and it even let me stay asleep for close to 8 hours before it woke me up.
And then, while I was reading the paper, it was all OH HEY I FORGOT TO BE A DICK TO YOU LAST NIGHT and it unloaded this memory on me.
So I do this podcast with my friend, Mikey Neumann, that I want everyone in the world to know about.
It’s called TV Crimes. We watch old TV shows, do a recap of them, and then put them on trial for whatever their crime against humanity was. A couple of my favorites are Silk Stalkings, Baywatch Nights, and Marijuana Ghost Says Don’t Use Drugs.
Our newest episode is Remington Steele.
I’m nearly finished with Ravenswood, and just about ready to give it to my editor for his Red Pen of Doom. Before I jump back into the short story that became a novella that is dangerously close to being a novel, I’m going to reward myself with a couple of fun non-writing projects. One of them is building and configuring (and hopefully playing) my PiCade kit. The other is just an idea, but I think it’s doable: I have a 7″ Android tablet that I don’t use very often, because the battery on it is crap. But I have this idea to keep it plugged in all the time, and use it to display a scrolling news ticker, the current weather, and my security camera feeds. It’ll live on my desk. Does anyone know if there’s an existing Linux or Android project that does that sort of thing? I don’t have the knowledge or ability at the moment to put all that together on my own, but I think I could learn, given enough time.
I’ll be on the pre-game show tonight, before the Kings vs. Bruins, on Fox Sports West, around 7:15pm, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
My friend, Robyn, is an amazing woman. She made a video this morning that I want to signal boost.
Anne and I are way late to the party, but we saw What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? the other night, and it made me want to rewatchWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sunset Boulevard. I’ve mostly been watching genre films (SF, Horror, Anime) and I realized this week that Classic Amazing Hollywood Studio Pictures is also a genre that I need to watch more of. I’m also on Team Bette Davis Forever, now.
I finished Dune. As I hoped, it affected me much more deeply and significantly than it did when I was 12 and didn’t have the ability to fully appreciate it. I kinda want to dive straight into Messiah, but I’m going to read Neil’s new book, first, and then maybe I’ll finally read Fall of Hyperion.