So, I feel the need to be creative, more to distract me than for any other reason. Unfortunately, I don't have much to be creative with right now. So here's some background reading for your perusal, an overview of some parts of Tempest, a city I created for a very...peculiar...science fantasy I am usually working on. It's not very well written because I don't have practice with these sorts of things, but it is what it is.

(It's also not done, but that's because I'm lazy)

( A Guide to Tempest )

So, I'm trying to write some stuff more regularly because I'm beginning to think that my writing's not improving. Part of this is that I've become embedded in longer works, which have nothing that can be released piecemeal, so this leaves me in a long stretch without anything to challenge myself with. For now I'm trying to present something at a writing group (which is another event which I have a hard time evaluating fairly), but I figured I might as well put it here too so people can mock it.

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( And The Clock Struck Midnight )

I had a dream last night.

Normally my dreams are somewhat distorted versions of reality, but this one was clearly cut out of whole cloth. Very strange whole cloth. Since this happens so rarely, and may indeed be my brain trying to tell me something, I'm writing it all down.

But really, I think it's just a plot bunny trying to weasel it's way out.

( My Subconscious Hates Me )

Every November I try to keep up with you-know-what, just to keep myself on track with something. This year I got through over 71,000 words, which is pretty good for me. Now I just have to keep going for what I guess is about 150,000 more and I'll be done with story arc number 4 (probably the longest of this particular work). Although why anyone would read through something that long is frankly beyond me.

I think I need to take a few courses in succinctness.

But at least my heroine finally got to completely freak out over discovering the periodic table.

I just came back from a trip to Fermilab (to give a talk at the Collaboration meeting), and I noticed, on the plane from Phoenix, that the woman next to me was reading a book.

Now, I, like most readers, have the ability to judge the genre of a book based on the cover. Sometimes it's obvious, like spaceships, and pirates, and kilt-wearing Scotsmen with their shirts unbuttoned, but sometimes, it's more subtle. It's in the way the words are written, the expressions that are allowed on the face, even the way that the author's name appears in conjunction with the title. This set off a bit of the romance warning for me, but also another sensation that I rarely experience in regular life. The cover illustration was simply drawn, there was no information on the binding, or on the cover other than the title and the author; only the bareness of the book's cover testified to its uniqueness.

Although it is always bad to judge a book by its cover, this one was screaming Vanity Press.

I don't see Vanity Press work on a day to day basis, so this aroused my curiosity. I caught a peak of the back as she was getting off the plane, and discovered that she was reading Pride and Prejudice fanfic. This Pride and Prejudice fanfic to be precise. Once my access to the internet was restored, I quickly discovered that this author has already produced other various works of P&P fanfic. And furthermore, there seems to be a whole industry devoted to the concept.

Now, I shouldn't find this very odd, considering that my choice of literature has never exactly been accused of good taste (in fact, Pride and Prejudice fanfic may be considerably closer to true literature by virtue of association), and furthermore I try not to malign other people's choices, but does anybody besides me find this vaguely disturbing? As if a piece of the internet, where I normally find fanfiction, had intruded on real life?

I don't know why this bothers me. Perhaps it's just because all those times when I was telling people to try making their pseudo-fanfic into an original work, I was apparently giving them the wrong advice.

For those of you who dabble in the art of writing, have you ever had one of those moments while you were researching something for a story where you think "You know, if I weren't doing this for the purposes of fiction, I would be a pretty sick bastard"? In my case, this is usually followed by the thought "Nope, any way I look at it, I'm still a pretty sick bastard".

I had this feeling today when I was trying to figure out how many lashes with a judicial whip it would take to kill a fourteen year old undernourished girl. It disturbed me enough that I put down the story and haven't been able to pick back up where I was.

I absolutely hate it when moral qualms get in the way of writing something.


You can all de-friend me now and run away in horror if you choose and I won't take it personally

Haven't posted much recently, mostly because of problems at the "other job".

( Bad Prank Gone Wrong )

I'm experimenting with the rtf interface right now (since I habitually write in word or other processors in .rtf format), and seeing how well it works. So far, I must confess it seems to be eating up a lot of my CPU. It does seem to overcome the standard problem, where the window I write in gets larger and larger as I write until I'm frantically scrolling both left and right.

 So anyway, because I haven't done anything worth reading in a bit, you get a strange snippet of a fairly disturbing story. I think both characters are rather weak, but tell me what you think. In the meantime, I'll be checking to see how the .rtf transition went.

 
 ETA: Boy did that not work.  Cuts went all to hell.  Dealing with the source is a pain.  Finally fixed 'em

Apologies to anyone whose friend's page got eaten alive.