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“Reshaping the landscape” posted
I wrote a piece of flash fiction last week called “Reshaping the Landscape” that I’ve published here at irrsinn.net tonight: “Flat landscapes for better visibility,” they claimed. “Safer all around,” they claimed. Bullshit. “It’s my landscape!” she shouted down behind her. “You can’t have it!” Writing this has spawned a whole set of ideas in this same ‘verse. A lot of the ideas concern what a “person” is, what essential rights people have, how subjugated people make their own culture and identity, etc. especially as pertains to artificial intelligence. I also want to use this to experiment with letting a universe emerge from a set of short/flash stories (as opposed…
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New laptop en route
I’ve been bantering around the idea of having a device for mobile writing for a while now. I had a list of specs that seemed rather impossible, initially. It needed to be small (less than a 12-inch screen), it needed to have at least a few hours of battery power, it needed network connectivity (for research purposes and managing the repositories of my stories), and it needed to be cheap. Cheap. I haven’t sold a novel yet, so I can’t fathom dropping $1000+ into a device that won’t actually make me a better writer. I was thinking more along the lines of, ya know, $300 or less. Preferably with a…
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What’s the bootstrapping process for this?
I’ve been spending a lot of time writing. Not here, obviously, but in a text editor whose contents only ever make it to my hard drive or a printer. I have a little editing circle with Gregory and Shun that meets weekly to trade chapters/units of our novels/screenplays for editing. As I knew I would back in college, I’m finding life as a code monkey uninteresting. I didn’t have an interest in sitting in front of a computer hacking out code all day back then, and it’s not so great now that I’m doing it. I know it’s a stepping stone, but what do I have to look forward to…
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Fear is the mindkiller…
I’ve been sitting here for the last hour or so, rereading my writing works in progress, trying to find a thread to pick up and run with. Or trot with. Or stroll with. I tried playing around with a micro from a writing prompt, but my imagination was pretty dry. I’m going to keep trying, but I’m saddened by my lack of creative thought. In other news, I told my students I was quitting today. One student’s response was, “You don’t like teaching high school? Why couldn’t you have figured that out at the beginning of the year?!” Ah. Nasty little child. Students like her, that want nothing other than…
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NaNo-ness
NaNoWriMo is done. I didn’t get 50k words, but I learned a hell of a lot about writing. I’m continuing the story for NaNoFiMo. My biggest problem was not having a plan at all when I started. I dreamt up characters, kept sparse notes, and plugged away… for about 22k words. As I approached the climax of the story (too soon, at that!), I was having to devote too much mental energy to figuring out what would happen when I wanted to be devoting energy to skillfully delivering that climax. Um… that crisis, I mean. Yeah. To make things worse, there isn’t really a good subplot to add complexity and…