FYI
The Amity Incident, aka the continuing adventures of T'reka and the strange creatures she encounters, is now up to 10 000 words.
10K down
110K to go.
And I just DL’d Sculptris so I can fart around and build a moquette of T'reka.
Did I mention that editing FUCKING SUCKS yet?
Whilst waiting for my dear Beta Readers to get back to me about Hevun’s Ambassador [C'mon! Hurry it along! It’s half-past January already!] I am putting together One Year of Instants.
Which requires a table of contents.
And in the making of said table of contents, I have discovered that pretty much ALL OF THE STORIES ARE FUCKING MIS-NUMBERED since story #16
There are no words for the level of meltdown that is threatening my sanity, right now.
I shall remain strong until I get to the end of it all. THEN I’ll edit out the extraneous ones, add them to the *next* year of instants, and bloody re-number all of THEM so I have a head start on the next lot.
I’m not fucking editing all the ones in my blog because I’m not THAT much OCD.
Just expect a sudden leap in the numerals at some later date. Followed by burbling insanity from yours truly.
Gah. I hate fucking editing.
I wish I could just hand off all my shit to someone trustworthy and say, “Make it look good for me and then hand it back so I can publish that puppy” but I suspect that that requires extra income.
Sigh.
I’m going on holiday for a bit
No worries, I have queued up some instant stories to cover my arse absence.
What I can’t do is tweet about them to spread the word while I’m gone.
So. For the next five stories, I would very much appreciate it if you would tweet my stories to all your followers. If you add the hashtags, #free or #freefiction (along with a pithy explanation), they may even garner the attention of Free Fiction Daily which, I am certain, has netted me more followers over time.
Forget publish or perish. These days, it’s publicity or perish.
Please help me get the word out.
Thanks in advance,
Your local cackling InterNutter
That was officially the last story for 2013
No, I’m not taking a break.
I am continuing onwards, because writing instant stories on a daily basis is an excellent exercise for me.
What I am doing is attempting to create a cover for this mess so I can publish it on a pay-what-you-want basis while I work on the sequel, One Leap Year of Instants (Subsequent sequels will just have the year as part of the title. Yes, I am planning to do this for as long as I have breath and time)
Now. On to the tricky stuff.
ART
I have not arted in a very long time and it SHOWS. I’m trying to get my groove back in my weird free moments and having a scratched-up graphics tablet does not help.
I have temporarily nullified the scratch by taping a manilla envelope to the tablet, and all seems to work fine.
Everyone who’s trawled my archive knows that I don’t have titles for some stories because they came to me as asks. Alongside editing (UGH) I shall be concocting titles for those.
The cover for One Year of Instants is going to feature the characters who got the most ‘action’. My extant cover artist is a photomontage expert (Hi, BespokeBookCovers! I’m sorry I give you so much shit) and I have looked and found zero references for the following:
- anthropomorphic guinea-fowl people (T'reka)
- shadow elementals (Shayde)
- Mauve-skinned shapeshifters (Rael)
- anthropomorphic Saint Bernards (Nanny)
- anthropomorphic beagle-mutts (Boy)
- and so on
My only logical course is to make these images myself. Unless someone better pops up and does the art for shits and giggles. Because the way things are looking, I might not gain satisfactory art for 2013’s year of instants until somewhere around 2017. [I have a plan B! The interim cover is going to have a melting clock on it with the numbers replaced with months] But I’m still going to try to get my arts on, anyway. Maybe I’ll be prepared for 2017…
So… alongside the regular fictitious insanity, do expect some sketch dumps interspersed with pleas for better artists to come along and help me out.
…any artists out there willing to deal with an author?
Workin’ on my fact sheet for The Amity Incident isn’t actually writing, is it?
It’s just getting my ducks in a row for the actual writing.
Isn’t it?
Challenge #00359: Shining, Gleaming, Silken, Flaxen, Waxen…
Here’s a good challenge - write something that involves someone finding a way to explain Wolverine’s hair. Seriously, whether comics, cartoons, or movies, it’s always the same winged sorta puffed-out spiky thing that looks near-exactly like the sides of his costume’s mask. Does he style it that way intentionally, does he just have the world’s worst case of Hat Hair, or what?
They had been hiking for hours. Everyone’s hair was plastered to their heads with their own perspiration. Everyone… except Logan.
Sara spotted it when they took a break by the brook. She, like everyone else, had taken a moment or fifteen hundred to soak their bare feet in the cool flowing water.
Logan took off his hat and, much to her surprise, his hair popped up in those two, distinctive ‘wings’ that sort of echoed his hero uniform.
“How?” Sara managed between exhausted pants.
“How’s that, Tallwater?” he famed himself with his hat.
“How do you… get your hair… to do that?”
He reached up. Felt it. Snorted and shook his head. “When Nikola Tesla asks you to hold two wires? Don’t.”
[Muse food remaining: 18 (fic war prompts: 0) Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
What does your handwriting say about your personality?
From the slant of your letters to the amount of space between words, this infographic explains what your writing reveals about you.
Lol.
Lots of this stuff has alternate explanations. My handwriting is usually a byproduct of cheap notebooks and shitty pens, with a side of either restrained budget or equally restrained time.
Thus, my handwriting was usually (1) bunched up as tight as it would go (2) incredibly messy and © incredibly tiny. The dots of my i’s or punctuation was slapdash at best - I knew what I was writing and I didn’t have a lot of time for iotas. To this day, my handwritten “the” can easily be confused with “He”. My n’s tend to vanish completely if I’m not watching them. My g’s hybridise with e’s and my d’s look like backwards 6’s.
And I only dot my i’s with circles when the quality of my pen is pretty poor or the paper is saturated with my skin oils, thus rendering the pen shitty.
No wonder I write via keyboard, these days.
Aaaawwwwww YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!
As of this moment, four hundred lovely peeps have downloaded a copy of Hevun’s Rebel [still available for free at Smashwords!] and I couldn’t be happier.
Thankyou. Thankyou all :)
I certainly hope you’re enjoying it.
Tell your friends if you are :D Tell them if you think it’d be right up their alley. Tell them if you reckon it might be a welcome change of pace for them.
Share and enjoy, eh?
Challenge #00342: Wild Goose Chase
The Three Pig Trick: Releasing into an area three havoc-causing animals, traditionally pigs, labelled 1, 2 and 4, (may be scaled up for larger numbers of animals) and watching the chaos ensue in catching the labeled animals and searching for the nonexistent missing numbered ones.
The premise was simple. There was a large flock of numbered geese in a fenced enclosure. Their opponents had to catch every last one alive before they went after Shayde and her reluctant companion, Rael.
It shocked him that Shayde herself cheerfully blew the starting whistle.
“Reet,” she said, turning away from the chaos of feathers, hunters and angry geese. “Let’s leg it fer the ship and piss off home.”
“What? That’s against the rules…”
“So’s makin’ sure there’s no’ a hundred geese in there.”
“What?”
“I might'a erased Forty-two and Seventy-three. And set ‘em a bit loose.” She grinned. “C'mon. Ere they catch on.”
Rael had to follow so he could ask, “How can you possibly believe they’ll let you get away with this?”
“Ye only get tae get away with the three-pig-trick once. So I made sure they didnae know it.”
“Those are geese…”
“Same principal, different pun.” She seized his hand and began running in ernest.
[Muse food remaining: 7 (fic war prompts: 0) Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
URGH!
So I just found out that Apple doesn’t like direct links to books sold through Smashwords. If I don’t fix it, they won’t stock my book.
I’ve already fixed it, by the way. And amended a typo that eluded me for like five edits.
I had to remove the links to the individual stories and add a link to my profile, which is apparently A-OK in Apple’s book. Not a big whoop, right?
Well, I uploaded my new version and discovered that I was at #677 in the fucking queue.
Which means that, until it’s converted, I can’t do jack shit about the tickets on my works… or my entry into the Aurealis awards [probably won’t win, but it’s worth a try] until the new version goes through.
Last time, it took AGES, subjective time.
Meanwhile, Hevun’s Rebel and Scavenger are tied for the number of downloaders at 376 each ^_^
So wait a day or two to get the fresh new version, folks. Or update and see if you can spot the difference :)
And tell your friends the book’s nominated for the Aurealis Awards. I can use all the help I can get.