Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Welcome To 2014

    So. Huh. Been a month or so, hasn’t it?

    It’s not like I’ve had much to write home about, as it were. You don’t want to hear about the nasty head cold this past week or so. The details of my love life aren’t generally for public consumption. My kids are off doing their own thing now. Things are crazy at work but I try not to write about work much here because man, I spend all day at work anyway, I sure don’t want to think about work during my downtime.

    Creatively, I’m still posting the story installments. Soon I’ll be forced to write the last few installments… which will be tricky given that I’m not 100% certain how I’m going to end the thing. Challenges!

    After that I’m going to do something more visual, either getting into time lapse, or stop motion animation, or perhaps just trying my hand at another AMV. Who knows?

    I’m not sure what that leaves me to write about. It’s not as if I go on adventures. (Maybe I should fix that…)

  • The First Real Installment

    On Tuesday I posted the first installment of The Critter Conundrum, which is a nice foot-in-the-door moment but there are only a few hundred words in that prologue and not much to get excited about.

    Today? You get the first and (currently) biggest real installment, where we meet Charlie and get reacquainted with Andrew (this version of him, anyway) and so on. Action! Snarky dialog! That sort of thing!

    I still really love this one, even a month or so after I wrote it. This is wildly out of character for me, by the way: Usually, once I write something and gain more than a few hours’ temporal distance from it, I can’t stand to even think about it ever again. This? I’m delighted with it. Truly.

    Now, Tuesday’s upcoming installment… that’s where I’ll either lock in my readership or lose everyone forever. I honestly don’t know. Were I prone to biting my nails, I’d be doing so…

  • The Critter Conundrum

    Starting today and running for thirteen weeks, Tuesdays and Fridays at 10am Pacific Time, provided nothing goes horribly awry during the following three months, you may read installments of The Critter Conundrum, my NaNoWriMo-fueled serialized story project, over at the new Stories site.

    Share and enjoy, won’t you?

  • To Allow Comments, Or Not To Allow Comments

    Out of curiosity I ask you: If I were to start posting installments of the aforementioned story project to an appropriate website, should I or shouldn’t I turn on comments for those installments?

    On one manipulatory appendage, comments are a great way to gauge appreciation and interest as well as to directly interact with the readership.

    On the opposite appendage, a trailing dangle of comments following one’s story installment may detract from the tone and presentation.

    I haven’t decided yet, so now’s the time to chime in. Posting should start… soon.

  • Serial Story Project: Preview

    Well, only one person showed any interest. Since I haven’t been doing much of anything other than working on this story all month, however, if I want to crank out a post this week I suppose that dipping from this well of 30,000 or so words I’ve created is as good a solution as any. So, without further ado, please enjoy this not-entirely-finished snippet from what may be the third installment of the forthcoming serialized story posting project…

    (more…)

  • HalfANaNo

    As of last night there are more than twenty five thousand words in my serial story writing project thing that I’m currently using NaNoWriMo as a motivational system for convincing myself to get the damned thing written.

    25,000 words. And I’m not even sick of this story yet. Hell, when I “won” NaNo back in 2002 I was questioning my choice of story ideas within just a few days. This one? I’m still excited about it!

    I mean, sure, it’s going to be terrible. It’s mostly dialog, punctuated by the occasional action scene and/or bit of carnage. I can’t help it, I’m writing what’s fun. Also, I couldn’t do it without the wonderful yWriter software which lets me write whatever scene I want, wherever in the story I want it. (Its other features include goal tracking, detailed character information, imports and exports, automatic backups… really, if you want to write and haven’t chosen a tool yet and want something more than Just A Word Processor, yWriter is a hell of a way to go.)

    Now, you’ll note that it’s more than halfway through November and 50,000 is a long way away. That’s fine. I never intended to “win” NaNo, just leverage its word-count-tracking and social-dynamic intensity to stimulate wordcount on the project. When the project’s done, I stop. Seeing as how only nine of the twenty-six planned installments are lacking any words at all (more than half of the “chapters” are essentially done in fact) I think I’m making good time.

    Projected start of posting? Early December ideally, but no later than Solstice if I can at all help it.

    And if there’s enough interest, I’ll throw a sample onto the journal here at some point.