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?
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.
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…
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.
Here, today, I would like to commemorate a rare event. I’m not sure that “rare” is even the right word. It’s almost unheard of.
Last night I slept for at least eight uninterrupted hours.
No loud noises, no random waking for no reason, no insomnia, nothing. So yes, I’m marking this on the calendar. Wow.
I’m going on record (ha ha) with an unpopular musical opinion, and I don’t really care who knows it.
Back in early 1985 two singers released their own versions of the same song. I was thirteen years old at the time, right in the target demographic for Top-40 “Z” stations like Z-100 here in Portland. One of their gimmicks involved voting for the better of two songs via a phone-in tally. Since this one song’s two renditions came out within weeks of one another it probably seemed a brilliant idea to put them up against one another.
It’s possible that I still have my cassette tape recording of the event kicking around here somewhere but I wouldn’t put money on that bet.
Everyone who lived through the ’80s is familiar with and may even like the version that went on to become a one-hit wonder. Me? I still prefer this one, and I always will. So be it.
(For the love of your sanity, don’t seek out the actual promotional videos for either rendition. They’re very, very… ’80s. Hooboy.)
