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Snippets

So, the name of the story is Hidden Things:

She smiled in the darkness and pushed herself further underneath the comforter with the phone. “Hey you. I thought you’d be home and asleep by now. How was the trip?”
There was a short pause, the strange hiccuped silence of an interrupted cell connection. “A few things came up; I’m still out on the road, actually.”
“Oh cripes, really?” The bed frame creaked slightly at movement on the other side from Calliope. She half-glanced that direction and started to pull herself out of bed. “When… hang on, I’m switching phones.” She padded to opposite side of the room, found a cordless handset and turned it on as she hung the first phone up. “When do you think you’re going to get back?” As she spoke she headed for the door to the bedroom, grabbing a robe on the way.
“I’m… I’m not really sure. Everything’s pretty complicated.”
“Complicated how?” Yawning and still half-asleep, Calliope shuffled into the kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator door. “Espain pees.”
“Can’t. It’s too late to get into any of it, anyway. You going to be all right?”
She shrugged, still staring blankly into the refrigerator, “I’ll be fine; I’m in my own house, not bored out of my mind and crank-calling my friends at two a.m.”
She should hear him smile just a bit on the other end of the line. “You’re cranky. You should take a shower and wake up.”
She shook her head in mock denial, pushing hair out of her face. “See, this’s the main confusion in the conversation. I don’t want to wake up. I wasn’t actually laying in bed thinking ‘oh, I wish someone would call and give me a reason to get out of this nice warm bed, because I’m so bored’. I wasn’t thinking that or anything else. I wasn’t bored. I was asleep. It was good and I was enjoying it. I’d like to get back to it sometime tonight if possible.”
“So…” she could hear the smile broaden in his voice. “No shower?”

There’s another snippet at WiD. If you want to read the thing while I write it, find my name on the right side of that page and click on “story”.

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Writing Help

Here are some good books that assist me with my writing:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
The first section is a brief memoir of his live and how it led to his career in writing. It is interesting to see how his young life went and how he became a writer. It is entertaining and helpful in that “if he could do it, I can do it” way.
The rest of the book encompasses his methods and views on writing. he preaches Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style pretty heavily, for obvious reasons. He is self-depreciating, to the point, and delivers some sound advice for aspiring writers.
It covers topics such as writing style, the process of writing, setting up a place for writing, how to get through writing the whole book, and how to write a publishable manuscript, among many other points that are well worth studying. Extremely good stuff. I heartily recommend it.
The Elements of Style (4th Edition) by William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White
This dinky book doesn’t look like much. It is thin and the cover is not flashy. If you skim through it, you will notice that there are no paragraphs and that the entries are short and blunt.
It is also the single best book about the craft of writing. All of those goodies that you learned about how to craft sentences in school are boiled down into a few sections of this outstanding little book.
If you are serious about writing, get this book. I guarantee that most editors own it.

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Empty

A sudden fiction thing that I’ve tried writing before. Never been particularly successful at getting the… whatever it is I’m trying to get, but that doesn’t stop me from poking at it.

Continue reading “Empty”

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Big Clock

Everyone needs a clock utility for their Palm; that’s just a fact. Yeah, there’s a little clock you can pull up on the menu bar, but that’s not a “real” clock, at least not to me. You need an alarm clock function, plus a timer… preferably several of each…
Well, Dave shot a file to me a few months ago and showed me that BigClock, by Jens Rupp, is exactly what I wanted.
The version he gave me was 2.2, which has worked great but is a bit glitchy at times and flat out refused to respond in the Timer mode today, so I set about finding myself my own copy of the donate-ware.
Turns out that Jens is up to something like v2.83, and I can’t say enough good about it. Avoid the extra little plug-ins, they’re pointless, but the added functionality in the Timers section is great (for instance, set up your hourly contracter work rate, start the timer, and it’ll tell you how much your client owes you when you’re done).
Anyway, for palm geeks like me, there’s your product recommendation for the day.

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Just another reminder thing

If you haven’t yet sampled Fox’s gonzo space Western, Firefly, its creator, Joss Whedon, would like to make one small request: Please do… and preferably tonight at 8 pm/ET. “This week definitely matters [to the series’ future],” the celebrated writer-director-producer tells TV Guide Online. “[Network prez] Sandy Grushow said to me before we ever started that this [show] is going to be a slow grow, and [the World Series] is going to hurt us, which it has. Fox has a lot of shows that are underperforming because of this weird season.

“So,” he continues, “I’m not like, ‘My future is assured!’ But it’s also not like the death knell chiming.”

Far from it. In fact, Fox just commissioned three additional scripts from Whedon, the mastermind behind UPN’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its WB spinoff, Angel. However, Firefly has yet to get a full-season pickup. “[The script order from the net] is a vote of confidence, and it’s a way of not making a decision,” Whedon theorizes. “The next few weeks will be important, and this week I’m particularly stressing because I think it’s such a good entrance into the world [of Firefly]. That’s why I’m all hyped about it.
“It has a number of flashbacks to how the crew got together,” he continues, “so it’s a really good way to learn how it all began. For somebody meeting the characters for the first time, it’s a real insight into who they are. There’s not all this [plot] information to process, which is a problem because the pilot was never shown. People are like, ‘Um, what’s going on?’ The idea was never to confuse people.”
Just so Whedon doesn’t add to viewers’ consternation, he quickly notes that the backtracking scenes are not highlights from the debut that Fox shot down. “These flashbacks are to before the pilot,” he clarifies. “The pilot was the story of how this crew picked up a few wayward stragglers; [this installment] flashes back to how [the original gang] first found the ship itself, what the ship is and what it means to Mal, because [the ship] really is the 10th character on the show.”
Now that that matter has been cleared up, Whedon hopes that viewers will be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the show… for years to come, ideally. For the moment, though, he sighs, “Everything is kind of in flux.”

I dig this show. I want it to prosper. I’m also really annoyed that Fox is forcing Whedon to air certain kinds of episodes, where “force” implies a passive aggresive action:
(a) They rearranged the air-dates on the episodes so that the ‘easy to view’ episodes are all at the beginning.
(b) By not airing the pilot, they’ve force Whedon to write ‘easier’ scripts to understand, since virtually no one’s seen the pilot.
This means (to me) that the show comes off as less story-oriented, less connected, and much more episodic than the stuff Whedon normally does, which is really a shame, since it’s not playing to the strengths of his writing staff. They can write fantastic one-offs, but the truly best episodes are those that tie into the major storylines — which they aren’t able to WRITE right now.
Gargh. Tune it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

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Bloody victory

Remember a few weeks month ago when I was bitching about trying to get MT going on any machine/server that had anything to do with work?
Yeah. Finally got that worked out TODAY. Mandrake, running Apache, FINALLY running all the patches and directives I needed to get the frelling thing to run.
10 minutes later, I had the start of the page.
Then it was 5pm and I realized I’m out of the office doing training until Monday, November 4th.
That insane cackling you hear, echoing the sadistic irony of the scene? That would be me.

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Season 3

While babysitting Katherine tonight, working on a thing for Rey’s game with Jackie and doing the last-edit-before-the-queries on Strange Weapons, we turned on the TV and caught some Buffy reruns on F/X.
Season Three. Not the best stuff out there, but still it was pretty damn good stuff. Shocking how much Jackie and I remember from each episode.
Man I miss Oz. He was cool.