g d townshende

The Currency of Our Lives

2009-11-15T13:00:00.001-05:00

To perfect the irredeemability of my sanctification (see previous post) and to perfect my digital apostasy, I questioned time.Time left unchecked, time run amok, time spiraling away into nothingness, degrades into chaos. The wider the bandwidth, the more feverish the download speeds, the less time we have to spare, until we find ourselves dangling precipitously at the edge of a life swallowed up

The Limnades

2009-11-14T17:00:00.007-05:00

Weekly Total (Nov 8 - 14): 3,946October Monthly Total: 3,946Current Story Total: 3,946Grand Total: 70,410 (46.9% of 150,000)Of the three days I've spent writing this story, today has been the most difficult and the most satisfying. This story is giving me the damned chills!This is the first time I've ever planned a story from "Once upon a time..." to "The End," and it's gone very well. In fact,

Irredeemably Sanctified

2009-11-13T21:27:00.007-05:00

I want, once more, to own a typewriter. After seeing — reading? I hope! — my lengthy post on these here magnificent machines, it should now be quite obvious to you.They are beautiful. They clack. They ding when they wish their carriage to be returned. They are friendly beasts. They're weighty — and outdated! They're substantial! and, yes, they make me feel shamelessly anachronistic. What more

The Limnades

2009-11-13T08:57:00.008-05:00

I wrote another 1274 words yesterday in "The Limnades," for a total of 2527 words. So, I’m now about 1/3d done.I fed the content of my story into Flesh, to take a gander at the numbers. (Flesh is a "readability" calculator.) My numbers are:Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 3.22Flesch Reading Ease Level: 89.00Words: 2,604¹Sentences: 272Syllables: 3,328Average Syllables per Word: 1.28Average Words per

Reminiscence of a By-Gone Era

2009-11-12T00:23:00.084-05:00

Warning, long post follows, but that's pretty typical of me. :P I hope you enjoy it anyway.Sigh. Having read some depressing articles on the economy and the opinions of some as to what shall soon come to pass, my mind turned to the pre-computer age, to the day when all my writing was done either by hand or by typewriter. My mind so turned, the old Underwood-Olivetti typewriter on which I learned

Another Little Progress Meter

2009-11-11T15:59:00.006-05:00

This is an interesting progress meter, I think. I found it on the web here. What's cool about it is that there are no graphics at all. It is generated completely using HTML code, although JavaScript must be enabled for it to work. What you see below is the meter as it appears with the code generated at the web page where I found it.66464 / 150000With a little manipulation of the code, the

The Limnades

2009-11-11T07:16:00.003-05:00

A quick note, just to say that the story for which I'd been reading Poe's stories as research has now been outlined in full. It has a working title now of "The Limnades," which I'm not going to explain, but which, if you look it up, won't reveal anything about the story's conclusion. This title may yet change, in fact. I'll say that the outline is three pages long, single spaced, typed in 13-pt

Grammar

2009-11-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

Now, to answer yesterday's question of the day... the de Camp's wrote:If you see nothing wrong with such sentences as "He stared like he had seen a ghost," or "An individual can return to any period of his entire life providing his passage is not blocked by engrams," you do not know enough about writing English to tackle fiction.Their answer, word-for-word, is:The first sentence uses "like" for "

WIR #31: You Can Write a Mystery

2009-11-10T14:44:00.000-05:00

I finished this last night.I like Roberts's constant devotion to giving specific examples to back up her instruction. For example, many writing books tell you to carry a pen and a small notebook, to write down ideas, observations, etc. Very rarely do these authors tell you what they write down. I don't understand why this is. It's not as if national security would be jeopardized. Prior to reading

Grammar

2009-11-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

One of my favourite books on writing is a tome published back in 1975, L. Sprague and Catherine C. de Camp's Science Fiction Handbook, Revised. (The link will take you to the edition of the book previous to that volume to which I've referred. The image to the right is of the cover of the first edition of this book, published in 1953. You can learn more about it here, at Wikipedia.)My copy of this

"Pedantic"

2009-11-08T18:23:00.013-05:00

I've grown weary of this word. I've grown weary of the pedants who bandy it about, nevermind that they misuse it. Most often, I see it used in reviews of books on writing. Two examples, but I shan't link to the reviews in which I found them:a book is given one-star because of its supposedly "pedantic instructions"another is given one-star for its "pedantic rules"Do you see the problem with this

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Literary Agents

2009-11-08T00:55:00.003-05:00

And, finally, the literary agents:AEI: Atchity Editorial International, Inc. Motion Picture Production & Literary ManagementDarley Anderson Literary, TV & Film Agency *Anubis Literary Agency *Connor Literary AgencyThe Jennifer DeChiara Literary AgencyAshley Grayson Literary AgencyAntony Harwood Limited *Richard Henshaw Group †Jabberwocky Literary Agency †Linn Prentis Literary ‡Donald Maass

New Template (Reprise)

2009-11-07T21:29:00.014-05:00

Yes, I've changed templates again. So sue me.The last template, although bright and open, had problems that I found damned annoying. On the sly, I've been getting this new template set up. It had problems of its own, some of them problems I've never dealt with before. However, I managed to fix them with nary a hitch.I'm no whiz at CSS (cascading style sheets), but I've worked with it before. In

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Book Publishers

2009-11-07T19:01:00.001-05:00

And now to list the book publishers:ArcheBooks PublishingArjuna Library PressAtheneum Books for Young Readers *Bantam Dell Publishing Group *Cellar Door Publishing, LLCChippewa Publishing, LLCCricket BooksDiskus PublishingDiversion PressTom Doherty Associates, LLC *Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy PublishingEllora's Cave Publishing, Inc.Eos *Flying Pen PressThe Invisible College PressKunati,

The Poe Fossil

2009-11-07T05:21:00.003-05:00

The path I have followed to this story's archæological site is intriguing. It began with an exercise found in Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction, wherein he outlines several methods for generating story ideas. These are found in part 2 of his book, titled "Idea into Story." Detailed below is the one method I have used to advantage:Another way [to generate a story idea] is to open a small

Reading Poe

2009-11-07T04:07:00.001-05:00

I've crossed out the stories I've read thus far.The Black CatThe Oval PortraitBereniceThe Masque of the Red DeathThe Tell-Tale HeartThe Fall of the House of UsherThe Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher shall be read next.

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Online Consumer Magazines

2009-11-07T03:45:00.001-05:00

Continuing with yesterday's post, here's the listing of online consumer magazines my search unearthed:AlienSkin MagazineAnotherealmAnti MuseAoife's KissApparatus MagazineBetween KissesBrew City MagazineThe Café IrrealChallenging DestinyCyberfictDark Energy SFdotlitDragons, Knights, and AngelsFar Sector SFFHFeel the Word MagazineThe Fifth Di...FlashquakeFrom the Asylum BooksThe

The Poe Institute of Research

2009-11-06T03:28:00.002-05:00

Using a technique outlined in Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction, I've come upon an idea for a short story. Interestingly enough, part of my self-imposed "homework" for this story is to read several of the short stories penned by Edgar Allan Poe. Namely,The Black CatThe Oval PortraitBereniceThe Masque of the Red DeathThe Tell-Tale HeartThe Fall of the House of UsherFor atmosphere, and simply

Horror Writers Association & SpecFicWorld

2009-11-06T01:11:00.003-05:00

Added new sites to my list of links: Horror Writers Association and SpecFicWorld.

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Consumer Magazines

2009-11-05T20:47:00.001-05:00

After some more searching, I was able, at WritersMarket.com, to come up with a list of 182 consumer magazines, online consumer magazines, book publishers, and literary agents to sift through. Not all were relevant. I'd searched on "science fiction, fantasy, horror," and I was surprised at the number (in all categories) who came up because their listing said they "did not want science fiction,

Characters

2009-11-05T04:38:00.010-05:00

In this post, I talked a little about Janet Evanovich's method of creating characters and also made reference to Robert J. Sawyer's method of creating characters (which he discusses here). Here's what Sawyer said:Psst! Wanna hear a secret? The people in most stories aren't really humans — they're robots!Real people are quite accidental, the result of a random jumbling of genes and a chaotic life.

WritersMarket.com

2009-11-05T03:03:00.005-05:00

I have a subscription to WritersMarket.com. This past year was the first year that I subscribed to their online market listing. I've purchased the print version of their annual market updates for many years, however.I logged into their site for the first time in quite a while, and started to make use of their service. (About time, too.) I did a search for consumer magazines that publish science

WIR #32: Lud-In-The-Mist

2009-11-04T14:31:00.000-05:00

Born Helen Hope Mirrlees in Chiselhurst, Kent, April 8, 1887, Hope Mirrlees was the daughter of a wealthy sugar merchant. She wrote three novels in her lifetime — she died in 1978, at the age of 91 — Lud-in-the-Mist being the last and proclaimed as "by far the more outstanding" of the three. Says Douglas A. Anderson, "with this single book her literary reputation as the author of one of the

WIR #31: You Can Write a Mystery

2009-11-03T23:03:00.002-05:00

This is the last of my most recent batch of library books. I'm eager to get these out of the way.Roberts, unlike Hayden, starts her book off on a positive note. Take a look at the first two paragraphs in her Introduction, in fact:A prevalent myth has it that the ability to write is innate, almost genetic — like freckles or a predisposition to diabetes. You either have it or you don't, and too bad

WIR #29: Writing the Mystery

2009-11-03T22:04:00.001-05:00

Finally! I'm done! It may be that the problems I found earlier in this book predisposed me to look for more, but I doubt that I would've missed the additional problems that I found.I don't like writing negative things about any book, but sometimes these things just have to be said. The concluding chapter is something of a question and answer session, where Hayden answers questions sent to her by