Long Time Coming

Ugh. It’s decidedly easy not to write when the rest of your life sea changes from somewhat-professional school to totally relaxed summer. I do intend to work on that. I’m kicking a few separate story ideas around, just waiting to see what flies out. Or maybe what’s left inside, like in Farnsworth’s alien paternity tester.

If you get that reference, I love you.

I’ve also come down with what is clearly some form of leprosy that the doctor, in complete denial, is calling mere strep throat. I should have asked to see that quack’s diploma.

In other news, it’s summer again, which means it’s time for the new Pixar movie. The trailer sold me, and I guess the reviews are good? Go see it, enjoy yourselves.

I think I’m going to go make a sandwich and down some more water. Still feeling dehydrated. Lousy plague. To my fans awaiting writing, I apologize once more. Right now my days are split between this, this, this, this, these people, and this.

Who Needs Sleep?

Ideas always hit me as I’m crawling into bed. In this case, it was a twitter by Lanuria to the evil overlord list we’ve all seen in one form or another, one place or another, and I realized that its tenets, combined with my penchant for anti-climactic stories (examples here and here,) and what I like to call convention awareness (here) could make for some good writing. Now I need to come up with some characters.

I want to reuse the minor character I said I wanted to reuse, but personalizing liches is hard. Hmm. Hmm.

There’s Some Public Domain Junkie Out There That’s Gonna Disown Me

After a night of soul-searching and pizza, I’ve decided to put my original stories up for sale, and have thus removed the .doc files of them from this website. I’ve done this for a couple of reasons.

• My World of Warcraft stories are more popular anyway, and I can’t sell those
• The whole thing is still readable, and copy & pasteable, from this website

I’m not here to restrict access to my content. If JoCo and Penny Arcade have taught me anything, it’s that. I don’t want to stop people from reading my stories. However, there might be someone out there that has the means and the desire to go “I’d buy this if it was a book; here, author, have a dollar.” In that case, I’m not going to stop them.

The stories are available for ‘purchase’ here. At present, the plan is to give the same loving treatment to my WoW fanfics and throw those up on Scribd as well – not to sell, but as a source of publicity and for tracking purposes, because either not a soul has downloaded a .doc from WordPress or the site’s not tracking those actions for me.

Is it good or bad that I feel mild guilt at even this totally minor monetization of my works? I’m not being greedy, am I?

Hubris And More

Remember when I wrote that long-winded piece about how writers can’t make money on the webnets?

I was wrong.

Me being wrong isn’t uncommon, but this time, my being wrong is more important. It provides… hope? How egotistical, how narcissistic is it to consider the notion that the things on this website would be worth money? Very, but shut up, I know that.

Just seeing a place where documents can be hosted for free and sold in such a way that I get 80% of the purchase price is… amazing to me. I feel like someone has just handed me the keys to my own magic money-making cow.

Does that ‘keys to a cow’ joke work with the hypertext interrupting it? Would it be noticeable even if there was no link, or is it simply too dry? The lack of direct feedback as to what jokes work and what jokes don’t bothers me. Stand-up comics get that kind of feedback. Man, I wish I was good enough to be one of them.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah.

Now I’m sitting here fantasizing about the day that I make any sort of money, even cents, from something I’ve written. It’s staggering to me. Unfortunately, I feel like the only way to do this would be to sell .docs of my work, which would prompt the question of what to do with the .docs here. Does removing them, a source of slight convenience, make me greedy? Does leaving them also make me look greedy by having the gall to charge for a product that’s identical to a free one? I literally have no idea.

However, I think it’s safe to say that sometime soon, my works are gonna show up on Scribd. No one’s going to buy them, but I’m okay with that. This whole website has been an exercise in pretending that a) this writer is a Writer  and that b) this website is a Website. Having the mere option of purchase available makes me feel like I have a real website – like a grownup.

P.S.: Now that the post has shifted from simple money to me feeling like a grownup, I thought I’d relate one more thought.

When I first got a copy of the Edgewood Review, the annual literary magazine that my college publishes, and saw A Dark and Stormy Night in it, the pride was awesome. However, when talking to the college’s primary creative writing professor, I remembered that his classes always have to read the previous year’s Edgewood Review, meaning that this coming fall, I will have one of my works read and discussed in a college course. That’s not just cool, that’s a life goal scratched offa the bucket list, and it’s strangely humbling.

Distractions

So I haven’t posted in over a week. Stuff happens. Moved home from school, for one, meaning that I’m spending lots of time hanging out with my RL friends, schmucks though they may be. Plus, I get to start work tomorrow, which means even less free time.

One of my hopes for this summer is to rekindle my love of Wilson. Monroe is only a hair saner than the fictional town, and I’m hoping that a jaunt around town will remind me of the stupidity of the average person. Add my natural insanity to that and you hopefully get humor.

Sorry for such a brief update. I’m hoping there’ll be more soon.

Manifestos are Fun

While discussing my website (in almost too much depth) today in the class I’m using it as a project for, the fact that not everyone knew what a fanfic was came up. I was forced to describe it as writing within an established setting, and the general demeanor of the class made it clear how disdainful public opinion is of this sort of writing. I can understand that, but I think it’s because of a misconception.

When people think fanfics, they tend to think of high-school level ‘What would Kirk do?’ stuff, or else slash fics or otherwise sexual fare. This is probably valid – in sheer volume, it’s probably most of what’s out there. But, at the same time, I don’t think the kind of crap I have on this site is really the same thing as Harry/Snape.

However, calling what I have ‘established-continuity fiction’ or something similar smacks of political correctness and naming things just to feel unique. I’m not exactly a huge fan of that. It’s fiction, made by fans. Fan fiction, fanfic. Boom. I think it’ll just take time for people to realize that ‘fanfic’ as a label can mean a zillion different things. It’s no more an indicator of genre or quality than ‘anime’ is, and yet so many people lump all that together.

Things’ll change eventually. All I have is tiiiiⁱⁱⁱⁱⁱiiime.

Under the Microscope

We’re workshopping this very site as I write this. It’s a very odd sensation.

Since I’m just about to the point where I’m turning this project in, the nature of this project is about to change. No longer will I have immediate external motivation to continue, so it’s going to be more of a for-fun project now than a class one. I’m interested in seeing what this means. Fewer updates? More of them out of guilt? I wonder.

G2G, as it were. Moving on to someone else’s actually useful project.

Finally!

I actually had to finish this one a bit early because I was just getting sick of writing it.

Wintergrasp is finally done. I really enjoyed the concept of the story, but I eventually grew bored with having to choreograph so much combat. I think it might show, and besides the obvious knocking-out of the narrator. I wasn’t too unhappy with that as a mechanism. I’ve used it once before, but not to skip part of the story, just as a comic device.

In the end, though, I’m not sure that my own writing and patience lived up to this story’s potential. We’ll have to see what others think.

With this finally accomplished, I’m going to turn in for a good night’s sleep.  By this, I mean a night of laying in bed and doing the math of the World Series of Poker in my head and wishing I had someone to snuggle with until I fall asleep.

P.S.: I need a singer or two that people might be surprised to learn is still alive. Boy George, for example. Feel free to leave ideas in the comments.

What’ll You Do When You Get Lonely

Back home again for the weekend. I’m hoping to get a chance to write, but hanging out with friends is a higher priority, plus spending time with my beautiful non-blood niece Layla. She’s walking and talking, if not in English yet, and she’s just so damn cute and cuddly.

Anyway. I’m on the lappy for the next three days, so that means less WoW, really, but more time to write. We’ll see what all happens.

P.S.: Ask people that are gung-ho about sexual assault and rape and they’ll point to, among other causes, the media (right or wrong) and its depiction of easy women dressing sexily and giving it up for plenty of guys. Exemplary example? Desperate Housewives.

Now, where does one go to see depictions of women as victims of rape and sexual assault, as well as every other type of abuse? Lifetime, of course, the long-time leader in ‘women’s programming’ which is, in my experience, female strength and female victimization in equal parts.

Lifetime, the channel that defined the girl-gets-raped-in-TV-movie genre, is now airing Desperate Housewives.

Oh, sure. It must be the sexist fucks in corporate that are — what’s that? The president is a woman? What’s that? Eleven of the top sixteen executives at the company are women?

I had an interesting chat in my Black Women Writers class once when I realized that I overestimated the amount that women blamed Men, as a whole, for gender divisions. Even the man-hater in the class — understandable since she’d been recently divourced — admitted her aunts and female friends pressured her into marriage, homemaking, etc, more than any man. But men still get the blame for sexual assault and domestic violence, and yes, statistics back that up. I’m not here to argue there aren’t lots of stupid, muscular men.

But the next person to unilaterally blame men as a gender for, say, rape, is getting socked in the jaw. Well, let’s be fair. I’ll ask if they think the media portrays women as too promiscuous. When they say yes, I’ll then sock them in the jaw.

Oh, and don’t you dare tell me not to hit a girl.