A Veritable Potpourri!

Just finished a draft of Chapter 11 of The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind and sent it out to those who may have cared once.

A new episode of Tank Riot is out. If you haven't listened before, I highly recommend it. I've never had such an enjoyable time learning about stuff I didn't know that I didn't know. The new episode is on Emma Goldman. What? You don't who Emma Goldman is? Neither do I. That's why you and I must both rush out into the net and listen to episode 74! http://www.tankriot.com/2009/074/

I actually cleaned today. The boy helped. See, we had Internet intermittence (The Goog claims I've misspelled intermittence, but I looked it up, so suck it, The Goog!) so the netty entities sent a man out. Well, the place was in its usual state: catastrophic. So we cleaned. When the daughter came over today, she couldn't believe it. "You can see the floor!" she said. "You can sit on a chair!" It was like Christmas all over again. And speaking of Christmas, I took down the Christmas tree today as part of the clean-up. The fixer-man did all his business outside and never stepped in the door, but I was happy that the place was clean. Or cleaner.

Cleanish.

I think that people who have friends have an easier time staying on top of things like that because they're thinking, "My friends could come over at any time!" Now I know how the other half lives. Quite a heady sensation.

I found this wonderful thing today. Wolfgang's Concert Vault. I'd known about the memorabilia from a spot on CBS Sunday Morning, but I didn't know that there were thousands of concerts online for free. This is one of those things that I think everyone but I knew about. You have to sign up, but it's pretty awesome. Besides, what's to stop you from writing complete bullshit on the sign-in if you want? Not that I ever would.
http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/al/performers/all.html

Maybes And Might Bes

I'm finishing up a flash fiction story called A Body is for Driving though I may change the title. I'm also still fooling around with chapters eleven and twelve of TIWOTAM. And I want ice cream.

Not much else is going on. I'll be on The Sofanauts in about a week and a half. I may be on Aural Delights next week with Fiction Crawler 7.

Also, I'm working on getting all my posts tagged here because there is a small but ferocious group of people following me who are only interested in the flash fiction I used to post here. So when I get that done, I'll let everyone know, then they can just search for the flash fiction tag and all of that will come up. I think I have over two hundred pieces of flash tucked away here. Golly!

A Bunch Of Things

Welcome new follower and fellow Twit, Meika! The army grows. Meika's a sculptor from Tasmania. Yes, that's a real place, Americans. If you follow him on Twitter (@meika) you know that he has a strange fondness for wallaby dung (no, really).

Here's some great music you can listen to online at NPR.org, probably for a limited time. It's a collaboration between Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch with lots of nifty guests like Iggy Pop and Frank Black among others. David Lynch sings! It's called Dark Night of the Soul. Just click the title, you'll get there. My favorite track is Star Eyes. Cool stuff!

Sent out story 111 yesterday, The Circle of Life. I took another stab at the novel (The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind) today, reworking chapter 11 which was a confusing mess. I think I originally wrote it twice, with two different foci in mind and today I mashed it all together into one narrative string. I want to go back to it and reread it in a couple of days to make sure it doesn't completely suck, but it's done for today.

Also, I'm digging around in my head for a flash fiction idea for this contest. You writers out there may want to take a crack at it yourselves. There's money to be had! Yay, money! Not that I'm a whore, or anything. We prefer to call ourselves Ladies of the Night.

A nifty Sofanauts this week. Amy's on with Tony, Jeremy and Paul Raven. They talk Orson Scott Card, Star Trek, mundane science fiction and other geeky things.

That's all for now. Tomorrow, I'll post a poem for Memorial Day. Not my poetry, but some good stuff by a dead guy. You look at all the poetry out there and most of the good stuff seems to be written by dead people. Discrimination? You decide.

Something New

Well, back to work tomorrow. The writing week started off gangbusters, but there must have been a leak, because the pressure dropped as the week went on. I wondered why my house was so steamy. Ah, well. Onward and upward.

I've been working on too much mundane stuff lately, Maisy's Many Souls, Process Five, TIWOTAM, and Fiction Crawler. I want to loosen up a bit and write some crazy stuff. I got very close to what I wanted last year with a short thing called Dritty Does. I like it a lot, I liked the writing, but I did want more story underneath it. The writing for something like that gets far out and the problem has been that the more I try to bring it down to something that appears to be a story, the more pedestrian the writing gets. I want both. I want acid-laced lunatic beat prose with a real conflict-laden story beneath it and I want some length to it as well. Dritty was only about twelve-hundred words. I want something in the neighborhood of four-thousand. Anyway that's what I want to do next. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

I saw Watchmen. You guys can hear what I thought about it on the next StarShipSofa. I won't be recommending it to people who aren't comics fans. I don't think they'll care for it at all. But hardcore geeks will wet themselves.

Do any of you guys do songza? I abandoned it for a while because it didn't seem to play nice with my Mac, but things seem to be better now. The thing I like about it that I can't get from Pandora or Jango is that I can listen to the song I want when I want to. Anyway, see if you like it.

I figured out what was wrong with this blog. Not enough Nerf Herder. Although the lyrics don't address my particular feelings about Van Halen, I love the song.

Writing And Kutiman

The writing is going so-so. Only 19 hours in for the week so far. (For those of you who are wondering, I did brush my teeth today.) I had to get out of the house today because of a sore neck and cabin fever. I was going to try to come up with some new flash fiction today, but I was more interested in moving forward with my novel The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind, AKA TIWOTAM. I finished a draft of Chapter 10 yesterday and sent it on to some readers and I wasn't ready to drop it there and move on, so I wrote another draft of Chapter 11 today and I'm on Chapter 12 right now. These aren't final drafts. As I've discussed in previous posts, I'm sending this one out to people chapter by chapter in a less than perfect state. It keeps me working on it, and they get to see it in a more raw form than they otherwise would.

Anyhow, I figured it was more important to keep up my momentum with a project I wanted to work on than to go in cold on something I thought I should work on and then fizzle out.

I finally wrestled Process Five to the ground! Woooooooo! It's visiting first readers and I'll have to make revisions once I get their feedback, but I finally feel I conquered that story. It took me years, honestly.

Steve Bickle turned me on to this yesterday. The site is http://thru-you.com/ but they've been down because of heavy traffic. No wonder. What Kutiman is doing there is awesome. He's taking other people's youtube videos and remixing them to make his own compositions. He's got all the credits for the original posters on his site. Sorry, I don't have them here. You can check out a couple of the songs right here. All the sounds you'll hear were made by the original posters. Enjoy!

The Mother of All Funk Chords:


I'm New:

Andrew Wyeth And Stuff

I just found out that Andrew Wyeth died a couple of days ago. Raise a glass to a master. I chose to post his Trodden Weed because I love the boots. You can imagine Solomon Kane wearing these, marching off to kill a witch.

I finally moved on a bit with The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind. I finished a draft of Chapter 9 and I'll shortly ship it off to its readers. You may or may not recall that the book is a bit of an experiment. Normally I won't send anything on to a reader until I think it's as good as it can get. With this novel, I'm sending it out less than perfect, partly because some people were curious about the writing process and partly to get myself into gear and work on the thing. I sent out Chapter 8 in September, so I'm a little behind.

Only a few days left to vote in The Sofanauts Awards: http://www.micropoll.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1118390

And finally, I think I post way too much eighties music here, so I want to put on some newer stuff. Here's a tune I like from Ellie Lawson. It comes with a homework assignment. I need you guys to comment and tell me if you can play the entire three minutes and forty-two seconds of song or if you get an abbreviated bit from it. I ask, because when I ran the Iron Maiden song the other day, I could hear the whole thing on my MacBook, from where I posted it, but only heard thirty seconds from my desktop PC. I used Firefox on both computers, but I wasn't signed into the blog as me on the PC. It was posted on imeem by the imeem jukebox, maybe that had something to do with it. Anywho, let me know, and here you go:

Gotta get up from here - Ellie Lawson

73

A Hard Rain, out the door. I'm hoping to have 74 packed off by the end of the week, just waiting for a microphone. It's an audio submission.

I just finished a draft of chapter seven of The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind and sent it out to early readers (by that I don't mean preschoolers), so now I'm thinking about what I'll work on this week. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that every so often I pull out a story with the working title Process Five and say, "This will probably be number (whatever the next number is)." But it never is. Process Five is the story that never launches. Therefore, I won't say that Process Five will be diamond number 75. I will say that I may make it a draft or two better this week and maybe work on something completely new next week. We'll see.

Doing a thing a week, whether it's a story or a chapter is working well for me and it's definitely a better gear in which to be. My short term goal is to reach one-hundred stories by the end of 2008. It won't be the optimal speed for The One-Thousand but it's a hell of a lot better than any speed it's seen so far.

I've got nine days of vacation beginning Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting more than one thing done next week. Time now to dive back into the fray. Talk to you soon.

Our Story So Far

I've added twelve stories to The One-Thousand this year. By that I mean, I've added them not to this blog but to my ultimate goal of one thousand stories sent to editors by the time I'm fifty. I guess naming your blog after your goal can get confusing, especially when you're blogging about your goal. Although I need to work faster in order to achieve the goal, I'm still happy because last year I only added five stories, and the year before that only four. If the year ended today, it would still be my most productive year so far in terms of number of stories, if not words written.

I'm working on a novel around the edges. I imagine I've mentioned it here before. It's called "The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind." This will count as part of The One-Thousand when it's finished and whatever year it's done will certainly be a record-breaker in terms of words completed. I only count words sent to editors as words complete when I mention that stat here.

I have 3,959 days left to complete The One-Thousand. I have 970 stories left to complete. It boils up to a story every four days. I'm not at that point yet and because I'm not, there will come a time when I'm down to having to complete a story every three days or less. I hope I'll have more free time when I get older.

Signing off now to go work on stories.