Posts filed under 'Blog News'

new year’s day

1) It’s New Year’s Day! Yay! Seemed like 2020 went on for about five years.

2) I’ve had this blog since August 21, 2005. I’ve published 910 blog posts, plus some pages (which are different than posts), plus everything over here and here. Damn.

3) Well, I’ve always admired persistence.

4) How to get revved up for the new year? Tangerine Dream, of course.

5) If that doesn’t get you revved up, there’s always “Cherub Rock” (definitely not Tangerine Dream).

6) I had a whole theory worked out as to why Taylor Swift’s “no body, no crime” (from her second 2020 album, evermore) wasn’t that good a song. So, why does it keep running through my head?

Well, it’s a murder mystery, which is kind of my thing, and, the more I study it, it’s a very well-constructed one. Very good use of pronouns. Also, there’s the fun of the nameless narrator starting with “Este’s a friend of mine” and then the later appearance of Este’s sister providing an important alibi (“She was with me, dude”), with background vocals provided by Swift’s friend Este (Haim) and her sister Danielle, from the band Haim.

7) Last year, the shows I watched the most were Game of Thrones and Legends of Tomorrow. I think the contrast appeals to me because Game of Thrones is (was — I’m way behind the curve on this one, or whatever the modern cliche is) very well made and complex and depressing and cynical. Most of the characters are bad, or worse, or really a lot worse, or dead. Near the end, most of them, better or worse, are dead. Many of the conflicts, if not most, are between people who are both bad, but maybe in slightly different ways, or someone who is already established to be bad and someone whose badness hasn’t fully come out yet.

And, as is pointed out occasionally in the show, in passing, most of the main characters are people of some power and influence, and, because of how terrible most of them are, the common people are generally living miserable lives (or just dying). Other than the occasional mention, though, the common people don’t get much screen time or attention.

Plus, as has been generally reported, the entire show went off the rails at the end anyway. But it’s got some good writing, some great acting, some huge big-budget battle scenes, and a lot of good characters (not morally good, in most cases, but you know what I mean).

On the other hand, Legends is about a group of misfit superheroes who have been entrusted (mostly by themselves) with protecting the timeline from both temporal accidents and malicious time travelers. They are hampered by their inconsistent understanding of the effects of time travel, their tendency to make stupid mistakes, their waffling between fixing time by trying to put it back the way it was and trying to make it better (which never works), and their giddy overconfidence (sometimes it seems that every episode features a scene where Sara, their leader, assures somebody “Relax, we’ve got this!” while her team is about to screw everything up even worse than it was already).

Even the fact that the team is called the “Legends” is pretty much a joke, but everybody calls them that anyway, because the name has stuck.

Unlike GoT, it’s optimistic, funny, and often goofy. In one episode, they scare George Lucas away from a film career and then they need to get him back to directing so they get their superpowers back, and in another their time ship stops working because they accidentally stopped Hedy Lamarr from inventing frequency-hopping spread spectrum, the technology which is part of how WiFi, Bluetooth, cell phones, and, apparently, time ships work.

8) “Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2020” has some good jokes, including one very long, almost Joycean sentence (904 words) about the early days of COVID-19.

Oh, and this made me laugh:

A much bigger international story concerns Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who announce via Instagram that they are sick and tired of being part of the British royal family and want to just be regular normal everyday hard-working folks making millions of dollars solely because one of them was born into, and the other one married into, the British royal family. This plunges Great Britain into a crisis the likes of which it has not been plunged into since “Brexit.” The crisis finally ends when, after a royal summit with Queen Elizabeth II described by participants as “frank and heartfelt,” Harry and Meghan are beheaded.

9) Okay, this is pretty special: “exile

Happy New Year, all.

Add comment January 1st, 2021

anniversaries

I always miss my blog anniversary these days. It was August 21st — and on that day this blog was 14 years old. During that time, I have written 857 blog posts (!) and a few pages. Plus some posts and pages over here: utownwriting.com and here: utownwriting.com/stevie1.

Here’s the first blog post: “A New Blog

But we’re also getting closer to another anniversary — next year it will be 30 years since I started my first novel (A Sane Woman), and 15 since I finished it. (I was about 45 when I decided that reaching 50 years old with two (2) unfinished novels no (zero) finished ones was just intolerable.)

I’d been writing for 15 years before I started A Sane Woman, but there was nothing that I wanted to finish. But what really changed was that I came up with the idea of publishing A Sane Woman myself, in little monthly chapbooks.

But they cost more to produce than I could charge for them, so the more people who bought them the more money I lost.

But then I heard about BBSs. I could join BBSs and upload my stories, and people might read them. And it didn’t cost anything. But A Sane Woman didn’t work in that format — the pacing was wrong. So, I started another novel that would (which is why, all those years later, I had two unfinished and no (zero) finished novels — but that was solved by finishing them).

And since then I’ve pushed to finish everything I’ve started, and my track record has been pretty good — not 100%, but I’ve only abandoned one (though now I see how I could go with it…) and put one away after finishing it because the story went in the wrong direction.

There are times, with some stories, that I say, paraphrasing Nero Wolfe, “I was a witling to start this story. All I can do is flounder around in the slush.” But posting the first half of a story online is a great motivation to push ahead finish the darn thing.

Persistence: a theme of this blog since the beginning and before: “Keep a-goin’

Add comment September 5th, 2019

’tis the season (to gather the suspects)

So, in the holiday spirit, let’s drop in on a gathering of suspects in the Marvel murder case:

Part Fourteen — where the suspects are gathered.

Part Fifteen — where things are not so festive.

Add comment December 25th, 2018

back!

Apparently the blog was down for a bit. Someone notified me this morning, and now, thanks to some quick work by the excellent tech support at my hosting company, everything is now back on.

(I didn’t notice at first because the mobile site was fine. Only desktop was affected, and I’m usually looking at the site on mobile.)

If you continue to see any problems, of course, let me know.

Add comment August 12th, 2017

so, a blog post

Well, it’s been a while, obviously. Stuff in real life is particularly challenging right now, and will remain so for at least the next couple of months. Little time for blogging — particularly on any regular schedule.

So, what do I want to focus on, in my more limited time?

Really, I want to get back on track with my current story, “The Bus Station Mystery.” I just listened to the whole thing and made a few very minor changes (fixing bumpy sentences). So, now I’m eager to get on with part six and so on.

I think that will be my main focus for now. I like how it’s shaping up. Like my most recent stories, I think it stands by itself nicely — you could read it without having read anything else of mine before it. I’m really aiming for that these days.

Other than that, I plan to post links. Just one at a time, as they occur to me — rather than what I’ve usually done, which is wait until I have a few and post them together with some connective comments.

For example, there’s this: “A Small Point of Usage Concerning those ‘Alternative Facts,’” in which Mary Norris, the Comma Queen, points out that, whatever the other drawbacks of “alternative facts,” at least the term correctly observes the distinction between “alternate” and “alternative.”

Unlike, for example, “alternate reality.”

Oh, and up there where the links are (assuming you’re on a computer)? There’s a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be there, like “Lost Password” and such. (I seldom see that stuff because I’m usually on mobile.) That’ll get fixed at some point. Probably not soon.

4 comments January 23rd, 2017

this is what i worry about when i’m writing

I’m going to start posting a new story, for which I don’t have a title yet, but I got hung up on this sentence.

It felt very different than running away from home.

Different from? Different than?

The rule from the Chicago Manual of Style:

different. The phrasing different from is generally preferable to different than {“this company is different from that one”}

But “It felt very different from running away from home” sounded awkward. Too many “froms,” for one thing.

Some authorities argue that people get too hung up on the difference, that “different from” is not that different to (as the British sometimes put it) “different than.” But I’m not above getting hung up on these sorts of differences, even though, as is often pointed out, great and respected writers have used both “than” and “from.”

But then, in several places, I found that an exception is often granted for situations where what follows is a clause rather than a noun or noun phrase. Which is clearly the case with my sentence (though I guess technically what follows is a gerund, which is sort of noun-ish…)

Anyway.

Problem solved!

So, the story is about to start. Then I’ll just have to figure out the title, characters, and plot.

Genre isn’t a problem. It’s a mystery. 🙂

2 comments October 10th, 2016

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