Category Archives: Writing

Some fiction experiments

Writing

Writing project (number to be determined)

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I put this draft entry in April of 2016.

Revenge is bliss

The obvious starting place is living well is the best revenge.

Here it is August 2018 and I’m still working on the story.  I decided on a smart girl that is turned by revenge and gets a job at Bliss (a real cosmetics company).  She gets a degree in cosmetic science (a real degree).  She picked that major to get back at the pretty girls.

She’s inspired by The Devil’s Rain in high school.  Her first real evil plan is to turn spit black  because a co-worker got some spit on her silk blouse right before a presentation.

I have story plotted out but the actual writing is going VERY slowly.  Writing is work when you’ve read a lot of good articles and books.  I’m a slow typist, I’m lazy and I have no talent for dialog.

I know I’m a slow typist thanks to the typing.io website.  This site measures code typing speed.  My best score is 23 wpm.  Another excuse is my wife has cats that like to get between me and the screen.

Writing fiction is work.  In fiction you have to turn movie scenes in your head into words and scenes take a lot of words for people to see the same scene that you see.  It takes so long to get some words onto the computer screen because I want to be original and I’ve seen and read too much.  All that dialog and location description is good for trivia but bad for writing.

 

 

Music, Writing

Unbroken circle and lazy blogging

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Unbroken Circle

I’m listening to Will the Circle Be Unbroken on the Modern Blues playlist of Spotify.   I’ve never heard a bad version of this song but I prefer the live Asleep at the Wheel version.  They played it more upbeat and it was my first time hearing it.

Lazy Blogging

I just finished an entry about a trip I took in June.  I published only one post in 2017.  If they were REALLY long posts I could say they were sparse.  But I read an article (on the web of course) that the average post was 1000 words.  I used to shoot for 250.  I still do.

In my defense, at least I post.  I’ve run across blogs  on blogger.com that are still up and haven’t been updated in 7 years.  Since the only readers I have are bots for SEO companies I don’t feel I have followers clamoring for my mind droppings.

I last touched this post on March 31.  Luckily a lot has happened in two months.  We went on a cruise from Sydney to Vancouver.  When we got back our calico had given birth to five kittens.  Those two events alone should fill an entry.

Those adventures are a bit off topic for the title of this entry.  Again, I’m trying to maintain some semblance of discipline.  I also try to fill 45 minutes with the random task that comes up on my task picker spreadsheet.

I have 27 tasks on my list ranging from working on my blog and website to playing two kinds of Star Trek.

 

Music, Writing

Prarie Home Companion changing of the guard

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On Oct 15 Prarie Home Companion is going to start with a new host, Chris Thile.  Garrison Keillor had been doing it for 43 years.  He deserves a rest. Garrison wrote and performed for two hours every Saturday.  The show also toured across America and did cruises.

I discovered PHC around 1978.   I tuned in at the end of the show during the News from Lake Woebegone.  This guy was talking about Pastor Inqvist and the Chatterbox Cafe.  The story ended with Lake Woebegone where the women are strong, the men are goodloooking and the children are above average.

This was before the Internet so all I had to go on was Saturday night, KUHF, and it ended at 7 PM.  I tuned in the next week at 6 PM and he was reading hello cards from the audience to people that were listening that couldn’t make it to the show because of distance, jobs, or children.

During that hour I heard musicians that were unknown to me like Jeanne Redpath and Leo Kottke.  I learned more about artists like Chet Atkins and Doc Watson.  An 18-year old boyon the North side of Houston doesn’t have any friends that listen to public radio so I didn’t have anybody to talk to about the show.

I could talk to the guys in the after work bar near me about the musicians.  The Namedropper was a small (1500 square feet) bar within walking distance of my condo.  The patrons were mostly in their 50’s and owned machine shops or car repair places in the neighborhood.

I learned to appreciate storytellers and the craft of radio comedy.  I silently cheered at Julie Walters’ line in Educating Rita about Peer Gynt.  She was given an exam question about how she would solve the staging problems of the play.   All she answered was ‘Do it on the radio’.  When Michael Caine wants more she takes the paper and writes Ibsen’s quote about it being a play of voices.

I’m afraid that the new version will cut out most of the skits and be a music show,  I’ll admit there’s not a lot of mainstream radio venues for bluegrass but there are even less for spoken word.

Podcasts are the coming thing but they don’t have the water cooler cache.  They are like the cool foreign movie you found on the bottom shelf at the video store.  Cars are starting to get the web but the radios are still there.

I wish Chris well but I’m not going to go to a lot of trouble to tune in to the new show.  The format will probably change.   Garrison  tweaked the format for PHC for probably 20 years.  I don’t think the new format will be perfect out of the box.

Prosethesis, Writing

An entry into a writing contest

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I haven’t been doing any computer work because I devoted myself to writing a complete work.  Brooke found this writing contest where the theme or the main character has to be disabled.

I thought I would give it a try because it was a narrow contestant pool of literate disabled Texans.  I had a couple of good plot points that I could expand upon, a part of a comedy routine and a cliche.  Here’s a link to it.

This a lesson in self-knowledge.  I learned about discipline, work ethic, and my world view.  I have a tiny amount of self-discipline and work ethic.  As small as they are I got the work done and proofed before the deadline.  It took me almost two weeks to write a 2100 word (4 pages) story.  I used every time-wasting excuse at the computer to not write.  I researched the area around the location and sounds of different squeak toys from 1967.

My story doesn’t reflect my world view unless you read stories to get into the head of the author.  If you find it share it with your English major pals.  My world view was cemented in the creation of the story.

You are going to fail in the attempt.  Fine, so do it anyway.   There are always people that can’t do it as well or at all. I think that all the time.  Losers out number winners all the time.  Look at a marathon.  The people that don’t come in first and don’t run the race could trample the winners to a smear on he street if they got the collective idea.

 

Job Hunt, Music, Writing

Sick and new phone

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My nose is running and I still have this cough.  That’s my pitiful excuse for not calling back about a Senior Linux Administrator job.  I have to be on my game to talk intelligently about regular Linux administration. The only way I qualify for the Senior part is by age.

After a month I like only 2 things about the phone; its basic existence and its cord connects to a PC for data interchange and charging.  I have yet to get used to the user interface to do simple things like get to the missed calls menu.   Another idiosyncrasy is I have to hold down the lock button a lot.  I’ll probably get used to it as I get more calls.

I’ve decided to make bigger blog entries. Cool Site of the Day showed a site last week that talked about writing 750 words(3 pages) a day.  I’m not going for that big but I will go for 250.  Lord know it’s not easy on this particular machine since it’s missing the t key cover.  

I got this machine from my last job.  I keep it because it has a old version of Photoshop on it.  I have Ubuntu on my other laptop and I downloaded GIMP.  I’m terrible at both of them but I’m much better than I was in November of 2008.

I must say I like Pandora,  I’ve picked a Dizzy Gillespie channel and it plays the kind of jazz I enjoy.  You can recognize a beat and a melody but it’s like a late fifties/early sixties detective movie soundtrack.

 

Music, Writing

Things I like today

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Blog came up on the task picker and I’m just not feeling it.  But I must maintain at least a small illusion of discipline.  All I need is at least one newspaper paragraph, 35 words.

In keeping with the title I would rather listen to Little Feat and re watch the fianl episode of Quantum Leap than create this blog post.

Trivia, Writing

HST rewrite of Visit to a Small Trivia Contest

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Friday we saw The Rum Diary. It’s an adaptation of a Hunter S Thompson novel. Every time I read or hear his prose I want to try to write like that. It’s a fun exercise. Here’s the original:
Tuesday we were invited to help The Concert Pub in the finals of the Sandbaggers Wetware Showdown Tournament.

They invited us because SRO OT had won Showdown two weeks in a row earlier.

This was the first time I had taken Lefty any where except OT. I was more nervous about driving home. Monday night we went to OT to play QB1 with Monday Night Football. I drove for the very first time in 15 months on the way home. We were pulled over and given a ticket because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Back to the trivia tournament, the important Tuesday trivia lineup consists of Glory Daze (50s – 80s), Brainbusters (super hard questions and hints), Showdown, Speed(questions come faster and faster), and then Countdown (normal 15 questions). I showed our mettle with a perfect score (15000) in Glory Daze. Brooke won Showdown with a 60000 out of 63750. Concert Pub won the tournament by 284 points.

Now for the Thompson version:

Last Tuesday the cabal at the Concert Pub realized the possibility of impending and embarassing slaughter by the bible-thumping, Long Island Ice Tea-guzzling and possible erotic-quilting miscreants at the opium den cum sports and trivia bar going under the odious guise of Stringz & Wingz in the Communist stronghold of Streetsboro, OH. At the acquisition of this epiphany they sent a clarion call on the electronic version of kneepads and sparkly-glossed lips to me, an under-achieving divinely-inspired veteran of the long trivia wars and my wife, a lapsed Ivy League lawyer that academics pay to exert her discipline over their prose.

I was paranoid about going into that part of town known for its’  lack of old cars held together with a combination of Bondo and rust.  That area between the freeways was also notorious for its’ surplus non-Volkswagen German cars.  I was breaking in my newly hatched with a gestation period of 7 months prosthetic.  The artificial limb with the mysterious and mystical moniker of Lefty had been only to the friendly confines of the bar where my fingerprints were burned into the pitcher handles.

Government regulations loomed in my isolationist miasma.   The night before I had beendriving home from enjoying a satisfying surreal televised football in which the victors had refused to score a touchdown.  The local constabulary must have used Patriot Act funds to purchase night-vision glasses because they pulled me over for not wearing a seat belt.

Tuesday came and I girded my loins to cross the threshold of an establishment that didn’t have my buttprint worn into any of the furniture.  We walked in to an atmosphere of a dysfunctional family reunion.  They knew we were invited but surprised and shocked that we had the cojones to show.  Brooke and I ensconced ourselves at a freakishly tall table, grabbed fully-powered trivia boxes, tuned my iPad to the bar’s Wi-Fi, and we were ready to pull the ConcertPub into the rarified air of championship.

An old chestnut of a contest called Glory Daze was the first game we deigned to show our talent.  I showed what going through an amputation and three hospitals does to a man’s mind with a perfect score, 15 right answers worth 1000 points each.  After another half-hour prelim game the raison d’etre started: Showdown.  Over 8000 bars filled with the best beer and whiskey soaked masters of minutia  hovering their tobacco-stained fingers over numbered bumps of plastic muted the jukebox in anticipation of this 45-minute mass in the religion of trivia.

We were all in goose-step through most of the questions.  Early on I was distracted by the lack of clothing by one of the non-trivia players.  The reason couldn’t have been ignorance since my divine inspiration radar was on full gain.  There was insubordination by some and confusion by the rest on one question and Brooke jumped to the lead.  After that there was no catching her and she was on top of the crew with a score of 60000.  Our average made the Ohio unfortunates mail the trophy to Texas.

 



Writing

My first flash fiction

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I used to want to be a writer. Real life got in the way and I found I enjoyed cable and air conditioning.

I kept my hand in by typing away on whatever word processing program I had at the time; on the Commodore 64 it was Omniwriter.  I used the cheap office program that came with the first Windows PCs.

Now I have Word 2003 and 2007 along with OpenOffice on my Linux side.

I don’t have a lot of major ideas but I like to see how far I can go on a seed idea.  It used to be song titles.  I once wrote a story about a knight with a big bag of marbles that could see after hearing a song called ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’.

I found this website that lists an idea a day.  When writing came up on my random task picker the idea for that day was a day in the life of a wedding dress.

My wife used to create flash fiction so I thought I’d give it a try because I’m lazy.