Time to Nut Up or Shut Up!

Today's title brought to you by Zombieland. If you're looking for comedy and zombies, watch Zombieland.

All kidding aside, it was a great movie. Gary, Jeff, and I went to see it last Friday and the line quoted in the title is going to be with me for weeks. It's simple and direct, and expresses volumes about the character who utters it. It is the character summed up in one phrase. I mean, wow, just wow.

That's one of the things I love about writing; the moment you find just the right phrase and everything just clicks together like a purring machine. It's something I'm working towards, and not much progress was made the last week. I'm still waiting on Gary for feedback, but we have discussed the story and he had a lot of good points. I'm hoping to have his input by tomorrow so I can take it into account when I resume revision.

You're probably wondering what I've done the last week. Well, without more feedback on the story I've been working on background material on the setting. I intend to reuse it, and maybe the characters as well. I have nearly 6 full pages single spaced of background material, and that is still likely to expand.

Something Gary said stuck with me. The antagonist in my Tesseracts story came off as one dimensional to him. Now, granted this characters function is to be more or less a force of repression on the protagonist, and by trying to stay under 7500 words I have to be careful in what I put in, so the character may not get much more time in this story. However, that doesn't prevent me from reusing him in a different story - maybe even recount the events of the same day from his perspective and show the opposite arc. In the current story the protagonist goes from being low to a new high, while in the alternate story the antagonist in the original story can go from high to low.

I'll need to put some thought into this.

New Doctor in the House?

Happy Monday Everyone!

Yeah, I know. Mondays suck. We've all read Garfield at one point or another so I won't belabor the point. One bright spot today, and the subject of the title, is the new season of House just kicked off with a 2 hour episode and it was a doozy. I'll resist the urge to reveal any details of the episode except to reveal that at the end of it House achieves a new equilibrium. Oh, and German woman are hot. If you've seen the episode you know what I'm talkin about.

So how are things going on the writing front? Well, we have a revised draft that my friend Jeff read over this weekend and he enjoyed it and he only found one obvious grammatical mistake. Why would I trust Jeff with this task you may ask. I trust him because he is a former Brock English Major, such as myself, and is even more widely read than I.

He is the first step. The next is to spend the next few days with the text and hammer out another revision. I didn't look at the story for the entire weekend while Jeff read it, so I can look at it with a fresh perspective. I will have another revision by Friday so that I can hand it off to my friend Gary for his impression, and then next week it goes to Trevor.

So, if all goes according to plan I could have the finished, or rather the submittable draft, ready by the end of next week. I already have a least two other good stories in mind, both in settings different from the one the current story is set in, but I intend to come back to this setting in future stories.

Who knows, I may be able to get a few stories out of this setting and years from know collect them and publish them in a single volume. Heck, stranger things have happened.