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Showing posts from November, 2011

What I read -- November 2011

“The Guns of Avalon” by Roger Zelazny. Book 2 of the Chronicles of Amber. I didn’t notice so much in book 1, but Zelazny really paints nice pictures and makes incredible economy of words in these. “Persuasion” by Jane Austen. When I go to the library, I like to take something out to be supportive, so when they didn’t have whatever the next Jim Butcher book is in the Desden Files, I took out this. Also, I have a DVD of it, and I prefer to read the book first. Anyway, this was a Penguin edition, and it had an over-explaining introduction and footnotes that didn’t seem necessary to me. A lot of the footnoted words were comprehensible in context, and I mean, who really cares that the particular coach they’re talking about is better than a convertible because the top can go either way? I love Jane Austen, and this book was charming. “Sign of the Unicorn” by RZ. These are so short I almost feel guilty counting them each, rather than reading the whole five-book series as a single book. But

Flash fiction challenge: Frog prince

The challenge is here . This is something I had lying around that I wrote originally in March 2009. Maybe I'll post the whole 650-word version tomorrow. The bouncy ball was bisphenol-b. When the princess accidentally tossed it into a well, it sank to the bottom. A frog croaked, "I'll fetch it for you, for a kiss." "Okay," the princess said. "Kiss, then ball," the frog said. Their lips touched. The frog grew and the green localized to tights and a jacket; obviously a prince. The princess forgot about the ball. They didn't live happily ever after. As a frog, the prince had absorbed a lot of pseudo-estrogens. His vestigial third leg gave the princess the willies, and his sperm count was insufficient to provide heirs, anyway.

In process: October 2011

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with about about 28,000 words, in the midst of Chapter 11. Now I’m in Chapter 14, with about 36,000 words. That’s a third of a book! And now I will espouse for a moment on why I write a page a day. A couple of nights ago, I’d done like 4000 words of the Dowsing rewrite and I wasn’t totally into writing a page (roughly 280 words) of Fairfax. But I had to, so I sat down and started writing. I wrote a couple of paragraphs of description, and then the POV character said something that totally surprised me: he said (without giving anything away) he missed the clothes. He didn’t miss the lifestyle of what he was looking at, but he did miss the clothing. I was totally shocked and surprised, because right there, with those four words, he gave me all of his backstory. I knew who he was right now, but I had no backstory for that character, and because I was dragging my way through that block of text, he gave me a gift, “this is who I used to be.” Editing “Ra