fontosaurus

Off-the-cuff, I just whipped up this post at DB.N. The post is 291 words. It took less than 10 minutes to write. Mother of god. If I can find a way to shut off my filter while writing rough drafts, and commit an hour a day to the novel writing, I can concievably crank out 10,800 words a week (assuming a 6-day work week). That's a novel every 8-10 weeks.

Step 1: shut off filter, set aside one hour per week to write
Step 2: ...
Step 3: profit! struggle to find an agent!

Okay, seriously. Must work on filter shut-off mentality.

Okay, I need to avail myself of the intellect of my friendslist. On a normal LJ this statement would be followed by an eye roll or derisive laughter. This, however, is not one of those...

That said, I'm writing a piece about a separate, small population that is significantly removed from its parent culture, but can receive the occasional influx of material goods or people. The group is materially-poor, but long on intellectual capital.

What I need is suggested readings from philosophy and history that describe similar situations, in order to expand my thinking. Science fiction recommendations would also be useful.

Thoughts?

(Edit: Wow. That location tag is more than just a bit off! Hooray for A-GPS!)

In an attempt to jump-start my writing, I am going to see about getting a copy of IBM's ViaVoice software for Mac OS X and see if that helps.

Addendum: It might be cool to leave this running while I sleep and see what I say while dreaming.

Bitterfatbitch.com is well underway. I got the navigation files in the thing today, and running, which is a good step in the right direction. Really all I have left to do is about five lines of ASP/VBScript code, configure mso's Blogger so that the homepage will render properly, and fill out some basic content. Once that's done, the site will be a fully functional babe magnet.

A Castle in the Sun needs to get finished. I've been working on this thing for over a year now. That's far too long. I want to be a published author now. Thank you, drive thru.

Writergroups.com falls into a similar category as the previous two. It needs to be finished. I haven't got much coding left. Some, granted, but not a whole ton.

You nosy bastards that wanted to see my screenshots -- if you can't, it's probably because you're behind a firewall that has port 2000 blocked. So sorry. Live in shame of your weak Internet abilities. :-)

Boredom: why isn't the government spending money to deal with this problem? Hello...George...? You wanna get re-elected...nationalize the country's amusement parks and make them free. Bread and circuses. I'd vote for ya.

Hello? Where is everyone today?

Ugh, mso was right when she implied I have too much on my plate, writing-wise. The aforementioned A Castle in the Sun finishing touches, A Hundred Bucks, a novel that I've written a few pages of. Plus an autobiography I'm tentatively calling An American Son, which focuses on what it means to be a Gen X'er/child of the Baby Boom generation. Oh, and let's not forget the science fiction trilogy that's been brewing in my head for five years now... (The Geek Exodus Trilogy). Sweet fucking Christ. I gotta get more of these things finished.

Must talk to Uncommon Grounds about hosting a writers' group, bi-weekly. Soon. I need to get my shit together with this stuff and get myself published. :-)

The quote of the month is from Neil Gaiman, in response to people saying "Information wants to be free."

"No, that's pizza," I want to tell them. "Pizza wants to be free. Concentrate on liberating pizza from evil pizzerias. Information, on the other hand, really hates being free, and is never happier than when manacled to a wall, like Kirk and Spock in some piece of late 70s bondage-oriented slash fiction."

I'm starting to feel pseudo-guilty for not having read any of the Harry Potter books. Part of me feels that since Joe Average loves them, and Joe Average is also a retard, that they can't be that great. Then people like my buddy Batgar (and I think even mso did) tell me that they're great, and I get more and more curious. Tonight when we were at Old Chicago, Batgar says, "Remember that sense of wonder you got from the first Star Wars movie? I got twice that effect from the Harry Potter books." Damn. My reading list is long enough as it is.

And on the reading front, someone sent me a book from my Amazon.com wishlist. Now I remember why I run the Fontosaurus site. Anyway, the book was The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. This is the book that became the bible for everyone's favorite group of eco-terrorists, the Earth First!ers.

Writing. I'm trying to get motivated to put the finishing touches on A Castle in the Sun. For those unaware, ACitS is the book I've been working on since last fall. Thematically, it's about growing up without a positive male role model, and how that affects your view on life -- goal-setting, what to do if by some miracle you actually achieve your goals, and so on. It's primary character is a professional bike racer in his rookie year. There's lots of parallels between it and my life (I was never a pro racer, obviously...and sadly), and I'm trying to make the writing eloquent and not a diatribe...it's hard to find the right balance, given that I'm writing it in the first person. I'm told that perspective isn't used much anymore. I'm also writing in the present tense, just to make it really weird. It reads nicely, I think. I just have to finish it up. (Don't get me wrong, I've written the ending already...it's just in strong need of final editing.)

In other fun, I've been talking to mso about starting a writers' group here in the Twin Cities. We could probably find a groovy coffeehouse in Uptown that would be happy to have us. Maybe I could use a group like that as the incentives to finish A Castle in the Sun. Anyway, I couldn't find any good writers' groups indexes on the web, so I registered writergroups.com, and I'm building a database-driven site that should be capable of managing itself. I think I need that support to get my shit together and actually write. Perhaps I'll call Uncommon Grounds later this week and see if they'd be willing to host us every other Wednesday or something like that.

The jobhunt isn't going particularly well. Not a lot of web design/dev/producer jobs available right now. Hell, I'd be happy with $55K, doing drone-work coding. Registered and set-up hosting for mso's site for her comedy -- bitterfatbitch.com -- I couldn't believe it was still available. Wow. maus asked me to do the design/UI for the porn site he wants to do, and he can pay me. Hallelujah. However, I'm taking that with a grain of salt until he talks to me about it while sober. The money would be helpful right now.

Game-playing has been keeping me sane. Chez Geek has been a lot of fun, thus far. Been getting my usual Scabble fiesta going, which rules. mso bought a learn-to-play-chess set, and she and Kellie are going to figure out the game. I'm tempted to buy her a copy of Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess, but I think the board/pieces she got will suffice. She's a smart girl...once she starts getting ahold of strategy, I'll bet she'll be able to kick my ass at that. I'm also wanting to find a group of people to play Apples to Apples with, and eventually scrape up some people to play Axis & Allies with. That would be good.

I should probably be asleep, but I think it's time I actually sat down and cranked out as much of writergroups.com as possible. Maybe I'll play some Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Who the fuck knows? All I know is it's time we kicked Israel out of Palestine. I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm just anti-genocide. I mean, Christ, is it obvious to anyone else that what Israel is doing to the Palestineans is the same was what Hitler did to Europe with his Leibensraum campaign? To Ariel Sharon I say this: the land given to you was a gift from the UN. The Palestineans are only asking for 22% of what you forcibly took from them. HAVE THE DECENCY TO GIVE IT BACK AND MAYBE YOU WON'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE TERRORISM ANYMORE, YOU JACKASS.

And on that note, I am going to bid you all a pleasant goodnight and go get writergroups.com up and running.

Peace out, lil honkies.

[2/27/2002 4:02:53 PM | Dan Bailey]
Okay, so I'm writing again within 15 minutes. Sue me. I feel like it. I've been pretty damn unmotivated lately. Depressed, even. I need to get my shit together. That starts today. Going to take care of all the little petty shit I've been neglecting. And I'm going to kick serious ass in the proecss. How ya like me now???

Perhaps it's because I finally, finally beat Roller Coaster Tycoon yesterday. I'm trying to ignore the fact that I have the expansion packs and the Mega Park scenario that was unlocked when I beat the game, because dammit, it's addictive. No more Roller Coaster Tycoon until I get back on track and have a job. Period.

Incidentally, things on the to-do list: get this site redesigned, get caught up on my Font-of-the-Month shit, and get some new free downloads on here.

Welcome to the section I call Dan's Bad Poetry. :-) I'll be posting a couple of pieces of dogmeat here, instead of in the writing section, because, really, they're not that good. And they'll disappear in a few weeks as the blog entries continue to pile up...

First, we have "Patrolling the Wire", a piece written for a class while I was in college. About an experience in Korea.

snow in eyes, he reaches out
would you look at that?
taken a crash-course in cyanosis
i've never seen someone so blue
dancing with the razorwire
what do you think killed him first?
Korea wails and moans around us
i'd say that's fairly obvious
askew clothing rippling, a surrender flag
stupidity?
the face is tracked with frozen snot and tears
good guess, private -- i'll call it in
tangled in steel and ice and wind
igloo, igloo, this is snowman six, we got a corpsicle on the wire
still he tries to crawl past
corpsicle, that's funny
silent, we walk on


Pretty bad, eh? Trust me, the next one ("Untitled") is worse. I made it out of one of those magnetic poetry kits, on my (now ex-) girlfriend's refridgerator. Doesn't really mean anything, but it's pretty cool use of words, I think...

life is like lazy juice
after a bitter symphony and
i worship the elaborate sky
beneath eternity
i live for raw urges
and ache for beauty


See? I totally suck at this. :-)

Ugh. Last attempt at a blog sucked. Will try to rewrite something worthwhile this afternoon.

Hey, I'm back. I guess I should apologize for going quite awhile without updating. Shame on me!

Things have been crazy lately. I've been working on a new batch of fonts, plus reworking the website, because the famous 1991 Honda Civic DX is gone, and has been replaced with a 2001 Nissan XTerra SE. The Honda was on its last legs, and I decided to go for it and see if I could get financing. And I did! It took awhile, and I drove the X around for six days until they brought me in to the dealership to sign off on all the paperwork, but it's mine...ALL MINE. *evil laugh*

I must admit, though. I do kind of miss the Honda. Or at least, the gas mileage of a Honda. I didn't realize that a V-6 sucked down this much gas. Oh well. You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

So atop the fonts, and the XTerra, and so forth, I've been working my lil butt off, starting to get out on the bike now that it's warming up a bit, plus I've been doing work on my novel, A Castle in the Sun. I shall now include another excerpt of it, for your enjoyment:

---

deleted

Well, last night I was jonesing to update this thing again, and Blogger.com was down for 16 hours, which put a bit of a crimp in things. Anyway, I can only remember about half of what I was going to ramble about...

Yesterday was a pretty cool day...I came in to the office and discovered a $50 Barnes and Noble gift certificate on my keyboard, with a note of thanks for all my hard work. So the entire day, I didn't get much done, jonesing to get out of the office and go buy some books. Anyway, I picked up the new issue of Bicycling and three novels, and while I was there, I started to slide back into Writer Mode.

Back in college, I had ideas for dozens of books rolling around in my head. And for some unknown reason, I left most of those behind. Last night, all these ideas started flooding back into my head. So I have concrete ideas in my head for three new novels -- one called Baikonur, Minnesota, which is going to be extremely surreal, another one, still untitled, about miracles in the modern world, and the last one is going to be a look at the aftermath of the Gulf War.

I seem to have found my Muse again lately. This excites me, but at the same time, it's terrifying. I don't want to upset the applecart of my groove -- so I live in fear of doing the wrong thing and ending up falling apart mentally, and losing my Muse again. Anyway, if anyone knows any good and reputable literary agents, let me know.

Something weird happened last night. I think I had a Writer's Epiphany -- I realized how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to dig out where the story really is, and to make use of that. Baikonur, Minnesota once lived under and entirely different title and would have been developed into a bad piece of science fiction, had I pursued it at the time. Now, it will be "spacey", but not in a science fiction way. Trust me. It'll be groovy. The book about miracles in the modern world was going to incorporate the Gulf War as a small detail, and then I realized that a major story lay right there...and a story centering around the Battle of al-Khafji is going to bloom from that...

Anyway, it's like 1:30, and I'm working a half-day today. So, I am outta here. Heading for home.

Peace out, honkies.