This Week in Misadventures

It’s been a mostly-exciting, somewhat headache-inducing week. Let’s just leap into the actual post. I’m entirely too tired for this early, which is embarrassing, but I want to finish this post before I fall asleep on my Surface 2.

Writing

Do tweets count here? They still don’t, do they? Damn. Ignoring that, there’s “The Maskmaker’s Apprentice”, “Another Starstruck Misfit”, the cannibal story I still haven’t officially named…something else. My brain’s gone a bit soft. I need to get back into setting goals for myself in terms of weekly writing, which sounds mildly suicidal since I’m working on my One Hundred Days of Blogging posts as well. “The Maskmaker’s Apprentice” doesn’t count towards the goal of twenty stories posted, by the way, because I’m apparently challenging myself to write and rewarding myself by making it as punishing as possible. On the plus side, I’ve received so many new commenting readers. Mostly spammers writing comments in Russian, but I’m not too picky when it comes to comments.

I’ve got no particular plans for writing in this coming week, but I might just be lying there. We’ll see.

Reading

So many books, so little time. I’m rereading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), and I picked up The Long Mars. You may be saying “Phil, you buy a lot of books and you should probably read them instead of buying even more books,” to which I say I will never stop buying books. I should, however, get working on reading them. I think a great starting point would be to start over on The Long Earth, move on to The Long War, and then get to The Long Mars. I’m impatiently waiting for Bryan Lee O’Malley’s new graphic novel, Seconds, which sounds like it’ll be a terrific fun read.

Important Miscellany

Car inspection happens this week, which is important for my planned Chicago adventure at the end of August. I’m anxious that something will go horribly wrong, but when am I not? Don’t answer that, anyone. It’ll be the longest road-trip I’ve ever taken, and I’m going solo so it’ll be something else. We’ll see, once all is said and done, what something else turns out to be (good or bad). I’m considering a travel journal to post on here, as there’s still enough time for me to actually plan it out. Or put off planning it and just haphazardly meandering through it like I do with many other things.

The plans for this week include writing, reading, and a little recovering from last week. I’m more excited, I’ll admit, for the week after this one, as I work three days (thanks to a couple leftover paid holidays). Making a trip home to see my family, and I’ll have plenty of time to work on getting some additional writing done. None of which will be spoiled here, of course.

Here’s to a pleasant, hopefully peaceful week for everyone, and remember to keep the Kaiju population under control by getting your Kaiju spayed or neutered.

PS: I’m sorry, but I refuse to see this post linger just beneath five hundred words. Nope. Had to fix that.

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Five

It’s Sunday, which means there’s a This Week in Misadventures post around the corner as well. I’d say that’ll be fun. Probably. If nothing else, it’ll offset this business of being awake at 4a.m., which is a time of day only birds and overly-caffeinated college students should experience. I still owe a Pokemon post celebrating my 150th and 151st posts on here, too, but I’ll get to that at some point. Probably.

Today’s topic popped into existence earlier. I had to stop by Walmart, and I encountered two of my favorite drivers. The first was the special sort of jackass who drives diagonals through parking spots to get from point A to point. The other one was someone who parked what I rather unkindly refer to as their compensation truck (the kind of truck that was clearly designed for people who wish to actually pack up everything they own and move it, house and all) over the lines that divided up four parking spots. And that brings me to today’s post topic. Continue reading

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Four

I finally got around to seeing Pacific Rim, and I’ve got to say it was better than I expected. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the age-old, time-tested tale of giant robots fighting giant monsters. I grew up on Gundam Wing on Toonami, and loved every second of its weird cartoon, semi-soap opera feel. A lot happier with the ending than I thought I’d have been going into it, too, so that’s a plus.

The flipside is that I’m feeling a touch under-the-weather, so I’m forcing myself to go to bed shortly. However, the post must go on. It’s only Day Four after all. Given that I watched Pacific Rim after work instead of working on this, I think my topic of choice is appropriate. Continue reading

The Maskmaker’s Apprentice

This short story popped into my head a couple nights ago, and demanded attention when I was too tired to provide such thought-requiring things. I started working on it last night, and continued on it most of today. I’m very happy with the end product. I considered sending it out for publication consideration, but I’m instead opting to be a story-dragon and keep it in my hoard. That is to say that I wanted to share it with those of you who misadventure alongside me at Misadventures in Fiction. I really hope you all enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Without further rambling, I present “The Maskmaker’s Apprentice”.

Continue reading

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Three

Let me start this by saying how much I love my days off of my day job (like almost every other person alive, save for those detestable ones who do something they love). While I’m not particularly fond of my internal clock having deemed 8a.m. the point at which I’ve slept in, I’m glad to say it’s not even 10a.m. and I’ve already been semi-productive.

No need to sugar-coat it: I’m a slow-starter, and I’m okay with that. However, being awake this early and meandering through my morning, complete with moments of being hooked up to my iPod, also provided ample inspiration, between half-sleepy yawns, for today’s Day of Blogging. Continue reading

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Two

Day Two – Creating Stories from the Chaos of Ideas

It only seemed appropriate to focus on the topic of creating stories from the chaos of my ideas, which are all over the place, for the second day. Mostly because I’m still convinced my Hundred Days of Blogging will be more chaotic than ordered.

My process isn’t new or revolutionary, and I’m pretty sure I’ve covered as much before. I’d like to say I sit down with a concept. Some sort of message I want to get across, maybe, or an image so powerful that won’t leave my mind until I share it. Deep stuff, right? Continue reading

100 Days of blogging – The Misadventures in Fiction edition

Or “Phil had an idea for a short story, but its quite stuck in his head” with strong notes of “If this week were a person, I’d set that bastard on fire and throw him off a goddamn cliff”.

I’ve seen One Hundred Days of all sorts of things. One Hundred Happy Days. One Hundred Days of Self-Improvement. One Hundred Days of Exercise (which I admittedly misread as One Hundred Days of Exorcise, which left me wondering who is going to the trouble of finding so many possessed people). And so on, and so on, ad infinitum. I also know that this Hundred Days of Blogging has been done before, and so I want to set up some basic guidelines for myself. Guidelines that are being made up as I type this, because I am the antithesis to planning and organization. With all of that in mind, let’s kick this off. Continue reading

An unusually sentimental post

Or “Sometimes my little, frozen black heart does things that require being broadcast, especially since I write about ending the world a whole lot”.

A writer, I think, can only be as good as their support system. Like any other art-form, it’s a grueling, time-consuming labor of love, and there are days when I, like many, many others, would be all right with saying “Fuck it, I’m done,” (special apologies to my mother, grandmother, and any other relatives who maintain the belief I don’t use that word and its various conjugations) and closing up the proverbial shop for good. Staring at a blank document, an idea in my mind, and being unable to produce anything of substance is extremely stressful.

Thank god for my iPod in those situations, or I’d probably have gone mad by now. Continue reading

A Remarkable Victory

This is an exciting moment for me, though I suspect that goes without saying. All of my typical thought processes are trying to cheapen this victory, and so I’m trying my damnedest to shut them up.

I submitted two short stories–“Death at Teatime” and “Rebooting Everything”–to Remarkable Doorways. And then I waited. I sent a story off to another publication, and then focused on other things so as to not go mad.

And then I got an e-mail containing words I wasn’t familiar with from my previous misadventures in attempted publishing – that one of my stories had been accepted (spoilers: it wasn’t “Death at Teatime”). I reread it a couple times, just to make sure I hadn’t confused a couple words. Or had been hallucinating.

“Rebooting Everything” can be found here, as part of their very first issue.

More importantly, Remarkable Doorways is always looking for submissions. Their submission page spells out the important details better than I can, so meander on over there, and then send something remarkable.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be lost in a state of excited disbelief for the next week or so.

PS: Let it be known I didn’t fail to realize this and my last post were my 150th and 151st posts, respectively, and that I should’ve posted something about Pokemon. I’m going to honor that with a belated something or other. Unless I forget, which is entirely plausible.

Monday Mayhem

There is a small, albeit moderately insane, portion of my mind that is convinced today was a test, for me from the Universe, to see just how many times I could string together expletives in the course of one sentence. If we take into consideration that I am a man whose verbosity and capacity for complex sentences is, at its best times, unrivaled, I would dare estimate that the total curse words I managed to cram into one sentence would max out around sixty. If I were actually keeping track of that sort of thing, anyway.

I’ve ranted plenty on Twitter already. I vented to my girlfriend. I even considered researching possible ways to bring about Armageddon (which, to the relief of many, is beyond my capabilities at present). Out of some weird, misplaced mercy, I will spare the additional ranting for other outlets. Let me just leave this portion of the post off with this open-ended question: why is it the universe is most prone to go to shit on Mondays? Ignoring the business of it being after a weekend, because some of us work on weekends.

My brain is a touch soft today. Whether it’s because I burned myself out writing three short stories and a blog post last night, or how the forces of stupid really stepped up their game today, I don’t know. I do know I don’t like this lack of motivation very much, as it puts a real damper on my ability to focus on anything at all (there’s a shock).

However, as a sudden plot-twist to this post, and thanks to some Twitter-chatter with @MortuaryReport, this story happened. I realize this is a rather abrupt transition into a short story that could have never happened, but that’s sort of how I do things on days like today. This is how I managed to be creative and destructive, all at once. It, like any story that happens out of nowhere, may have gotten a bit (and by a bit I mean extremely) ridiculous. I’m not sorry.

Continue reading