Tag Archives: writing

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Two

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

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

Posted on by under Uncategorized

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

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

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

Posted on by under Misadventures in Fiction

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

Posted on by under Posts of a Rant-like Nature, Short Stories

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 →

This Week in Misadventures

Posted on by under This Week in Misadventures

Or “The post that almost didn’t happen because I have to be up for work at 5:30 tomorrow morning” with a dash of “Oh god, why am I still awake? Because I’d lose sleep if I tried skipping this post”.

It’s well past the 4th of July, which means everyone should be fully recovered from their red, white, and blue hangovers. Pet eagles should have been returned to the wild by now, free to soar high above the freedom and liberty of America until next year, when they return to their rightful owners to drink beer and cook burgers made from the crushed hopes of terrorists. I have no idea where all of that came from, but I’m not even kind of sorry.

This past week had ups and downs galore, but when everything is said and done it was awesome in terms of progress. That’s why I’m glad to make this edition of This Week in Misadventures happen. Continue reading →

Old stories, new stories, and Saturday miscellany

Posted on by under Misadventures in Fiction

Or “I’m pretty sure the only thing I’m accomplishing outside of work this weekend is licking windows, and I’m not entirely thrilled with that”.

Holiday weekends always leave me a bit catawampus. Friday seemed liked Saturday, and today seemed like Sunday, so I’ll probably wake up early tomorrow, very afraid I’ve missed the weekly conference call at work. I’m probably kidding.

Today was filled with unexpected episodes of nostalgia, which is the worst kind of nostalgia. It inflicted memories on me that I was happy to revisit, and some I could’ve done without spending time focusing on. Enough about that, though.

This isn’t a post about today’s weirdness so much as it is a post about tomorrow’s hopeful productivity. That’s the exciting stuff, I hope. The plan is to get up relatively early, which is easy enough since I’m no longer able to sleep past 8a.m. anyway, and get as much writing done as possible. I can’t think up a sufficiently clever name for it, so Sunday Marathon Writing Bonanza-Thing. It’ll be a little of the old, a little of the new, and enough writing to make my fingers bleed. Two stories that helped inspire my post on my story mortality rate. A story inspired by The Bloggess’ Fourth of July tweets. A story idea that happened at work or while I was celebrating yesterday or at some point other than those. I’m a master of Fuzzy Thinking today, with some particularly impressive Mush-Brain attributes. Maybe a new Warpt Factor, unless all of my fingers have fallen off by that point.

I’m beta-testing the pilot episode for Phil’s Misadventures in Podcasting before, you know, recording an actual first episode. Not before figuring out how to convert and upload the pilot, of course. So that should be its own misadventure in dumbassery.

There’s also some exciting news for This Week in Misadventures. I guess I could just say how the news is about [redacted] and [withheld], but not without forgetting [spoilers].

I’m so goddamn funny.

That’s all for tomorrow. Tonight’s for recovering, Adventure Time, and remembering what day it is, because I still keep thinking it’s Sunday. In about an hour, that’ll be right…so hooray for small victories. I hope you all, dear readers, enjoyed a pleasant Fourth of July with your bald eagles, burgers wrapped in steak, and your assault rifles that launch fireworks, and avoided the standard Fifth of July Hangover. See you lovely folks tomorrow for the standard weekly recap.

 

Introducing the impending

Posted on by under Misadventures in Fiction

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given my tendency to leap into trying new things with all of the preparation and thoughtfulness of a man on fire who happened to spot a nearby lake. I’m very excited to announce I’m actually going to take a crack at starting my own podcast.

By that I mean I’ve recorded the pilot episode of Phil’s Misadventures in Podcasting, and now it needs attention in the form of editing. Once that happens, I need to either create (oh god, no) or obtain cover art, figure out how to actually disperse it for the enjoyment or suffering of others…and that should do it.

If you enjoy the snark I produce here, in written words, then I think it’s a safe bet to say you’ll also enjoy my upcoming podcast. Hopefully, once I get the ball rolling on it I’ll be able to bribe, coerce, or blackmail people into being guests, and I assume my editing skills will only improve with time.

Most importantly, what manner of shenanigans would you folks want from such a podcast?

Misadventures in accidentally creating my own brand

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff

Or “If it walks like a self-congratulatory gesture, and talks like a self-congratulatory gesture, it might be one of my blog posts”.

Before I even delve into this post, I need to address the fact that this post started while I was watching So You Think You Can Dance. Needless to say, that time is well past and I have no idea how I got so easily distracted, but this is a very real problem with no probable solutions shy of me deleting all social media apps from my Surface. God damn it. Continue reading →

My ideas, and their woefully high mortality rate

Posted on by under Misadventures in Fiction

At any given time, there’s probably about a dozen too many ideas rattling around in the vast weirdness of my thoughts. This can make keeping track of everything a bit difficult, though I say this as someone who also owns a good number of notebooks that are far more devoid of any writing than they should be. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m now working on the first draft of yet another novel idea, which arrives and leaves the forefront of my thoughts at its leisure. There are Warpt Factor plotlines bouncing off of one another like they’re all locked up in a particularly potent bouncy castle. Many short stories. Posts for Screen Robot. You get the idea. Continue reading →