..:: Written .:. Off ::..

Well, the new year is all but around the corner. Can you believe how fast time goes by? Remeber all that BS about Y2K? I was one of those unfortunate IT folk who had to work during on New Years 2000 because of all that crap. We had 500 PCs and 70 servers and nothing happened.

This year should be very interesting for me. I am armed with a completed novel and the knowledge that I will be laid off from my job of 10 years in March. I also have a new novel to begin.

Well, hopefully, I will continue to blog throughout the year. I look forward to reading all of your blogs and finding out what the New Year has in store for you as well!

Drink Up!
Happy New Year!

I had some free time last night and decided that if I ever wanted to see King Kong, then that was the time to do it. I don’t know what I was thinking because it never occured to me that this was a holiday week and every hormonal teenager would be going to the movies at 7:30pm. Shit. I got there and the crowd was ridiculous. I don’t know about you but I hate to pay $10 to see a movie and have it ruined by a group of unruly teenagers ($20 bucks if you count a gallon drum of coke and a small tray of nachos). King Kong is a 3 hour movie too. I may have been able to stand the crowd for an average length movie but no way for an epic.

So I get to the theater, see the crowd, curse myself and leave. I decide that instead of going home, I will rent out the original King Kong (1933). This movie is considered a classic and I haven’t sat down to watch it since I was a kid.

I rent King Kong, go home and pop it into my computer. The movie starts off with 4 minutes of orchestral music played over a still picture with the word Overture written arcoss the screen. My guess is that this is what you watched if you arrived early in to the movies in the old days instead of Coke commercials (a practice which I find to be vile).

I get about 10 minutes into the movie before I decided that something was really odd about this movie. First, its treatment of women is sort of..um..old fashioned. The women in this picture (dig my old style lingo) are depicted as eye candy and incapable of being any use to anyone. The main male love interest constantly talks down to the leading lady. He is also proud of “not liking women” which can get you into trouble aboard a shipload of sea men. Then there is Charlie the cook. Of course Charlie is chinese and only useful when it comes to peeling potatoes. Later on in the picure, when all of the other (white) men on the ship are getting ready to rescue Fay Wray, Charlie wants to help but is told that he is only a cook and would be of no use. All of the black men in the movie are depicted as savages. I am sure that I saw a few white people dressed up and painted black but I could have been imagining things. The funniest bit was when, after Fay Wray or as they call her The Golden Goddess, is abducted by the “savages”, Charlie finds the captain and tells him that she was kidnapped by the “crazy black men.”

All of this is laughable, of course but it still makes you wonder what it was like back in the 30s when these stereotypes were acceptable. Attitudes were certainly different back then! Sheesh!

Still, I have to say that I still enjoyed this movie. The stop motion animation must have been incredible back then and it is still sad at the end when Kong is about to die and all that he can do is pet Fay Wray.

This movie is as close to a chick flick as you will ever get me to watch.

Holy crap! This is my third post in 2 days!

There is a book called, “A Gentle Madness” that describes a true psychological condition called Bibliomania. A bibliomaniac is someone obsessed by books and is compelled to collect them. I suffer from an acute case of this condition. I love books. I have stacks of them in my house. I tend to buy more than one book at a time. My biggest problem is that I am a slow reader and have a short attention span. If a book does not grab me within 10-20 pages it goes back to the shelf. I all fairness, I could stand to give any given book more of a chance.

I have a whole list of New Years resolutions this year. I won’t get into all of them but I will cover one resolution in this post. I went through my book shelf and pulled out a slew of books that I have not read. I put these books on a separate bookshelf and plan to read them all. I am also not allowed to buy any books unless they fit the following criteria:

1. It is a book on writing or publishing.
2. The book qualifies as research for the new book that I am writing.
3. It is a sequel to one of the books on the list.

I went to the bookstore yesterday and spent the last of my gift cards. I purchased two books. Both of these books were recommended to me by readers of this forum. These books are:

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski recommended by The Punk Parent
Herris Serrano - Elizabeth Moon recommended by Dawn Marie

The other books I have in the line up are:

1. The Briar King - Greg Keyes
2. Wraeththu - Storm Constantine
3. A Feast For Crows - George R. R. Martin
4. Dhalgren - Samuel Delaney
5. Babel 17 - Samuel Delaney
6. The Gods Drink Whiskey - Asma
7. Grendle - John Gardner
8. Beowulf - Seamus Heaney
9. The Last Human - Doug Naylor
10. The Darkness That Come Before - R. Scott Bakker
11. Gardens of the Moon - Stephen Erikson
12. Downbelow Station - C. J. Cherryh
13. Curse of Lono - Hunter S. Thompson
14. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
15. Herris Serrano - Elizebeth Moon

If you have an opinion or have read any of these books, let me know if you liked them!

Disclaimer: All of the links above lead to Amazon.com. I have no affiliation with that site nor do I receive any $$$ for linking them to my site. I linked the book as a convenience to the reader in case you are interested in finding out what these book are about. I personally use Amazon as a resource for book info and reviews even though I don’t always buy from them.

So I finally got my satellite radio. I got a Sirius radio and the boombox. I have been listening to it off and on for the last few days and it was really worth the wait. They do play a whole variety of music that you will never hear on regular FM radio. Here is a sampling of what I have heard:

1. Lots of Black Sabbath.
2. A few Frank Zappa songs!
3. Lots of obsurse music by The Who, The Stones, Blue Oyster Cult
4. The Howard 100 News.
5. Lots of metal: Carcass, Exodus, DevilDriver, Opeth, DRI

I have also been listening to a station called 1st Wave which is early alternative music. There is another station called Sirius Disorder where you can hear anything from The Sex Pistols to Miles Davis. There a lots of good Jazz stations too.

Another cool thing is that you can log into the Sirius website and listen to most of the music stations on any computer!

So what are the downsides

1. You have to position the Antenna near a window or you will get drop outs.
2. Driving around, there seem to be some drop out areas. Fortunatly, these areas are few and far between and only cause a second or two drop out.
3. Heavy rain definately affects reception.
4. Way too much Billy Squier and Ozzy on the Rock stations.

Other than that, I love it. There is one thing that you should also be aware of. Each station has speciatly programs. You can check the program listings at the Sirius Website. For example, the metal station HardAttack has a weekly show called Contact High, where they only play stoner rock. You should check out the programming for your favorite stations to get the most out of your radio. It also pays to have in indoor dock or boombox so you can get the most of your money.

I left a message of good cheer at my other site Sentenced to Write for all my readers. Since this site is the evil twin of Sentenced, I decided to do something different!

Christmas getting you down? Tired of all those people singing carols that make your stomach turn? Did the rude crowds at the mall who trampled you just to get an Xbox push you over the edge? Has the commercialization of Christmas sucked all of the spirit out of your soul?

Well, welcome my friend, to Doomed To Rock’s list of the most vile music created by man. This list of CDs is guarenteed to scare away family, friends and kill any Christmas trees within earshot. Just get a nice set of really loud speakers, set them in either your windows or outside and crank up this list of darkness:

1. Sunn(o))) - Black One: 50+ minutes of downtuned ambient evil that will peel the paint off Santa’s sleigh. Will kill any living plant within 10 feet.

2. Mayhem - Wolf’s Lair Abyss: True black metal. The first time I heard this CD, the hair on the back of my neck stood up when the vocals came in. Great for chasing away those unwanted relatives.

3. Venom - Welcome to Hell: One of the original Black Metal bands. Sloppy rock and roll with a jokey satanic twist. Venom got by on pure attitude. This CD is great for withering miseltoe.

4. Slayer - Reign In Blood: The ultimate thrash metal album of time. The CD is almost 20 years old and it still has never been topped and still sounds fresh. If this does not shatter ever Christmas ball on the tree, nothing, I mean nothing will.

5. Ulver - Nattens Madrigal: Supposedly recoreded in the woods on a 4 track recorded,during the full moon. This CD is filled with the most raw, ear shattering metal that I have ever had the pleasure of suffering though. This is earbleeding country.

6. Bathory - Under The Sign of the Black Mark: This CD sounds like it was created in a cauldron. Evil can not even begin to describe the inhuman vocals that launched a thousand black metal bands.

Disclaimer: I am in no way recommending any of this music to anyone! Listen at your own discretion! This stuff is not for the feint of heart or even for any normal people out there! This list was created for my own twisted amusement.

Merry Xmas to all!

I am not sure what all of you celebrate, so let me be the first to wish all of you a Happy Festivus!

I will be signing off for a few days as I am sure all of you will be doing. I have made a lot of really good friends since I started this blogging thing so I sincerely want to wish you and all of your families a Merry Christmas (and all of the other iterations of this holiday that are out there

I am well into editing Chapter Two of my book. I know that I am slow but this process has been brutal. Each and every sentence needs to be scrutinized and also, once I am done fixing things, I have to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure it flows. I am in no way a professional editor but I think that I am pretty good at casting a critical eye at my work. With that in mind, I wanted to list a few things that I look for while editing and, of course, I am always interested in reading what your methods that you use.

1. Misused Words: Always keep an eye out for misuse like affect and effect or other common mistakes. My biggest mistakes come in the form of your and you’re. I know the difference; I just have a metal block when it comes to these words.

1. Stale Prose: My writing is replete with stale sentences. The reason for this is that in my first draft, my goal is just to get the story written. There are lots of passages that describe a character doing something in the most basic way. During the editing process I have to go back and add some flair to these passages or at least trim them down and get to the heart of what I am trying to say.

1. Clichés: Weeding these cliches can be difficult because they pepper our everyday speech. See? I just two clichés in the last sentence. Did you notice? I almost missed them. These clichés are the hardest things for me to replace. You have to look at the situation and decide how to say it in a new way.

1. Continuity: I am paying very close attention things like what the characters are wearing, wounds and their histories. If a character gets shot in the leg in Chapter 5, he better be limping or feeling it for the rest of the book. It’s very easy to forget that your character’ s hat blew off her head and was never recovered. In order to remember this stuff, I have been taking notes about each character as I edit. This helps me if I have to refer back to things.

1. Timing: The passage of time is of major concern to me because there are things that happen before the novel starts and also, since there a lot of the story takes place on the road, I have to be concerned about where all of the characters are at a given time. I am making a timeline as I go along to refer to. This makes things a lot easier when you see it laid out in that format.

1. Character Actions: Another thing to look out for is a character doing or saying something that is not in their personality. In my first draft, the main character in my story was very brazen and tough. I changed her a lot in subsequent drafts to make her more stoic and wise. So now, I have to make sure that traces of her old personality are gone from the final draft. I have made her much more subtle. There are still times where I read things and say, “She would never say that.” Those things have to go!

1. Names: City names, street names, character names and so forth. Everything needs a name but are the names that I originally chose for these things good? Most of the time they are okay but there are still many that need to be changed.

1. Description: Do my descriptions make sense? Are they good enough? Does a description of, say, a building or town need to be more fleshed out? One thing that I learned about description is to inject your character into the description. When you do this, you keep the reader immersed in the story and see things through your characters eyes. Example:

1. There were piles of leaves and garbage in the street.
2. Agent Cooper had to step over the piles of leaves and garbage while crossing the street.

A boring example but you get the point.

1. Overuse of adverbs and Adjectives: I have to watch out for the piling on of adjectives and overuse of adverbs. There is nothing worse than reading sentence after sentence of:

Jim threw the big blue ball at the large round hole.

Or

“Get out of the way!” She screamed loudly.

Cut your adjectives and kill your adverbs. They deserve no better treatment.

Well, that is about all that I can think of off the top of my head. Grammar and spelling are a given of course. What methods of editing do you use?

My friend Taorist turned me on to this. There is a website called Pandora that helps you discover new music. All that you do is go to the website, click create a new station and plug in the name of either an artist or song that you like. Pandora will then create a whole station for you that plays music like what you selected. It works pretty good too! This is great if you are into a new style of music and want to hear other similar bands. I plugged in the band Earth and was treated to all sorts of weird instrumentals. I am going to play some more now!

Well, I just spent my final credits on Blog Explosion. I had racked up a nice amount of credits and even hit a 50 Credit mystery prize but now, my pockets are empty. Maintaining two blogs is a bitch! I guess it’s back to the heinous task of blog surfing. Can some of of you seasoned bloggers out there turn me onto some other ways to advertise my blog? I already read a lot of other peoples blogs and comment on them. I find that this gets me the most readers but it’s also something that I really enjoy. What do you do to get readers?

I could have come up with better title for this post but I just got over the flu. I think the 5 hour conference call that I was on yesterday finally knocked it out of me.

I love a story that has a good twist. A twist is something that usually happens toward the middle or the end of story that usually flips the whole story upside down. A lot of horror short stories contain a twist at the end. For example, in Stephen King’s short story, the Boogyman, a man is relating to his psychiatrist the story about how he believes that his children killed by the boogeyman. When the man leaves the office, the psychiatrist takes off his mask and you find out the he is the boogyman. It works better in the story, lol. We all remember the movie the Sixth Sense, where we find out that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost. Some books and movies do this better than others. Some twists you can see coming a mile away, while others can seem forced (like all the horror movies following the Sixth Sense that shoved a twist in).

I decided somewhere along the line to put a twist into my novel. It is something that happened by accident but it is there no the less. Without getting into specifics, you find out something about two of the characters that snaps a lot of their actions into place. It’s as if two people have the same condition but one goes one way the other takes another path. The nature of the twist in my story could have seemed very heavy-handed and I realized this early on. The best way that I could come up with to deal with this and not make it an, “Oh My God!” type of twist was to basically bury it. When you find out the twist, none of the characters make a big deal out of it, The story just keeps going on. The main reason that I did this, is that my twist is a bit cliche. I kept it in because I feel that it is necessary to the story but not earth shattering enough to change anything. It just clears some things up for the reader and gives you a deeper understanding of the characters. As I type this, I am already beginning to second guess myself, lol.

How would you deal with working a twist into your story? Is it something that you like or is it something that you avoid?