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Posts posted by The Pecman
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What Gee said.
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Read Noah Lukeman's book, The First Five Pages. There's tons of good advice on how to make the first chapter of your story -- indeed, the first five pages -- get the novel moving.
One trick that took me a long time to learn is to start each scene from the middle. Avoid the temptation to go through the entire thing from the very beginning. Read any major published novel (or any major film), and you'll see they use this trick often.
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I have yet to encounter a single one of these idiots who can explain to me how gay people are hurting them, and how gay marriage makes straight marriage anything less. The vast amount of research and public opinion are way against them.
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So true James. I have looked at the sunset many times and said that if I could paint that as I see it, everyone would say that it looked fake, or unrealistic.
Same here. I have to deal with color mastering for video in my day job, and there's been many times (especially in recent years) where the sky looks so unreal, I comment to my partner, "man, if I made a picture like that in a movie, people would yell at me that the sky never looks like that in real life!"
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Hot water is another thing that seems to get my mind working on plot ideas and twists. Under the shower, sitting in my hot tub or the bath, there's something about hot water that makes my mind wander in this direction.
I carry a little notebook and pen almost wherever I go, and I also have one by the nightstand in case I get a weird idea right before I go to sleep, when I'm most relaxed. I think that's probably the state you're in when you soak in a hot bath.
I've gotten a few story ideas while working out at the gym, which is a 99% physical activity. One of the books on writing I read mentioned that "even when you're not sitting in front of the keyboard, a part of any writer's brain is still churning along, mulling over plot points, character issues, and other story ideas in the background. You have to train yourself to listen to them when a good idea pops up when you least expect it."
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Here's one: "And suddenly, they were all hit by a bus."
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That is beautiful country!
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Terrific beginning. I like where it's headed -- many questions that need answering.
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Good piece on 419 scams in Nigeria:
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I hope you were shooting blanks!
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And the link is here:
http://www.awesomedude.com/lugnutz/rolling_the_dice_by_lugnutz1.htm
I agree: good luck, Lug! We've all been there, and we know what it's like. I always say, "it's never too late to find happiness."
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I wasn't all that happy with Waiting for Godot either.
Best laugh I had all day! Thanks for that, Cole -- I needed it.
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And the link is here:
http://www.awesomedude.com/cole-parker/one-summer-in-georgia/index.htm
I agree: a terrific open, and it looks like another compelling Cole story!
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I think that kind of calls attention to itself too much, plus it's hard to read. I have read some works of fiction where the foreign person utters a phrase, then indicates in sign language what he or she means. Eventually, the two figure out a way to communicate.
But I think long stretches of
Blah-blah-blooey-blah-blah <I see the moon in the sky>
Blooey-blah-blah-blah-blah-blimey <and it totally matches your eyes>
would drive me crazy. What was the story somebody posted here recently where an American boy meets a French boy in Paris, and they figure out how to have a conversation? Very well done. What I remember there is, the American figured out the French words in context, and the French boy knew enough scattered words of English to make the point clear.
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I'm still waiting for everything to go wrong...
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I agree -- Rick does great work.
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Let's see if the links paste:
- The Bar-Tender
- The Carpenter and the Piano Man
- The Catch of the Day
- Chaucer's Knight
- A Classic Fairy Tale
- Cloaked in Many Colors
- First of May
- Gif's Island
- Gillie
- Heart of a Dancer
- Last House on the Left
- Our End Is in Sight
- Railroad Bridges
- Parker's Love
- Sheldon's Nutshuckers
- Suffer the Children
- Table Number Five
- West Otter Lake
- When Elephants Rode in Trains
- Where There's Will
I agree, there's some good stories there, and much of it is very well-written.
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Silly me! I thought it was a video story.
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Doh, Cynus beat me to it! <deleting post elsewhere>
Wow, this is a horrible video -- very hard to watch.
This 20-year-old came out to his family in Georgia, then a few days later his ultra-conservative religious family had an "intervention" to try to convince him his lifestyle was "a choice" and that he had to be straight or else they'd throw him out of the house (which they did).
Horrible story. Here's the details:
http://www.huffingto..._n_5731462.html
The good news is that people have already raised $19,000 to help the guy on GoFundMe:
http://www.gofundme.com/dnoqgg
A lot of major news sites like The Advocate, Huffington Post, The Savage Report, and The New Civil Rights Movement are covering this story.
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I'll say this: there are damn few movies that get a 99% rating on RottenTomatoes and keep it over a period of weeks. This is unbelievably high.
And I do applaud the director for the degree of difficulty in telling a story that happens over a period of 12 years, and uses the exact same actors as they age into the part. The only other film I can think of that did this is Michael Apted's Up documentary series, which takes a group of 14 British children and then follows them from the age of 7 and does a new film every 7 years to see how the person has aged, changed, and grown over time:
It's remarkable that they could keep track of all of these people over a period of 50 years.
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Wow, this is a horrible video -- very hard to watch:
This 20-year-old came out to his family in Georgia, then a few days later his ultra-conservative religious family had an "intervention" to try to convince him his lifestyle was "a choice" and that he had to be straight or else they'd throw him out of the house (which they did).
Horrible story. Here's the details:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/28/family-son-coming-out-gay-video_n_5731462.html
The good news is that people have already raised $19,000 to help the guy on GoFundMe:
http://www.gofundme.com/dnoqgg
A lot of major news sites like The Advocate, Huffington Post, The Savage Report, and The New Civil Rights Movement are covering this story.
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I liked it! That kid needs to learn French, and fast. I can only kiss in French.
I had to live in Italy for three months a few years back, and I only learned enough Italian to curse at bad drivers, tell the cab driver how to get me to and from work, and how to order a reasonable meal. In six months, I'm certain I could've gotten a date...
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Trailer here:
I'm going to wait for home video on this one, for the simple reason that it's 2-1/2 hours long and that's a lonnnnnng movie for a tiny indie with just a half-dozen people in the cast. But I applaud filmmaker Richard Linklater for having the courage to try making a film with the same core castmembers over a period of 12 years, which is incredibly risky given that one or more of them could've been killed, or dropped out of acting, or otherwise drastically changed their appearance or something.
New Zealand Outraged by X-Rated Candy
in Laughs & Limericks
Posted
I personally have no problem with candy shaped like this:
But apparently the residents of New Zealand do...
Children love candy and so do I but that's not important. What children don't love is candy that is shaped like penises. That's fucked up. And parents in New Zealand are not happy about the fact that penis-shaped candy was being sold to their young ones.
Apparently, shops in the lower South Island of New Zealand were stocked with 7200 bags of Dragon Sweets from China, and found out only after customers began to complain that the bags were full of gummy bears with dicks and penis-shaped gummies.
Willem Van de Geest of the Stoke confectionary company who accidentally imported the bags of dicks, expressed his apologies for making such a huge mistake. Via the New Zealand Herald:
A likely story. In the meantime, children of ages eight, six, and five got their hands on the candies, and even went so far as to deliver a bag to their father, a disgruntled parent said. From the New Zealand Herald:
Lesson: check your bags of candy for bears with dicks before you give them to anyone as a gift.
http://gawker.com/parents-outraged-after-bags-of-dick-shaped-gummies-sold-1633146925