Gee Whillickers
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Posts posted by Gee Whillickers
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You guys must be embarrassed when you try to sing 'I've Been Working on the Railroad.' Must sound like the start of a fart joke.
C
Dinah, won't you blow,
Dinah, won't you blow,
Dinah, won't you blow your horn?
Hmm, I never realized the salacious nature of this song before. Figures Cole would pick this one.
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.... And I hate hockey!
Grrrrr. Them's fighting words. Drop your stick and gloves and let's go.
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I look forward to reading more of Gee's stories as well. He needs to get off his motorcycle and back on his word processor!
C
Harumph. It's motorcycles. Plural. One is never enough.
Actually, I just sold one, a Triumph. Sad to see it go, but it was too similar to one of my other bikes, and I'm wanting a dual sport for my ride through the Northwest Territories and the Yukon to Alaska. I've been to NWT, but never to the Yukon, and never to Alaska.
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Very good read.
You could easily have made it into a trilogy of full size books, there are a lot spaces to expand. You could have ended the first when he was captured, and continued the second with the escape and the taking of that state. The final could be taking of all the states.
I understand the effort you put into this, though. It would be nice for it to be longer, particularly with the rebels at the end, and the character dev at the beginning at high school.
But anyway, well done on this story.
I have to pay more attention. I didn't even realize this thread was bumped and there were new posts in it.
Thank you! When I wrote it a few years ago I had a second book in mind. That never came to be. However, encouraging words certainly inspire motivation!
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I already sent an email, but a public thank you and recognition for a wonderful, sweet, and highly enjoyable read! Excellent story.
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Up here in the frozen north it's not always quite so frozen as some seem to believe. We were at the lake last week, and with temperatures constantly at around 40 C (104 F) and 75% humidity it was a bit hard to take. We were in our old camper, no air conditioning. It was hot.
Now, back home, it's considerably more tolerable. 30 today, so around 85 F. Fortunately, we're at a high enough elevation (think Denver) that no matter how warm it is during the day, the nights cool off quickly after sunset.
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I don't really think this can be generalized like that, Cole. One of the things that makes our stories about teens so interesting is because of the conflicting emotions and drives they feel at those ages, and before they're adult enough to have settled these down into some kind of coherent world view.
Yes, teens are driven my peer pressure, egocentricity, short term gain, and lack of understanding of consequences. But most, unless they have significant emotional and social problems, still have empathy underneath that. It's just often hidden by those hormone-driven emotions that seem to supersede it. And sometimes help is needed for them to connect the dots. The empathy usually comes out after one-on-one time with someone more mature who role models it, quiet reflection time, and, mostly, direct observation and time with someone who has suffered the consequences of such things and who they have or are led to have some kind of relationship with.
Yes, there are kids who simply won't get it. But many will.
When I was in junior high school there was a girl in my grade who suffered from a weight problem. She was often bullied and teased about it. I was most definitely not the type of kid to join in which such things, more often I was at the receiving end of bullying and teasing. But one day, for whatever reason, she made a friendly comment to me which I answered with a offhand and rude, sarcastic remark about her weight.
I remember her reaction. I remember how I felt. Immediately. I realized I had just inflicted the kind of feelings I so much hated when others inflicted them upon me. I felt horrible. Awful.
Unfortunately, those feelings, empathy, altruism, etc, are so very well suppressed by the desperate need to feel accepted. Especially at certain ages.
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Dropbox, Google Drive, and all the other cloud storage services can be useful. Of course, there are privacy and permanency issues with all of these. Personally, I TrueCrypt the stories before putting them there. At least it gives me some degree of privacy.
For my stories, I have all of them stored in a particular directory on my hard drive. This directory gets automatically copied a few times a day to a different hard drive on the same computer. I manually copy it to a couple different USB drives which are stored elsewhere in the house (still not off site storage) from time to time. Then I Truecrypt the entire thing and copy it to cloud storage regularly. Stories I'm currently working on I encrypt and email to myself, mostly so I can work on them when I'm elsewhere, but partly for backup.
You can tell I've been through my share of catastrophic data loss in my career/life. And yet this still probably isn't enough. Automated, fully private and controlled by me, fully offsite backup and storage is the way to go.
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Narrative, for me, is quite different from dialogue. When I run my stories through my software editor it inevitably underlines vast swaths of dialogue as problematic. For most of this I tell
the software editor where it can shove it, and I leave the dialogue exactly as I had it. People speak in odd ways. Especially casual speech. Especially when so many of my characters
are teens. Those dangling participles and cliches and overuse of certain words and verbing of nouns (heh) are intentional.
However, sometimes it finds things I didn't see, even in dialogue. Then I change those before sending to a real live editor who finds an order of magnitude more errors. The errors the
software finds in narrative I more often agree with and change.
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I saw this yesterday as well, and then stayed up way too late until I finished the entire thing. Believe me, it was worth it. Well done!
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One of the things that most endears me to writing is that there are no rules.
But that widespread freedom we enjoy as writers is intoxicating. I can't think of any other place in life where we're so free. We can put something on paper anyway we wish, in any form we like. We only have our own imaginations to limit us.
This is so true, and one of the reasons writing can be so much fun. We can literally create entire universes, entire human beings, entire scenarios and events. All in our heads, then on screen or paper. As long as they're plausible (and this can vary greatly depending on the type of story and context), consistent, and well written, the possibilities are almost endless.
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This looks very useful. Thanks for posting it.
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I'm just tossing out some ideas here, so don't bite my head off. We all suffer from stress and over-analytical behavior, and I'm my own worst critic when it comes to my stuff.
Woops, didn't mean for that to come across that way!
Your response, and, Cole, yours too, really were encouraging! I was just making a poor attempt at a bit of humor there.
Doh! That's only happened to me about a hundred times. I have two notebooks and two pens right on my bedside table, and I still occasionally am too tired to reach over and write the thought down. Same deal with me: I remember having the thought, but damned if I know what it was.
There's an inverse relationship between the probability I have a notebook, or even my phone, easily at hand and the probability of having a really great story idea spring to mind. I'm sure of it. Some kind of quantum brane fluctuation causing the multiverse to remain tau-zero in energy fluctuation. Or something. In other words, the universe is laughing at us.
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Hmm, language is so fun to look at, examine the history of, and play with.
Right now, I think it's almost more common to say, "After the most satisfying experience of his life, he slid his boxers up while gazing lovingly at..." as it is to say, "he pulled on his pair of boxers..."
Context seems so very important. When taking about laundry, it seems more apropos to talk about how many pairs of boxers were washed. When talking about the above situation, 'pair' seems clumsy.
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It's interesting that sometimes, I get my best ideas when I'm sleepy, or when I'm completely distracted doing something unrelated to writing. Try that: a total physical activity like walking, running, or exercising, out of the house, and take a note pad along. Maybe you'll find the key that unlocks the solution.
I get ideas in the strangest of places. Until I learned to carry around a little notebook to jot them down I ended up forgetting a lot of ideas that I just know would have led to some really fun or interesting stories. But two places in particular are almost always when I get most of my ideas. First, in the middle of the night. I'll wake up, sometimes musing upon a dream I just had, sometimes I'll just wake up. And then something occurs to me, something I can quickly build upon and run with.
I'm still kicking myself over one idea from a few months ago that happened precisely this way. An idea that came to me one night for a new science fiction story. It was a really great idea. I know it was. Fun, interesting, enough avenues for plot complexity and stability, something that could really work with a particular kind of character and really give opportunity for conflict with other characters and environment. So I smugly went back to sleep, thinking I'll jot some notes for an outline down the next morning.
And then I utterly forgot the idea.
I've been trying different approaches to try and remember a thread of it ever since. I really wanted to write that story.
The second place I frequently get my ideas is sitting in my hot tub. Hot tubs are reasonably common where I live in Canada. Sitting in hot water, outside, on a cold winter day, staring at the stars and listening to the sounds, and maybe if you're lucky seeing a glimpse of the northern lights while sipping a good scotch can bring a state of mind, at least for me, that often leads to interesting ideas. Half of "The Wish" was written in my head sitting right there staring upwards while warm water gently bubbled around me.
But you're right, Pec. Ideas can come anywhere, and at any time. Often in the middle of the grocery store, or during a run or bike, or while teaching a class. I remember a good portion of my last Halloween story coming to me in the middle of a sentence while talking about sublimation of carbon dioxide. I have no idea what one had to do with the other, but suddenly there it was.
I know it'll come. It's been a frustrating few months for me in terms of writing.
I'm curious what everyone thinks of the rest my original post, the quote from Ira Glass, how new writers are so often discouraged by themselves and others, and how they give up before they give themselves a chance to really get rolling.
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Uh, so you guys are saying write about crap.
Got it.
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Jimmy was straining out a doozy of a deuce. Eyes closed tight and sweating, the pressure on his vegal nerve made him shiver in goosebumps and become lightheaded until he or......
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Uh, I don't think this is quite working guys.
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The thing is, I learned to type way, way, way before word processors were even someone's dream. I learned to insert two spaces after a period, and it's automatic. It's ingrained in my very DNA at this point. If it offends a graphic or any other sort of artist, no matter how closely related, I'd advise him not to read what I write.
C
Oh, the time I spent trying to unlearn typing two spaces after a period. It had been so ingrained in me from high school typing classes that forcing myself to stop doing it was quite the chore.
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However, one thing I might pick a bone with. What you're talking about isn't what I call writers' block. I've had that, and it's awful. Really, truly awful. When I had that, I'd try to write, have an idea, and sit down, and the words wouldn't come. That was decidedly unusual for me. Usually the words to complement an idea just flow. But when I was blocked, it was lucky if I could write a single sentence. Really. It was a struggle to write a sentence. Sometimes even to write a word. That may seem unimaginable, but it was fact.
Very encouraging, thanks!
I think, for me, part of the problem is that it really did lead to writer's block. I had been discouraged with the last several attempts. I sat down a few weeks ago, cognizant that I really needed to write a Valentine's story. I had one or two tiny ideas but nothing terribly great. I sat. I stared. I typed a word. I erased it. I sat. I stared. For hours. Until, frustrated almost to tears, I turned the blasted computer off and went and did something else. After two or three episodes of this, I kind of gave up for a while.
For a while.
I fully intend to try again. To write.To continue writing. I like writing. When it's going well, it's fun. It's a lot more than fun, it's somehow amazingly fulfilling. Some have told me I'm passable at it. I don't know, but it's nice of them to think so. Sometimes I think I need to just push harder. Sometimes i think I need to wait until I feel that spark, that idea that comes in the night and just burns and sizzles in my brain until it's down on paper, and the words flow and flow, because they have something important to say, and that wonderful feeling that tells you that just maybe, just maybe you are putting something pretty good to words.
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That was great! Nice to see the collector's employer recognized him for it, and said how proud they were of him, as well as gave him a gift certficate. A far cry from what is so often seen these days if an employee does anything that's not strictly company policy.
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I've been struggling with writer's block.
That's understating it.
Everything I've been trying to write lately has come out, in my opinion, slightly worse than steaming, aromatic crap. I've started and started again. Then I re-read the first page or ten pages or paragraph and I'm finding myself just shaking my head and wondering why I even thought my idea might have something interesting to say.
There's a rule often bandied about in writing forums. Some agree and try to follow it, some think it absurd. The rule is, "Finish everything you start writing. Don't edit until you are finished."
I don't know how true this is. I certainly don't follow it. I have untold numbers of unfinished stories.
But, to the point. I came across this quote today.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass
Perhaps this explains a few things. New writers seem to quit often and early. They write, they get some accolades, they write again, they read what they wrote, maybe get a critical email or two, and they quit.
How do we work with this, or against this? How do we encourage writers who obviously have talent to keep writing and not give up because they don't like their own work?
More imporantly, how do I get over this block and stop writing crap and give something Mike thinks is worth grudgingly posting?
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I know, I know, these types of commericals all try too hard, are far too manipulative, etc. I agree. But this one actually works, though I'll admit I wasn't expecting it to.
See what you think.
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People can have any faith they like.
People can NOT use any reference to this faith in any matters of public policy. This is wrong. Public policy and law must be based on empirical and repeatable data, and must be open to criticism, examination, and challenge, and it must be allowed to change or be discarded when found wanting as a result of this.
Religion can not and is not willing to do this. Therefore it has no place in this sphere.
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It's not just maliciousness that makes me wonder how they're going to overcome all of the hurdles I can immediately see in this plan.
What about trees, power lines, fences, weather, stopping people from stealing your package - this is like an advertisement to the whole neighbourhood after all, "Look! Cool stuff to steal at Gee's place!!" I could go on. I suppose all of these are solvable problems, but I can't help wondering how feasible this really is.
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Yes, Amazon is planning on using automated flying robot drones to deliver packages by 2015.
From the time you click the "buy" button to your doorstep in 30 minutes.
Just watch out for the neighbourhood kids with slingshots...
Oh c'mon! What could possibly go wrong?
http://mashable.com/2013/12/01/amazon-unveils-flying-robot-delivery-drones/
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in The Raccoon's Den
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Funny thing is, that's standard labelling for homogenized 3.25% milk here in Canada. Common, so nobody bats an eye. When I saw the picture it took me a moment to understand what the joke was.