WWW.770DAYS.COM

"The Price of Valor" is a new short story (about 8K words) that I wrote recently. Hope you like. It's about relationships and superheroics. http://www.770days.com/shorts/valor.htm

Here's the three posts I did this week at WELCOME TO HELL, Glenn Walker's pop culture blog. http://monsura.blogspot.com/2010/07/afterdark-horrorfest-part-1.html http://monsura.blogspot.com/2010/07/afterdark-horrorfest-part-2.html http://monsura.blogspot.com/2010/07/afterdark-horrorfest-part-3.html

Okay, where do I start? Been unemployed for a couple months now... job searching sucks and no real leads yet, but one keeps at it. Over at http://store.770days.com/ I'm selling a bunch of stuff online - personal collection of books, comics and the like. Also selling stuff on Ebay, there's a link to my account there from the main page at the 'store'. If you're looking for stuff, please take a look and see what I have up. There's about 50 listings now, but expect that to double in the next week or so. I'll be updating the main page at the store very shortly, too. Please check out the Poo Bah page. It has a link to a project over on Kickstarter, hoping to raise funds to finish the book this year. If you can, please pledge and help out - 3 weeks from today is the deadline and nobody has pledged as of yet. Soon, Glenn Walker of WELCOME TO HELL, a pop culture blog, will be posting some guest-blogging posts of mine - reviews on the 8 films of the AfterDark HorrorFest IV. I'll be linking to it when they're up. Follow my writing Twitter (@770days) and my personal (@cr8dv8). Thanks!

I was going to do Script Frenzy this year, but after an abortive attempt, I gave it up. I need to focus on POO BAH and doing other stuff too much isn't helping with that. Other stories, "Forty Whacks" (Lizzie Borden as a zombie hunter) for instance, are tugging on my creative desires. I'm writing a short story/novella, "Darksiders: The story of Anna and Bill" for a ladyfriend. Life continues to be kinda crappy, and that doesn't help me focus on writing. Ah, well.

Link: http://www.770days.com/ilovewriting

So, over on Twitter, the following question was retweeted by my good buddy, Glenn W: TOPIC. For Val. Day: What do u love about writing? What do u love to write about? What lights ur heart on fire? This is an easy question to answer, but if you're expecting a big, long answer that goes into the depths of it, then you're going to feel cheated. I love writing because I do. No, really, it's not a cop-out. I just love sitting down and writing, mostly because it's an adventure for me as much as for the reader of whatever I write. When I'm writing, I almost always have little to no clue what's going to happen. I might have the beginning, an idea of one thing that I want to happen in the middle, and if I'm lucky, I think I know how it's going to end... but it doesn't always end the way I want it to. I love to write about everything, really. Anything that I'm interested in, at least. I wouldn't want to write on the shell-life of mollusks at the local grocery store. (Yes, that's an intentional typo to make a bad pun... you know you love it.) A good story, that's what lights my heart on fire.

That's right (write?), just one. Write. Write 5K words a week. If I break that up over 5 out of the 7 days, that's only 1000 words a day. I can do that, easily. If I bang it out on the first day of the week and don't do any more the rest of the week, that's fine too. Or I can do a bit mover 700 words a day, 7 days out of a week. 5K a week. 52 weeks in a year times 5K a week, that's over 250K words. A quarter of a million words. That's my goal. Creative writing (though if I do any essays or essay-style blog posts or any non-fic or op-ed stuff, I will count those as well. But not just regular updates, only stuff that has a creative or focused approach.) Stories. Comic book scripts. Movie or tv scripts. Poems, should I do that. Writing. Poo Bah. Ozzy. Thunder. Forty Whacks. Whatever else I decide to work on, all of these will count. 250,000 words. 2010. Go.

Another year (mostly) gone by, another handful of writing goals not all reached. Sure, I cranked out just over 50K words in the month of November on a a new story (OZZY THE OGRE OF ORLANDO), but I think it's a safe bet that I epic failed at completing POO BAH this year. Sure, I reached the goal on my attempt at Script Frenzy, THUNDER, but that's going to be completely retooled. The bottom line is... I need a laptop that I can take on the bus and use while on the bus. The laptop I have now... no can do. Not only does the battery not hold a charge, the laptop hinges are broken - the monitor still works, but it's only connected by the flat cable-thing... it's one mishap from Final Death. So, I'm ostensibly saving up for a cheap laptop (or maybe a netbook?)... but that's not gonna be anything that happens any time soon. I'm having trouble making my bills and eating and all without juggling finances and selling books on Ebay just to keep making it month to month. (Hey, anybody got a decent laptop they're not using that I could rent from them? Or buy in installments? And, no, I'm not looking to get one through Aaron's or whomever, paying 5-10 times what the machine is worth over a couple years... but if someone had an old laptop they weren't using or didn't want any more...) 2010... I guess that's the year of POO BAH. 2009 was supposed to be, but that didn't happen. 2010 - I'm not going to partake in the NaNoWriMo exercise this year. I beat the goal four out of the past five years - 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009. That's good enough for me. Now it's time to get serious about getting serious and finishing some projects. POO BAH is unfinished. I WAS A TEEANGED EVIL OVERLORD is unfinished. OZZY THE OGRE OF ORLANDO is unfinished. THUNDER would make one helluva tv show - I think more a cable network programme than not. It's time to prioritise. It's time to get real. If crap like Alan Rodger's PANDORA can get published, I can get published.

This is made of wootness.

Title: Ozzy, The Ogre of Orlando Genre: Urban Fantasy Synopsis: Ozzy is an ogre, an exile from the realm of Faerie, who lives in Orlando, FL. He's also a private detective and security consultant. He gets hired by the Royal Court of Faerie to find the missing crown prince, Albion. Things go from there.

Getting edits done on the POO BAH AND THE WOLVES "novella"; the plan is to self-publish, hopefully before the end of the year. Hal is working on some new art for the publication. Haven't really gotten all that much more done. What else is new, eh? Oh, on Facebook, there's a PooBah (Book) fan page.

I haven't had the chance to get a whole lot done on Poo Bah so far this month; typical life excuses - work, health, relationship stuff (nothing particularly bad, just the usual drains on one's free time/creativity.) I'm working on setting up an Ebay store to sell a lot of the inventory of books and comics I've amassed over the years. If I can make enough money doing this, I'm thinking of going to 4 days a week at my job, to free up an extra day a week to focus on other matters - including writing!

April is over (and with it, Script Frenzy, which I completed.) Back to Poo Bah. Plot mapping and then... MORE WRITING!!!!

As of today, 4/26/2009, I am a winner of Script Frenzy 2009. My story is not completed, and I'm seriously realising that this is better done as either a tv miniseries, or an actual television show... not sure that I'll actually finish this actual script, but I damn sure will be doing something with this story - this is even better than I realised.

As often happens with my stories, this is growing beyond the originally conceived boundaries. I rather see this more as a television program - one that would run several seasons on a network, or perhaps longer with shorter seasons (much like HBO or BBC...) I don't know my progress at the moment; I'm still in the process of transcribing from longhand to computer. I've written almost 100 pages on paper - at this point, I'm guessing that's about 60 pages - if so, I'm fairly close to being on schedule. (I'd be ahead if I hadn't taken a break from writing for the past 3-4 days.) The world is fleshing itself out on its own - again, this is normal for me.

Doing it longhand on the bus (since my laptop can't seem to carry a charge. Stupid laptop.) Got at least a good 24-30 pages done. Am trying to transcribe them into a computer file so I know for sure. Am happy with my progress so far - for never having seriously written a real script before, am rather pleased.

Did some minor edits/adds to the main pages for the FREE YLAM subsite, POO BAH subsite, and THE LANDS OF DAY AND NIGHT subsites, as well as the EVIL OVERLORD page - all reached from the menu to the far right.

Looks like I'm going to participate in Script Frenzy this year. I'm thinking of doing a movie script, too. Never done one before. The concept I'm going with is "Thunder", a cyberpunkish setting story about a mysterious street fighter. It's a great story and I have no idea if I'll be any good at writing it.

For me, writing has always been easy. I hardly ever suffer from Writer's Block. I more suffer from Lazy Fuckwad Syndrome. Writing a novel in one month... rather, writing a novel-length amount of story in one month (as my novels tend to exceed the 50K goal of NaNoWriMo) is really easy. The trick is just to MAKE TIME and DO IT. The process is ricockulously simple. Honestly, if you're doing NaNoWriMo and aren't having fun writing, then SERIOUSLY, please consider another career path. You're not meant to be a writer. I am amazed (and appalled) by the sheer number of people in some of the NaNo communities on sites such as Livejournal who spend as much time bitching they can't get their story going or get the time put aside to write, as they do actually writing. Don't get me wrong - there are days during NaNo where I whine to myself, "But I just got home, and I'm tired and..." And then I write for 45-90 minutes, and I'm swept away to whatever magical land I'm writing about that year... and the world is GOOD. I have never come away from writing in a worse mood then when I started, and 99% of the time, I'm in a better mood. It doesn't always work out well, the forcing yourself to write in this one story for one month. Sometimes, you walk into it unprepared. Sometimes you get 14 days into it and you're like, "Damn, this is gonna change..." This happened to me last year (2008) - the story I'm writing I like, but it's gonna go through some serious revisions, if I keep it at all. There's a lot of groundwork I like, but I really think it's gonna be completely retooled - it'll be vastly different, but the characters and the relationship stuff (damn good meaty stuff that I wrote that I had NO FUCKING IDEA was going to be so good) will certainly stay. Here's the thing - I'm a writer. I'm not a published author yet (and there is the difference - it may be semantics, but to me it matters), but I AM (and always will be) a writer. My mother tells a story about me as a young tyke, sitting on the couch with my brother. Mom had just been reading to us, but she had to go start dinner. From the kitchen, she heard me talking, and as she listened, she realised that I was telling a story to my brother. At this point, my reading ability was there, but not yet developed... she peeked around the corner and saw me 'reading' from the book, turning the pages, as I told the story. A story that was not one she recognised... one that was not in the book. (She later realised that the book was upside down... and on top of things, my eyesight was so bad that I couldn't have read the book if I could've read - I didn't get corrective lenses until I was 5, by which point I was already reading.) So, I've always been a storyteller. I'm currently reading Stephen King's EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL; in several of his introductions/afterwords for the stories, he speaks of how writing isn't a creative process, but an exploratory one - he believes that stories exist already in their completed stage, and just have to be uncovered. The writer is nothing more than an archaeologist, digging up artifacts. I have to agree with him 100%.

(nothing about writing in this post) It's all about perspective. I know this. I know this WELL. However, sometimes, we get wrapped up in our own troubles and forget that. Today, I was reminded of this. A guy, we'll call him Blue, for the colour of the bicycle he rode into the shelter, came to do some Community Service Hours. He looked around at the approximately 6-8 people we had helping us out and said, "Wow, looks like you got plenty of help already," and he said it with concern. (Not that he needed to be concerned, there's always plenty to do at the shelter.) Anyhow, talked to him, found out he was doing CSH to qualify for food stamps (yeah, by the way, those of you who think people who get food stamps are all sitting on their asses doing nothing, here's some information - as of the past year or eighteen months, a LOT of the time they are required to perform Community Service to qualify.) We had several people raking leaves, several people working on cleaning out and arranging things in some auxiliary areas, and a couple volunteers walking dogs. So I took Blue and we went to the laundry room. I explained to him that we have a crappy washer that doesn't shut the water off when it's full, so we have to manually manage that or the laundry room gets flooded. (Yes, Terry is speaking from experience here, folks.) I told Blue that I wanted him to make the laundry room his project - we had about twelve blankets that were soiled, some floor mats and a couple loads of towels. PLUS, the laundry room needed some reorganising. He happily (yes, happily) set to his tasks. Throughout the afternoon, I'd go down there and each time I did, there was marked improvement. He was cheerful and chipper and a downright pleasure to work with. Didn't have to hold his hand (like I did with one guy who was there today, pain in the ass that he was.) Didn't have to correct him or tell him to put a little pep in his step or anything. Oh, also? He's homeless. Lives in a tent on a guy's property (that he does work on the property for the guy in exchange to put his tent on his land.) Lives in a fucking tent. How cold was it last week? Does work for the guy in exchange for the right to squat on his land. Is doing Community Service to qualify for food stamps so he can buy food, because he can't get a job because it's hard right now. Man, I thought I had it rough, struggling to keep paying my bills and keeping my house. Perspective.

Still about 1/2 way to where I should be on the word count. Really wish I could get a laptop; writing on the bus would EASILY get me caught up in no time. Dammit.