http://www.770days.com/shorts/valor.htm

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.