Belated New Year's Post, Plus Fortune Street

I was going to do a New Year's resolutions post yesterday (my normal Sunday post), but I didn't. Instead I got sucked into a new Wii game--Fortune Street. It is absolutely fabulous, albeit only suited for a narrow range of players. More on that later.

I am going to go ahead an tackle the resolutions (in the form of challenges, natch) first, then do the launch of my newest blog feature--the weekly media breakdown. Which is basically what I've been doing the last few weeks anyway, where I talk about books, movies, and games I've been grooving on lately.

I am a (moderately) Old Person. So yes, I am allowed to use phrases like grooving on. You might also note--pursuant to my quest to chunkify my writing--that I am using em-dashes, parenthesis, italics, quotes, semicolons, and colons liberally. You are my punctuation guinea pigs; I hope to make you squeal. With delight, of course. Literary delight.

Moving on, Here is my 2012 Challenge List--otherwise known as the forties. Which is  a reference to one of my favorite songs, 40oz. to Freedom, by Sublime. And yes, that is the correct spelling. No space between 40 and oz.; no capital o in oz. either. Thank you Internet search engine.

Also, their are lotsa fours and multiples of fours and other math stuff.

1 - Write 400,000 words of new fiction this year. Otherwise known as the "Beat Michael Stackpole's 2011 Wordcount--or BMS2W--Challenge". This breaks down to about 2k a day on weekdays. I hope to write 3 novels as part of that 400k, which will cover about 2.5 k or so. The rest will be short stories/novellas. This challenge is roughly equivalent to doing NaNoWriMo two out of every three months, which is kind of nuts. Wish me luck.

2 - Self-epub 40 titles. I will likely not count five and ten story collections towards this goal, unless time gets tight. :) Roughly equivalent to three titles every four weeks, or four a month with two months off. Again, fairly aggressive. I'm starting to get scared.

3 - Lose 40 lbs. Which, not coincidently, is about how much weight I've gained since turning into an Old Person. Works out to about a pound a week, with the occasional week off. I am easing into a regular jogging/workout schedule, plus cutting back on snacking. In many ways his is the easiest challenge. Excepting that time to work out is difficult to come by for a blazing pen such as myself.

I clearly have no grasp of the insanity I'm signing myself up for.

4 - Of course there's a four! Be 40% nicer to people. This one is a little tough to quantify, and/or judge success; I'll admit that. Roughly, as long as one out of every two times I say something complimentary instead of choking someone out, I win. Important Note--I only choke people out in my imagination.

So there you have it, quite a full plate for Your's Truly this year. I'll be giving regular updates/running totals to keep myself honest and to (hopefully) provide inspiration for those out there that are struggling like myself. Note the lack of any goal related to submissions. I will continue to send some of my stories off to paying markets (magazines, mainly), but my focus is shifting.

Announcer: Aaannnd now...

cue drumroll

Announcer continues: The Weekly... Media... Breakdown... (echo: own... own... own...)

As promised--Fortune Street. This is a Wii game, featuring characters and themed boards from The Mario and Dragon Quest series. Gameplay is like a much deeper version of Monopoly, and is skill-based (while featuring just enough luck to keep things interesting.) If you love statistics/combinatorial type stuff, Mario/Dragon Quest, property buying and trading games, and are a super-nerd (like me), this game is for you.

Each game takes a few hours and there is no twitch-type action. There are a few minigames, but they are entirely luck based, with no real player input. This game is all strategy and horse-trading, folks. There is an easy mode, with reduced complexity, but I haven't bothered with it. The full game is where it's at. I haven't tried playing with other humans; the AI is good enough for me so far. But apparently you can play online, so I might try that out later.

Also, when you finish games you win stamps, which can be spent on outfits for your Mii (avatar.) I know, I know. But it is squee-ishly fun to dress your Mii up in a Santa suit with pink butterfly wings. Seriously, I love this game.

Other stuff - I finished 11/22/63. Writing was great throughout; ending was a bit meh. Worth reading anyway. 'Nuff said. Just watched Contagion; it was decent. Some fun virus stuff that might be useful for SF/Thriller writers. Hangover 2 - fun if you like jokes about sexparts. This series is basically the raunchier version of American Pie, which was the raunchy version of Porky's, and so on.

That about does it for this week. By next time I'll be reading something new; dunno what yet. See you then.

Merry X-Day, More King Fanboying, and Maybe I'm Just Lazy

I find trying to figure out which holiday exhortation to use for any particular audience incredibly annoying. Christmas? Holidays? Kwanzanukah? Grr... Happy holidays was supposed to solve the whole mess, but it feels impersonal and overly PC.

So...

In an effort to live by Bob's rule (Don't just eat that hamburger, eat the HELL out of it!), I have decided to just wish everyone a Merry X-Day. I realize X-Day sounds vaguely like foreboding, maybe the day the mutant uprising kicks off, or the Mayan prophecies come true, or the UFOs descend from Mars to consume our Moms. This menacing cheerfulness is just a happy bonus. The vague part was really what I was after.

So Merry X-Day, everybody. May the cattle of your heart remain unmutilated, and your inner Earth shy from climate change. Also, I hope you get cool loot. Or your two front teeth. Or--if you're a thieving tooth fairy--a pair of pliers and somebody else's two front teeth.

I may have been reading too much of Chuck Wendig's blog. I'm only so-so on what he has to say, but the way he says it is f-ing hilarious. Only he would never abbreviate f-ing as f-ing. Other censored phrases he would never use likely include c-ck g-rgler, b--ver d-ck, -nal p-ssy h-le, and so on. So, fair warning there, but go check him out.

Moving on: I've made it about 1/4 of the way through 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Still loving it. Page-turning, can't-put-it-down loving it. Highly recommended. I find the treatment of time-travel--from a horror perspective rather than SF perspective--especially interesting. Also, man can this guy write. A lot can be learned here from how he structures his phrases.

I'm not gonna spend much more time on this, but it bears repeating--King's writing is Chunky. Long-short, florid-simple, occasional and effective use of tricks like repetition, just a wonderful variety, nice and chewy. I'm going to be spending time rereading this book in analytical mode when I 'm done reading it for fun.

Final stop on today's choo-choo of fun: I have written almost nothing this week. A couple of poems, which I consider fun-but-not-really-productive. IE, good luck selling those, you bozo. I keep a daily log, and I've mostly kept up with that this week. My writing calender (what I use in place of something modern like a spreadsheet) is a long row of zeros.

Part of my excuse is that I've been sick, as has the rest of my family. Also, NaNoWriMo burnout should be good for some slack. Still. I may have to face the fact that I am just lazy. Which is No Good.

A successful writing career (the goal of this whole exercise--IE, not working a shitty day job for the rest of my life) requires working my ass off. Not lounging it off. So I am going to have to do something about that.

My goal for next year involves doubling my wordcount from this year, what I'm calling the “Beat Michael Stackpole’s 2011 Wordcount Challenge” (or BMS2W Challenge, which sounds like a German car), which I announced in the comments section of this blog post, because I got the minerals. So now the only question is whether the threat of public humiliation can overcome my natural inertia, AKA the laziness of a depressed cat on Valium.

We'll see.

And I'll see you next week, likely early again (because of Pounding-hangover-I-did-what-to-the-dog? Day--termed New Year's Day in more civilized places.)

The Wind Beneath My Whine, Also Stephen King and 11/22/63

I am not entirely sure what that title means just yet, but I suspect we're going to find out.

Before I get to the self-critical moaning: congratulations are in order. For me I mean. Goofball. I finished my MS! Yippee-dippee woodlee-hoo! I am a Real Writer now, right?

Granted--and we've talked about this--it's just a zero draft. It needs some heavy edits before it's ready to be seen by anyone, and I'm sure it will want more after that. But still...

But still...

I finished a novel. I am so absolutely, ravingly, ridiculously proud of myself. More importantly, now that I have proven to myself that I am, in fact, capable of writing an entire novel, I can get started on the next one. But maybe not this month.

My current idea is to do at least two NaNo's next year, maybe three or four. Okay, I really want to do four. But I don't want to set my goals unrealistically high. If I do one in March, then Camp Nano in July, Then regular NaNo, that might work out pretty well.

My writing schedule has still been pretty slack this week, but I did manage to turn out the last chunk of the MS, most of a new short, plus a poem. Yep, first poetry I've written in nearly ten years. No idea why I haven't had anything to say in that form, but I haven't. Until now.

Still not up and running on all cylinders, but at least I'm sitting in the chair again. Which is the most important thing--apply butt to chair is all a writer really needs by way of advice on writing.

I have also been doing some reading, Stephen King's 11/22/63. I'm not far into it, so I'm not ready to make any pronouncements about the plot. But the writing is absolutely gorgeous. Not in a flowery way, or overly descriptive or ornate way. In a chunky way.

One of the flaws in my own writing is a tendency to repeat too few of the same sentence structures too many times. King's prose ducks and weaves, tending toward the long-winded but keeping things interesting by constantly breaking things up, doing things differently. I'm really digging it.

My name for it--Chunky Writing. Like peanut butter. I want my writing to be Chunky Writing.

So yeah. I've gotten to a point in my own writing where I'm definitely seeing a need to increase my awareness of grammar and punctuation, so I can vary my phrasing more. I want my Writing to show off and enhance my Storytelling, propelling it forward rather than holding it back. Which maybe isn't exactly a job for peanut butter, but whatever. Work with me here.

This new focus/area to improve/awareness can now go on the To Do pile, along with more writing by voice recorder, self epubbing weekly, writing new short fiction, and on and on and on.

If finishing my first MS is the Wind, that last paragraph, folks, is the Whine. Each depends on the other. I need accomplishments and success to keep up my pace, and I need a frenetic pace with high expectations to get anything done.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to work. So thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week.