Using this to test "Extended Entry":

Raindrops chased each other across the windshield. The car was muggy and close, but with a busted compressor there would be no relief from moisture until the next exit. According to the map though that would be at least another fifteen miles and at this rate, Alex cursed, he was never that good at math. All he knew was that it would be too long by half. On top of that the constant drumming on the old Honda’s roof was starting to lull him to sleep. Granted he was only going about twenty so if he did drift off it wouldn’t hurt too badly, but he decided he’d rather not.

I'm gonna do it by golly. If you're wondering what I'm smoking, well all I can say is that I want to be a writer and the way to do that is to write. If you want to know what it's all about, I along with some unknown thousands of others will try to complete a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30 starting on November 1st. I think that I might even just do it online so that you can all point and laugh or encourage me or whatever. I've tried this once before and didn't finish. Hopefully I won't fail this time. Care to join me? Click the pic to do so!

Chapter one of my November novel goes up tomorrow (I hope). I know you're trembling with anticipation. I am too. I'll link to it here once it's up.

What's that? What am I talking about? Well it's right here in black and white. Okay shades of blue.

It's not too late. You can join me. Click the pic to find out details.

Well it has begun. Chapter one is up. You can find the table of contents here. The novel part of my site is not set to take comments, but feel free to leave some here. I may set up the chapters to allow comments, but I wanted the look to be pretty streamlined. Enjoy!

I've been a busy boy. My NaNoWriMo novel is up to over 7,000 words. Go read it!!

Also, watch this video. It makes fun of Rush L and is thus a very good thing. It does have a little language though so be warned.

Well I'm at 10,979 words and seven chapters on my NaNoWriMo Novel. That puts me a bit ahead of schedule which is nice. Hopefullly the plot is moving along nicely and you're enjoying it. Feel free to chime in with any comments you might have and keep checking back daily!

Thanks to what little I did get done this weekend and a productive lunch hour I've broken 20k. With seventeen days and a handful of hours left in my deadline that means I'm breaking about dead even where I should be. That means some good key pounding tonight and I'll be a day ahead again. That realization lightens the old mood again.

A hair over twenty-five thousand words and at the halfway point. They may not all be good words, but they're mine and I think I can make it all the way. Wish me luck.

Twenty-one is up action packed and no small amount of blood-n-gore. Hope you enjoy. I'll keep writing over the holiday weekend, but don't know if posting will be possible til Sunday night. Nine more days with a little under fifteen thousand to do. Stay tuned!

Four more days of writing. I got two and a half chapters done over the holidays and need to crank out about 2500 words a day to finish up. I'm pretty sure I can do it.

sort of. Since I did cross 50,000 words I'm entitled to this:

but it aint done yet. Gotta finsh one or two more chapters and then let it breathe for a few weeks. Then I look at it with fresh eyes and bring the scalpel, chainsaw, needle and thread.

Well it's done (draft one at least). I'm putting this puppy to bed for a while. There will be a Book Two and perhaps a Book Three. Sometime in January I'll begin editing it. If you're interested in proof reading it then drop me a comment/email. I have it in Word form.

Escape Pod, a weekly sci-fi fiction podcast, is holding a flash fiction contest. If you're a writer and the idea of trying to write a complete story in < 300 words doesn't freak you out just a little you should give it a whirl (if it doesn't freak you out at all you should seek counseling). Winner gets a hundred bones. I'm going to try and put together the maximum three stories by month's end for submission. After they're submitted I'll post them here.

Here's a piece of flash I wrote for the contest. Let me know what you think!

The first three rounds for the Escape Pod Flash Fiction contest are up. There are some really good ones and a few really bad ones. Go vote!

I sent out an email to some friends/web acquaintances about this a while back. My intention is to start a podcast of short Christian fiction (not my own). I intend this to be a paying market and am looking for people who can contribute in any way. I've had a few nibbles from the email and I think that I can make this happen.

If you want to have a story of yours put into a podcast, if you want to read for me, or if you'd just like to start a conversation about what "Christian" fiction is exactly, drop a comment here.

I'll let you know more as things progress. Oh and feel free to link this from your own blog/website if you are so inclined.

I'm gonna pound out five hundred words a day if if kills... somebody. What I write will go here. That's five hundred a day, every day, until I just can't no more. Figure thirty-five hundred a week, fourteen thousand a month, five months til Nanawrimo, works out to sevety thousand words. Sooooo two novellas in six months. Or at least that many words. This may be a collection of shorts, I don't know yet. In any case, watching me turn myself into either a writer or a drooling maniac should be fun for at least one of us. Enjoy!

So I haven't come anywhere near meeting my goal, but 500 Words is still alive. I just added the latest installment and have an idea how it will all end.

Also I just saw Stranger Then Fiction and loved it. Who knows, maybe I'll pen some thoughts on it tomorrow.

Also also I just turned in my interview with DecembeRadio so that should be posted tomorrow.

Also also also I emailed a blog associate Teresa Gubbins, formerly of the blog NYCE, regarding her blog's stasis. She is now writing for Pegasus News and as such has put her blog on hold. Sounds like it's for a good reason and I wish her well. If this blog ever goes under ir should be under such circumstances. Write on sister!

*UPDATE - New story on 500 Words, unrerated to Ryan's Florist. It's for a blog party that Lorna is doing. It required the use of the words practical, shaggy, porcelain, dragon, approximate, explain, narrower, fountain, gyrate, exhaling, off-balance, angels, exaggerate, cotton, incriminate, afterward, moon, terror, ruptured, and sickly. I'll return you to your regularly scheduled florist soon enough. Called Bobby and Spinel, it may be the next story after Ryan's is done.

George Orwell laid out the following rules concerning how to better use the English language for expressing thought (ht to pickthebrain):

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The essay that it comes from "Politics and the English Lanuage", written in 1946, also contains some eerily familiar thoughts on political speeches.

Well here we are at yet another Halloween and what I hope will also be the second of many successful NaNoWriMo-eves to come. I have a place holder page for the sequel to last year's entry. If you want to read the 2006 attempt Archangel: Valley of the Shadow then click on it and let me know what you think. Starting tomorrow I'll have to right 1,666 (bwahahahaha) words to keep apace and they recommend busting out 2,500-3,000 the first few days as a buffer. If you read either of them please feel free to comment and don't pull punches. I ain't no sissy.

Things are pretty crazy around Casa del Roche so I'm probably crazy for even trying it this year, but things will never be less crazy so I gots to try.

Excelsior!!

Aaaand we're off. Only 320 words are up so far but hey it was a short lunch. I'll have the rest of it up tonight and mayhap start on the second. Keep in mind that if you haven't read the first book there be spoilers ahead.

at being a blogger and NaNoWriMo-er. No writing of any kind this weekend. I'm flying to California on bidness Wednesday and hope to get some writing done at some point between then and Friday when I return. We'll see.

Food for thoughts:

I think Hillary crying sexism is pretty funny, but is she right when she intimates that being sexist in this country is easier than being a racist? I think so.

Olympians won't be able to carry any religious items into the Olympic village in China. I'm not surprised, I'm not even angry. I'm something I'm just not sure what.

The writers strike hurts good shows and helps crap (reality) shows. I'm not a big fan of unions and strikes and in this case I think that if writers are so worried about their monetary future I think that they should be creating it instead of clinging to DVD sales. Still they are in some sense fighting the power and so rock on with your bad selves.

The JLA movie will rawk hard as will Iron Man. Don't pinch me.

Why do people inist on building houses where they know they will burn down/blow away?

TTFN

Well, I didn't get any writing or blogging done while in California due to a goodly amount of fatigue/busy-ness/laziness. I did however sit down tonight and throw down 2,100 words. I'll have to keep up this pace to finish on time with a 2500+ session on a couple of those days. We'll see. Anything's possible.

I was Googling myself (oh like you've never done it) and I ran across an article I wrote for Nations Punched, an offshoot of Chud. Since I believe in recycling I'm reposting it here. Enjoy!

Woohoo!!!

The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your blog?

Fast Payday Loans

ht to Casey

Over at Middle Zone Musings bloggers are being invited to share the posts from 2007 that they learned the most from. I posted my "best of". Comment here, there, or EVERYWHERE!!!

Trying to get my fiction cloak back on. I wrote this semi-hemi-demi autobiographical bit night before last. Not sure where it's going but that's the fun part sometimes.

The Cage

Go read some. Let me know what you think.

500 Words

And just so you don't think I've gone all maudlin, I present The Cage pt 3.

Aaron and I waxed political on his BlogtalkRadio show. First time I've been on in a while. We talked about corruption, Hillary, Obama, bias, all sort of good stuff.

I hope to blog about the following this week:

1. The birthday trip we took this week to Pilot Mountain. (My wife's b-day)
2. Why I am a Democrat Pt. 2
3. More entries in the ongoing story I'm calling The Cage

See you round!

The Cage pt 4 is up!

Just make sure that you choose them and the order you put them in, carefully.

This post was inspired by the above cartoon I found at Wordsell. They're sponsoring a little contest and so I might win a Nano. I might not, but anything that serves as inspiration for a post is a good thing.

So anyway, it got me to thinking about how we as Christians market our message. There seem to be two major means these days as far as the written word is concerned. The first would be the ubiquitous Christian tee. You know the kind I'm talking about, that say things like "Property of Jesus" or the ones that rip off a popular logo. They usually have some sort of scripture verse attached and occasionally that verse might even have something to do with the logo/slogan being put forth. There was a time in my life when little other casual wear existed in my closet. I thought to myself, "Now this, this right here is evangelism!" I honestly thought that someone would see my "Not Without Jesus" tee and immediately fall to their knees in repentance, or something like that. Surprisingly it never worked that way.

The other thing I'm seeing everywhere is the Church Sign. You know what I'm talking about. There have been a hoard of memes thanks to sites that let you create your own. In case you don't though, in place of the typical Name of Church followed by the times of worship, you get pithy sayings like “Give God what's right--, not what's left!” or the ever popular “Make your eternal reservations now--- 'smoking' or 'non-smoking'?”. If that doesn’t make you want to veer into the parking lot and jump into the pew…

So what am I saying here? Are the signs or tees bad? No. I still have a few of those shirts left and if the sign is pithy enough I could see it drawing me in, of course I’m already a believer. I think what happens in most cases though is that if any thought occurs in the mind of the unbeliever that sees these attempts at distilling down the gospel into bite-sized chunks, it’s rarely a positive one. If you really want to communicate the gospel to your community, I would recommend starting with your actions. When necessary, you should certainly use words. Those words need to be filled with love and wisdom and it may take time to use them to good effect. Sure it’s not as funny, but it is in fact What Jesus Did.

This is something I've been thinking about doing for many moons. I'm a huge fan of what Steve does at EsacpePod, PseudoPod, and what PodCastle will be doing. That is have a paying market for artists to sell their audio rights to. So here's what I'm thinking of as far as submission guidlines go.

Length - 2,000 to 6,000 words long. That seems to work well for what I'm hearing over at Steve's place.
Licensing - I'd use the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.
Content - This is the tricky bit. I would want it to be Christian speculative fiction.
Pay - It will. Not sure how much to start, but I don't want anyone to work for free who doesn't want to.

What is speculative fiction? That would be fantasy/sci-fi.

What does it mean to be Christian fiction? Well my wife and I talked about that. In a nutshell (and I'll expand upon this as things start to gel) it would mean that the story would have to communicate some aspect of the Gospel. It wouldn't have to nail everything down since that might be asking a bit much. I'd be looking for things along the lines of what Ted Dekker writes. I'd say it needs to steer clear of excessive violence, sexual content and profanity. I'm not looking for rated G stuff (though that would be fine), but defintely no R. I don't want allegory (unless it's just REALLY good).

So I need your help. One, would you listen? Two, would you contribute? Three, I'm mulling over names and will take any suggestions.

The Cage pt 5 (500 Words) is up. Go forth and reeeead!

And so finally, after many moons of hemming and hawing, I now present Episode 1 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow. Listen and let me know what you think.

Referenced in this podcast:

7th Son
The Rookie
Billibub Battings
The Heaven Series
The Metamor City Podcast

Music in this episode from ADRAW
Thanks to the Free Sound Project for the gunshot.

Hope you enjoy!

John Scalzi is doing something pretty cool. He is releasing a shareware short story. Called “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story”. Basically you can download the story, pay for it if you want to, don't if you don't. Now granted this isn't particularly a new idea. Cory Doctrow does it after a fashion. Podiobooks does it with podcast books. Even Scalzi has done it before with a novel. So why do it? I'll let the man speak for himself.

I’m curious to see what the market is for shareware shorts (or, at least, my shareware shorts). Basically, I think it’s an interesting experiment. Also, I think it’s a fun, fast story, one that folks will enjoy reading — i.e., if any science fiction story could make a go at converting readers into buyers, it’s this one. And finally, today I just paid a plumber lots of money to fix the pipes coming into my bathtub, and for a new faucet. I could use the cash.

As far as the money goes? Again here's John.

Half of the money you send (after PayPal/Amazon fees are subtracted) will be donated to The Lupus Foundation of America, a favorite charity of Subterranean Press publisher Bill Schafer (who has graciously given me permission to use Subterranean’s beautifully designed and typseset version of the story). The other half goes to me, because it’s nice to get paid.

Certainly a worthwhile cause. You can get the details here.

Here's Episode 2 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow. Listen and let me know what you think. There's no intro but stick in 'til the end to hear a promo for The Adventures of Indiana Jim.

I got a lot of GREAT feedback. Keep it up and I hope you enjoy.

Music in this episode from ADRAW

Now that I've got some listeners and have been getting some feedback this is starting to get fun. Due to the retreat I was unable to record this weekend, but I should be able to lay down tracks tonight. I may have made inroads toward getting some better sound equipment thanks to a buddy at church. Until then audio quality won't be as good as I'd like it to be.

If you want to subscribe to my podcast in your favorite podcatcher just use this url http://www.spiritualtramp.com/index.xml. I haven't submitted to iTunes yet because I need to figure out how to get MT to pass the right data to iTunes. When I get that up and running I'll let y'all know.

If anyone in the audience knows how to get MT to cooperate let me know.

I couldn't pass up this great writing prompt from Mur's new series, The News From Poughkeepsie. It's an effort to give her fans some great story ideas.

What if, instead of pardoning people at the end of his term, the President had the power to raise people from the dead? It would have to be limited, of course, else he’d be required by popular demand to raise everyone who’s died in whatever military conflict he’s brought about, and pretty much anyone else who had died. It may be limited to someone who had died on US soil, or only American citizens, or… there are many options. Then of course we have to ask if it’s like the Monkey’s Paw, that they come back exactly how they died? “Gee, thanks Mr. President, that kidney cancer felt SO GOOD I’m glad to get back to it.” What would life be like if the President of the US was granted the powers of a necromancer?

Here's my entry. Let me know what you think!

Sorry for the wait. Here's Episode 3 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow. I included a new intro and hang on 'til the end to hear a promo for Morevi.

I got a lot of GREAT feedback. Keep it up and I hope you enjoy.

Music in this episode from ADRAW

Cory Doctorow interviewed by J.C. Hutchins. If you write and are interested in hearing about how giving your stuff away is a good thing, you need to listen.

Cory is best-known as a pioneer in the Open Media movement and the “giving it away is okay” philosophy — releasing free versions of his fiction to evangelize and enhance the exposure of his printed work. He’s a trendsetter and visionary in this field. In addition, Cory is an activist, consumer advocate, and a co-editor for the culture blog, BoingBoing.net.

In this interview, Cory chats about his career as a writer, his activism, and Little Brother, which debuted in bookstores last week. Stick around after the interview: you’ll hear an excerpt from the novel, which is also available as a DRM-free audiobook from Random House Audio.

Reposting this to see if iTunes will pick this up from my Feedburner feed. I now present Episode 1 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow. Listen and let me know what you think.

Referenced in this podcast:

7th Son
The Rookie
Billibub Battings
The Heaven Series
The Metamor City Podcast

Music in this episode from ADRAW
Thanks to the Free Sound Project for the gunshot.

Hope you enjoy!

What does Matt do now? Will he turn himself in? Who is this Sanders character? Will you find out the answers this week? I'll never tell. You have to listen.

I now present Episode 4 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow of Death. Listen and let me know what you think.

Referenced in the intro:

The Voice of Free Planet X
Jared Axelrod Interview

Promo for this week:
Chasing the Bard

Music in this episode from ADRAW

Hope you enjoy!

Repost of Episode 2. iTunes/Feedburner is being a naughty thing.

Here's Episode 2 of Archangel: Valley of the Shadow. Listen and let me know what you think. There's no intro but stick in 'til the end to hear a pro