Meanwhile…

This amusing little ruckus (which was done as a joke apparently, so you can take your head out of the oven – wait, who am I kidding, there are plenty of reasons to despair for the human race and stick your head in the oven) reminded me of an experience I had with the local library system a while back.

I should preface this with the fact that I love our local libraries. Fort Worth has a pretty extensive network of them, and I don’t think I’ve ever had trouble finding what I need.

So when I discovered that they had a digital audio book library, I was overjoyed. Being able to listen to something, be it a podcast or music or an audio book, makes 9 hours of sitting in a cubicle all day bearable. What did people do before this?

So I investigate. Basically it works exactly like checking out a physical book – there’s an expiration date. No problem, understood. You have to download special software to listen – okay, annoying but I get it. They’re not giving this stuff away, just loaning it. If it were just a regular audio file they would have no control over it.

Unfortunately, just like checking out a physical book, there is only one copy available at a time. Of a digital file. This is something I simply can’t comprehend. It flies in the face of everything that digitizing books (audio or otherwise) is about. There’s a file. It’s sitting on a server which can be accessed by thousands upon thousands of other computers. But for some reason only one of those computers can actually read it at once? Complete and utter fail, Fort Worth libraries. So I haven’t bothered with the entire endeavor. Too much trouble. Luckily there are plenty of podcasts to rescue me.

So I thought I’d ask – is it like this at other libraries? Is there some reason I’m just not thinking of? Some technical limitation that I can’t imagine? Feel free to let me know.

As I mentioned yesterday, on a whim I have decided to undertake a little twitter story exercise. Each day (weekends? not sure yet, though I feel like I should) around noon (US Central time) I’ll be posting a new piece of fiction on my Twitter account. We’ll see how it goes! I actually wish I had done this before the Hint Fiction contest, as I think the two items I’ve posted already are better than what I turned in for the contest (even with the embarrassing typos in the first entry).

Anyway, I’ve taken the step of favoriting the stories, to separate them from the rest of the chaff of my twittering. So you should be able to just go straight to my Favorites page and see only the stories. You don’t have to create an account of your own or sift through my tweets about fighting bees or my pop culture commentary. I’ll see if there’s some way I can integrate that feed into the site here. I think some fun stuff can be had with this.

If anyone wants to join in, let me know and I’ll make sure to follow and shamelessly plug you.

It’s been a while since I posted any writing exercises. To be fair, I’ve been just as remiss in actually writing any writing exercises. Hurm.

So here’s a few I just came up with for the writing group. Feel free to use them! And let me know what you come up with!

• Begin your story as something horrible is crawling toward your protagonist!
• Put a twist on one of the clichés listed here. You can just change a word (I dunno, write about a Lifetrap, or the Bad Old Days) or put whatever other kind of twist you want.
• Feature a character who loves something you hate.
• Set your story in a cramped place, like a train, airplane, or locked room.

And speaking of exercises, I’m thinking of trying my hand at posting super-short Twitter fiction each day. I just posted my first clumsy attempt. Feel free to follow me and watch me stumble and fail!

And of course it would not be a true Burns story without a glaring typo. Or two.

Last night HBO premiered its new series, “Bored to Death.” Starring Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson, and Zach Galifianakis, this show is pretty much what you would produce if you were looking to create porn for Alexander Burns.

I’m a big fan of Schwartzman’s, ever since Rushmore, one of my favorite movies. There’s something about the way he can deliver the simplest of lines that is just sublime. He can take a little throwaway sentence like “I understand.” and imbue it with real significance. Rushmore had a great, tight script that really took advantage of that.

So take Schwartzman and:

1. Make him a writer,
2. living in New York,
3. pretending to be a private detective,
4. inspired by Raymond Chandler,
5. whose best friend is a comic book artist,
6. (and I believe at one point they made reference to his fascination with British slang and terminology)

and you’ve pretty much pulled something straight out of my brain and put it on television. Galifianakis is a funny guy, too. On top of all that, I loved how they filmed the pilot. There are a lot of very Sam Raimi-esque shots that tickled me. Honestly, the only thing that would make this more crack-like for me is if Ted Danson turned out to be a robot.

The pilot was a bit slow, introducing everything and what not, and I feel like they probably could have developed the characters a little more. The standard troubles pilots usually have. The big problem I see is that I think it may end up suffering from being only a half hour long.

Still, I’m looking forward to the rest of the season. HBO will repeat it like a billion times this week, and you can watch it for free via iTunes, so you should have plenty of chances.

Since KC has abandoned her post (I kid, I kid, KC!), Every Day Fiction is looking for a new slush reader. If you love to read and critique, and want learn a little bit about how the publishing biz works, you should consider volunteering. I understand it’s actually a highly valuable experience. I would, but I hesitate to commit to something like that – I’m not sure I would have the time. Maybe at the beginning of the year, when work is less busy.

So I just turned a story over to the writing group for crit. This is an old, old story, written for one of my creative writing courses in college. It’s a good ten years old.

Personality-wise, I was in a pretty tumultuos period at the time. I was changing quite a bit, my mind expanding far beyond the confines under which it had labored in small town Texas just a couple of years before. The foundations for who I am today were being laid, brick by brick. The philosophy with which I view the world today saw its early birthing pains in the dank first floor of UNT’s Language building and the couches of the University Union. I was encountering music and writers I’d never heard of before, but which were old hat to everyone else. I was making many friends who didn’t have preconceived notions of me based on the high school years. It was a glorious time, in many respects.

Mostly I watched girls and tried to be moody so they would notice me.

In any event, it is interesting going back and reviewing this story from that time. There is a theme and everything, it’s not just written for fun and entertainment. I don’t know if I’m better or worse in that regard than today. My stories usually still have themes, they just have a tendency to change to fit the events of the story as it unfolds (and sometimes they get dropped altogether). The theme is not especially complex – in fact, I clearly remember making it simple so that I could focus more on the storytelling. I didn’t want to get too hung up on the ideas of the story, I just wanted to get a story down on paper. No one will be blown away by what the story says about humanity. But that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

What strikes me the most is the way its written. There are certainly many of the standard amateur mistakes – too many adverbs and what not. But I’m impressed by how moody and introspective the piece is. The narrator is moody and introspective, and the story matches that, from the language to the plotting. You definitely get the impression that this character is suffering from some serious ennui.

It’s so different from how I write now. I think in the intervening years I’ve become far more influenced by television/film and comic books. I stress action and dialogue now more than anything else. Those are the tools I use to describe my characters and how they think. But back then I was a lot more invested in inner monologues and using the setting to reflect the characters. I’m looking at an entirely different type of writer as I look at these old Word Perfect documents than my current stuff. Alex ’99 was better at setting a tone and establishing a mood, Alex ’09 is better at dialogue and focused story structure.

I feel like I need to figure out how to merge the two. If I can whip together the best ingredients of both, I feel like I’ll become a much better writer.

I have some ideas to finally spruce this place up with some art. If I can find the time to actually do it, keep an eye out for that. I’m hoping to do it without destroying the site. Anyway…

Thought I’d share a few things I’m reading (or just read):

Iron Council, by China Mieville - Jens raved about Mieville not too long ago, and I’m forced to agree. This is a fantasy steampunk with absolutely stunning prose. Apparently it’s book three in a series about this setting (which is not our earth), but I didn’t even realize that until it was pointed out to me, as the books aren’t really connected. There are all sorts of remarkable facets of the book and its take on fantasy – I may try to organize my thoughts for a few separate blog posts. But let me highly recommend this novel. It will change the way you think of fantasy. I’ve just started in on Perdido Street Station, which is the first book of the series.

The Nightly News, by Jonathan Hickman – I mentioned Hickman’s Pax Romana in this space a while back, an effort that I thought was laudable but ultimately a failure (simply because there wasn’t enough of it). This doesn’t suffer from that so much – in fact, I’d say this story about a home-grown cult of anti-media terrorists fits the comic book medium perfectly. It packs quite a bit of punch, and Hickman’s annotations at the end of the book are as interesting as the story. As an artist, Hickman’s style isn’t easy to describe. He’s a lot more of a graphic artist than a traditional penciler, and for better or worse he leaves behind the old style layouts of most comics.

Queen and Country, Definitive Edition volume 1, by Greg Rucka and various artists - Who doesn’t like a good spy story? And this one is great. It’s not super spy business, so don’t look for battles between skiers down the side of a mountain or invisible cars. It’s gritty, realistic spy drama and action. It makes me want to write my own spy stories. I like the Steve Rolston art on the early material best, at least in this collection.

Update! On a somewhat related note that not-so-coincidentally comes roughly 3 hours after this post, I finally saw Inglourious Basterds and it rocked. It was a lot more of a spy movie that I thought, and a great one.

That is all.

Jordan is blogging about more workshop experience, this time at the Writers of the Future events (he did Clarion before, in case you missed it). And once again I am in awe and terror.

A workshop would be something I’d be interested in, but I’m not sure there’s anything local, so I’d have to travel. Anyone have any good ones to recommend? It would also be cool to have a familiar face or two there. It seems like a nerve-wracking experience.

I’ve decided to go ahead and post that Moonian sketch I did a couple of weeks ago. Wait, it was a month ago, wasn’t it? Man, alive.

I don’t feel like it’s strong enough to stand on its own, but I do think it might be useful to base other stories on (though I guess based on some of what I have published, maybe it is, heh). Nobody is really actively doing anything. It feels like this would come in as Chapter 2 of a novel or the first act of a longer short story. I like the setting it creates, at least. Less than a thousand words, and probably a bit rougher than something I would submit somewhere. Enjoy! Continue reading