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Alpha vs Delta - Part II

February 13, 2007 – 1:50 pm

Hot on the heels of Part I, here’s Part II of Alpha vs Delta, my exercise in 7th Son / Infection fanfic.

For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

Thus far, it still feels like 3 more parts of 5 left as far as my notes run and how the pacing and length feel. And in case it’s not obvious, this is written entirely from my own memory and interpretation as a listener of these two podcasts. So, blame me for any oddities or deviations from canon, etc. And, keep in mind that this is hot off the TextEdit — I’ve given it a quick once over, but won’t do any serious editing / revision until the very end. Don’t let that stop you from commenting with suggestions or criticism, though!

So with all that, I hope you enjoy Alpha vs Delta - Part II:

John Alpha yawned and stretched in his chair. He felt disgusting and itchy all over. He scratched under his beard and behind his neck, and he wondered just how long it had been since this body’s last shower. Oh yeah, he remembered: this morning. It hadn’t worked, apparently. Of course, the bachelor squalor in which Marten lived didn’t help.

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Alpha vs Delta - Part I

February 11, 2007 – 11:34 pm

Update: For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

Remember the story pitches I posted? I got some comments from a pair of my favorite podcast authors. So, I started writing the 7th Son / Infection fanfic. I’ve got the plot outlined to pretty decent detail in notes, and I’ve worked out an ending. Let’s see how this comes together - here’s a first draft of part 1 of 5:

The snow crunched under Marten’s feet as he made his way home from work at the computer lab on North Campus. His shift at the help desk had ended around five o’clock, but shorter days toward the end of the year meant it was already dark out. He cut across the yards of student family housing on the way back to his apartment a half-mile or so away. There were sidewalks, which in theory might’ve been the faster way, but campus maintenance didn’t seem to do that great a job at keeping the paths shoveled up here. So, rather than do a slow shuffle all the way home on snow packed down into ice by a day’s worth of foot traffic, he opted to forge his own route through the fresh stuff.

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Some Story Pitches

February 8, 2007 – 8:33 pm

Another thing that’s crossed my mind to do here is post my story ideas. Part of me recoils from this because, of course, Every Story Idea is Precious and throwing them out there will either spoil the stories or cause something else equally bad to happen to them. On the other hand, I’d kind of like to get some feedback as to whether one or another is even worth writing with respect to interest from readers.

Screw it, here are a few quick story pitches. If you’re reading this, and you’re not me, maybe drop a note as to whether any strike your fancy:

  • In the near future, a reclusive writer / researcher who has taken GTD and productivity technologies to an extreme degree falls into a coma at his desk. It takes awhile for anyone to notice - even his family - because his apparent output behavior in response to sources of input seems not to have changed at all. Turns out, it’s lucky he lives with a cat.

  • A pair of newlyweds move in together. She’s a librarian and into archival sciences. He’s a dot-com project manager. She has a lot of books, and he has a lot of digital storage. One day, his company takes on a client preparing to launch a product based on nanotech that can restore nearly anything to pristine condition. His job is to help them market the service, and a perk of the job is a free trial of the product. His wife just happens to have this beat-up old dresser and a bit of nanorepair looks like a great surprise for her. Of course, he’s wrong.

  • How about some fanfic? I really like Scott Sigler’s Infection and J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son podcasts. What would happen if John Alpha sidejacked into the body of an alien Triangle mind-control infectee? Who’d win control of the poor victim, and would either of them want control when they got it?

  • An alien ansible network router arrives in orbit, showering the planet with access hubs. What seems like an attack at first turns into an invitation for inhabitants of Earth to join the greatest file sharing network imaginable. Actually, quite a few parties on Earth consider that an attack, after all. Nonetheless, a lot of kids tune their wifi routers into the universal mesh with new firmware and fire up their torrents. (I think I got this idea before I read Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky with its telephone shower opening scene, but it seems a little silly now that I have read it).

Maybe I should collect these in a list somewhere and let random passers by give thumbs up or down on them.

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Weight of the Endeavor

February 8, 2007 – 7:57 pm

I’ve posted a couple bits of my incomplete draft for The Juggler so far, and I think I’m probably about 1/2 way through. I’m wondering if that’s what I should be doing. The story’s not finished, not edited, and I don’t quite know how it’s going to end yet. But, I feel like I need to instantiate this stuff somewhere earlier than later, in order to help it drag me through to finishing it.

Of course, I haven’t actually told anyone about this slush pile yet, so it’s not as if I expect anyone but an accidental visitor. I am tempted to toss a link to someone soon to get some premature opinions on what I’ve written. Not sure if that’s a mistake or not.

Basically, my problem is that I keep putting my writing on pedestals. Not in that I think I’m the best ever, just that Writing is a Great Pursuit for Me. I’ve been doing it for a long time, with varying degrees of success, and I consider it something I Want to Do. Other things that I’ve Wanted to Do include: Finding a girl exactly like my wife and marrying her (check), writing a book and getting it published (check, check), moving to California to be a Computer Scientist (check). Pretty big things, and there are more, but I’ve not done too shabby at accomplishing them so far.

Problem is, all this puts a great pressure on me when I face a blank page and feel the Weight of the Endeavor.

Realistically, I know that I haven’t written fiction in awhile. So, despite my having perhaps some passable or even good skill at writing in general, 90% of what I’m going to write story-wise will be crap. It’ll need reworking and editing and feedback from readers. And though in one cranial lobe I recognize that, the perfectionist side expects me to spin gold immediately.

The thing is, though I think that I can turn crap into gold eventually, it’ll take metric fucktons of crap produced repeatedly over a long period of time. And more importantly, although that one cranial lobe considers that Every Story Idea is Precious, the other lobe can admit that even many of my ideas are crap. And, at this stage at least, I’ll probably butcher even the ideas that are good.

Hmm. That all sounds horribly depressing, doesn’t it? Why bother? Well, mostly, because this is something I’ve always wanted to do and something I figure I can be half-way decent at with some work.

And, then, there’s this skein. Why’s it here? Well, mostly, so I can subject some other poor saps to my metric fucktons of crap and get their feedback eventually. Hopefully it entertains, at some point. I’d also like to get beat down a bit early and often so as not to get too precious with this stuff. I suspect I’ll have a tendency to do so, thanks to all my pedestal building and Capitalized Phrases of Importance.

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The Juggler #2

February 8, 2007 – 7:33 pm

More work on The Juggler, this time even less complete than the last entry. But, hopefully there’ll be more here soon.

Like the prof had promised, we put on a lot of shows over the next few weeks. It was like we were a little circus, performing at lunches and dinners for old big wigs and sharp young guys, all with a lot of money to burn.

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The Juggler #1

February 8, 2007 – 2:22 am

So, here’s one of those half-dozen or so ideas I’ve got for a story. It’s not done, but I have managed to get some writing done on it. It popped into my head with the first line…

These days, everybody juggles like me. And when I say like me, I mean just like me.

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Bleeg, blurg, blargh, and bloorg

February 8, 2007 – 2:04 am

I’m trying to make myself write something fictional, but nothing’s coming. I’ve got somewhat detailed plot and character notes on at least five different stories, but I can’t start a single one.

I’ve even been thinking maybe I should do some writing exercises here, maybe even work on some very short flash fiction ala 365tomorrows.com - but no dice there either. I have, however, given myself the notion that I should post something here every day, no matter what it happens to be. I’ve also thought that categories or tags can help organize things around here so that I can lift out threads of writing worth revisiting from freeform spew like this.

Anyway, it’s late-ish, I’m tired, and yet at the same time the siren call of World of Warcraft tugs at me. Waste time, it says. Level up and feel temporarily accomplished, it says. Catch up to your friends at higher levels, it says. Maybe I’ll give in for an hour or so. Of course you know it’s never an hour - it’s always or so. I wonder if I can find some way to reward myself with XP as a function of word count?

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Hello world!

February 7, 2007 – 2:21 am

It’s best not to think of this as a blog, as such. This is more of a slush pile from myself to myself, with occasional invitations to others to read. There’s already a blog over there, and it may mention things here occasionally, but this is something different.

Anyway: Hello world. Hopefully, this was worth setting up. Someone slap me around a bit if I spend too much time yak shaving and tweaking WordPress settings here.

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