Time to stop being such a load, I guess.

Total word count: Somewhere around 2000 (officially 2017, but that includes some notes and things.)

I mostly got this bit written on Wednesday, with a few additions on Thursday. It's not great in written form, but should work well as a page in a comic book--lot of crowd shots as we spotlight some of the important figures in Beacon City. Some of these people will be important later.

Narration provided by Brenda and Pablo (they have last names, I assure you,) hosts of KBCN-TV's morning show and possibly also news anchors as well. They're very talented.

Oh hai

So, yeah. No progress made this weekend--busy with other writing things on Friday and Sunday; social engagements on Saturday. Monday was just...meh.

Perhaps today will be better. I've borrowed several jazz records; maybe those will help.

Punchline Q&A

While a lot of you are familiar with my lead character, many of you aren't. So I wrote some questions and then some answers about Punchline, to help you get familiar with him. These questions mostly have to do with his back story. Ideally, in a longer comic series, I would go back and write about some of these things in story form...but since the past isn't going to be the main focus of the story, I'm safe in throwing it all in here now.

If you've got questions about him (or anything else relating to the setting and/or history) ask away, and I shall answer as best I can. It'll be fun!

Day 9: No Clever Subtitle.

Managed some semi-outlining today, to hopefully make future work go easier. Unfortunately, it will still be work.

The plan for Act 2 is to set the stage for the modern story--showing off Beacon City and some of the major characters--while also showing how important the Cowboy was to the city. Act 3 will be "shit happens, someone's gotta deal with it, and who you gonna call?"

Yeah, I dropped a Ghostbusters 2 reference. You can't stop me.

Day 8: Clever Subtitle

Word Count: 1629.

I've skipped ahead a bit in the story; now working on what is basically Act 3 of the first "issue." Was able to make some decent progress. Back when I did more internet writing stuff, I used this "connect the dots" style of writing a lot--figure out the important beats I wanted to hit, write those, and then filled in the blanks until I liked the flow of it. (You might call this a case of doing the easy bits now, and the hard bits later...and you wouldn't be wrong. This is one of several reasons why I gained a reputation as a notorious deadliner.)

I'm still hesitant to post pieces of the project, simply because there isn't very much of it. If I put up segments every day, you'd have it all pretty much read by now. (Right now it's just over four pages in my preferred format--12pt TNR font; single-spaced.) That said, I might pick an interested few to give Act 1 a look, since that's finished.

Day 7: It's Been One Week, And You Asked Me To Stop Making Barenaked Ladies References

Word count: 1329. Wheels were spinning hard today; couldn't seem to make any progress. I think I need to spend more time thinking about this scene, and maybe do an actual goddamn outline or something. (This is one of the problems I have with writing--I rarely plan ahead, and I only have a vague idea of where I'm going with something. It's like trying to do a paint-by-numbers, but only checking the instructions for one color, then trying to guess what the rest should be.)

Day 6: Slow going.

Not much today, but I did get the one linking paragraph done...so the first scene is finished, and I made a little progress on the second scene as well. (Word count is now at 1281.) Also, wrote more about wrestling on Twitter.

Day 5: Actual progress!

Managed to mostly finish the scene; still need to do a little bit of connection between what I wrote today and what I already finished. Since I wasn't home much today, I had to do it all in a notebook, which I'm not used to. My penmanship is terrible, and my hand starts to cramp up if I go too long. Still, I got a page and a half handwritten, and just finished transferring to the main document.

Word count is now 1186.

Day 4: Slightly Better Than Nothing.

Got some dialogue done, extending the scene. Total is now 797 words for the Punchline story.

Also wrote about professional wrestling on Twitter. Like I do.

Day 3: Piracy Is More Fun Than Writing

Black Flag is playing merry hell with my productivity (such as it is.) But I did manage to accomplish something this morning--I attached the original starting piece to the front of what I've got and made a quick edit to make it look nice. Total word count is now 665. Two pages in typed form, and I bet it could be four pages of an actual comic book.

Unfortunately, I'm soon going to run out of "scenes I've thought about a thousand times," and will have to actually create something. Dammit.

I did the thing!

Not much of the thing, but I did it. Made about a page before I started spinning my wheels, and then just kinda sputtered out. Still, it's progress. Total word count: 392.

Today's work went toward the second "scene" of Punchline's introduction--I wrote the first part several years ago, for either the first or second attempt at Nano-vember (which I completed in 2007, but only managed about 13 stories in 2008.)

For the uninitiated, Punchline is a supervillain who specializes in two things: boxing glove guns and bad jokes. He's a very Silver Age character--not so much "threat to world stability" as "high-profile pain in the ass." Here's a snippet, to show you what we're dealing with (not much joking in this bit...but trust me, the first scene is more than enough on that front.)

Out of the corner of his eye, Punchline saw a security guard reaching for his holster. He whirled around the bank manager, aimed his pistol, and fired three times.

The bullets whizzed across the room. Along the way, the casings fell away, leaving only a tiny red blob. The blobs expanded in the blink of an eye, eventually forming into the shape of boxing gloves. The first two collided with the guard's chest; the last caught him in the face, knocking him unconscious.

Punchline twirled the pistol around his finger like a Wild West gunfighter. "And no more funny business," he said with a smile. "That's my job."

The Idea Box: write365

One of the things I was most afraid of when I "agreed" to this project was the possibility of not having anything to write about. As it turns out, I needn't have worried--after shaking out the dust from my imagination, I found a few workable concepts. Let's open the Idea Box!

write365: Let's Get Ready For Disappointment!

Here's the skinny: a few years back, an internet cohort by the name of Pete Speer decided "Hey, I'm going to write something every day for a year!" A few people joined in, and they all wrote a lot of stuff, and it was beautiful.

Well, Pete has decided he wanted to do it again, and more people joined in...and somehow, I have gotten press ganged into this effort. I'm not happy about it, as you all know how much I hate doing things...but what the hell, let's give it a shot.

Ideally, I'd like to spend some of those days with further blog posts--more nano critiques, a few rants, and the occasional glimpse into the ongoing slow-motion train wreck that is my life. I also have three or four story ideas that I like--and have been batting around for a few years--but I have put zero words to paper (or screen) for any of them. Hell, I don't even have outlines. I wouldn't put it all on the blog, but I'd put a few snippets and things. I also have an idea for November that would take some serious pre-planning, but would be cool if I could pull it off.

Realistically...two posts a month if you're lucky.

You can also keep an eye on the progress of other participants at these places:

Peter Speer
Jon Nathan Raby
Lindsay Branca
Sean Williams
Dan Sackett
Andrew Dugan
(also Joe Schmidt, who doesn't have a link that I could steal from Nate's preview post like I did all the others.)

I recommend keeping an eye on those links, as they probably won't let you down nearly as much as I will.

Book List: January 2014

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

2. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

I've got quite an impressive backlog of books, so I thought I'd try and get some reading done this year. I'd hoped to make better progress in January, but I do most of my reading at work and my schedule was *really* weird for about three weeks, so that didn't happen.

Both of January's selections came from a hardbound collection of Mark Twain novels that you can get at Barnes & Noble for twenty bucks. (I've also got the Ray Bradbury and Neil Gaiman collections, and there's at least three others I'd love to have.)

I probably haven't read Tom Sawyer since junior high (same for Huck Finn, which I'm currently reading.) It was a really fun book, although it mostly reads like a collection of very short stories that uses recurring characters. Finn is a more complete book, but Sawyer is still enjoyable.

While I knew the basics of the story, I had actually never read The Prince and the Pauper. This one had more trouble holding my interest (I finished Sawyer in three days; this one took me a few weeks) but it had its moments. It definitely picked up once the narrative started following Edward more.