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.