Spontaneous ∂erivation

The Great Tea Debacle at CarrPeeDiem

I’m one of the lucky fifteen writers who will be going head to head to see Who Writes the Most Words in November.

There’s someone there who wries 100+k word novels in a month on a regular basis.

So I’m going to see if I can do two books in November.

Crazy times are coming. Watch this space!

Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent: The Largely Indispensible First Paragraph Challenge

First prize is a manuscript critique, runners up get query letter critiques.

Go forth and write.

Let me try.

It is indeed fixed.

But I like Flickr better.

We’ll see.

Amazon.com: In the Garden of Iden (The Company): Books: Kage Baker:

I went and surfed Amazon a bit, to find out who’s a precursor to my own dystopian person aggrandizing organization of spies, assassins, and troopers. I found a long-running series by Kage Baker about “The Company”, which as far as I can tell, travels through the entire freaking timeline to grab agents and items of value for a greedy company that, of late, is being run by a board consisting of candidates for the Best Short-Sighted Power-Corrupt Psycho Award.

The main protagonist is a man in the Company who wants to bring it down. The Company is so powerful, though, so it’s taking quite a while. Meanwhile, the Company is being eaten from within by faction power struggles.

Kage so owns us all. Nobody can be up against a covert organization more greedy or corrupt or extensive than that. It’s just not humanly possible. The Company doesn’t just aim for secret world domination in the future. They do it all through all of history, man. And they have won.

This did not stop The Matrix, though, or any number of dystopian futures.

My reaction is to entirely rethink the motives of my agency, and to come up with further twists a la Gene Wolfe. For instance: the Company owns through time, but not through space. Another example: being more corrupt is not humanly possible. This leaves other kinds of entities. And yet another: the Company has very human motives of power for power’s sake. So that leaves other motives.

The Matrix differs because a) the “Company” is made up of cyborgs and artificial entities, b) their motives are inhuman as a result, and c) because of (b), their motives are limited so far to world domination. They threaten humanity, whereas the Company would simply co-exist more or less benignly.

So I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

In the meanwhile, the belated Arcady and Zene for Friday is coming up.

YouTube – The Hamster Dance (Music Video):

Can you name all the movies? There’s attempts in the comments on YouTube, but even the long lists are incomplete. Go there and disburse knowledge.

And now that you are cheered up (and yet not too involved in something deep), go write!

I live on the outskirts of Seattle, where there are plenty of trees. Usually this is very nice.

But not when there are windstorms.

I hear when I get home there may be no electricity and thus no internet. The state of such affairs is uncertain, so the Flash Friday might end up on Caturday.

Hooray for the power of propane!

Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead
by Paul Bibeau

A wacky tour-de-force through the history of vampires from a pop culture perspective. From the historical roots of the Dracula of history and the Dracula of literature and current Romania’s love-hatred of the idea of making money from its most famous icon, through a whirlwind of bad vampire movies, LARPS and the vampire subculture, this is a fun book to read in little bites at a time. I also like Bibeau’s version of the “real” story behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Recommended when you need to procrastinate and yet extend your pop culture knowledge in a way most appropriate to the current social clime, i.e., Halloween. Get in touch with your inner Count Chocula.