Rants & Ravings
This blog will contain information about my various works, resources related to them as well as miscellaneous rants and ravings of a lunatic… err author.
Thinking of stirring up a shitstorm!
The other day I joined a discord channel and you have to create your own profile. Within minutes of joining, one of the moderators messaged me asking me what my pronouns are, because I hadn’t answered that question for my profile.
I felt like saying, “Looking down my pants, I’m a guy, so he/him.”, but I didn’t know the snowflake factor for that discord, so I simply replied, “he/him”. Turns out the snowflake factor is pretty high on that discord, so I doubt I’ll interact that much.
Then the other day, I witnessed an obviously female person go off on a poor food vendor when she ordered something. The food maker person brought up the order and the cashier person pointed to the customer and said, “It’s for her.”
Well the lady made it a point to say, “My pronouns are they/them.”
As if anyone would assume her pronouns from looking at an obviously female person that doesn’t have a huge they/them sign around their neck?!?? Anyways witnessing that spectacle and trying not to laugh, an idea for a future book popped into my head.
I immediately thought of calling it The Stupidity Virus, or The Snowflake Syndrome, but may well just go with some version of Infected or Pandemic… I’m open to ideas people!
The premise will be episodic and much like Mork and Mindy, except it will be Martians getting to know Earthlings a bit better because Earth is setting up a base on Mars, with plans for colonization.
The Martian researcher(s) will report back on various aspects of human life on Earth (I’ve got a lot of topics in mind… every one of them guaranteed to piss off some segment of the population!) 🙂
The Martians eventually come to the conclusion that Earth is infected with a virus that prevents rational thought and limits their intelligence. They don’t want it to spread to Mars, so they confront the humans. It begins with peaceful negotiations, but escalates from there because the humans we’ve elected to be our leaders are useless.
In the process, the Martians learn that there are some humans with intellect and common sense and they eventually work together to try and resolve the pandemic on Earth.
What do you all think?
Turtle Island
Since Aliens and Cowboys is finally coming to an end (I think?) I’ve just been struggling with writing the ending. I know what I want the ending to do, I’m just having troubles putting it into the proper words.
I do still have my block distraction project, which is The Runes of Elsewhere, but even that series is at a bit of a crossroad in my mind. So I’ve been brainstorming about new story ideas.
I’ve already got a Christmas story planned for next NaNoWriMo, so I’m thinking the logical choice would be to actually write Turtle Island… the first decent story I ever wrote. Unfortunately it was back when there wasn’t computers, so it’s lost forever.
Since I still know the premise behind the story, I’ve been doing some plot development and I think it would make for a nice stand-alone story and I can easily turn it into a sort of origin story for the Aliens and Cowboys series as it’ll take place about 20 years prior to the events in The Cowboy and the Aliens.
I won’t even start to write this until Aliens and Cowboys is finished, then it will become my block distraction project for The Runes of Elsewhere.
Creative Writing
To further my writing (and maybe figure out what the hell I’m doing) I enrolled myself in Creative Writing Level 1 and Level 2 through Mount Royal University’s Continuing Education program. Level 1 started in October and ran into December, then Level 2 started in January and just ended.
For the program we needed to define our Work In Progress for the class. Aliens & Cowboys was too far along to use for the class as there’s far too much history for anyone new to understand, so I decided to use my block distraction project, The Runes of Elsewhere for the course.
I got a lot of good feedback on my writing and have already made numerous changes to what was originally released to my patrons.
Elf on the Shelf
After the success of Witches and Werewolves that I wrote for the NaNoWriMo 2021 contest, I’ve decided maybe I’ll try it once again, only this time I’ll have the characters and plot sorted out beforehand.
It’s going to be a Christmas story and it’s going to tie into my Runes of Elsewhere series, which I will continue to write once I complete Aliens and Cowboys.
In the simplest summary, an elf helping Santa on his Christmas Eve deliveries gets betrayed and stranded on a farm without communication or magic. It’s her quest to try and return to the North Pole, find out who betrayed her and try to get justice for doing her wrong.
The blog post title was just a working title, I can’t use it though as everything about it is copyrighted to the n-th degree.
Anyone got any ideas for a title?
NaNoWriMo 2021
Witches & Werewolves is a story I wrote during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It was more or less just to prove to my creative writing class that I could do it. It was definitely difficult to meet the 50,000 words in 30 days target, but I managed to do it.
Most writers that participate in NaNoWriMo do all their plotting and planning in the months leading up to November, they even have sessions to help with this process… but not me!
I happened to watch a movie with my daughters on Halloween day when my oldest asked, “What would happen if the werewolf only turned human on the full moon?”
Good question! It got me thinking and I didn’t think a reverse werewolf story had ever been written before. So after thinking about it until November 5, I decided I had enough ideas to write a story.
I joined NaNoWriMo, almost a week late, and STILL managed to hit the target… albeit around 11:30pm on November 30th (50,320 words!)! Then December and January were editing and revisions and today the book is available.
It was a fun little story and is already popular on SOL.
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