Kiteanic.com

Didn’t go to work today, due to the fact that I woke up at around 3:30 this morning and made five separate trips to the bathroom, three of which involved some very “Wow, I must be sick” activities, two of those being accompanied by sounds like those you’d find in the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Y’know . . . the Bog? The one in that muppet movie with David Bowie, and they went to the bog, and . . . whoosh! C’mon, people . . . work with me here!

Okay, so loud-ish bass tuba noises aside, I did get some stuff done.

Poison Princess – 3 pages done on Chapter 4

Yeah, starting to like this whole scenario, because I really really hate the bad guys in it. It’s all about the “GAH! Oh, I hope something bad happens to you, buddy!” kind of vibes. The monsters are doing monstrous things, and you find yourself hoping for the person you’re supposed to be hoping for. Hard work, actually.

Shakespeare Project #2 – Act 1 Scenes 1 & 2 80% done

Yes, this is project #2. Turns out that most of what I went through with Project #1 transfers over to #2, so actually getting down to business and writing #2 is looking like a piece of cake. I spent all that time working on a usable format, and now that I have, I can just plunk all these new words into that format, and create content in the template that will be used for printing! This’ll be easier than trying to get a cat to ignore you!

There’s a few people with conflicting viewpoints regarding the act of writers ‘giving their stuff away’ online, much in the same way that there’s a ‘few’ drops of water in the ocean. Many writers see nothing wrong with it and do it as much as they possibly can, others start foaming at the mouth and use words like ‘Devaluation’ and ‘Second-rate’ and ‘Idiot’, swearing that those other people are killing the industry, ruining things for decent folk like themselves, and are little better than Nazis.

There are benefits to giving your stuff away, to be sure. Stephen King himself attempted that in 2000, providing an online serial e-book called “The Plant” that you could download for free and pay for using the ‘honor system’, just in order to find out how this whole strange intrawebbernet thing worked. Scott Sigler’s free audiobooks are legendary, and people could listen to his completed story long before anything was available for print. Some could argue that the whole reason his books sold as well as it did was because he’d built an audience for it prior to releasing it, and they’d probably be right.

On the other hand, you’re giving it away. “Are you crazy?” is one of the more common responses, even from writers who know and understand how things work. They’re the ones who look at the numbers, the downloads, all the information available to them and they think to themselves “Every time someone is able to read a copy of someone’s stuff, that’s a book sale that’s been lost. They don’t need to buy it then – they already have it!” They think of it in terms of their livelihood, money getting taken out of their pocket. Small surprise they don’t like the notion.

To me, giving stuff away is fast becoming a way of breaking in, generating interest, even finding out if you’re any good. The notion that I can ‘devalue’ someone else’s work just because my work is out there for free is really only valid if I’ve got the same product as that someone else, or something equivalent. Really, if I’m crap, me giving something away for free doesn’t bother published authors, who are obviously not crap. Or maybe they are. Who knows? I’ve read enough terrible books in my day. Still, I would almost consider being told by an author that I’m “Killing the print industry” to be a compliment of sorts – I’m at least good enough to get them riled up over the fact that I’m giving my stuff away. If I were writing 2-paragraph fanfic about Indiana Jones brushing his teeth, doubtless I wouldn’t get that sort of reaction.

The point is that things are changing all the time, and the internet itself is such a massive change that we haven’t really figured out just how much of our lives have been changed as a result of it. I think most published authors are safe for the moment – being published has always been one of those things that the public interprets as meaning ‘this is not crap, you should buy it’, much like the Times Bestseller list does. A teenager writing his first novel and posting chapters on his blog for everyone to see is not responsible for John Grisham waking up in the dead of night in a cold sweat. Nobody reads the teenager’s stuff and thinks to themselves “Hey, this is good! This beats the John Grisham novel I was going to pick up today! I can just save my money and read this instead!” Or if they do think that, I’ve never been told about it.

Me? I’d rather be heard than paid, I suppose.

Anyways, in completely unrelated news, here’s a link to a free partial-something I’ve put together recently. Which brings us to:

Shakespeare Project – 99%

Just simply awaiting approval on the files, at which point I’ll get a proof and see what happens. Exciting, though it does remind me that I need to post a picture of the cover, and then I’m going to have to go over the details of the site and make sure that I’ve got all my links and images and promo stuff together, all pointing at the right places, stuff like that. Oy . . . the work never ends.

My incredibly motivated alter-ego is trying to kill me.

It occurred to me early this morning, as I was still blinking some of the sleep out of my eyes, that there was something I could do . . . something bold and daring, something that a wacky hero on a circa 1970 TV comedy show might hear about and say “You know something? That’s just crazy enough, it might actually work!”

Ah, how I miss those crazy circa 1970 TV comedy show days. You couldn’t be tired and cliché in those days . . . everything was fresh and new, and ideas were ripe and ready to pick, practically dying to get overused to the point of cliché.

Anyways . . . I’m just trying to delay the inevitable here, which is putting this out there for the world (3 people) to see. So, enough dilly-dallying and reminiscing about the checkered, striped, and lime-green past. Here goes . . .

Updates like the ones I’ve been doing aren’t hard. They’re born of the nagging sort of ‘Hey, I haven’t done this in a while, and I probably should’ kind of guilt that into my head from time to time, when I realize that I’ve actually spent the past hour googling for pictures of swiss cheese for no other reason than to count the bubbles. I mean, if I can spend an hour doing something like that, I can spend at least ten minutes coming up with a quick note about writing, what’s going on, and where I’m at, right?

And then this idea struck me. The implications terrify me.

I said to myself, “Self? You can spare ten minutes every day, can’t you? I mean, you’re writing, you’ve got projects on the go, you’ve got all sorts of things occupying your time and energy, but you can spend ten minutes a day putting together a brief something, right?”

So I replied to myself, “Uhm, yeah. Yeah, I guess,” not liking where this was going.

So then I said to myself, “Well, that’s settled then. We’re going to increase the frequency of posting. You know what? Just to make it easier on you, we’ll do updates every other day!”

“Uhm, thanks?” I said to myself. “I guess that’s . . . good? Hmm, what will I write about though?”

“Glad you asked – that’s actually the brilliant part! What you’ll do is you’ll identify each of the projects you’re working on and provide updates on progress made, so that people will get to see how much work you’re putting into stuff! And, of course, this’ll shame you into doing even more work, because you don’t ever want to post an update that just says ‘Hey, I did nothing these past 2 days. Sod off.’ Do you? Public shame as a motivator! It’ll be awesome!”

“Now hold on a second,” I shot back at myself heatedly, “I didn’t agree to that! Let’s just slow down here a second, figure this whole thing out!”

“Nope, sorry . . . done deal! Mwahahaha!” I laughed, running off before I could do or say anything to change my mind.

Stupid alter-ego.

So, there we are. I guess I’m stuck with it. Starting now, updates at least every other day, and in those updates I shall speak of the progress I’ve made since the last update I’ve done.

(deep breath) Okay, starting . . . (checks wristwatch, realizes he doesn’t wear one, and instead stares at his wrist for an appropriate amount of time so he doesn’t look silly) . . . Now!

Interesting. Or, as my Bond villain persona might venture – “Iiiiiintallesting…”

I’ve done a number of things differently this month. For one, I don’t make it a habit to leap onto an aircraft and fly to exotic (ie: Colder than Calgary) places, nor do I habitually experience this thing called ‘stress’ at work . . . but ‘lo and behold, I’ve experienced both these things in the past week.

AND I’ve cheered like a maniac at a bunch of guys who strap steel to their feet and run around on ice, who wave large wooden sticks at a black rubber disk.

An interesting week, all told.

And I’ve even made progress on the various things I’ve told myself I need to make progress on. In fact, I’m soon going to be in a position where I’ll actually have to *do* something with this progress! Indeed, I’ve hit the 95% completed mark on a certain project of mine, and all that’s left is to open this program I have called “Photoshop” and create a cover for it.
And I’m still eating like a caveman (Cavemen ate chicken wings, right?) and writing like a maniac. Score – Me:1, Fast Food and Procrastination: 0

I dare myself to keep it up…

…oh snap. No I di’int…

I’ve noticed that there’s a few things that get in the way of my writing sometimes, and all of them have to do with the word ‘lack’. There’s lack of time, there’s lack of inspiration, lack of motivation, you name it. Look at all those lacks.

And yet, when I attempt to find some common thread that ties all of those together, well . . . it’s me.

There’s things that I find I’m doing that I really shouldn’t be, stuff I’m making time for that really doesn’t do anything productive or useful aside from giving me time to think of bizarre things. Sometimes this can be useful, give me ideas and whatnot. Well, at some point you have to look at the vast storehouse of ideas you’ve got trapped in your cranium and say to yourself, “Self, I think you’ve got enough. How about we actually do something about one or two of those ideas you’ve got up there?”

This morning, I asked this question of myself, and what did I have to say to myself?

“Self, you’re absolutely right.”

So, this is Day 1. Note the capital letter. Starting now, I eat like a caveman, and I write like a maniac. And I don’t stop until I’m forced to.

Watch the Aaron-shaped blur.

The year we make contact. Or, was that 2001? I can’t quite remember. See, that’s the problem with writing stuff that’s in the future … we think it’s really good, we remember it, and then when that actual date comes around we go, “Hey! What the crap, man? Aren’t we supposed to be seeing monoliths on Jupiter, and have flying cars ‘n stuff like that? What gives?”

Indeed … if literary future-thinkers are to be believed, we should have a second sun by now, three-point-two flying cars, and something called ‘thought crime’, which I’m pretty sure I’d be guilty of if it actually existed. Ever walk into a store and think, “Man, I could just totally grab that thing and run this-a-way, and there’s nothing nobody could do about it!!” Yup… guilty! (pounds gavel) I sentence you to forty years in the electric chair.

Anyway, this post isn’t about that.

No sir, it’s about what *I* plan on doing in 2010! That’s right… I’m going to take a rather daring step and post some new-years-eve resolutions exactly three weeks *after* new years, just so they become extra poignant. Are you ready? Here they are.

1. I will finish my current project, which is *so* top secret that if I were to tell you what it’s called, a very influential writer would start spinning in his grave. I mean it, too! He’d be generating enough torque in his final resting place, if you hooked up a battery to his forehead and looped a copper wire around him in a ten foot circle, he’d light up Times Square…
2. I will begin/middle/finish my YA novel… the one I’ve been mulling around in my head for the past two years. Yes, the one that will be turned into a multi-million-dollar movie within five years, because that’s what they’ve been doing with any sort of literature that involves seventeen-year-olds and even *remotely* occult circumstances. I’m gonna be rich, I tells ya… *rich*!
3. I’m going to finish pt 1 of my trilogy. I’m so serious about this, I haven’t even bothered to make some sort of gag about it.
4. I will begin the third of Vincent’s journals.
5. I will look both ways before crossing the street. *honest*

As for the last one, based on my understanding of this morning’s walk to work, as well as this evening’s walk back from work, I’ll have to be very careful to pull off #5, just so I’m in a position to be able to pull off #1-4…