atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#4246: Well, that's a little better

After the blog post last night, I wrote a few pages on the flashback sequence, which sat neglected for two months. I'm not sure they're very good, but it's progress.

* * *

So, Obama and his EPA are talking about making electricity cost more. Obama campaigned on this--"the price of electricity will necessarily skyrocket," remember?--and I was wondering when he'd finally get around to it. Well, apparently now is the time.

The elites like Obama don't give a rip how much electricity costs, because they're able to afford as much of it as they want regardless of its price. These are the kind of people who will have a 15,000 kilowatt generator flown in via helicopter to a remote site so they don't have to sweat in the dark; the idea of paying $0.15 per kw/h when formerly they paid only $0.10 is not going to bother them. So what if it means their electric bill for July is $1,500 instead of $1,000?

Hell, look at Al and Tipper Gore: one of his houses uses ten times the energy of a single-family home, and you don't see him crying about it.

They claim it's about the environment, but as Denninger points out it's anything but. The reduction in carbon emissions that Obama desires will not make a damned lick of difference to the ecology or global temperatures...but it will make the middle class more miserable. As Orwell pointed out, when you can make someone suffer, that is when you know you have power over him.

* * *

Like this. Cops no-knock raid a low-rent meth dealer's home at 2 AM. The flash-bang grenade they throw in the place lands in a baby's crib and goes off, badly burning the baby, such that the kid may not live.

A flash-bang grenade is a grenade, a pyrotechnic device. It's not something an adult would want to cuddle with; what happens when one lands next to a baby?

"Raiders found no drugs, gun or cash — nor the suspected drug dealer — at the house," says one of Borepatch's links, and the actual meth dealer was arrested later on, away from his home.

Well, that's the "war on (some) drugs" for you.

* * *

Well, the grass has grown again, and I've got to go cut it. Whee!

Contrast this with six months ago, when I had to run the snowblower every week, or thereabouts. Remember that? At least with cutting the grass I can sit on the tractor for most of it and listen to music and not freeze bits of anatomy.

Today is a gorgeous day, too--a pleasant temperature, a nice breeze--and I think I really ought to get after the motorcycle maintenance I've been putting off. Adjust chain tension, clutch, etc--you know, the little things. I'm going to have to go get some fuel system cleaner and dump it in the tank, too, just because. Do they even make carb cleaner any more? (Rhetorical question; I know they do.) I suppose it's also time to start reassembling the dirt bike. I've got what I need for that project.

* * *

...yet instead of doing anything, I procrastinate by trying to blog more.

One thing that's missing from Windows 8--that I found very useful in prior versions--was the list of documents that you had recently opened. Hit "start", mouse up to the appropriate place, and a little box would pop up with that list of things you'd looked at recently. Very useful, when you're working on a story and want to add more to it.

There may be something of the sort in Win8 that I haven't found yet, but the use of the OS ought to be intuitive. I shouldn't have to hunt for something like that. That's why getting rid of the start menu was a bad idea--or, at least, getting rid of the option to have a start menu was a bad idea.

There is a freeware alternative, of course, but since I haven't quite decided whether or not to wipe the system and start fresh (though I am leaning ever closer to doing so) I'm not going to go to the trouble of finding the thing and downloading it just yet.

The thing is, you can set the task bar to auto-hide just like previous versions (which I like). Best this thing can do, though, is to give me a list of recently visited "places", such as the data directory where the modified files are stored. That'll have to do for now.

Anyway, the evil bitch in the flashback has now been thoroughly characterized enough that I should stop clubbing the reader over the head with her perfidious nature and start telling the story at a faster clip. I've established the three major players in the drama (as well as a couple of supporting characters) and any further flogging of that horse will result in reader fatigue and/or burnout.

...like that story I read, in an anthology with a Dresden Files short, where the author wasted no opportunity to explain to us how nasty, gritty, grim, wicked, debauched, horrifying, appalling, and terrible Darkside was. Yeah. After a while you find yourself skipping the exposition and saying, "Okay, it's a nasty place, we get it already. Jeeze!"

The hell of it is, I used to know people who would have loved that shit to pieces. I'm certain most of them will have gotten over it by now, because that kind of stuff is designed to be consumed by adolescent fuckheads, and most of the people I know have grown up by now (even if I no longer associate with them I hear things, so I know this to be so).

I've picked a difficult task for myself, and it's made worse by the fact that this shit doesn't exactly write itself.

See, that's the thing: it used to be that when people talked about writing being hard work, I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. For me, it's always been easy to write; when I have writer's block it's because I don't know what I want to write about, or because I haven't got any ideas. But once I have a good idea, it's off to the races.

All this tends to give me trouble, though, when the going gets tough. I have not had that kind of thing happen to me very often, but this is the first time that this is the best way to tell this story has presented this much of a problem for me. Normally, once I get past the difficult bit (and starting was it, as usual) the rest flows naturally.

This is not. I don't know why. With this story--unlike any other I've written before--I've had to think about structure and composition and so forth, stuff that I normally pay no attention to. #RELEASE_CANDIDATE_ONE was plotted and structured entirely subconsciously; I never gave any conscious thought to what and why and when and how. Not like I have to do with this one. Hell, the larger story that this sequence fits into is exactly the same way as #R_C_O--no real thought given to what happens next, or why--just a general idea of where the story ends up--but it all makes sense after it's finished, and fits together as if precision machined.

But by page 16 I've started to show where everything is heading, and though I haven't yet really discussed what the protagonist is trying to accomplish, I'm starting to throw some hints around. (I want that to be a bit of a surprise.) The next step in the story is to begin building up to the main conflict, which leads back to where the protagonist is when the flashback begins; and after that, the main part of the story, climax, denouement, and a return to "present day" (though "present day" is sometime in the 28th century, about fourteen thousand years after the flashback). (Don't let anyone say I don't plot big. Holy smokes.)

Along the way I have to explain a ton of things in the main story, of course, but that's not hard to accomplish; it's the whole point of the flashback and will come naturally. Unlike the rest of the thing, it seems.

* * *

Well, that grass won't cut itself, and I want to noodle around on the word processor before I start. See ya!
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