The First Adventure (short)

I have begun my summer adventures. So far I have seen one new movie, driven 600 miles round trip  to visit my brother in another state, eaten at two restaurants I’d never been to before (not chains), gone to a farmer’s market and found the most delicious Italian dressing, and visited a cultural museum that I will be returning to sooner than later. Given my typical level of activity in the same amount of time (five days), I’m pretty pleased. Finding time to read and write, though, was a challenge…as in it didn’t happen. We’ll call it a learning curve.

Taken from a series of short stories about GT, takes place about fifteen years before the previously posted part with Leslie.

(1/1)

Only the light of a flashlight broke the gloom of the little apartment that felt suffocating just by stepping inside. Kalie shut the door quickly to keep any of the heat from escaping into the cool hallway. “That’s so bad for your eyes,” she remarked, kicking off her shoes and letting her too-large coat slide off her shoulders.

Film Review: Iron Man 3

Turns out, I don’t do proper movie reviews; I ramble out all the thoughts it provoked in me and try to organize them succinctly. That is what follows. HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD.

***

Iron Man 3 (2013)
Director: Shane Black
130 minutes; PG-13
7.8/10 on IMDB
78% Fresh on RottenTomatoes

This movie gets a THUMBS UP and I would (probably will) watch it again. To start the film, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) angsts after ‘that thing’ in New York until terrorist actions afflict his life and he’s given a chance to fight back in a field he understands. Throughout, director Shane Black has juxtaposed technology and the organic, setting up the latter as the survivor, while taking pot-shots at the oil industry, fear of the Other, and the literal and figurative prostitution of entertainment. There’s a lot of violence and destruction, a lot of laughs and a little bit of romance. Below are spoilers and some thoughts that occurred to me while watching Iron Man 3.

Update

The semester is almost over and I should do better with updates during the summer. I did not make is past the second round for ABNA, unfortunately. I did work on a few projects, including what used to be called Sever/Us (definitely not using that title again), what I traditionally call my Heaven is Fucked story, and the semi-Steampunk epic that Tick-Tock Man alludes to.

I delved into an unrealized enjoyment of movies, which informed the structure of my English Comp class; I’m debating adding a film review/discussion aspect to this blog, both to keep track of what I’ve seen , remember what I thought of it at a given point, and maybe to track what, if any, influence the entertainment I consume has on what I feel inclined to write.

In that vein, maybe I should do annotations on what I’m reading, as well.

My current ambition is to spend the summer researching for an Andrew Jackson-focused screenplay. As I have no experience with scriptwriting, this should be interesting.

Tick-Tock Man (WIP)

Written for Short Story Sunday, over sushi. The majority of the reason for lack of regular updates is I do most of my writing by hand in notebooks. It invariably takes twice as long to transcribe something as it does to come up with it in the first place. Making no excuses, just explaining for any who might wonder or care.

Oldest Tale (One)

Below is not actually the oldest story I’ve created, but it is set at the earliest time in the chronology of my fantasy planet. When I first wrote it (almost a year ago now) I was approaching it from a very removed perspective, as if this story were old to this world, there’s no one left who knew such times; even the gods are different. When I picked it up again, that style wasn’t working for me anymore, and even the plot trajectory wasn’t as favorable, so like many of the things that will be posted here, when it gets to be written in full, it will probably be very different from the excerpt here.

Round Two and Excerpt

Ouch, it’s been another week since I posted. I can’t even say I’ve been ‘crazy’ busy, but I have been going at a trot, actually keeping up with homework for once.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award advanced to the second round yesterday, and my novel, The Scapegoat’s Vengeance, goes with it.

ENG Draft 1

I feel so guilty for not having posted anything for a few days. I haven’t done any serious writing in about the same amount of time, which is even worse.

Scream

You thrash and you shove,

Praesul and Cards

Warning: Image heavy post.

I can’t really call them business cards, because they’re not for a ‘business’ but I got my business cards today! Inter-cut with the photos is a summary of Praesul, the fictitious USA-based city almost all of my realistic and urban fantasy stories are set in or around. Scroll to the bottom of the post for the map of Praesul.

Motherless Daughters (one)

At this point I feel a need to explain that I’ve been posted the first 1,000 – 3,000 words of things I’ve written in the past year and a half or so, all crammed into the same notebook. I’ll be continuing this trend with other works, as a way to display the jack-of-all-trades (and master of none) approach I’ve had to writing genres for years. So far I’ve put up samples of: realistic fiction, science fiction, a semi-urban fantasy, and the following is pure fantasy.

I’m not crazy about the opening segment, but it seemed like a straight forward way to introduce the reader to an important aspect of the culture. When I do get around to working on this story again, likely only a fragment of it will survive.

(1/?)

Geiphren closed his eyes and sank into the rhythms of his body, seeing the glow of the embers with his mind, sifting through them with his hand and no fear. He squeezed the power of flowing time on it and guided it to change, but before it was complete an unpleasant sting teased his attention.