anacronyms

I have two characters that I love
When I was young, I read a lot of fiction by Fritz Leiber. Leiber created Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, a series of adventures set in Lanhkmar.
Early D+D was influenced by F + TGM. Early copies of ‘Dieties and Demigods’ had the pair, and a few of the [...]

Creativity
I’m listening to Jagger’s ‘Wandering Spirit’. It’s better than I remember. I had always had the impression of it as a competent but essentially uninteresting album by a bored rockstar, the original ‘rockstar’, the guy who defined the cliche.
It’s actually pretty damn good. If you’re looking for a good example of a song that shows [...]

Overheard at the Pussy Ranch: “I try to channel Jesus when I’m working, but it’s hard in a g-string.”
Somebody should put that on a t-shirt. I could wear it here.

We have a drip coffee-maker, with which the Powers-That-Be attempt to fuel our desperate attempts to keep Feature Creep under control. Not an easy job in an environment in which most iterations of The Product contain 10,000 modules. No, I’m not kidding. And they all have 5, 9, or 12 character identifiers, most of which [...]

Progress
I’m making good progress on the novel. I finished chapter 9 today (22,000 words in the bank now!), and the hero and the (as yet unrevealed) heroine are midway on the river part of their journey. Very shortly they will come to the conclusion that they will need to travel on the river at night, [...]

I finished chapter 8 this morning, and started on chapter 9. I had to knock off to come to work. You know something’s going well when you really, really hate to quit it to come to a job that you like.
The way is clear for another 3 chapters or so, and then I have to [...]

Irons In the Fire
I have a lot of them, at the moment. Creatively speaking, of course.
Hmmm, it just struck me that the expression “irons in the fire” is one of those odd ones. We all know what it means, but we know what it means as a whole, as a cliche, as a meme. We [...]

Wordspew
The novel is ticking along nicely. I finished chapter 7 this morning, and started chapter 8. I also started a chapter summary, which may be necessary when I try to sell the thing.
I’m getting conflicting messages on length. I checked Baen books, who seem like a likely publisher for this sort of thing, and they [...]

Smoking because you don’t want to gain weight when you quit is like keeping your boots on when you’re drowning because you don’t want your feet to get cold.

Head down
I haven’t been posting much, almost a week since the last entry. Not that anyone is likely to notice, let alone care…
I’ve been working on the novel. The first three chapters rolled out, then there was a lull while I reworked parts of the plot and a transition, and then another three poured out. [...]