“Darkness falls across the land The midnite hour is close at hand Creatures crawl in search of blood To terrorize yawls neighbourhood And whosoever shall be found Without the soul for getting down Must stand and face the hounds of hell And rot inside a corpses shell The foulest stench is in the air The funk of forty thousand years And grizzy ghouls from every tomb Are closing in to seal your doom And though you fight to stay alive Your body starts to shiver For no mere mortal can resist The evil of the thriller…” Vincent Price – Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1984. Dir. John Landis
So with Hurricane Sandy now gone, things can get back to normal, maybe. New York, New Jersey and Southern Rhode Island was struck the most by the storm. Houses went into the sea, restaurants damaged and subways under water. Entire neighborhoods went up in flames, parts of the power grid in NYC went down, front end of buildings dropped, cars floated down the road and six inches of sand now cover much of the costal roads in Jersey. It was 2012 without Jack Gyllenhaal and the spaceships. Thankfully my neck of the woods did not get hit, tree limbs are down here and there but nothing like Newport, Charlestown or Wakefield. Last year’s storm hit NYC and people thought it was once a century storm and now used pumps from the Panama Canal are trying to pump out the subways. I look at the Hurricane Barrier at Providence, just spitting distance from my brother’s old apartment and wonder if the same type of technology installed in the 60’s can help out Jersey and York. If anyone was thinking of doing a disaster movie novel set in NYC just start mainlining the 24/7 new channels now, even if they do repeat footage it’s still a sight to see what happens to a major metropolitan city when mother nature drops a late storm on your door step for the 2nd year in a row to the date. I’ve been waiting for Tobias Buckell to weight in all this but he may not have power. Oh, and let’s not forget that Disney bought Lucas Film for 4 billion dollars. Insert your own Dr. Evil finger to the mouth if you wish. I think the only geek thing Disney has to buy is the BBC and they’ll would have cornered the market. In other news, Halloween is soon upon us, it means only one thing: NaNoWrimo in 1 more day! I’ll be putting the work in progress on hold to work on one of two ideas I worked on during the Gotham Writing Workshop Classes: Either the one about zombies in space or how does one handle becoming a god among men. Each idea tickles my fancy. I recommend getting that dropbox account now to back yer stuff up. Trust me. You’ll be thanking me later. Last thing: Rhode Island Comic Con this weekend. With NYC out of commission should be interesting to see how many people show up. The subways are one thing getting the planes back into position is another…
NaNoWrimo just 3 days away time to post the locations of the Write Ins for this year. All of the write ins can be found on the Google Calendar. Sundays – With the exception of the 11/11, the write ins will be at Providence Athenaenum Library from 1:15pm – 4:15pm in the Art Room. On 11/11 the Write In will be in Cranston at Panera from 7pm – 9pm. Mondays – 11/5 will be at Panera in Cranston. 11/19 + 1/26 will be at Woonsocket Library from 530pm-845pm Tuesdays – Warwick Write Ins will be TBD on 11/13, 11/20, 11/27. Wednesdays – South County Write Ins at Brewed Awakenings. 6pm – 9pm. Thursdays – Empty. Fridays – Google + Hangout at the Rhody Wrimos Google + Page from 7pm – 10pm. Saturdays – A write in on 11/10/12 will be Providence Anthaenum Library from 10am – 2pm. Newport Library for every Saturday from 2pm – 545pm.
I thought we had run out of stupid names for storms. Apparently I was wrong. While Hurricane Sandy rolls up the coast, calls on Facebook have gone out looking for D Batteries. Double A batteries they got, but D Batteries, uh uh. brought up a good point in her post: If Jim Cantore shows up in your neighborhood: it’s over. So with enough water, TP, paper towels, a twelve pack of pop tarts and 24 pack of AA batteries, my car gassed up, all the lawn furniture inside and the trash cans next on the list, I hope the house is secured. The pumps and hoses from 4 years ago are at the ready in the basement. Hopefully the snow they are predicting for the middle of the week doesn’t materialize. With NaNoWrimo upon us next week I’ll be post more than I have been recently. I may have stepped back from coordinator duties but I’ll still be going to some of the write ins and going to be writing about an idea I came up with during my Gotham Writing Course. I’ve been playing catch up with the Self Publishing Podcast and highly recommend it if you are thinking of self publishing. There is a good post on Johnny B. Truant’s blog on how he conceived and wrote his latest novella Fat Vampire in 29 days. Johnny has freely admitted to not getting it heavily edited, a step in this process that I, my entire family, my writing group and the Gotham Writing Group have said needs to be done before I submit anything.
We’re now into the final week of the Gotham Writing Course and have to say I’m glad I took the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. The Workshop is set up with a weekly lecture followed by homework from the lecture and lastly the writers are given two chances in the booth. The booth is similar to what many writing groups do where the writer submits a piece and is not allowed to respond for at least 5 days. The feedback I received was great and brought up some good points like: the first chapter is a wee bit slow to pay off. So, I went in, gutted chapter 1 and moved the story a head a bit and introduced one of the main characters early and I thought it went pretty well. So, I submitted it again and several POV errors popped up so I revised it and managed to keep most of Chapter 2’s action. I now have a better looking chapter one that encompasses the same characters but puts the readers in the action early. With Chapter 1 locked down, revising Chapter 2-3 now. For now the word count is lower but if the work reads better so I’m not complaining. The WIP K BAR count is: Shifting gears a bit, NaNoWrimo is 3 weeks away and I had hope to have the WIP done by now but no such luck. One of the exercises from Gotham was to plot out a story from magazine articles so I might try my hand at Moon Base Adventure Idea. A NaNoWrimo communication check is in order for those who haven’t updated their bookmarks: RI’s NaNoWrimo LJ Community RI’s Wrimo’s FB Page RI’s Wrimo Twitter Feed RI’s NaNoWrimo Message Board Andy will be ML this year while I step back which is probably for the best due to a job shift at work may be coming up soon. And, if anyone is looking for software to try out during NaNoWrimo Scrivner is free for the first month. And, if you make it to 50k and validate by the end of November the software will discounted. PC/Linux Version. Mac Version.
