CSS, why you no function?

I'm so sorry I haven't posted in a few days!

You see, Blogger is being a dick lately. Sometimes it refuses to publish posts correctly that are longer than a paragraph , and the comment box ends up floating in the middle of the post. I have no idea why this is happening, and Google doesn't either. This is one of those situations where I ask someone a question, they call me stupid for not just Googling it, and I pull my hair out because I already did.

I've been  having this problem with Blogger since day one. I was hearing for a while that it just happened with posts that I copied and pasted from a word processor, but the post I've  been trying to get out for the past few days was one hundred percent hand typed. I would just switch platforms since this has happened so often, but my domain name is with Blogger. Honestly, I've switched platforms so often it isn't even funny ^^;;

I hope this post is short enough for them.

It's Creepypasta Time.

Scareh.

Halloween arrives in just four days. I've only just now started reading Creepypasta again, and I'm rather disappointed in myself. The month of October is, for me, completely void of sleep most years.

I don't know what it is about a good Creepypasta that is just so damn frightening. Perhaps it is how poorly written most of them tend to be, convincing you every time that a real person--not some college student who wants to be a journalist/philosopher--wrote it about something that actually happened to them (without saying in all caps that it did, of course). The conjured image of the last survivor of some disaster scribbling out a warning and plastering it on the Internet for someone to find is both ridiculous and wonderful.

In fact, that was why smile.jpg didn't scare me at all. I could tell from the constant Thesaurus rape that whoever was writing it was trying to be some bigshot writer. Remember, kids: create images with your words, not just jumbled sentences of ridiculously long synonyms that make you look smarter.

You can find Creepypastas here, of course, but I like to go to the Wiki when I'm in the mood for a good scare; new ones often pop up there. I've pretty much read them all, so I'm always looking for new stories.

But there are a few things that bother me about Creepypastas, including but not limited to:

1. Stories that begin with, "please don't read this", or "I beg you not to continue reading." If the story is really quite long, most of the time I'll think, "Alright, then ^-^" and just hit backspace.
2. The idiot main character who for some reason goes through with the ritual pasta even though he is promised to either be killed or stricken insane.
3. Stories that begin or end with, "This was my first time writing a Creepypasta, guys!" or, "This was written by me, -insert random forum username here-, because I love Creepypasta." It's much more fun when the story could have been written by anybody. I guess that's why horror fiction doesn't bother me. I'm much more unsettled by myths and legends and other 'could be true' stories.
4. Video game Creepypastas. I don't know why, but I rarely find them scary. They're mostly addressed to the game's fanbase, however, so I guess that's why certain people find them horrifying.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, cliches bother me. The writing world is full of them.

Anywho, if you're knew to Creepypasta just as I was at around this time two years ago, I would recommend starting out with Candle Cove. It's the first one I ever read, and since then I was hooked.

I also agree with every single one of the choices on this list.

And here's a Tumblr full of them. I swear, I seem to have an infinite amount of Creepypasta links. This post would probably require some major scrollage if I were to list them all.

Mind Sludge

So apparently, "I'm posting every Monday evening" now means, "I'm writing the final 2-3 paragraphs of Monday's blog post Tuesday morning during the first ten minutes of History."

Do you ever have those days when all you can manage to do is stare sleepily at the page?

Ugh. I was doing so well, and now I can barely make my mind move. It's not writer's block; I know exactly what's coming next in the story. It's more of a mind-sludge that keeps the gears from turning, even though they know what they're supposed to do. This may have something to do with this being the last scene of the first third of my novel. After the end of this chapter, I've only got 2/3 of the way to go...sure, it's more than half, but way more than 3/3. I'm one of those 'chicken out at the very end' people. I've done it with every video game I've ever played. That boss battle means that the game will be over, and writing that last scene just puts me closer to the story being over.

Plus, I feel like this transition between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the middle should have a special scene, a scene that jumps off the page and grabs the readers heart. You know, one of those scenes that no one can talk about the book without mentioning. So far, however, I'm sad to say that this scene is nothing but any other scene. When we expect our story to be something, and it insists on being something else, we always run into problems actually writing the thing. That's yet another lesson I've yet to really learn.

Like most writers at this point in their story, I find that the middle is no more than a vast desert. I know where my characters are supposed to go, but I don't want the novel to fall into the classic rut that fantasy adventures have the opportunity to fall into in which the characters are doing nothing but walking. I'm also worried that this work is going to be too short. Even though it seems I have a lot of things that need to happen, I'm only going to have about 13,000 words in the beginning. If the middle and end also only have 13,000 words, then my novel will probably barely skim past 35,000.

The internet says it's a sin to write books that are shorter than 50,000 unless you're a big-time, famous writer who can get away with it, because no one will pay for a shorter book. I'm actually disappointed that my story looks as if it won't be longer. When I go over the plot line, it seems like it should at least be 60,000 words, and that's being stingy.

I hope I don't have to resort to sticking "that" in wherever it wouldn't be incorrect, like when I need more words in an academic paper. Awkward wording and creative writing do not mix--unless you have an awkward character, that is.

Trimming the fat...before the cow becomes a steak?

Image via WikipediaI know that editing during the first draft is a bad idea, but I've been compelled to do the most major form of editing that I've come across: cutting out entire scenes.

Or rather, ripping them out. I literally tore about five pages out of my notebook when I realized that I was going in a direction that was completely wrong. In fact, I may  need to do away with several scenes. They're all getting repetitive.

At this point I fear I may even need to re-title my novel, "A plot revealed through a bunch of characters sitting around talking about it."

Of course, the problem isn't that extreme, but it might as well be. Any problem is magnified to twice its size in the eyes of the readers, be it an inconsistency or an author who is too frightened to leave the exposition.

As I reminisce about my older novel projects that have been started but never finished, I realize that they all could have possibly been saved had I sat down, looked at all of the scenes I had, and figured out which ones could be combined, especially if they take place in the same setting and are made up mostly of exposition. I just don't know how to get the beginning of the novel all squared away so that I can jump right into the middle. It has always been a problem of mine; the first novel I ever started writing had about 150 pages and at least 20,000 words before I really even got into any of the action at all.

Now that I have recognized this problem, I feel as if I've taken a huge jump forward in remedying it. There are some scenes that just don't belong. Even if they reveal necessary information, that necessary information may not be necessary at that exact moment in the story's timeline. You can always put it in wherever you feel it needs to go in the rewrite. The first draft is, more or less, about getting the very basic story out of you and onto the page so that you can work with it. It's better if you don't even worry about spelling and grammar until you sit down to do that editing.

 Some things are even better left unsaid, like Hemingway said in his famous Iceberg Theory.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.  ---Hemingway

For example, Hawthorne never writes, "The Reverend Dimmesdale was too scared to admit what he had done."

He makes you know it, and without ever saying a word.

Related articles

• How to Silence Your "Inner Editor" (thewritersrefuge.wordpress.com)

Girls Write, Too

I'll never understand why it's so hard for readers out there to believe that a chick can write a kick-ass story that isn't pumped full of abs and estrogen.

Of course, considering what they've got to go on, I don't really blame them.

Everyone's heard the classic spiel saying that female writers who don't write erotica and romance should use a unisex, or even male, pen name. If they don't, their sales will suffer, because most readers out there will see the female name and immediately judge it to be in contrast with the genre of the book. Just once, I dare some writer of beautiful, passionate erotica to use a pen name like "Paul Schmidt", or "Al Gutman."

Nothing is worse, however, than the pen name that sounds like it came straight out of either the 60s or Lord of the Rings. No one is going to believe that your name is Rain Firestorm. Move on to the next name on your list, unless it's Crystalline Promise.

I won't deny that I've always wanted to publish at least one erotica under the psuedonym, "Jane Doe."

I don't know why. I can't write erotica--it's just that it would be pure awesome, just as awesome as I. M. Hornay. 

Halloween 'Be Approachin'

Image via Wikipedia Today I finally began regularly working on my novel every day, bringing my goal of at least 1,000 words each day back into the forefront. I've been thinking about doing something weird with the story: cutting out an entire character.

Well, not entirely cutting out said character, but rather cutting them out for the majority of the plot of the first book in my series. I had originally planned to have my main character and this other character, who is her foil in every sense of the term, undertaking the journey of the first novel together. Now that I look at the purpose of the story a lot closer, I think it just might be more useful to have her make that journey solo.

Plus, if I did that, I could cut out the scenes where my main character and this character become better acquainted.

Or, you know, I could just shove them together as still 'sort of enemies' and see what happens from there. That adds drama, for sure.

Part of being a writer is struggling with decisions just like this one. You have several different ways that you want the story to go, but  you just can't let go of any of them to use just one of them. It is in situations like this that I propose a compromise of some sort, or a merging of the plots together so the good parts of all of them sort of happen. Usually, when you do that, one of them shines as the strongest and best one to take center stage, anyway. There's just something about seeing all the story directions in action that helps you figure out which one really was the "one."

Now that the first and most rambly part of the post is over, I'd like to bring to your attention this author and his books.

They are for children, and yet they are amazing. Any true horror fan would love his work; trust me, I'm a horror nut, and after reading the first one after dark, I wasn't able to get to sleep until I forced myself there.

Because, you know what? It always seems like my bedroom door does that violent shaking thing where it sounds like someone is trying to get in RIGHT when I've scared myself silly with ghost stories all day.

After the first anthology of scary stories, O. Penn-Coughin's stories only get better and scarier. Not to mention, of course, that if you read it on kindle you can only view one page at a time, making those scary illustrations seem to actually jump out at you at the end of every story. Trust me, they're a lot of fun.

I've only just started with Kissed By a Clown, and so far I wouldn't recommend that those of you out there with elementary school aged children let them get their hands on it.

But you and your older children?

Go nuts. Knock yourselves out. It seriously rocks so far.