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Finished the play. Fairly satisfied with it. So now what?

Attended the Buffalo Book Fair yesterday, and swung by the library for the first time in a decade or so. The fair is certainly worth a stop-in, so keep your eyes open next year.

Any library gives me a feeling of coming home, of course. The decor in my apartment is a testament to that. The Buffalo library, while awesome, did manage to piss me off. There’s a “Mark Twain Room” in there, outside of which is a recently posted sign reading “Iconic Mark Twain”. Grr….

My hatred of the “i” word knows no bounds.

June has ended, and the play is decidedly less than 20,000 words long. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the third and final act, and the final product will not hit the word count. No big.

As this is my first salvo into comedy, I have found myself in an new situation: asking myself “is this funny?”. The answer is usually “if somebody funny said it…”. A new vertex is added to the normal author-piece-audience triangle, that being the actor. Weird.

Looking for some good old timey illustration (movie posters, book covers, et cetera)? Enjoy.

Avid B A Starters will remember the Final Reality post, in which we discussed using experience points to track one’s progress in real-life goals. Here’s the idea in webcomic form:

Took a wee break from Scripto today and found myself ingesting a few new savories

I read a sample chapter of Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean. Wow. Now that’s just bad. Here’s a taste:

The storm seemed to come out of nowhere. It came at Grace and Connor just when they were at their most vulnerable, out beyond the harbour in the open ocean.
It didn’t give them a chance.
The sky changed colour so fast, it was as if someone had ripped away a sheet of blue wallpaper to reveal a gaping black hole.

The Magnum Space Opus doesn’t seem so awful now, does it?

Also watched Pi. I have four things to say. Awesome, awesome, and also awesome. The fourth is as follows: shame on you Wachowski brothers. I knew The Matrix was stolen, but I didn’t realize it was that stolen. The blinking command-line prompt? Scrolling numbers? Multiple monitors and loads of hanging cables? A man standing in complete whiteness? Sentient computers? A Massive Attack song? A subway showdown scene? Shame.

7 days into June and I’m through Act I. Of a three act play. That’s 4000 words out of 20K. Time to make with the padding….

For those of you who have expressed interest, I have started to post the end result of November’s Nanowrimo challenge on another blog: Magnum Space Opus. Unedited, unrevised, unadulterated fiction. It’s only opened to registered readers, so if you would like to be added let me know.

Seems every time I travel I end up at a bookstore. Odd, really, as I don’t read all that much anymore.

I picked up a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable in Milwaukee this weekend. Awesome. I first heard of the book in an intro Neil Gaiman wrote for one of the trade paperbacks of his Sandman series, and it has been a staple of Alex’s Fantasy Library ever since.

While in WI, the friend I visited shared that one of her life’s goals is to read all of the books in her home. Yosh.

The Nanowrimo people have issued another challenge: Script Frenzy. A 20,000 word play or movie script written exclusively in the month of June. Considering the timeless work of high literature I squeezed out last November, how can I resist? Now, if only I had a plot….