Yoshi and I have started a friendly little writing competition over at amifamousyet.com. This is an invitation only event that starts on October 1st and ends on October 31st. Sound similar to NaNoWriMo? Well it should because it’s a blatant rip-off for the most part except there are almost no rules and it’s for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words and we will be reading the stories to judge them. And judge them we shall. We are quite judgmental.
Interested in joining this elite group of writers? Send me or Yoshi an e-mail. If you don’t know our e-mail addresses then you probably aren’t someone we would let in anyway. Unless you are like some people we know who can’t keep track of contact information to save their lives. You know who you are. Comments here will also be considered. Mostly.
Note: There are no prizes. If you are only in it for the prizes you will be sorely disappointed.
In an age when even Ameren UE is using TXT speak in it’s new energy efficiency billboards, it’s hard sometimes to even remember what grammar is much less what good grammar would look like. People spend a lot of time “typing” on their phones and unless you keep up with such things, that TXT you just received from your son or daughter may look like another language or a system error instead of a message.
But grammar – and good grammar – are still important. That’s something that I hope the kids today will still understand when they grow up texting their term papers into their robotic professors. Writing is something that can make or break you in certain situations. I dread the day I see a resume come across my desk written in a hybrid of 1337 and TXT.
Here’s a perfect example I just saw on Facebook. I notice more and more often that people are skipping capitalization and punctuation in their posts. I see the number 4 replacing “for” and the number 2 replacing “to” all the time. But sometimes, you really have to go back and make sure what you wrote is actually what you meant.
Here’s a post from a Facebook friend taken word for word:
My good friend dave brockett was killed lastnight in a motrcycle accident. Please pray 4 his family. Ill let everyone that knew him know when the funeral is gonna be.
This is tragic, of course. I don’t know him personally but I feel sorry for those that did. I would have capitalized his name… but maybe I’m just being picky. Good grammar and writing – no, but it gets the idea across properly.
Now here’s one of the comments to this same post:
let me know when he was a good friend
Where to start? Ignore the lack of a beginning capital letter and let us jump straight to the punctuation. Go ahead and read that again and think about what that says. Now I am assuming that this person was not trying to be an insensitive jerk by asking “When was he a good friend?“ That would just be rude no matter how you feel about someone.
What this commenter must have meant was exactly what he wrote but without punctuation. Here’s what it should have said:
Let me know when. He was a good friend.
Big difference, right? That one period between when and he make all the difference in the world. All of the sudden you go from being a well meaning sympathetic friend to a hateful asshole when that one character is left out. Keep that in mind next time you decide to write something in a hurry.
Strange things happen. My family has always been blessed/cursed with that sort of history. I’ve lived with that all my life. Today was just another one of those days.
Many people claim that writing is therapeutic and I am definitely one of those people. I have a hard time expressing my thoughts and feelings on a regular basis but I can pour my heart out with writing. However, I never thought that my writing about depression and the loss of my USB drive would have the effect that it did.
I was in a two hour meeting this morning where my boss and I were trying to figure out the extrordinarily poorly documented process of getting SSL setup with Windows 2008, IIS7 and Exchange 2007. I did a lot of pacing and leaning on the desk as we worked through things as there isn’t room for two people to sit at his desk. Inevitably at one point I started fidgeting and put my hand in my pants pocket and started fiddling with my key ring. I do that sometimes. Just a nervous habit I suppose.
It was then, while I was in mid-sentence, that I realize that I had something small and plastic in my hand and I was spinning it around on a pivot over and over. Another nervous habit but one that was lost when my USB drive disappeared. I kept turning it a few more times in my pocket while my brain started putting two and two together in a fairly efficient manner that was thoroughly clouded in a haze of WTF.
Then just like that I pulled my hand from my pocket and looked and sure enough – there was my little black and blue USB drive completely intact. Of course my boss had turned to look at me since I had stopped talking mid-sentence and I had to explain.
Of course the funny thing is that there is no way that the drive should have been in my pants pocket. It’s been over a month… maybe a month and a half since I actually lost the drive. I’ve worn these pants since then and the pocket it was in is the right front that I use most often. And these are not the pants that I wore the day I lost the drive or on the day before which was the last time I had used the drive. I had searched both those pairs of pants. And of course I had put my keys and pocketknife in that same pocket this morning like I do every morning and didn’t notice it then or even when I was putting the pants on.
But strange things happen. We were also missing a portable hard drive that we had backed up data to for the trip from Hong Kong. It showed up two days ago in a bag that we had both searched previously. Muse had lost her Nikon flash for her camera after just having it in Chicago. It showed up buried in a box of stuff in the office that had yet to be unpacked. Yeah. Strange things. It’s what we live with every day.
Of course this USB drive doesn’t show up until I write about losing it. It’s not until I tell the world that it went missing and how it made me felt and how its loss was a focus for so many things. It wasn’t until I opened up after a long break that it came back in the most impossible of places. So you see, writing is therapeutic for me. Just maybe not in the way I would have expected this time.
Well it’s Friday and the work day is almost done. I may get to the weekend faster than my friends in the States but I also get Monday faster too. It’s a win-lose situation.
I’ve spent part of the day packing up my personal items from my office to be shipped back to the St. Louis office. My technical books and toys and decorations and paperwork and toys. I have lots of toys. It’s been kind of a sad day.
Which led to my activities at lunch time. I skipped lunch to stay in my office like I often do and I drug out some writing. I opened up a story that I had started back in February and edited/added about 500 words during my break. Oddly enough, even though I went from 1,040 words to almost 1,500 words… the story didn’t get progressed at all. I have an idea of where I think I want to go with it now. Before I had just written the setup and had no idea what was going on or where it would end. Now I think I’ve gotten that part ready. I just have to remember it long enough to get it written.
But my point was that I was kind of sad about packing and that sparked me into writing. I’m wondering if I only write when I’m sad? I don’t think so though. I blazed through the first four days of zombie stories and I don’t remember being sad then. So I’m probably just jumping to conclusions. Which, for those of you who know me, is very unlike me. Yeah.
Anyway, hopefully I will get Chapter One of that story finished up pretty soon and unleash it on everyone here. Or I may wait till I get a few chapters written so I don’t leave everyone hanging like I did with the zombie stories. I will finish those zombie stories some day. At least the ones I have outlined already. I just haven’t been inspired on those like I was before. Not sure what was different then but I wish I could duplicate it. That was awesome.
For those of you interested in my previous writings, click on the Writing category on the right side of the page.
I have a lot of big projects going on this week and next before we head home for the Christmas holidays. So I was able to get a guy from our home office to come help me out for two weeks before he went to visit family and friends here in Hong Kong. Which is awesome because I’ve needed help for a while and especially during the upcoming office move next week.
The other side of this situation is that because we are out of space, he’s sitting at my little work bench/desk behind my desk so it’s kind of crammed. And worse yet, he can see everything I do. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a ton of time to goof off or anything so it’s not that. However, when I do catch a break I tend to browse the news and write my posts for this website. But with someone else there I can’t do write. He could care less what I do I’m sure but it’s not that.
I hate it when people watch what I type while I’m typing. There I said it.
I have no idea why. It’s completely irrational. But it just irritates the piss out of me if someone starts reading my screen while I’m typing. So much so that I usually just have to stop typing altogether for a bit. Even my wife has experienced this whether she was consciously aware of it or not. Even now, I’ve been at my computer for the past hour or two with her sitting next to me at hers and it wasn’t until just a few minutes ago when she left the room that I brought up my web site and started typing this post. All while she’s off somewhere else.
Shh… here she comes. Make like you’re doing something else.
OK she didn’t come in. I feel like I’m hiding something from her by not typing around her but it’s nothing like that at all. I have no idea why I feel that way and no idea how not to feel that way. This is why most of my blog posts and my writing on my stories gets done while I’m in the privacy of my office at work. During my breaks of course.
Anybody else have this problem? Or something like it that you’d like to share?
I started writing again the other day. No, not on the zombie series. [Well OK that's not entirely true. I did do a little work on The Killing Fields at lunch today.] This is another new story line. Something along the lines of a children’s book. For adults. Because of all the blood and death. You know… for kids. *swivels hoola-hoop*
Yeah OK so there usually isn’t a whole lot of blood and death in kids books so this would obviously not be the correct classification. I was just thinking of something light-hearted like Jumanji and Night at the Museum mixed with something a little more disturbing like Hellraiser and The Relic with maybe a bit of Cthulhu mythos influences to spice it up a bit. I probably won’t finish it just like everything else, but you never know. Maybe if things settle down at work after I get back from the States, I can try and concentrate on writing more often. Maybe some more drawing too. That would be nice.
If any of my readers is a police officer, especially one that’s been on a murder crime scene, and wouldn’t mind me asking them a few procedural questions through e-mail, send me a message @ cybrpunk 13 @ gmail dot com. Your country or state of jurisdiction is not important to me so don’t let that stop you.
Even though he isn’t a high salary executive, Joe is what most people would consider a world traveller. He works long hours for his company and spends a fourth of his time each week flying from one city to another. He likes his work and his company and doesn’t even mind the constant travel so much. He does have one complaint though. Although he always gets a window seat, he never has a view.
Every single flight, day or night, Dallas or Tokyo, his window always looks out over the wing of the airplane. He doesn’t know if its just bad luck or someone in the airline was just picking on him, but it never fails to happen. Its especially grating when the captain makes an announcement to look out his side of the plane to see the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower or some other scenic treat that everyone else gets to “oooh” and “ahhh” over.
Today Joe is flying from Singapore to Hong Kong. He is sitting in his requested window seat and he stares out the window at the grey wing obscuring his view of the water. He bitterly wonders what he did to deserve this curse and wishes that just once he could get a clear view of the scenery below. He pushes the button to lean back his seat and tries to nap for the remainder of the trip.
Joe wakes suddenly to the unexpected sound of metal grinding on metal which is immediately followed by the cries and screams of many of the passengers of the plane. Joe looks out his window and sees the wing and the sky as usual. He notices that it looks like the wing is not only flexing up and down like normal but forward and backward as well. A flight attendant is walking down the aisle trying to calm people down and asking them to be quiet. No one seems to believe her as the tearing sounds come again.
Joe never screamed or panicked. It was with mixed emotions that Joe greeted the sight of the wing crumpling and tearing and eventually ripping from the side of the plane. Even though he knew that they would all die, he had a spectacular view of the sea and the islands below from his window seat.
This is a crosspost from DarknessWithin.net.
I remember one time when I was eight years old and my parents took me to a county fair. It wasn’t our county as ours didn’t have fairs worth mentioning but the next nearest one to us. They always had the best fairs with ponies, demolition derbies, funnel cakes, lemonade and my personal favorite: a magician.
Since as long as I could remember at that point, I was fascinated with magicians. My Dad always harrumphed and said it was all fake, but at least Mom encouraged my fantasies as a child. When I went to a see a magician, I’d hang on their every word and their every motion. I’d gasp at the appropriate times and clap like a lunatic at the end of the show. To me, magic was real and I knew that when I grew up, I would be a great magician too. That is, until the county fair.
You see, up till that point I had always been a spectator. Spectators are safe in their seats and safe in the knowledge that it’s just a show, no matter what their beliefs. That day however, the magician asked for a volunteer. As fascinated as I was with magic, for some reason I didn’t want to be a volunteer. Something about this man on stage sent my skin crawling up and down my spine when he looked at me. I did not raise my hand and tried to make myself as small as possible as the other children frantically waved their arms in the arms in the air while simultaneously making sounds like constipated monkeys. I would have crawled in my Mother’s pocket at that point if I could have. I watched the magician cover his eyes with one hand and make a grand gesture of pointing out at the audience and sweeping his hand back and forth across the crowd. And when his finger stopped while it was pointing in my direction I knew that it must have been one of the other children with their arms in the air that he meant. He uncovered his eyes and his eyes immediately locked with mine.
“Come on up, boy!” called the man from the stage. He grinned at me and the assembly of kids exhaled in a single disappointed sigh.
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I am not a beach kind of person but that doesn’t stop me from really looking forward to our island vacation. Six nights in what we are hoping is something close to paradise should do the trick. Maybe next time we can go someplace with mountains. I’m more of a mountain and rocks kind of person. Need to pack tomorrow night after work. We leave bright and early on Thursday.
In other news, you’ll be seeing another original story here tomorrow that will be cross-posted on the fiction site I told you about before. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with zombies for those of you waiting for DAY FIVE. It is a decent diversion though, so keep an eye out for that tomorrow. Hopefully you’ll like it.
I need to go take the dogs outside to do their thing before bedtime so I suppose that’s it for now. Goodnight.
DAY FOUR: IN A CAGE
“SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!” I scream at them as if they can understand me. Maybe they can. Who the fuck cares anymore. I’ve been trapped in this fucking cage for four or five days now. I don’t know. There’s no day, no night and no end to that constant moaning. It’s enough to drive a person insane. Add to the situation that there’s no food, water or toilet in here and we got ourselves one serious problem. Oh… and no way out. I hadn’t thought about for a while. Except maybe five minutes ago. And probably every two to five minutes before that. I don’t have a whole lot else to keep me occupied these days.
So for the eight thousand and first time, let’s take a quick look at my world of shit. I’m trapped in the lay-a-way cage of my local Z-Mart since the day my shift as a stock-man quickly got extended till the end of my life. Whenever that will be. I’m surrounded with a few shelves filled with cardboard boxes. I’ve been through every box at least five times. I guess its common sense but people don’t seem to put food or drinks into lay-a-way. “Or fucking toilet paper!” I yell out loud as I smash my hand against shelf. And… “Oww! That hurt!” I yell again as pain in my hand flares up for doing something stupid like punching a metal shelving unit. I hold my hand against my stomach and nurse my ego more than anything. I look around for any sort of applause from my rapt audience but they don’t seem to care what I do as I long as I’m still breathing. Well, I’m sure they would care if I opened the door to this palace of mine. I’m sure they’d love that. Zombie, party of 200: your table is ready.
No toilet paper, but someone did take the time to put a toilet seat into lay-a-way because they obviously must not have needed it too badly. “Oh, we should get a new toilet seat. Ya know… sometime. Let’s put one in lay-a-way so we don’t have to pay that $29.99 all at once.” I hope the people who thought of that little gem are in this crowd right now. Although I shouldn’t be too annoyed with them. That seat and a mop bucket are the only thing I’ve had to take a dump in since I got in here. It would really smell like shit in here if it weren’t for all the decaying dead bodies pressing themselves against the chain link fencing. Ah, the smell of death and shit. I wish I had some brownies.
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Writing | cybrpunk | 
September 30, 2009 8:00 am | 
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