I almost forgot to mention this! As promised, sort of, this is an all-Evening Standada week on Anacrusis. Hover your mouse over the story text to see the title that inspired it. Your entertainment has never been more like the news!
Category: Pulverbatch
Story Hacks: Sixth in a Series
Pronouns? More like don’t-nouns!
Sure, you can use pronouns if you have to, like if you’re addressing someone in the second person and don’t know what real name to use. But here’s an AlternaTip–just imagine up a real name for your audience! For example, I’m going to call you Laura. Isn’t that better, Laura? (I bet that somewhere somebody’s reading this who actually is named Laura and they think it’s so awesome. Laura: it totally is!)
The real “Pronoun Problem” is that they’re so short. Pronouns reduce not only page count, but often word count as well! Plus, if you (Laura) have more than one person of a given gender in a story, pronouns might refer to any of them, reducing the laser-like accuracy of Laura’s sentences. And such ambiguity can lead to worse things, like speculation, or interpretation! These serious flaws may even prevent consumers from properly receiving your (Laura’s) Vision.
FACT: The previous paragraph was 56% shorter before I took out all the pronouns. FACT!
Writing without pronouns (or “liprography”) may not come easily at first, Laura, but it can be done–with enough AccomPracticeMent. Here’s an example to get Laura started!
“As you know, Kevir, today is your wedding day and it is a very important day for all of Pseudio,” said Kevir’s Mom seriously.
“Yes, serious Mom,” said Kevir to Kevir’s Mom. “It’s because I’m marrying the Princess Launa, the most famed Princess in the Land, who loves Kevir’s Mom just as if you, Kevir’s Mommy, were Launa’s own Issues Mommy!”
“I do!!!!!” Princess Launa began saying to Kevir’s Mommy. “You, Kevir, and I, Launa, are almost like your Mommy’s son and daughter!”
“Which is as it should be,” said Kevir’s Serious Mommy. “After all, no woman can truly love you, Kevir, unless she, Launa, is family!”
“Kevin’s Mom is right,” exclaimed Kevir.
“All of us love each other, but not necessarily in any sexual manner!!!!!” said Kevin’s Serious Fucking Mommy Issues.
Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Laura, seriously, give me a call because I have this screenplay and there might be a part for you.
Follow-up
Mr. Munson wrote me a great email about The Implicit, and noted echoes of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Valentine for Ernest Mann–which I think we read in his class, and which I had completely forgotten until I read the “poem like a taco” bit, but had clearly absorbed and recycled. Just illustrates the point, really.
And Holly made two cakes (they were supposed to be a four-layer cake, but they got nervous and decided to be two cakes instead), one of which had this written on the dish around it:
Eventually he finds himself writing another pubic hair story, and realises he’s bored. He’s done three zombies, twenty-six otherworldly small girls, ninety-three ninjas; fifty states, every tube stop, all two thousand UN constituent nations, cutting everything he’s ever seen into 101-word pieces. He’s sent the small girls to Ganymede to fight the ninjas (the small girls won), and then set up a rematch deep within the sun (they united against their common enemy, the masked superwhale).
“Next time,” he says, eyes narrow beneath the unruly crest of his white eyebrows, “a hundred and two.”
People read my stuff and write about it. There is no better feeling in the world.
The insignificance of numbers
Today I posted the 1001st story in Anacrusis, and I wanted to do something a little different for the occasion: an audio story, read aloud by a startling array of generous people. I thought the hardest part would be actually asking them to read the silly little thing without cringing, and the next-hardest would be the actual mixing process. It turns out that the hard part is not being able to use all the material from everyone for the whole thing. They were all so good!
Thanks to Robert Baker-Self, Maria Barnes, Amanda and Jon Brasfield, David Clark, Amanda Dale, Kevan Davis, John Dixon, Holly Gramazio, Josh Hadley, Sumana Harihareswara, Stephen Heintz, Catriona Mackay, William O’Neil, Leonard Richardson, Kristofer Straub, and everyone who’s had a kind or critical word to say about Anacrusis. Let’s do this again when we hit 10,201.
I’m running the first (theoretically) paid ads ever on xorph.com, now. I don’t have any particular moral objection to ads; it just never seemed worth the trouble before. Until Clockers got boingboinged.
As Holly pointed out, I wrote 991 extremely short stories and she wrote 41 stories that interlock in a crossword, and yet the fanfic we did for a bad movie is what starts eating into our fifteen minutes. Internet is really weird.
Self-exposure
I have the instinctive habit of never mentioning the goals I set for myself, on the grounds that if I then fail to meet them, I don’t have to be embarrassed. But embarrassment makes for good blog entries! So here’s the setup, even if it takes a long time to pay off, one way or another.
My goals for 2007 are to get my driver’s license and complete a half-marathon.
My goal for 2008 is to teach at the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program.
My goal for 2009 is to attend Clarion South.
A day late
I keep track of Anacrusis anniversaries in an idiosyncratic way, which means that I don’t notice things like June 21st, the day I first went public with it. But Mister Munson did, two days ago:
“Something seems to have worked in your googlebombing efforts. Bobrulez is higher in the google results than your blog site.
Hey, Happy Birthday to Anacrusis tomorrow, and as a nod to that spirited bit of rhetorical dabbling, I have posted my xanga entry in 101-word-anacrusis form.
It’s no great shakes, but it was fun. It is actually more of a writing exercise, isn’t it? It’s like Soduku for the literate.
Not sure I want to get on face book, it just seems so public. Xanga is so much more anonymous.
By the way, this email was an anacrusis!
I’m hooked.
Bryan”
I’m not sure whether I prefer “Sudoku for the literate” to “fiction for the attention-deprived,” but it is a nice dig at Sudoku. I’m not a huge fan of crosswords, but at least they’re not entirely computable.
“Say hello to Bono and Sandra Day O’Connor!”
All right, I freaking live with The Surrealists, it’s about time I memed it up, right?
Presenting Dr. O’Callaghan’s Scientific Fist Names Generator.
This is all 30 Rock’s fault really, even if they didn’t invent the gag. I love 30 Rock.
I am maybe working a little too hard to keep from turning on comments here
Further discussion of A Small Town Anywhere is kind of exploding in its Dispatch follow-up post, including (just now) some lengthy and illuminating commentary from one of the organizers.
How I spent my summer abroad
So some of you may remember that I like Hackers. I like it a lot. I realized some time ago that while I am not into Rocky Horror, if Rocky Horror was Hackers, I would be a full on costume-wearing hot-dog-throwing line-reciting fanboy. GET A JOB, I would shriek. YOU ARE IN THE BUTTER ZONE.
I recently moved to London and into a house where the function of the residents is, essentially, to egg each other on about goofy ideas. Catriona provided the idea of doing read-throughs of plays or movie scripts as a form of participatory recreation, and Holly asked if there was anything I’d like to toss in the prospective-script pile. Could it be really bad, I asked? Because there was one that could be funny.
Later, we were passing around emails about said read-throughs and a possible visit to a museum full of automata. Somehow Holly came up with the joke of steampunk “hackers” as “clockers,” constructing automata instead of programs. I laughed at it. Then I said “clock the Bigben!” Then I said “oh no,” because I really had more important things to do.
Instead, Holly and I spent a few weeks interpolating the movie script into 1860s London, replacing the absurd computer-feats with absurd clockwork and technobabble with Victorian slang. Then we revised and got it printed and got some friends to come over and wear funny hats, and this was the result: Clockers.
Of the people who did the read-through, only Holly and I had read the script or indeed seen the original movie beforehand, and they all did a fantastic job picking up multiple parts and figuring out what was going on. And putting up with my Matthew Lillard impression. Thanks again, guys, and let me know if you want a link under your name on that page.