hello friends

Two months since the last Merrick post WHAT

The apparently-book I'm writing is in a slow spot now -- I know the basics of what's about to happen, but I need to let it turn over in my head before I start putting words on not-paper -- so now I'm actually playing Sims again. Or, in this case, posting the update that I played months ago.




General warning: sometimes I swear.

Last time: One last gen 4 kid was born, a boy named Kurt, who sadly was a faceclone of his mother. Aldo was abducted by aliens, and Toby caused two different kitchen fires! Michael got haunted by 43724973343 ghosts, then got old at a sexy party with a baker's dozen of his college girlfriends. Toby joined her siblings in the I Done Gots Abducted By Aliens Club; Kurt grew up mysteriously fast into a teenager LOOK I WAS BORED OKAY, and then also took a trip to the saucer in the sky. Also he figured out how to set macaroni and cheese on fire. And then all the kids left for college!

( EHRMAHGERD! SERMS! )

Next time: possibly the gen 2 spares update, since all I really have left to do is fight with the gimp long enough to get a good animation out of it (the way the gimp does animations is really stupid you guys). Either that or the start of generation 5. Yes I am way behind on spares updates.

Spoiler from the first update of gen 5: ohmygod babiesssss D:

I'm also starting all of my posts with "so" again. (And no, the book in question is not this post, despite blue-green forest-dwelling-ungulate appearances.)

I had this idea for a story-ish thing way back in November; that's not so odd, since I get story-ish ideas fairly often. Most of them come to me as comics, though, and comics are hard, so I never do them. My room is littered with piles of scripts and doodles of some of the most crucial scenes of these things, and all they ever wind up doing is gather dust.

I wrote down this script in November, a brief scene of some story that had vaguely coalesced in my head, and then I did nothing with it. Hell, I even expected to do nothing with it; at the top of the first page, before the first line of the script portion, is written "The climactic scene of something I'll never actually get around to creating. I do a lot of those."

Then, in April, I started from the beginning, and I wrote it in straight prose. Both sides of two pieces of paper, hand-written. That sat around until the last week of May, when I got a Kindle. And I started looking for things to download on my Kindle, and realized, hey, anyone can publish a book on Kindle. And compared to some of the stuff on Kindle that people have downloaded, read, and rated 4+ stars, I am William fucking Shakespeare. I could totally write a book and put it where, conceivably, more than five people would see it. And I could tote it around on my own Kindle just like a real book!

So I started writing.

The longest single piece of writing I've ever produced before was, I think, my nanowrimo attempt back in 2003, which was to be a romantic comedy turned on its head. I got about 8600 words in and then gave up. The problem was that I came up with an idea that amused me, had a couple rough ideas for how the thing would start, but then... lost the thread. I only got as far as I did because I would phrase things using as many words as possible, just to up the count.

This thing I'm writing now? That I did four scribbly handwritten pages of in April, and then started writing for reals about two weeks ago?

I'm up past 20,000 words.

And I keep chopping words out. I keep writing things and then realizing that they're super-awkward and rephrasing them to be shorter. I keep writing, and the ideas keep coming. I've got a second doc running that's just full of notes on what I want to happen later, and about two nights out of three I'll go to bed, suddenly get an awesome idea, and have to get back up to type it in before I forget it. This is craziness. CRAZINESS I TELL YOU.

Of course, I have no idea if what I'm writing is actually good; in fact, I rather suspect it isn't. But it keeps coming. I keep starting scenes with a vague idea of where they'll go and then suddenly my characters take over and yes, of course, obviously they would say this and do that and then some other thing would happen. It's fantabulous. I'm not writing just to up the word count; I'm writing because I know what thing I want to happen next, and then when I'm done I look back and realize I wrote another two typewritten pages. And then five paragraphs of narration + dialogue pop into my head, almost perfectly complete, but it's not quite time for it to happen yet, so I jot it down in my notes file.

So. Yes. I am writing a book. This fact is pretty awesome.


Other awesome fact: I started an attempt at 2010's nanowrimo, too. It was going to be called Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse, and I got exactly this far:


Most of the main characters of Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse were going to be zombies, because the zombies were the ones who were having to survive against a world of ignorant, violent, gun-toting jerkfaces. One of the other zombies, a professor named Bertie Mendoza, is written up in one of those comic scripts that I'll never draw.

And now you know!