Sentential Links

It’s time for links!

:: Still, if nothing else, this serves as a valuable object lesson: when you read this (well, if you can get through the entirety of it; it’s a joyless slog, all self-congratulation and abuse of no doubt multiple thesauri), you can take solace in the fact that this is a man who is, in fact, a professional writer, and who is living proof that a writing career has much more to do with work ethic than it does innate talent. (Ohhhh, boy. Good old John C. Wright, spouting the long-winded crazy, as always. I can’t push my way through that…I much prefer Wright’s short-form crazy. And don’t forget that according to him, by 2059 homosexuality will again be considered a form of mental illness!)

:: In November of last year, I self-published my first novel, Falling For Your Madness. It changed my life! First of all, this was a life long dream now coming to pass, but other than that I learned some very interesting and surprising things too!

:: So humor has been banished. Everything is, if not grim and brutal, at the very least to be taken absolutely SERIOUSLY. Everyone is serious about everything they do, and every villain is a serious threat to humanity that must be fought by serious heroes being seriously serious. The only humor still allowed is to make fun of how silly things used to be; everyone can mock the way that the Hulk used to talk, but nobody seems to understand that it was a joke. Even when we’re not getting on-panel disembowelings and villains raping women to show how evil they are and the other trappings of arrested adolescence, the pathological avoidance of anything that might be considered “fun” is almost total. (Maybe this is why Squirrel Girl and Deadpool are such fan favorites. They actually get to be…gasp…silly.)

:: Could it be that some students regard a university degree as a sort of credential awarded upon the conclusion of four years of tedium? How miserable! “I’m sitting here waiting for my ticket to be punched.” What a way to go through life.

:: If you want to see how people’s fears and hopes for the world have changed over time, pick up a range of Star Trek novels. (Huh. I stopped reading tie-in novels years ago, although there are a few I wouldn’t mind checking out at some point….)

:: So I’m going to get me a magic feather and stop folding under all the lame excuses. I’m going to make solid, specific word count and pitching/querying goals and actually write them down and use whatever magic feathers I can find to accomplish them. No excuses, and here’s to flying.

:: Of course, no one is their right mind in this home-baking house of perfectionism would spend good money on such a thing as a frozen banana cream pie. (Well, frozen pies do have their uses…of which they already discovered the finest!)

More next week!