Merry Christmas to all our beloved friends out there in the blogosphere and elsewhere. May your day be blessed, happy, love-filled and joyous.

God bless you all.

I watched a movie today on FearNET called Unearthed. It’s about a small Arizona town cut off from the rest of the world when a tanker carrying the fuel for the only gas station has an accident and all the gas is burned. The town sheriff begins to determine something strange is going on when animals and people begin being mutilated.

The basic set-up isn’t complicated. The plot isn’t tough to figure out either. If you’ve seen Alien, Jaws, or pretty much any horror movie you know the premise. A small band of survivors isolated with a monster of tremendous power and frightening as all get-out.

The movie was pretty bad. I don’t need to tell you the sheriff is a drunk because of an incident a year before involving a little girl who died. The sheriff blames herself and drinks to forget or calm or insert-your-own-excuse here. Of course the

incident is played back in a series of ill-devised flashbacks of a couple seconds each. (Of course it was an accident and the sheriff wasn’t to blame. We learn this right before the end of the movie.)

What I will tell you is, I’m sick to death of this cinematographic trick of shaking the hell out of the camera during filming. Holding it by hand, deliberately rattling it, whatever they’re doing. I think it’s supposed to emulate the realistic feeling of being in the scene the way it did when Steven Spielberg used the device during the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, but all it does in these cases is make a bad movie worse. TV shows use it too and

I’m tired of it. JUST SHOOT THE SCENE, dammit! If you don’t want the audience to be able to see what the hell’s going on why make a movie at all?!

A lot of the movie is filmed in dim lighting too. Not a good choice. And the CGI looked like a couple of students from a local community college’s computer animation program did the work. The lighting didn’t match the environment, the monster was not believable (not to mention being pretty much a modification of the creature from Ridley Scott’s classic, the aforementioned Alien), and the characters? Well, let’s just say it’s not a good idea to use stereotypes as characters in fiction, either written or visual.

So I wasted a good hour and a half of my life watching this dog and all its fleas. I don’t recommend you do the same. *Sigh*

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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Do you know what you’re reading? You’re reading a post I made for my blog with Microsoft Office OneNote.

I’ve been hearing about this OneNote thing for a long time. Supposedly, it’s a real boon to students, who can take intuitive style notes and drop images, web links, all sorts of things like that right in, anywhere they want.

So, I can leave ALL this white space around what I’m working on and position stuff just so, all without having to worry about the program making me jump through any sort of properties hoops or any of that.

Really, it’s pretty cool.

Then again, you guys know me. I’m a software sleaze-ball. I’ll do ANY software if it’s cool enough, and this OneNote thing’s pretty cool. I can see applications for linear thinking, or for making templates and notes for new novel ideas, story outlines … almost anything a writer needs to do except, maybe, for the actual writing.

So, you know I’m a happy camper.

-JDT-

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Well, the solstice is over and we’re on the way to having more daylight every day now. Soon we’ll be complaining about the heat and humidity again.

It’s been a surprise, as it normally is, to see how quickly 2009 went by. Just yesterday it was 2008 and there was all the bustle and excitement and disappointment of an election year. Then the holidays rolled around and here I am again at the holidays, and it feels like all I did was blink.

I have to go get my driver’s license renewed very soon here. I’m not looking forward to that. I’ve a lot of reasons for dreading it and all of ‘em are monetary in nature. Oh well, gotta do what I gotta do I guess.

I’ve spent the entirety of 2009 unemployed, living paycheck to paycheck with my unemployment benefits. That’s a blessing – it paid enough for us to survive, if not live. We’ve had some fun, but also some hard times. Right now is a hard time, and there’s no sign of it letting up. I keep hearing in the news about how things are improving in the economy and that simply doesn’t play out in my everyday life.

I had a full year and some where I could’ve been writing mostly full-time. I squandered it. At the same time, the stresses of job hunting and trying to figure out how to get by on a fraction of a regular salary hasn’t exactly been creative-juice flow medicine, you know? I can look back and regret what I didn’t do or look ahead and hope 2010 is better. I choose the latter, even though that’s not my nature. But everyday will be a little longer from here until June.

And that’s it. It’s all I’ve got right now, so I’m sorry this is so boring, but I really have nothing to add.

What about you? Plans for the holidays? Visits, visitors, staying at home?

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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I had another round of rough critiques on my last #fridayflash piece this weekend. I don’t really mind, and I did set this one up as an exercise and asked for input, but sometimes people are just rude in their criticisms. I guess that’s fine, but I still find it unwarranted and distasteful. I certainly wouldn’t be so rude to anyone else. Then again, I guess I’m not a critic and I wonder how many people would disagree with how I’ve handled my input and feedback. Meh.

Still, most of the feedback I got was helpful and constructive, so as much as a blow to the ol’ ego as it is, I have to say I’m learning stuff. Last weekend it was cut adjectives; more of that this weekend but now I can add in sentence length. I think that’s what most critics meant – too many sentences of similar rhythm and pattern and length. Ah well. Live and learn, right?

I also found Saturday night on the Internet very quiet. I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, but it seemed a lot of people didn’t hang out despite the huge snow storm in the northeast and being so close to Christmas. (Actually, maybe that latter bit is the reason after all.)

GREAT football game on Saturday night. I know my buds Sherri and Courtney Vail are happy campers today. My son is too; he couldn’t have been happier his new man-crush Tony Romo and the Cowboys upset the Saints. The game came down to the last six seconds and it was a thrill-ride. Great stuff if you’re into that sort of thing – and I am. Heh. And the Titans and Dolphins played a nail-biter that went into overtime. And how about the Steelers, coming back in the final seconds to win with NO TIME on the clock? Wow! Awesome. Quite a few games came down to the closing seconds before being decided as teams are battling for playoff spots. In fact, a whopping 24 teams were still in contention as of this weekend, so some excitement and desperation mixed for great games.

Nothing much else happening here. It was a quiet weekend, which I like, and so I’ve nothing to offer today. Not really. With Christmas so close at hand, I’m sure things will slow down here in the coming days. My posting will be day-to-day; I have stuff going on and I’m not sure how to organize it all yet. Stay tuned if you’re a mind to.

Hm. Let’s see … nope, I guess that covers it.

How was your weekend?

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

Hurrah! After more than a year of not being able to get searches beyond stuff related to resumes for marriage in the Asian subcontinent, the strange search terms have reappeared!

Oh joy, oh joy!

So I check my search terms every once in a while just to see if something hinkey comes along. And today I was rewarded with this gem:

Oh, how I’ve missed these beauts! Lookit that! Ain’t it just grand?

I have no idea who might be a whore as a hobby, but hey, everyone needs a hobby right? Might as well enjoy it, right? And if you can get paid for it to boot, well – show me the downside to this one?

Of course, it might just be someone who’s a whore for hobbies. But admitting you have a problem is the first step, don’t you know. So there you have it! I’ve been sought out by someone who’s a hobby whore or a hobbyist whore, whichever.

Also note the “what are two paragraphs” entry there. I’d say two paragraphs are … well, two paragraphs. One paragraph more than one. A pair. One paragraph and another paragraph. Maybe it’s just me, but did you really need the great Oracle Google for that?

Well, wasn’t this fun?

Have a great weekend everyone, and if you’re interested, my #fridayflash piece is up on my fiction blog. Stop by if you’ve a mind to.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

Well. I have a new toy to play with.

I love software. It’s no secret. Every time I find a new piece of software to play with, so long as it’s free or I can get it for free (ahem), I’ll try it. Within limits. of course, but for the most part, I’m a slut for software.

So I’ve experimented with a couple of email clients over the last couple years. Mozilla Thunderbird, for one. It was okay. At the time I installed it and tried it, it was not only free and not difficult to use, it was the only one which connected to almost all my email accounts. Yahoo mail, of course, is a problem child. They won’t let you connect unless you pay for their email, which stinks, and I won’t do it. So phooey on them.

Anyway, I’ve avoided using Thunderbird because it’s slow (to me), cumbersome, and doesn’t handle Gmail accounts well. Frustrated, I gave up on it. It was easier to use my little WebMail Notifier addon for Firefox than it was to use Thunderbird, and that just defeats the purpose.

So tonight, I lamented to my wife about how much I wanted to be able to work offline and still get my email. My feed readers and other things interfere with actual work I have to do lately, and I need to curtail how much time I spend on the Internet. So I wanted an offline client to check ALL my email. If I sign on to Firefox I’m going to end up losing a couple of hours. I’m undisciplined.

She spent a while searching and offered me two potential clients. One specialized in Gmail, but I have other accounts I want to check too. So I held that on the back burner. Then she told me about Threadsy. Okay, it’s great – she can tell you about it if you’re interested – but I wanted to stay off the browser, not work in it. So strike that.

Then she showed me one she loved. It used to be Microsoft Outlook Express. Now, it’s called Windows Live. It’s incredible.

First, it accepted all my Gmail accounts without problem. There’s a setting in Gmail you need to use to permit IMAPI access, then you’re good to go. It naturally took my Hotmail account without even asking. But it also offered to establish subscriptions for my RSS feeds. That means I could read your blogs, my comments and almost anything else providing an RSS feed, right here in my little Live window.

OH, heaven!

Now, I haven’t set up the subscriptions to either my RSS feeds or any newsgroups. But I have established all my email accounts and got them going. Live was so clever it took the ridiculous tags Gmail uses instead of folders, called labels, and it turned them into folders all by itself for me. So if I’m overwhelmed looking at my Inbox, I don’t have to filter the mail and risk forgetting to remove that filter later. I can just click in the folder of choice and see all the mail in those folders. And as email comes in I can just move it to the appropriate folder and it’s out of my way; then it syncs everything up on the mail server too and voila! My email is solved!

So, if you’re a Windows user, and you like Thunderbird or are on Outlook Express stubbornly refusing to upgrade, you need to look at this. The software’s free; it’s fast; it’s simple to use and set up; it’s interface is clean and intuitive. It’s fantastic, and I don’t generally rave about email clients. But I give this one two thumbs up and can’t wait to dig farther into it to see what else it can do.

Interested? You can download it here. It also offers to install a bunch of other stuff too, but you don’t have to take ‘em. I do, however, recommend Windows Live Writer.

Have fun.

-JDT-

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Okay, yesterday I got some good input on the best opening lines in fiction, music and movies from you guys. You did a good job providing me some great openings to books and songs and such. So today, I’m looking for the flip side, the B-side, the side nobody listens to.

What’s the worst line you’ve ever read in a piece of fiction? or scene from a movie? line from a song?

The worst thing you’ve run across. Something which made you groan, roll your eyes, heck, maybe even put the book, song, movie, whatever aside.

It doesn’t have to be the opening this time. Just something really bad you ran across somewhere in your experience. There are a ton of ‘em, I’m sure, and there are going to be some really fun examples given. But, as I did last time, I’m going to kick things off. For me, the worst line I’ve ever read comes from a classic book, written by Dashiell Hammett, in his hard-boiled novel The Maltese Falcon.

His eyes burned yellowly.

Okay, “yellowly” does a couple of great things for me. First, it’s an adverb. I hate adverbs. Second, it’s not even a real adverb. It’s so absurd and ridiculous, I actually laughed aloud when I read it. Then I had to read it to my wife. And she laughed, then groaned, then we laughed some more. I mean … c’mon, Dashiell. That’s bad.

So, that’s my entry. What’s yours?

Sound off and give me a giggle. I can hardly wait.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

I read a lot, but not as much as most of you do. Most of you.

Despite my experience with novels and how they’re written – which, while not extensive, certainly isn’t too shabby – I had an interesting experience sort of recently which made me stop and take stock.

Of the elements which hook a reader (or, if you’re a wannabe published writer as I am, an agent or editor) is the opening line. It’s crucial to the success of your novel. A good hook set in a reader’s mouth can reel them in for the whole book, even if the writing isn’t stellar from that point forward. The hook is the element most writers hear they need to focus on, make it as impactful as they can.

I asked an acquaintance of mine – technically, my wife asked him – to read a piece I considered submitting for publication. My friend Sherri had given me her feedback already, and my loving spouse offered me a good deal of her input too. So I thought a tie-breaker would be in order. You know, just see what shakes out from having someone who’s not as familiar with my work look over my story and see what they thought.

I asked him to be brutally honest, and to his credit he was. Of all the very helpful things he pointed out, one of the things he liked least in the story was the beginning (he hated the ending too; not a good combination). Sherri told me the hook was adequate, but not great. Only my gentle wife said it was good.

So I looked at the opening. I haven’t revised it yet. Time is not my friend now, but I don’t want the critiques to go for naught. I will make the changes suggested and see where it goes. But the story, as I wrote it, got a rejection from the only place I submitted it. I could keep trying, but I think I want to improve it first and see what happens.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the opening hook of my stories lately, since that event actually, and it got me to thinking:

What’s the best opening line to a book you’ve ever seen? What line stuck with you, wedged into your mind so solidly you can’t forget it? What book’s opening sentence grabbed you so viciously and refused to let go until you finished the book? Can you remember it?

Not a big reader? What about movies? What’s the best opening scene to a movie you’ve ever seen? Or a song – what song has the best opening lyrics, the best first line, say, you’ve ever heard?

I’ll start, okay? This is, in my humble and mostly uneducated opinion, the best opening line in all of literature:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

That’s from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower cycle, book one, The Gunslinger. It’s the opening line to the entire cycle, which goes for seven books.

How about you? What gets your vote?

Sound off, and let me know.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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Okay, so most of you are probably aware of the discussion which occurred on my fiction blog over the weekend. I posted a bit of a novel I’ve been kicking around for a few months. It’s the opening. But I posted it as a piece of #fridayflash, which is limited to about a thousand words. I wrote the piece at about 3 a.m. on Friday morning, read it and trimmed to to under 1K, then posted.

And it promptly met with mixed reviews.

Most folks found it entertaining and emotive, but some questioned the direction I chose for the piece. New blog buddy Linda had some excellent things to say. Foremost among those was use of the term “post critique syndrome”. It’s very much like PTSD in some ways. I was shell-shocked, discouraged, a trifle depressed and in the end, just wished I hadn’t posted the piece at all.

But CalliopesPen showed up and offered me some outstanding, glowing words. I sat and basked in them for several hours before I could even realize I had no words to describe how she’d made me feel. Sherri was also encouraging, and my loving wife? Well, she’s always the most amazing and supportive of all. Those who enjoyed it really did. Those who thought it could’ve used a bit less had me on several counts – too much adjective-spicing, too abrupt an injection of the fantasy element (even though this was deliberate, the 1K limit made the couple of sentences I used for that portion of the story severely inadequate), should’ve said more with “less words” [sic].

Then, Linda went a step further. She emailed me a line-edit critique of the piece.

It was amazing how many mistakes I’d made. How much I’d been lazy about the writing portion. I tried to work the piece as both a study in character and a fantasy-western piece, and that just didn’t work, period. I did overuse adjectives. I made sentences more complex than they had to be. Some of the wording could’ve been smoothed out and solidified by just saying the plain, ordinary thing I intended. But no, I tried to get all literati and eloquent, and boing! – weak piece. Big surprise.

In the end, what happened here can be boiled down to this: I tried too hard while not trying hard enough. I didn’t put enough effort into cleaning the prose, and I put too much effort into trying to “write”, like I think I’m supposed to write, like I’ve always told myself I write. Different pieces cry out for different voices to me. I’ve written some which were deliberately lyrical and lilting in tone. I’ve written them punchy and direct. I’ve written in the style of Poe and Lovecraft. I’ve written like King, and like Hemingway. In all of that, I never lost sight of the writing and the style.

In this short bit, I did absolutely lose sight of the writing. I blame those who came by and offered only accolades for previous works I’ve done. (Just kidding.) It inflated my ego to the point I thought I wouldn’t get anything but glowing reviews for this one too. (Not kidding there; my ego was out of control this time. I didn’t even imagine I’d get so many people calling out my flaws.)

Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I got over my PCS, and moved on to the point of being my usual, thick-skinned self (with a little more humble added, me hopes).

I’d love to do another character study, but this time I’m going to stay focused and remember my KISS principle. Finding the best way to say something with as few words as I can is the goal. One of the comments I received stated “I’d never suggest you eliminate adjectives from your writing.” That person is being honest, but for me, the best medicine is the harshest. Taking things to their extreme as much as I can helped me break my addiction to, reliance on, adverbs. This part about the adjectives is the next step. Finding the best noun-verb combination to say what I want to convey is the best medicine for me. It’s just how I work best.

So next Friday, if I have time to do an entry, I promise to make it better, and pay attention to those things I didn’t pay attention to this time. I promise to apply the lessons I learned from all the wonderful people who challenged me to stop trying to pull a fast one, stop thinking more of myself than I ought. Most of all, I promise to apply the lesson of humility I learned. It was long overdue and desperately needed.

So, to Linda, CalliopesPen, Sherri, Louise, Al Bruno III, and every one of the great people who sounded off on the piece – thank you. I needed you this weekend and you delivered. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

So … how was your weekend? What did you all do? Have fun? Ready for Christmas yet?

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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