Wow. Thanks a lot for that post, Debaser. That's really helpful there. I've written a lot of short stories in English class, many of them consisting of lotts of people getting real, real dead, and have continued doing so at times that are inappropriate (like, say, math class.) The problem I'm having right now, before I can get started, is trying to mass all of these ideas into one coheesive work of literature that has--hahaha--a plot of some sort. Yeah.

Okay, JB, I am kind of reminded of a younger and/or less filled with self-loathing me and, while I will forever hate and despise you for that, it does put me in some sort of position to offer a couple pieces of advice:

Ideas are easy. Real easy. Myself, I probably get twenty or thirty ideas of one sort or another every week. But most ideas in and of themselves are crap. Read my outline for a Toad comic over in the other base. In my head, that idea seemed (and still seems) really cool and wonderful and fantastic. But on paper (or electrons, as it were) it doesn't look like much.

A building monster, a deconstructivist take on Satan; these things, or things like them, have been done before.

A superhero riding the edge of insanity while hunting down his girlfriend's killers? Old hat before I was born. Dreams actually existing in another dimension? Old hat before people wore hats. Space travel and high technology being lampooned by absurdist humor? At least as old as space itself.

And yet, I have just described the "idea" behind one of my favorite pieces of IF, one of my favorite comics series, and one of my favorite books. The art lies in the artistry.

Worm telling you to practice writing on these message boards is good advice. And I don't just mean for the case of learning how to properly punctuate and format a paragraph.

There's a rythm to writing. Even prose (good prose, at least) has something approximating a poetic meter. Really read the way Robb structures his sentences. Sometimes, the difference between something he writes eliciting a cackle of glee or simply a chuckle is the way an insertion of ", badly," alters the comic pacing. I'm constantly playing Salieri to his Motzart on that front, but I can't tell you how much better I feel about my writing (in the purest sense of the word "writing") since I first played Chicks Dig Jerks half a decade ago.

On a similar note (but one that involves less gobbling of Mr. Sherwin's nob), next time you read a book, pay close attention to the way it's structured. Figure out how characters are introduced, how information is imparted, how time is passed. Find the seams. I have no clue what books we've read in common or I'd provide examples, but when you read a paragraph in a book, try to figure out why it was placed there. Does it provide exposition, illustrate some facet of a character, provide "foreshadowing", what? Productive lines of prose often do two or three things at once, and hopefully manage to be entertaining on top of that.

The key, after that, is rewriting and realizing how much your shit stinks. If, in rereading your work, you encounter a paragraph of yours and you suddenly realize it sounds like absolute shit and you're never going to produce anything decent and everyone who reads this will be secretly laughing at you, then that probably means you're starting to develop an objective opinion of your own work. Rewrite the offending paragraph over and over until you don't feel that way anymore. This is actually a semi-decent way to "gear back up" for that difficult first sentence, since you'll be writing, but won't really be forced to come up with brand new material.

Anyway, that's my take. And it's based entirely upon assumptions since I've never read so much as a sentence of fiction from you, but I think as general advice it's pretty good. It's everything I've managed to come up with in a decade of not quite producing literature.

Hire someone to read as you write and hit you when you start going nuts....

I was thinking full novel-size here. And, yeah, I see what you're saying. For me, the first two and the last one sentences are always the toughest to write. This includes if I break for five minutes and come back; I'll have real trouble coming up with a couple more sentences at the beginning. But once I get going, I have a tendency to write, and write, and write.

There are maybe twenty regular users here. Just don't bump. Jonsey is right. I myself think you need to practice in posting before you start writing. My mom was into writing a book (And wrote a few) for a bit and they really will throw your stuff away if you don't write it very well*. Unless you are going to publish it your self [pardonme]ha ha ha ha[/pardonme] which is very hard. Are you thinking novel or novella here? How many pages are you envisioning here?

*Unless it is good enough to be written in chalk on a sidewalk by a child with a sidewalk colored piece of chalk held in his cleft lip and still have an orgasmic affect on ANY being to read it.

Hey, Robb, did you manage to get a picture for shameless bumping that I can use? Just curious.

James Bond wrote:My mind has a really strange way of (A) stringing a bunch of seemingly-unrelated details together into a thought process that other people

OK, first off, you don't want to do a list like that unless you have a B, C and D available.

laching

Also, definitely spell-check your work before sending it out. If you have a word shift that a spell-checker doesn't catch that's one thing and that's what editors or for, but you're going to want to make sure that non-words are properly caught.

I mean, it went from pree-sunset glow to almost completely fucking dark in like fifteen minutes. That shit is extreeeeemme. (for the record, a thunderstorm did not occur, much to my intense disappointment--where I live they are uncommon to the point of being freak weather events.)

A word other than 'fucking' would probably serve you better here when describing how dark it got. Additionally, you'll soon find out that in writing, getting characters into a completely dark and isolated location is a dime per dozen. Ask yourself some questions about what the night was like -- one of the best descriptions of night I've ever read came from a Batman comic, actually. The word "filthy" was used. That little word alone spoke volumes about how it was. Growing up in Rochester we'd actually get nights like that -- calling a night out like that implies that it was wet, that the ground was muddy, that debris was floating around the air... and that's just from one word, albeit a word which has a meaning, unlike 'fucking' in the above. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for swearing and cursing where appropriate, but I don't think it was appropriate here.

Also, I think you'd be better off if you didn't spell words like 'extreme' up above with extra letters. You're tryin to get the reader interested in your character here, and I don't think that quite does it.

Lastly, you want to capitalize the word "for" in the parenthesis there. You did get the punctuation correct, though, which is nice.

OK, waitasec, I just read through the rest of this again -- is this prose here, or are you just talking about your idea as a whole? I was under the impression that this was the start of a book, for instance. Argh, I misunderstood you here. OK, let me re-read this.

Okay, I understand, I was just bringing it up, 'sall. As for feedback, well, I really am not picky. I'm basically looking for something that could actually kickstart the *plot* of the story. I've got a zillion gimmics, but no plot to tie them in with. Oh, and see post #5 for more ideas of mine, if you please.


My mind has a really strange way of (A) stringing a bunch of seemingly-unrelated details together into a thought process that other people would find completely
insane, and laching onto completely random thoughts for no good reason. So one day I was walking downtown when it began to get so rainy that I was
fairly sure that a thunderstorm would soon follow. I mean, it went from pree-sunset glow to almost completely fucking dark in like fifteen minutes. That
shit is extreeeeemme. (for the record, a thunderstorm did not occur, much to my intense disappointment--where I live they are uncommon to the point of
being freak weather events.)

I began thinking of the Stephen King short story "The Mist". You may have heard of it. It is in the short story collection
"Skeleton Crew", along with "The Monkey" and "The raft" and "silver bullet" and other horrendously-disturbing tales, and has been published on its own
as well as made into a radio play that was actually not bad if you ignore the fact that the swear words are completely removed ("the windows are just plate
glass." "holy sh... we'd better go get Norton." "ho, sheesus! Up to last week we had those barbecue lighters!") which i am willing to ignore--its radio,
for gods sake--and the incredibly commical way the characters are compelled to describe the creatures they're about to get killed by to no one ("certainly
not an ordinary spider its something larger not, maybe, maybe not even a spider at all--aaah! Aaaah Aaaaaaahhhhh!!") which I am not willing to ignore.

Anyway, its about a group of people who got trapped in a grocery store after a bank of unrealistically-impenitrable fog encloses them in one day after
a big storm. But this is not normal fog, of course. Oh no, *this* is *monster-generating* fog. Inside the treacherous mist roam gigantic spiders the size
of dogs (Nemesis flashback! PJ FLASHBACK! AAAAIAAUUUAAGGHHH!!), [... Don't ask. *DON'T* *ASK*.] tiny insectile pink wormlike things, huge pteradactle-like bird things with leathery wings
(said leathery wings, I believe, get approximately six lines more description than the main character's wife), huge tentacles that leadd to god alone knows
where and have acidic suckers--like the acid in the spiderwebs, huge things with six legs the heighth of telephone poles with a bunch of the pink things
(TM) clinging to them, and many more that aren't mentioned. They also seem to be hanging around the store for unknown reasons, as whenever someone ventures
outside they are attacked in no less than five whole minutes (and I'm talkin' at *most* here, folks). Also, the power is out due to the afore-mentioned
storm. This is good because the automatic doors ("these stupid automatic doors, I thought they were automatic!") politely refuse to open for the creatures,
and bad because a lot of the food there is spoiling. If you're curious (which you're not), the main character ends up gathering up a group of "hard-bitten
survivors" (I.E: not the ones who refuse to believe the stories of weird creatures (they are killed within the first fifteen minutes, "nach"), the religeous
nuts, the Screaming Useless Bitches (TM)) including the store manager (who refuses to leave the store--talk about dedication. Jesus.), the main character, the main character's kid, the main character's swiftly-discovered
banger (he does her on the first, possibly second, night. Jesus *Christ*. "I've seen a pile of those sleeping pallots in the manager's office. Its empty. There's a lock on the door. Whaaaat? I saw you looking at me like that..." *twitchtwitch*), a guy with a shotgun in his trunk, an elderly woman (but this is the actually
useful kind of old lady--the kind that will break your arm three times if you look at her wrong), the assistant manager of the store who somehow manages
to be the best shot in the store ("I did a little target shooting in Nam.") and probably a couple others I forgot make a break for the main character's
car. They make it, of course, and go to the main characters home--oops, the road's been blocked by trees! Guess the wife's gone, time to bang Amanda! Twitch, TWITCH.
So they start heading south, the end, haw haw. But I digress.

I started thinking "what would it be like to be stuck in a farmacy or a grocery store? I
mean, how could you consider it to be a bad thing? The main staple and motivation that gets characters to move out of their safe hiding place and get severely
fucked over in survival horror, food and drink and a place to sleep, are well taken care of. And unless the store manager was a complete and total loser
dickhead prick, it'd probably be something along the lines of "free coke for all! W00t!"

And, while thus absorbed in this thought pattern, (I was walking
under the overhanging roof of the buildings to avoid the rain) I promptly ran smack dab into a big-ass post used to hold up the roof. Something about the
stinging *smack* of the hit gave me the at the time a highly amusing image that the post had just bitchslapped me. This vanished instantly, replaced by a bit of
thought "... if that building was alive, that post would be *perfect* for a foot it could use to punt people, cars, small buildings..." And, of course,
I ran into another post. A long and quite possibly crowd-pleasing flood of profanity, naturally, ensued. But that is beside the point. I started thinking
"Wouldn't it *totally fucking rock* if, somehow, a building that was going to be torn down to make way for a housing development became sencient, and not
being oh so fond of the idea, decided to rip itself out of its own foundation and storm in a richeously pissed manner down to the local zoning office and
start with some puntin', Godzilla-style, completely obliterating everything in its path?" My response to this question was a resounding "*yes*." Your milage
may vary. Thus, I decided to make a book with that at the end of it.

A couple weeks later I was watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (King
Dinosaur, if you're interested, which of course your not) and during the fifteen-minute long safety film that was being made fun of, which existed of a
car driver getting put on trial by god after he got in a car accident and died and is goofily obsurd, I started thinking in my warped way... what if hell,
although its terrible and evil and in general a not nice place to be, wasn't all it was cracked up to be as far as enforcement and security was concerned?

Who *says* that the devil is in fact a huge demon with... leathery wings..., a forked tongue (that basteech is *so* ripping off Revenger, muthafuckeh),
and can breathe fire out of his nostrels? What if he's a slightly pompous and overweight, but other than that, perfectly normal demon who just happens
to be The Man (TM)? What if, in short, Hell was designed much like a present-day office block, with a whole bunch of "lesser demons" running around, doing
the devil's bidding, and all of that "I am the manj who can singlehandedly torch the entire world, assjacks!" is simply devil PR designed to make you not
attack him? I mean, if you knew that Hell was a well-organized and heavily-fortified area but with one man at the top, you would want to organize and defeat
him, whereas if you think that the devil is one man who can basically do whatever the fuck he wants to, Timmy, you seriously do not want to fuck with the
guy.

So, as my brain continued to rationalize, he has a bunch of his lesser demons go, taking whatever shape they will including none at all, into the
world and causing a certain quota of "bad things" (TM) to happen. Certain kinds of catastrophes give more "points" than others, therefore an earthquake
that makes the rictor scale yell "What's the point anymore!!!" and self-destruct will be far more valuable than, say, a car crash. If the demon fails
to meet his quota someone else will have to take up his slack and perform *more* evil deeds than he normally would have to, which makes the other demons
mad at the first one that they had to work harder, and thus the code is enforced. A couple details I thought up: this explains how (no facts can back this
up but bare with me) there were no car crashes or tornados durring the Vietnam War. The demon running the war was doing such a good job that the others
basically said "aw screw this, I'm takin' a day off" until the Vietnam war guy got verry verry pissed about the whole afair and ended it so he could finally
get some goddamn piece.

The demons, if they wish to be seen, will take the form of a busness executive/polititian (sharkskin suit, flinty eyes, you know the look). This is ue to
a careful studdy of today's culture. Demons, no matter how they try, can't quite get the whole human appearance thing down quite right; there's always
an aura around them that makes people uneasy. Therefore, since they can't hide it they cammoflage the effect by taking a slightly-unsettling form, ergo
anyone off-put by their aura of wrong will think "he's a polititian, that's why I get this instinctive feeling not to trust him."

A *nother* few weeks later, I suddenly and for no reason at all that I can come up with got the sudden image of an elivator saying "Level, five. Now, get
the fuck out of my elivator!", the floor under the hapless travolor heaving upwards and throwing him out into the hallway.

Then, like an orgasm... IT HAPPENED!! [disclaimer: the following and proceeding post is nothing more than a highly-disguised excuse to use the previous
phrase. Thank you.] I was trying to figure out how to actually write this shit into a story, wheen I got the crazy idea "Why don't you combine them?"

So, I've now got the idea that a demon, in one of his "evil acts", telepathically inserts the instructions for how to give an inanimate object "life" (and
not undead life, but a real personality) to some highly-distraught guy, who decides for whatever reason that he wants to hex the hotel he's somehow involved
in building, and promptly does so. (this is because one of the few rules that everyone is forced to abide by is that you simply do not fuck around with
free will.) Hilarity, naturally, ensues. But, yet again, I ran into that metaforical brick wall yet *again*. Because, quite frankly, I don't have a plot.

I've got several ideas, and I've got a premise that I think could work, but I have no fucking clue whatsoever what to do with it.

So...

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

...I'm done! I'm done! Yee-motherfucking-haw! ...Ahem.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters.

I realize you can't edit your post as you entered it in as a guest, but do me a favor and post it again in this thread and reformat it for me. I'm not trying to big time you, it just gets very difficult to read over a giant blorb of text like that.

Also, what kind of feedback are you looking for?

(In addition, I am this close to getting a new computer game into final beta test, so the time I've been able to grab for the BBS has been low and probably will be low until I get the thing finished up. Hopefully the benefits the new game brings to the table makes up for my silence during this stretch.)

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

James bond, the bookmaker wrote: So... Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters. Honk honk honk!

Actually, I just got finished editing your X-Men review for tomorrow, so I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer this question of yours. I've got to burn through a few other things tonight, but I will get back to you on this one, bud.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

James bond, the bookmaker wrote: So... Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters. Honk honk honk!

Actually, I just got finished editing your X-Men review for tomorrow, so I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer this question of yours. I've got to burn through a few other things tonight, but I will get back to you on this one, bud.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

James bond, the bookmaker wrote: So... Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters. Honk honk honk!

Actually, I just got finished editing your X-Men review for tomorrow, so I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer this question of yours. I've got to burn through a few other things tonight, but I will get back to you on this one, bud.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

James bond, the bookmaker wrote: So... Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters. Honk honk honk!

Actually, I just got finished editing your X-Men review for tomorrow, so I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer this question of yours. I've got to burn through a few other things tonight, but I will get back to you on this one, bud.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

James bond, the bookmaker wrote: So... Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything? Anything at all? Hellooooo? Pleeeeease?

Er, hitting the "return" key twice after a paragraph would be good, for starters. Honk honk honk!

Actually, I just got finished editing your X-Men review for tomorrow, so I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer this question of yours. I've got to burn through a few other things tonight, but I will get back to you on this one, bud.

..................
James Bond "I'm a bumper! I have no shame!" *cries into a handkerchief*

A couple weeks later I was watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (King Dinosaur, if you're interested, which of course your not)

One of my favorites.

perhaps you should actually write a twenty page plot synopsys instead of free forming all over the place with Stephen King short stories ( some of his shorts could be called long johns) and get tho the point of the novel. then write a first draft here (make up a base Jonesy!) so we could ridicule you into psycotherapy and/or grammar class.

remind me to post the first draft of a Walter Gibson novel that I improved upon. It's quite funny. Bet nobody ever heard of him.

THE
LURKING IN THE
AARDVARK

*raises hand*

bot wrote:He said it was the very form of the child who proudly displays his/her feces to his/her parents, and seeks approval for said production.

hey, any1 else used to do that?

I think Freud was just playa-hating because his shitting skillz were so wack. I very much doubt that he would have excelled in our very own gay scat porn month.

He said it was the very form of the child who proudly displays his/her feces to his/her parents, and seeks approval for said production.

I want Debaser to have sex with my mother as well.

What did Freud say about artists who display their unfinished work?

bot wrote:You do know what Freud says about artists who display their unfinished work, don't you?

Does it involve having sex with your mother in any way, shape, or form?

Note that I'm not referencing the Oedipal complex here; I'm saying I want to have sex with your mother.

And by "you" I mean whomever is reading this post currently.

In point of fact, James, the fact that you have read more than one book by Stephen King - and, moreover, the fact that you cite him as some kind of authority - disqualifies you from being an author.

Seriously, though, I would think someone who was aspiring to be a writer would spend more time actually writing than horse-pucking their ideas around a forum full of smart-asses. You do know what Freud says about artists who display their unfinished work, don't you?

Try calling yourself an author.

Another idea I had back when was that some guy manages to create a device that can peer into the human brain. As a matter of fact, it actually allows you to move around inside of it. The thing creates a virtual reality matrix around you and the person, and makes a virtual reprisentation of the brain for you to walk around in. Since every brain is different, and everyone thinks differently, the background of the brain will be different for everyone as the device makes them as close to what the real life equivelent would be. Take an example: if you tapped into the brain of a computer nerd, you'd be sitting at a computer. The files on it would be the person's experiences and memories. If the person was a librarian, then the brain-machine would transport you into a library, where the books were the life experiences. If the person was big on CD burning, the place would make Stephen Hawking retire to a monistary, and the various CDs lying around would reprisent that person's life experiences. If the person liked clubbing, then the result would be something like the bar in Chicks Dig Jerks, only without price tags. The people on the dancefloors would reprisent the life experiences (you could talk to them and they'd all have one memory that they would share with you). You get the idea, hopefully. I wasn't sure on the size, wheter it was a huge aparatus-like thing or something small enough to carry around/conceal and aim at people. I was thinking that somehow two people would be chasing each other around in each other's/other people's heads. Another unrelated idea I had just to end a novel with was some assassin being killed and then waking up in hell. But hell is different for every person. In this case, he has to meet all of his victems. I was thinking the guy murdered a lot of pros for some reason or another, and when he showed up he'd see them walking out from around a corner one by one by one, and they'd surround him, and then one would walk up to him, smile sexily, and stabb him in the eyes with a knife.
Discuss! Now! Assholes! ^_-