In which I show you a new book cover!

Please visit my all-creativity blog, I’m Also a Novelist, to see my new urban fantasy cover! If you’re not following IAAN, why not?

 

The Monster is a two-blog writer!

If you’ve been following this blog for the fiction, please go visit my new site, I’m Also a Novelist. You’ll get all the creativity and none of the leftist heathen posturing. (Except for the extent to which my fiction is full of leftist heathen posturing, so…the more things change.)

 

The Little Free Library is a thing, and it is fabulous.

There is now a Little Free Library box in Greenbelt, Maryland courtesy of my mother, who is also a librarian in Montgomery County. You will find a variety of books to check out, including a pristine copy of Charlinder’s Walk. Unlike the public library, this one is open for business at all hours of every day. Visit the LFL’s Google Maps to find a library box in your area.

In other news, I have decided to run a separate blog just for my fiction. I am also sharing iPad wallpapers there because I have a fractal-generating app on my Mac and it’s fun. Go take a look at I’m Also a Novelist, will you?

Bradley Cooper, will you just write a freaking book?

The Words is the second movie I’ve seen in which Bradley Cooper plays a guy who wants to be a novelist but is having a difficult time getting started. In both movies, his character cheats in some way to get over the initial hump, but in Limitless, at least the creativity is his. Oh, and Limitless is not a waste of two perfectly good hours.

The lessons of The Words are, basically:

1. The publishing industry is so fucked up that it kind of, sort of, forces otherwise well-meaning writers to plagiarize.

2. Always save duplicate copies of your manuscript, even if you don’t keep them all in safe places.

Also: Jeremy Irons needs to learn a better American accent. Dude, if you don’t like the way we sound, then don’t play us in movies.

 

Elizabeth Wurtzel is a trainwreck. I can’t look away.

There is not enough booze in the world to deal with this.

Y’all had better appreciate this video; I was up until midnight filming, editing and uploading it. This morning was a shit show because I was so short on sleep.

Here are the selected highlights. Someone actually put these words together, and someone else actually decided to run them in a magazine and pay Ms. Wurtzel for her troubles.

*eyeroll*

Still working on the rubbernecking at the latest Elizabeth Wurtzel display of look-at-me. It’s in video form and taking a very long time to upload. I’m already up past my bedtime. We’ll just play it by ear.

Sunday Storytime: “This one time, I got kicked out of your art exhibit!”

This is the last Sunday of the year, and I don’t intend to continue Storytimes in 2013, at least not on a regular basis, so I’ll end the year with something fun. While I’ve tagged Book 4 as “meliana and miranda,” the snippets I’ve posted have been mostly about Scanlon, so I’ll skip ahead and show you some more of Meliana getting to know Miranda. You might like a little background info about fairies if you’re new to this WIP. This passage is from Meliana’s POV.

Why do I care about spelling and grammar? Let me show you some examples.

Buzzfeed shows us The 20 Most Unforgivable Spelling Mistakes of the Year gleaned from Twitter, and there are some real gems on that list. It is because of errors like these that I give grammar advice and tear at my hair over spelling mistakes. This is why grammar nerds exist and why we want you to be aware of when you’ve spelled, punctuated or conjugated something incorrectly and how to do it correctly in the future. It’s because we want to prevent you from becoming one of those typists. It’s because we want you to communicate clearly.

To communicate clearly, you need to be aware of how a spelling error can change the whole meaning of a sentence, and usually not for the better. Some errors merely make the user look sloppy or uninformed, but some actually render the message incomprehensible. For clear communication, one should know the difference between COLON and COLOGNE. One should know that OVERREACT is a single word and OVARY has no place in that sentence. If you put EAGLE where you want EGO, I might not catch your meaning. If you’re going to use the expression “time heals all wounds,” you should know what it means, and if you don’t know the difference between WOUND and WOMB, you probably don’t understand the expression.

If you think there is an O in GENIUS, you are not a genius at anything that involves language. If you think there is an A in COLLEGE, you will not do very well in a lot of college courses.

If you have Internet access, you can find an online dictionary, which will show you that SILHOUETTE is not two words. Yes, I see that it’s a tricky word. If you can’t remember whether it’s one word or two, try using SHADOW instead. In this case, the meaning is close enough. I know that AMBIANCE is also difficult, so if you’ve never seen the word in writing, try using ATMOSPHERE to get the same meaning across. You might misspell atmosphere, too, but you’ll probably get the first letter right, and that will make the sentence much clearer.

Look up VICARIOUS in the dictionary. Now, look up BI-CURIOUS. Not synonymous, are they?

If you can type HIPPOCRATES with perfect spelling, you should know that a HYPOCRITE is something else.

Yes, I am aware that English is a non-phonetic, idiom-heavy language full of exceptions that only weirdos like me ever manage to learn. Except, actually? No, I won’t take the excuse that English is so incredibly hard. I’ve learned and spoken Spanish and Albanian, and let me tell you: there is a lot of shit that we English-speakers don’t need to worry about. We hardly conjugate our verbs at all, our plurals are nearly effortless, we don’t adjust our adjectives for number or gender, and in fact our nouns are all gender-neutral. If you don’t need to worry about hitting the right form of the imperfect tense for an irregular verb, or how to decline a masculine plural noun in the accusative case, you should know the difference between ORGASM and ORGANISM before you try to use either word in a sentence.

Sunday Storytime: “You brought back their old selves kicking and screaming.”

‘Twas the Sunday before Christmas and,

stuck without chimes,

a Monster was ad-libbing

meaningless rhymes.

***

Okay, that happened.

Let’s see if I can scare something up for y’all.

Right. Here we go. Picking up where we left off, Scanlon is getting introduced to Professor Teng.

This apocalypse is broken, I demand a refund.

The next time the world supposedly ends, I would like to get up in the morning to some fires raging outside. This business of waking up in a dark, cold apartment is a total disappointment.

Besides, the end of the world was supposed to begin in June of 2010, and it was all supposed to be squared away by mid-May of this year. Charlinder and Eileen will tell you all about it.