Stringing Words Day 2: Word Game threads

Sometimes you just need to relax and have a little bit of fun before going back to writing. That’s what word games are for.

There are two long-running word games on the Stringing Words forum. One is fairly simple, a word association game where you type in the first word that comes to your mind in response to the previous word:

Narratives from the real world.

I was listening to a Storywonk podcast today, more than a month behind as usual. This time, Lani and Alastair were talking about reality television, and some of the ways producers set up the shows so that no matter what the participants do or who wins, some kind of a natural narrative will flow naturally. They also mentioned that professional sports are set up in somewhat the same way, which naturally made me think of this cartoon:

Searchers in the Files

Okay, following a meme from Elizabeth Twist and LG Smith, I’ll share some of the most popular and strange search terms I’ve found on my blog statistics. I hope that you find them interesting. We’ll start with the popular ones.

1. ‘short dialog’ is easily the most popular search term for my blog ever, and I’m not quite sure why so many people are searching for short dialog instead of long dialog. But they end up here: A short dialog exercise.
2. ‘extra post’. Again, I find this a bit puzzling. Are these people trying to figure out how to squeeze an extra post into their own blogs, or looking for extra posts that have been added to other blogs? But I do love A-Z extra post by request: The Umbrella rant, and I hope that the searchers like it too.
3. ‘elizabeth twist’. This might be for people who are searching for Elizabeth’s own blog, but on wordpress.com instead of her home at blogspot. At least I include a link to her, as well as sing her praises, here: E is for Elizabeth Twist
4. ‘small wallpapers’. I hope that they enjoy all the fandom-y goodness here: Fanart 10: Lots of small wallpapers.
5. ‘summer glau’. Any Summer Glau fans will hopefully love the story of my meeting her: Fan Expo Diary – Part Two
6. ‘serenity analysis’. Beat sheet for the win! Beat sheet analysis for ‘Serenity’ (spoiler warning.)
7. ‘iphone riddle’. The answer is… An iPhone riddle…
8. ‘diane duane’. There’s a lot that this could lead to, but maybe they’ll start with A Wizard of Mars – Chapter One
9. ‘save the cat chapter 2′. Hopefully, this will help explain it without giving away too many of Blake Snyder’s secrets: Blog the Cat, Chapter 2 – Story Genres
10. ‘alphasmart dana’. I’ve talked about my Dana in several places, but dedicated this post to it: Dana by Alphasmart
11. ‘tess harding’. An interesting search term, but it could lead to my tribute to R is for Roswell or Fanfiction flashback: Not Written Yet
12. ‘firefly fan art’. Well, I shared some here: Fanart 9: Two Firefly Banners

And, for the stranger search terms:

• “that’s what i did and you came back to me”
• buffy/lindsey fanfiction
• davis smallville chloe nanowrimo
• faith hill & roswell
• games on alphasmart dana
• glau fan expo brown guy
• how busy is the go transit bus from hamilton on saturday nights?
• mike kelworth
• roswell liz swaps with tess
• screenwriting on the dana alphasmart
• stringing in writing
• the louvre sweater
• viable paradise waiting list
• where i made my passport im in herkimer
• yahoo game where you put characters in which room
• you can’t go home again billy joel

If you’ve got a blog that lets you see search terms that led readers to you, share your favorites and comment here to let me go look!

Guest Post: Introduction to fun for the Adventure Inclined!

Greetings all!

For those of you who are wondering, my name is Mark Allen and I’m doing a guest post for Chris today as I was originally supposed to write up something while he was out in Kansas saving the Kingdom of Oz under the guise of attending a Con there (er, that is to say the Con is in Kansas not Oz) but was delayed due to RL asserting itself at the worst possible time so naturally I’m finally ready to post this now that Chris is back from his trip!

Now for all those of you wondering just who the hey I am, let me give you a bit of background about myself:

I’m an American (since I’m admitting that up front, kindly refrain from spitting on me as much as you can) I grew up just outside of the DC area but have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the vast majority of my life and currently live in the Tri-Valley area of the San Francisco East Bay, and have been working in IT related fields just prior to graduating High School in 2002!

I met Chris several years ago now (I’m really trying not to think of exactly how many given how old that makes us both now) due to our mutual interest in Roswell fic (because Opie deserves his threesome and us Stargazers have to stick together, damn it) after PMing him regarding a fic of his he IM’d me and we’ve been chatting pretty much ever since!

In fact, one of the highlights of my life occurred last year after I finally got the opportunity to meet up with him face to face for the first time when he made in to my neck of the woods and because he’s far too modest to admit this, just so everyone knows, he’s actually a lot thinner than you might expect (of course, I wish he could say the same about me)!

Anyhoo, a few weeks ago I was chatting with him on IM recommending he look at some great adventure game titles to play on Frotz for his new iPhone and I thought it would be neat to post a quick feature on a few of my favorites so hopefully they would sound appealing enough to where he might look at them sooner than later! 

It’s all fun & games until somebody starts a Blogfest!

It’s Blog-festing time!

Now, I had a fairly hard time picking just three games to feature here, and there’s entire categories that didn’t get represented. I’ll give a brief list of honorable mentions at the end of my post. But I’ve picked three games that have particular meaning to me, and that you might not be familiar with. Counting up to the top spot:

3) Heroes Unlimited.

I had to include a dice and paper RPG, and Heroes Unlimited may not be the best in any practical terms, but it’s the one that I have the fondest memories of playing, usually with my brother and his friends in one of their apartments. There’s something to be said for a game that allows you to become any of:

• An alien
• A bionic cyborg
• A robot
• A mutant
• Somebody who got super-human powers from a scientific experiment
• A wizard
• The lucky owner of a magic weapon or artifact
• Somebody who owns or operates a robotic exoskeleton
• A weapons collector
• An elite vehicles gearhead
• A mutated animal.
• A martial arts specialist
• A super-detective

And probably a handful of other character classes that I’ve forgotten off the top of my head! The details may be a bit fuzzy now, but I can’t forget those crazy interdimensional adventures we dreamed up, with brave but somewhat morally challenged heroes battling to stop the Master Programmer!

2) Inspector Parker

A fairly simple computer game in scope, but one that I’ve loved for years and keep going back to when I want to while away a few minutes training up my brain. I discovered it while looking through the online yahoo games site, and ended up buying a licence for the desktop version.

Games

G is for…

I’m a big fan of a lot of games. Not so much the active sporty type games, and I’ve never really got into hard-core computer gaming, but card games, some board games, and a lot of other types of games. I’ve tried making my own text adventure computer games several times.

If I’m pantsing a story, (as in writing it by the seat of said pants,) having my characters play a game is one of my standard stock tricks. Often, the resulting scene isn’t something that should survive the first draft, but a lot of the time it helps me figure out something new about the characters. For instance, in Children of the Molecule, I had a game of alien hide and seek as one of the events at the Prince’s naming-day party. I was really just going through the motions, as were some of the characters, because they couldn’t leave that planet and go on to the climax of the story until the party was over. But after that game, in the final concert stage of the party, I realized that Aunt Shelda seemed to be fixated on her niece marrying the Prince, and that was a plot thread that I’m really glad I picked up.

“It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.  The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better.  It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are.  It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden.  The graphite’s not important.  It’s just the means of revealing their indentations.  It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”

Blogfest – top ten songs.

Blogosphere Index

Well, if I’m looking for somebody to feature on Blogosphere Monday, and I see a fun-sounding Blogfest scheduled for the right day… I’m gonna do the blogfest. That’s just kind of an obvious one by now. Even if it keeps me up until past my bedtime, sigh.

So, from Captain Ninja Alex – the Top Ten Songs Blogfest!

Now, trying to pick my top ten favorite songs at the moment, or of all time, is one of those impossible tasks, so I’m going to instead go for picking ten great songs where I can actually tell a little story about why I like them so much. Be warned, my taste in music does does skew a little to the right – as in the Country music, but I’m trying to not load the list too badly in that direction.

10. I never really knew what music to connect with the name ‘Billy Joel’ (aside from “Uptown Girl,” which seemed catchy but shallow,) until I caught myself humming “The Longest Time” after it had been playing at a Hamilton write-in and made a memo to look it up. From the Billy Joel Essential collection on Itunes, I found “The Downeaster Alexa.”

Again, the celtic melody and harmonies draw me into this number, but it’s the lyrics, and the story that they tell, that really make me love the song – the vivid way in which it portrays a fisherman’s life, and the stoic resolve with which the protagonist clings to what might be a vanishing trade.

“Tell my wife I am trawling Atlantis / And I still have my hands on the wheel.”

“I was a bayman, like my father was before / Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore.”

SDMB Holiday Short Fiction Contest

Well, Christmas festivities are over. Thanks to my family for the candy and the gift cards.

Time to buckle down on writing/critiquing/editing, and even though I really have enough other things on my list, I’m going to participate in the third Straight Dope Message Board writing contest. I’ve really enjoyed participating in it each time before, and last time I basically got my Nanowrimo idea from the short fiction contest, so that certainly recommends trying again.

A few things about the format are similar – every writer gets the same three prompt words and a photo that they have to include in the finished story, and a time limit. On account of holiday schedules, they’re trying a new wrinkle in which not every participant has to fit into the same writing window – you send an email to a particular mailbox to signal that you’re ready to begin, and get an autoreply with your prompts. You then have two and a half days, (or 60 hours) to complete your entry and email it in.

To take best advantage of my available free time for the holidays, I’ll probably start around 8am tomorrow, so that I’ll have until 8pm on Tuesday, the evening before I go back to work. And I actually have a little secret weapon of a plot notion that I *might* work in, if it looks like it’ll fit with the prompt.

It’s nice to get a chance to go with little unplanned side treks like this in my writing when other commitments allow. The first SDMB contest, I ended up coming up with something that wasn’t exactly fanfic but somewhat close – it was a little spy story that was a spoof of the TV show ‘Chuck’, with Chuck’s character painted as a completely incompetent secret agent, and his long-suffering brother-in-law constantly covering for him. Last time, I ventured a bit further into original territory, coming up with a storyline of an angel on a mission who fell in love with a human girl and ran away with her, which got tweaked somewhat as the basis of “The Angel’s Charlie.”

I can’t wait to see where the paths less traveled take me this time.

Award acceptance speech.

First off, once again I’d like to thank Brittany for giving me these two awards!

The Versatile Blogger Award: Link back to the person who gave you the award (already did), share seven things about yourself, pass the award to up to fifteen bloggers who you think deserve it, and contact the people you’ve picked.

One Lovely Blog Award: Accept the award, post it on your blog with a link to the person who gave it to you with a link to them, pass it to up to fifteen other bloggers who are new to you, contact the people you’ve picked.

However, I have to say that I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about passing them along at first… not that I don’t want other bloggers to feel valued and appreciated, but that the whole deal seemed a bit like a benign version of chain letters or something, and I’ve never been a big fan of spreading chain letters.

Having spent a little while mulling over the question, I’ve decided that it’s not really the same thing. For one thing, these awards seem to be pretty honest as to what they’re about, while chain letters always tend to have the ridiculous claims about what has happened to various people around the world when they got the chain, which presumably can’t have been true when the chain started, and couldn’t have been added in later unless someone took liberties with copying the letter exactly as they received it. But never mind that.

Also, these awards don’t seem to be as bully-ish about chain letters about passing them on. And this is the sort of thing that Blogosphere networking is made of, isn’t it? So – I accept the awards, and I will be passing them along, but not just yet. For one thing, I’m not sure who to award yet, so I’ll take my time and hand them out one by one.

And, for my seven things to share as a condition of Versatile Blogger:

1. I love listening to country music.
2. I have many stuffed animal friends.
3. I collect PDAs and other electronic devices.
4. I’ve lost over 100 pounds in the past three and a half years.
5. I recently got a beginner driver’s licence for the second time.
6. I go to the Toronto Buffy/Angel fan meetups when I can.
7. I love Larry Niven’s Known Space/Ringworld books.

Quick mini-updates.

Hey, I’m feeling a bit drained – I’m going to driver education classes this weekend and next, so the time crunch seems to be tighter than usual at the moment. So, I’m just going to quickly run through a couple of other things that I’ve touched on recently for today’s post.

Critmo is well into the second week at this point, and I’m a little worried that participation seems to be lagging somewhat. I still have one excerpt to crit, and somebody else who I’m supposed to be critting is several days late posting her excerpt. Guess there’s not much more to do than keep soldiering on for now, and try to figure out some way to muddle through.

I’ve got more feedback swaps than I can keep up with at the moment – I’m trying to work my way through one Nanowrimo manuscript, an interesting alt-historical romance called ‘Duty’, and I’ve got another novel and a script sitting on my hard drive, and another scriptwriter who’s sent me a message saying that they’re interested in a swap, but I’ve put them off saying that I can’t commit to it yet after all. It’s fun stuff, though, when I can fit it into the day.

And some more playing around with ‘I write like…’

All of my JulNoWriMo words came out as: Dan Brown again. Sigh

The sentence ‘I hate Dan Brown’ bounces back without a result, and highlights the note: ‘For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets).’

The Preamble to the US Constitution is written like: H. P. Lovecraft

The first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence are written like: James Fenimore Cooper

The opening paragraph of Tale of two cities – is recognized as being written like Charles Dickens. That’s good, I suppose

Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech could have been written by: James Joyce

The ‘Give me Liberty or Give me death’ speech is written like – William Shakespeare