Short Post and a Song #134: Please be sensible, you young gaggle of twins.

Good afternoon, Velocininjas! I don't even care if you're having a good Halloween weekend so far, since you're about to get the blessing of FOUR pages of It Takes Four, so it'll even out to an awesome weekend no matter what. 

More like SUBSTANTIAL Post and a Song, amirite? Ah, alliteration.

In case you don't remember, last week's adventure ended on a cliffhanger: "So Amanda and Anita went back to the Dractec house. Dractec is Anita's last name. They did that because they..."

Translation: ...were full of ideas. Alisa and Octavea went to the Callaway house because they have the most convincing voices.

Meanwhile at the Dractec house Anita said, "Why don't we just be mean and they'll get so caught up in fighting who would get which one of us?" You could tell by the look on Amanda's face...

First of all, what the fuck are those girls standing on? A changing table?

Also good job whoever hangs pictures in that house, A+.

What is this business about "convincing voices"? What does that have to do with anything? I still don't understand why this switch is happening at all. Please be sensible, you young gaggle of twins.

Translation: ...that she thought that was stupid. Anita said "What? You have a better idea?" Amanda said, "Actually I do. We could do a little romantic show for them." Anita said, "Yeah.

Okay this house of blank pictures is starting to freak me the fuck out. Would it have been so hard to draw a tree or a dog or something?

I almost wish the book ended here, with Amanda proposing they do a show and Anita, real low-key, just saying, "Yeah."

Translation: Maybe would sing." Amanda said, "What woud we sing?" Anita said, "We will make-up song

So soon everything was made up. They got the parents on the patio and the girls sang, "You ever been on a date?

Translation: "Was there nothing but screams and hate? Well now we have the cure for sur it's the love prance/Swing your girl with a love whirl/Here's your chance do your dance, it's the love prance!

The parents clapped and in the morning the parent had forgotten all...

Does anyone else feel like things went from "have you ever been on a date" to "screams and hate" really quickly? Like, dude, what happened on that date?

So I guess a love prance is a certain kind of dance. Did the girls choreograph a dance too? Because if not their stupid song is fucking worthless.

Aaand this week ends with another cliffhanger. Are these the parents with Alzheimer's? If so the girls kinda wasted their time making up that whole song and everything...

~*~*~*~*~

"Solid Ground" by Maps & Atlas

Spotify Discover Weeky recently introduced me to this song and it's become a regular in my rotation as I edit Viable. It's got a real soundtrack-y feel to it, particularly the first minute or so.

I'm editing Viable because I finished the rough draft of Rebel (the sequel to Viable) on Tuesday, yaaaaay.

Photographic evidence

It's a thin draft, but at least the basic bones of the story are in place. 

Now I'm going through Viable to make sure everything across both books still makes sense, since I started writing Viable in 2010 and Rebel in 2011, so the worlds of both books have evolved substantially.

Rebel is the fourth novel I've finished writing, and the first novel I've finished in four years. It's not very good at all now, but I think maybe it could be. We shall see.

I hope all of your writing is going well, those of you who write. Some of my writer friends have half a book or most of a screenplay, but just can't seem to finish. The only advice I know how to give is: Keep going. 

It's gonna suck. You're gonna hate it. Do it anyway. 

If you're lucky you'll get a few of those sparkly moments where you truly sink into the story, like you did into the stories you loved to read most as a kid. 

Do it for those moments, especially since if they give you those feelings, there's a good chance there's some reader out there, at least one, who might feel them too.

At the end you'll have a draft that will probably fall incredibly short of your original vision. But it's yours. It exists. And nobody's going to stop you from chiseling away at it until it starts to look more on paper the way it does in your head.

Short Post and a Song #133: Pick a direction to color and stick with it, Christ.

Well good afternoon, Velocininjas! Hope your weekend's going well, and even if it's not, this work of fine literature I'm about to share should turn your frown upside down.

(Does anyone else think turning a frown upside down sounds like a rather horrific process?)

Translation: One day Alisa and Amanda were playing in their room. They decided to go on a walk in the woods. As they were walking they ran into 2 girls who looked exactly like them. Suddenly, they were confusedly scared. They all talked anyway

Well first of all that sky is atrocious. Pick a direction to color and stick with it, Christ.

Also, remember how I said the movie It Takes Two is highly improbable since it involves two identical but unrelated little girls meeting each other by chance? It looks like I decided to exponentially increase that implausibility by featuring two sets of identical twins who also look identical to each other.

They all look pretty shocked. Or, I'm sorry, "confusedly scared". Good thing there are those rocks there to hold 'em up.

Translation: They all had their problems. The other pair of twins names were Anita and Octavea. Their problem was their parents were just about to get divorced. Alisa and Amanda's problem was about their parents were forgetting things. They had tried almost everything...

So wait, "forgetting things"? Do their parents have Alzheimer's?? If so, that was some pretty heavy territory for eight-year-old me to be entering with my ripoff of an Olsen twins movie.

Translation: ...but switching, but this wasn't just switching it swop switching. swop switching is when one of the twins in each of the pairs switches. So Amanda and Anita went back to the Dractec house. Dractec is Anita's last name. They did that because they...

Why is this switch happening at all, though? What do all these twins think they're going to accomplish with this?

Also, Child Self, all you had to do was give Anita a normal-sounding last name like Miller or Smith. But instead you chose the name Dractec, a name I am quite sure no human has ever had. 

You're an embarrassment.

~*~*~*~*~

"Death of a Bachelor" by Panic! At The Disco

Over the years a number of folks have made the mistake of observing I have "good" taste in music, only to later be disappointed by my fervent love of a band whose albums they want to set on fire. 

Musical taste is extremely subjective, friends, and odds are one of these days I am going to profess my adoration for a band you hate.

For some of you, that day may be today.

Whatever you may think of Panic! At The Disco, I believe that band has done some of the most original and interesting music that's come out in the past decade. This song manages to seamlessly blend big band jazz, pop, and hip hop into an addictive tune I can quit dancing in my seat to.

Short Post and a Song #132: No, I don't know what a love prance is any more than you do.

Hope everyone's having a good weekend, and even if you're not it's about to get much better.

Today we begin our second trip down the memory lane of books I wrote as a child with a laminated masterpiece called It Takes Four.

I fucking loved the movie It Takes Two as a kid. My youthful obsession with the Olsen twins can probably be best explained by the fact that I had two older sisters who were much closer in age to each other than they were to me, and so I desperately longed for my own partner in crime in the form of a twin.

It Takes Two is basically The Parent Trap only even less plausible, since the two identical girls in It Takes Two are miraculously supposed to not even be related. 

Ah the good old days of drawing birds as the letter "V".

They're supposed to be identical and yet one is several inches taller than the other. 

It appears that I also chose to call something in this book a "Love Prance". 

Jesus Christ, Child Self, get it together.

I love you, Mom and Dad. Here, have some creepy, misshapen hearts with Olsen faces on them.

We'll pick up with the proper story next week.

~*~*~*~*~

"Alive With The Glory of Love" by Julia Nunes

I posted about Julia Nunes a few years back and thought I'd share a favorite video of hers: her cover of one of my favorite songs (original by Say Anything). You can really see here what a fantastic performer she is and her amazing instincts with arranging harmonies.

Short Post and a Song #131: Forrest Gump rough draft

FORREST GUMP: My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." 'Course you could know if you read the inside of the box, but Mama wasn't much for readin', said books were "where the devil was hiding."

~*~*~*~*~

"Hobo's Lament" by Larry and His Flask

This song is fantastic. Despite some fairly depressing lyrics, the song is bouncy and fun and head-bopping-y as fuck. It really gets going around 2:54, and the guitar at around 3:58 is just bananas.

Sorry I've been absent (again) in recent history, Velocininjas. For whatever reason my body has been not been doing a very good job absorbing potassium for the past few weeks and, apparently, potassium is kind of an important thing to not be deficient in. So I've been fairly weak and worthless these days, laying around and watching TV. I've started supplementing with potassium and things are already starting to improve.

I've reached the end of my supply of Short Posts and am not really feeling up to writing more, so instead we are going to take another trip down memory lane. This will be a journey through It Takes Four, a book I wrote for my third grade class. 

The back cover

Translation: It takes Two was A very good film. Now the sequel It Takes Four. Two recodnized characters with a double bump. Read it to see what I mean.

Well I for one am very excited to find out what the fuck "recodnized characters with a double bump" means in the weeks to come.

Short Post and a Song #130: The moral of this story is that flip flops are terrible.

ME: It's nice out today. I should wear flip flops!

[roughly five seconds after leaving my apartment in the flip flops]

ME: *sobbing* Why do I always make decisions that end up hurting me in the end?

COP: You need to get up off the sidewalk, ma'am.

~*~*~*~*~

"Oslo in the Summertime" by of Montreal

I'm back to working on the second book in the Renaissance Experiment trilogy now, but last week I took a break to clear my head and splash around in a few of my other works in progress. I spent most of the week editing my monster novel, Moorhouse, but I also did some conceptual work on a science fiction project of mine, tentatively titled Tabula Rasa.

Halfway through writing Moorhouse I found a song that I could imagine playing during the opening credits of the movie version of my novel. Despite being a severe case of thinking way too far ahead, this really helped crystallize in my mind what the important themes were of what was at the time an overly complicated story.

For Tabula Rasa I imagine "Oslo in the Summertime" playing right at the beginning of the story's first scene. A group of young adults wake up on a beautiful but deserted island, and no one has any memory of who they are or how they got there. There's something in this song that just perfectly captures for me how unsettling an experience like that would truly be, how a person might almost become sort of numb and just float through it all, because what else could you do?

Short Post and a Song #129: Gotham can be a real dick.

GOTHAM: Fuck off, Batman, you're a weird criminal and we don't want you.

*Batman leaves*

*Something terrible happens to Gotham*

*Batman reluctantly returns*

GOTHAM: What the hell, Batman, where were you? You could've prevented this whole thing, you asshole.

~*~*~*~*~

"Love Man" by Otis Redding

"Love Man" is another one of those songs I had to hear randomly on a playlist before I could divorce it from the movie I first saw it in (Dirty Dancing). To be honest I still have trouble listening to it without imagining Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey sway-dancing, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I'm posting this on Friday since I'm going to Love Dan's family's lake house for the long weekend. "But, but, the alliteration!" you're probably thinking, since like me, alliteration is probably something that haunts your thoughts day and night. But I think Short Post and a Song will survive being posted on a non-S day just this once.

Short Post and a Song #128: Well, we had a good run.

[watching Alien]

Me: You know John Hurt's in this movie.

Danlien: Oh yeah, which one is he?

Me: The one with the alien on his face.

ExtraterrestriDan: Heh, is that how he got hurt?

Me:

Superdan:

Me:

Danvin the Martian:

Me: Get out

~*~*~*~*~

"Call Me" by St. Paul and The Broken Bones

This 2014 song sounds like it came straight out of the 70s, right down to the phone number's lack of area code and use of the term "pick up that telephone", and I love it so goddamn much.