An April Fools Day Post (that is totally true)

Take a look at Gavin Williams “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.” I did his April Fools Day post.

The other… Alexandra Erin is doing something interesting called “Lit Snacks” in which she writes an ebook and sells advertising in the back of it. She was kind enough to give me free advertising in the first one “The Gift of the Bad Guy” (a piece of superhero fiction).

I’d planned to mention it when it came out, but I somehow didn’t notice. Thus I mention it today.

13 thoughts on “An April Fools Day Post (that is totally true)”

  1. Oh dear!

    I had a lot of fun reading Jim’s version of my story, “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin,” and popped over here to see who had written for the Legion. To my surprise, there doesn’t seem to be a post from another author?

    Jim my friend, did somebody bail on you? I thought it was supposed to go in a total circle. If no one is writing a chapter for you, I could always throw one together — I find it really entertaining to see someone else’s take on my characters and I’d hate for you to miss out.

  2. Yeah. I’m not sure why, but the person who was supposed to write something never did send me anything.

    So it goes.

    If you want to, feel free. I’m sure I’ll be amused.

  3. This is totally my fault. :/

    I just couldn’t get into my story for you at all. I thought Wystie was going to tell you and she thought I was. Then I had a guest last weekend and it totally slipped my mind to check if you knew.

    For what it’s worth my writer for the day seems to have bailed on me as well.

    Sorry about that.

  4. I wrote a little possible something-something, but it promptly blew up into a full-fledged storyline. I’ve sent the first part, anyway; the *opening* is very April-1st-ish.

  5. All of a sudden, Nick was thrown against the wall, which stopped his velocity. Just. He could see the portal created by the Power Inseminator growing, but his HUD showed only fuzziness at the center. The giant tentacle known as Cthulhu’s ankle stretches outward from that point, violating known space in the only way a giant tentacled monster could that involved a machine known as the Power Impregnator (or Inseminator). The sonics in his arms were useless, especially since he rigged his iPod up and cranked “Friday” on full volume. He had just been trying to make sure the Impregnator would be completely annihilated, but the pure wrongness of the song had been enhanced to 4 KiloSnookies, tearing a hole in time and space that also woke up Cthulhu.

    So that would not be a good idea. Glancing around, his hopes were raised. He grabbed the beer bottle, smashing the end off on the counter. With a determined grimace under his helmet, he brandished the jagged bottle and advanced. To his eye-tearingly bowel-loosening surprise, the tentacle grabbed a broken bottle of its own!

    Nick knew that this night he might well dance the macarena of doom.

    33 hours later, an exhausted Nick pulled himself out of the brothel museum’s wreckage. What was left of his armor either clung to his body by the force of the blows he had suffered, or threatened to drop off at the merest fart of a mosquito. Can you imagine that, like a mosquito’s fart? You know, they just eat blood. It’d be freaky. I guess the only thing it would be like is someone farting after eating lots and lots of really rare steak. But I digress. As he checked the devestation, Nick saw Sean nearby, giving an interview to the local news on how he saved the world from Cthulhu. Sean turned his smugly grinning face towards Nick as he tromped over.

    Nick promptly pulled out the severed tentacle of Cthulhu and bitchslapped Sean in the face with it.

    The End.

  6. PG: The macarena of doom? Isn’t that all macarenas? But seriously, that was funny.

    Robert: I got it at about the same time I got Gavin’s (which I just posted). I’ll be happy to take and post yours though.

    Becka: No problem. I assumed that something like that had happened. I considered emailing you to ask last week, but I didn’t. That would have solved the whole problem though.

  7. You know. I should I tried to write it in third person. I got stuck on trying to write in first person because the story is written that way, but I never write first person, and I think that’s what flummoxed me.

  8. Could be. Prior to writing this story I’d almost never used first person. I wrote about 20 pages of stuff that I discarded before writing what currently appears as chapter one. And chapter one has a number of small tense related problems that I’d never have made if I were more familiar with writing in first.

    Alas I’ve still got to fix them…

  9. I find that really interesting. I started out as predominately writing third-person myself, and Jim and I have certain stylistic similarities, don’t we Hemingway?

    As part of my own experimentation during the writing of No Man an Island, I branched out into first person with a few characters, and found the pacing much more immediate and intimate. Some readers commented on the first person stuff being their favourite so I went with it for Diggory and that’s gone well.

    I think half my problem with the Samaritan Project is that it’s in third and I can’t find the flow. Somehow having a personal narrator gives an extra ooomph and not having it can be problematic for me — so I can see why being used to third might mess up someone when they try to switch to first, becaues it’s a totally different mindset.

    I find in third I try to be objective and detail oriented, while in first character comes through in narration as well as actions — even biases.

  10. I like third person limited a lot. In that, you’ve got the narrowness of perspective of the first person, and so you can’t be as “distant” from the action as you can in third person omniscient.

    You also don’t get to move around quite so much, or get outside perspectives as easily, but the trade off is that its a much easier variation on third person to write.

    I tend to write it almost in the voice of the character being followed, but not quite.

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