Milo's World
author's blog for Jul-Sep 2005

last update 2005Oct12 up home

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005: Feeling better -- worked on the Milopaedia yesterday and will today. Got an idea for a new story yesterday... actually the flowering of an idea that's been maturing ever since I saw "Beer Bad" (Buffy). It should be very short, is named Heroes, and will feature Bester and Preiss. I might try to toss it out after the current ch08 Demon Bear draft.

Sunday, September 25th, 2005: Sick with cold or flu yesterday and today. :-( Not doing much writing.

Thursday, September 22nd, 2005: There are a handful of little things I've been meaning to blog but have just been sticking away over the past months... gonna get some of them down now. Consequently I'm going back in time a little in the subjects of my comments.

The chunk of time I took off a while back to do computer-related things that were only tangential to Milo's World... toward the end (and moreso now) of that month-plus period "off" it dawned on me that what I was really doing was a combination of letting Milo's World settle in my mind so that I could go back to it with fresh eyes, and also returning to some old and unused thought patterns -- I think to let my writing technique, which must be 95% new patterns, gel a little while uninterrupted. And I think it worked... the story seems less complicated now than it did (though still plenty complicated and I'm grateful for the wonderful document management tool that is HTML), and I believe my editing if-not-my-writing has been somewhat sharper the last two months.

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005: I did my second sit-down on a non-MW poem, "Seer in the Seen", yesterday and my third? sit-down on an MW-related piece of flash fiction, "Shell Game" -- called 'em both finished and e-mailed 'em off for hopeful publication. Today should be the second full day of work on "Fear is the Color..." and tomorrow back to work on MW. At present I'm alternating on MW between the Demon Bear sequence in ch08 (just hit v0.5) and the unnamed Durant short story with Kuora.

Friday, September 16th, 2005: Back on May 13th I was talking about possible trouble with a version of vim. To date I have had no trouble with data corruption since the last of those incidents prior to when I stopped using the version I'd questioned. At this point I consider it conclusive, or at least conclusive enough that I'm not going to fool with the program anymore, that there's a serious buffer glitch somewhere in the code causing periodic corruption.

The audit I referred to back on May 20th was a process I went through last year of word-counting all the Milo's World material, separated into notes and narrative, so I had some reasonable idea of my progress. It took, if my memory is reliable, about a week... and that's more time than I was willing to put in this time around. So this year, no audit. Next year, who knows. Hopefully by May 2006 I'll be published in a couple semi-respectable places and won't feel so much pressure to regularly benchmark my progress.

I started a new story today: "Fear is the Color of Blood" (science fiction not Milo's World). It started to come to me yesterday, sitting in the doctor's office waiting for my wife's physical. That's after I'd spent the morning sitting in the dentist's office waiting for my wife's crown. Medical offices have a particular feel for me, half hopeful half sad. I had eight pages of handwritten notes when I was ready to start the real writing.

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