Nothing to Say....

I haven't posted in awhile. Basically, nothing to say. I'm waiting to see how the election and the stock market do, and writing.

Here's a snippet of what I'm currently working on.

Please don't quote or post elsewhere, first draft.

Deyna opened the door, and a bell rang somewhere in the back of the shop. Except for a couple of comfortable-looking chairs and a table, the front was empty. She let the door swing shut and stood without moving.

Motion from the back of the room caught her gaze. A curtain swung in the draft created by opening the front door.

“You can come out, Morion Grey Cloak,” Deyna said. “I know you’re there.”

Some indeterminate thumps sounded. Deyna felt a twitch of amazement. Morion entered the room on crutches, dragging a useless left leg behind him.

She shook off the amazement and held up the knife. “Yours?”

“Mine,” he acknowledged.

“Why?”

His deep-set eyes surveyed her. “Right to the point. I like that. I had to make sure you came here and that you’d need my help.”

“Why in the name of the Great God didn’t you just ask?”

“Because you’d never have agreed,” he said, and gave her a faint smile.

That smile made her uneasy. His next words confirmed it.

“I need you to kill a stone dragon.”

How the Current Economic Crisis is Like Jenga...

Remember that game? You build a tower with wooden pieces, and then try to remove pieces without the whole thing tumbling to the ground.

To understand the current Wall Street fiasco, imagine that derivative investments were those wooden pieces--remove the wrong piece and the whole tower comes crashing down.

Well, remove subprime mortgages from the picture--something which many of the so-called brilliant lights in Wall Street used to build their towering investment edifices--and you can see that collapse was inevitable.

If no one is buying subprimes, that particular wooden piece is removed from the game. Ergo, boom! Who couldn't have seen that coming? Apparently most of Wall Street's analysts.

Simplified explanation? You bet. However, if Wall Street investors had stuck to simpler, time-tested and tried stuff, we wouldn't have to be bailing their asses out with taxpayer money.

How time flies... Friday Snippet, September 12, 2008

I haven't posted in awhile, I see. I'm plotting. Trying to come up with scenes for the story I want to write as a part of the How to Think Sideways course.

There's so much in Holly's course, it would be difficult to convey it all, but the highlight for me so far has been the Sentence. Once I figured out that doing the Sentence correctly builds in all the conflict I need in a scene, it was like coming out of a dark room into daylight. Oh, yeah! That works! If I take nothing else away from this course, THAT will be worth the whole enchilada.

I started writing a story that's modeled after my childhood role-model Andre Norton. I think I caught the flavor of her technique--

Brief snippet--- please don't repost or quote without permission--the usual.

Jetan found Berek’s cruiser buried nose-first in the snow and ice. He stopped, hand on his holstered pistol, and looked for signs of life.

The cruiser lay, silent and broken and – empty? Had Berek survived what must have been a terrific crash?

Jetan would not be surprised. Berek had managed to survive worse and emerge from hiding just as the Academy considered him safely dead.

He triggered his communicator. “I found the cruiser. I’m going in.”

The communicator blipped. “Careful, Jetan. Berek’s been known to set booby traps.” Zed’s voice came over as tiny and distorted on the communicator’s speaker.

Jetan wasted a second trying to modulate the frequency. Something on this fierce, savage world interfered with the unit.

He stowed the communicator and drew his pistol. Moving slowly and carefully, his glance darting among the wreckage, Jetan approached the damaged cruiser.