Stories of the Week for August 7, 2013

Much like buddy cop movies and boy bands, Stories of the Week is back. 

Not a ton of story news to report this week.  I've gotten a bit sidetracked from the environmental horror story I started last week.  I'm over 2500 words into it, and nearing the ending, but it seems I've gone and started another project.  As if I don't have enough  projects in the works already, I decided I needed one more on my plate.  This time, a Middle Grade novel.

For the new book, I was toying with an idea of writing a spoof about a wizard called Harriet Porter, who attends a school called Toadhorns...but then I remembered that I'm deathly afraid of lawyers.  So I decided to scrap the idea and work on something completely different, but still in the realm of magic.  It's partly inspired by one of the concepts in Neil Gaiman's brilliant Stardust, and partly inspired by apartheid. 

Only the first page has been written, but I'm already finding the main character to be quite fun to write.  She's got a bit of moxie, this one. 




Once again, the weather's pleasant here, so no "Beat the Heat" tip.  Instead, I thought I'd try out something different:

"Movie of the Week."  The Good Night, starring Martin Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Simon Pegg.  An incredibly slow first twenty minutes, during which I wondered what I'd gotten myself into, but I kind of loved this movie once it got going.  It deals with one man's attempts to descend into his dreams instead of facing up to reality.  But can he find the satisfaction he's looking for, or is he only pushing away what really matters most?




More news and nonsense next week, when I should have my nature story completed. 

Adventures in Streamlining

I've been reading a book on blog design (“Blog Design for Dummies," fittingly enough.  I still don't understand most of what it's talking about, though, which makes me think I may need a book called “Blog Design for People Who Were Born Yesterday.”)

One of the main things it talks about is making your blog easier to navigate.  It mentions the "three clicks rule," where you don't want to make your readers click more than three times to get to the info they're looking for.  To that end, I've made a few changes to the blog format:

1: I took most of the links out of the sidebar and added them to their own page on the site. Aside from lessening the clutter, the links now have spiffy new pictures attached to them.  Well, some of the pictures are spiffy, anyway.  Others will need to be replaced with higher-res images. 

2: I added the Amazon Slideshow Widget to the blog, to make it easier for readers to get to my novel.  It was surprisingly quick to set up.  You simply choose the books you'd like to add, choose the style, colors and sizes (I went with basic black), then paste the code they give you into your blog.

3: I streamlined the Labels menu, so people can find topics that might interest them (like the game show interview I did with author Jaclyn Aurore.).  First, I changed it to the cloud format, so the labels with the most posts attached are easier to see.  Then, I went through and deleted some of the clutter labels.  For instance, I had the label "synopsis" for one of my posts, which seems a little silly, now that I actually think about it. 

4: I tweaked the "About the Author" page to make it a bit cleaner.  Now that the site is somewhat easier to navigate, I didn't feel the need to include quite as much junk there. 

I'm still learning as I go, but so far, I'm quite happy with the changes. 

Ten Minute Flash Fiction Experiment: Door to Door

Here's a little flash fiction experiment of mine, inspired by a recent encounter with a door-to-door salesman that left me scratching my head.  I was going to mention it in a quick tweet ( @michaeldmatula ), but I decided to give myself ten minutes to write it out as a mini story instead. 

Hope you enjoy it.

A pair of crisp knocks. Low voices outside my window, carrying on a conversation. Not wanting to be bothered, I wait ten seconds, expecting them to go away on their own.  I hear the voices again. I stop writing, toss on a more presentable shirt and go answer the door. Two men are standing on the porch. Squarish types. One's middle-aged. They're both wearing button-up shirts. Ties.

I leave the screen door shut. No point getting too chummy.

A pamphlet is shoved towards the screen. The man on the left says some words I don't bother to commit to memory. I'm already preparing to say, “No thanks.”

The other man then utters a phrase that manages to stick to my brain like newsprint on Silly Putty. “We're going door to door, asking people, 'How long would you like to live?'”

I'm speechless for a moment. It sounds more like a threat than a conversation starter. “No thanks,” I end up saying, my powers of speech returning. “I'm not interested.”

I let the door close.

I wonder what the hell that was all about.