Category: craft

Functional Friday

Flash Pulp
Tonight’s episode will cap our second month of putting out Flash Pulp, so I thought I’d throw out some stats:

Episodes: 23

Script Word Count Total: 20,946-ish (¼ of a short novel)
Total Run Time: 2h 37m 10s (4 minutes over Apocalypse Now.)
Shortest Episode: #5 – 03:45 – The Neighbourly Farmers*
Longest Episode: #22 – 12:48 – The Charivari: A Blackhall Tale, Part 1of3

Episode Breakdown:

Mulligan Smith Stories: 9
Thomas Blackhall Stories:  8
Kar’Wick: 2
Chiller: 2
Joe Monk & SF: 1 each

(*The last time I did this, I claimed the shortest was Red Mouth’s Legacy Pt 6 – I was wrong.)

Some Notes On Charivari

They seem to have been forgotten in most places, but the subject of our current Blackhall story, charivaris, were a real practice.

From wikipedia:

The custom dates back to the Middle Ages and originated in France… In the early 1600s, the Council of Tours forbade charivari and threatened its practitioners with excommunication. Nevertheless, the custom continued in rural areas.

The writer of the wikipedia article states:

North American charivari is noted as less extreme than those in Europe. They were unique and the depended on the family as well as who was participating. While embellished with some European traditions, the North American charivari were often more so dipping the culprits in horse tanks or forcing them to buy candy bars for the crowd.

This actually runs contrary to my own findings – it may simply be the case that a non-violent charivari wasn’t worth the news-space, but there are plenty of examples of something more than roughhousing taking place.

American Gothic

Here’s an excerpt from the Perth Courier, Sept. 12, 1873 – the telling takes up after old Mr. Chapman has already been dragged from his home, his door having been smashed in with rocks. He fainted, so the intruders held a mock funeral:

After maltreating the old man for a length of time in this manner, one of the villains deliberately fired a shot at the prostate body, the charge taking effect just above the knee… The ruffians then left Mr. Chapman to his fate. Medical aid was summoned… doctors concur in the belief that his case is an extremely doubtful one, and that the chances are very strong against his recovery.

The same issue of the paper also noted:

Such exhibitions of atrocity as are so frequent at charivari are simply disgraceful, without one mitigating accompanying circumstance. That the strong arm of the law should step in and quell all such disturbances of the peace,… no law abiding citizen can deny.

Still, I did love this detail from the wikipedia article:

From an 1860 English charivari against a wife-beater a chant was created which was sung during this particular man’s charivari:

“Has beat his wife! Has beat his wife! It is a very great shame and disgrace To all who live in this place It is indeed upon my life!”

Functional Friday

Flash Pulp

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a Functional Friday post, and I thought it might be interesting to throw some random Flash Pulp stats out there. (Or, interesting to me at least. Har.)

Episodes: 14

Script Word Count Total: 11,635-ish

Total Run Time: 1h 22m 35s

Most Downloads: #11 – Red Mouth’s Legacy Pt. 5 (Mostly due to Mr. Tom Merritt)

Least Downloads: #3 – The Downtown Couple

Shortest Episode: #12 – 04:16 – Red Mouth’s Legacy Pt. 6

Longest Episode: #6 – 08:43 – Mulligan Smith in The Trunk

I didn’t include our two newest episodes (Say It Ain’t So & Mulligan Smith and The Retired Man) in the popularity contest sections, as the last episode will likely always count as the least downloaded.

Tonight’s episode introduces the first science fiction regular to the cast, and next week should bring a three part Mulligan story.

Whee.

Eye Rhymes

A bit of interesting randomness:

Eye rhyme, also called visual rhyme and sight rhyme, is a similarity in spelling between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an auditory rhyme. An example is the pair slaughter and laughter.

Many older English poems, particularly those written in Middle English or written in The Renaissance, contain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by modern readers they are now eye rhymes because of shifts in pronunciation. An example is prove and love. – Wikipedia

Was Love, Louve, or was Prove, Pruv?

Functional Friday

I need another three or four hours of sleep, so this is going to be a pretty light day. I did want to be sure to once again publicly shame myself though, as it seems to be serving the useful purpose of keeping me on task.

  • Lukas & Nan is currently 11% done. I realized I’d started my first scene too far into the plot, so I’ve been doing a lot of structural work and not throwing a lot of words on top that I may need to change down the line.
  • My serial project has been further fleshed out. It’ll be a story in four parts, and it’s my intention to finish the first half before putting anything up. I feel like the format is solid and the story flows like water, so there’s really nothing to complain about here. I’ll get a word count together for next Friday, but there’s no real way to guesstimate how much is complete because of its more freewheeling nature.
  • Lovely Alex has been doing sketches for the gag comic, but it’s a tough haul as we’re swimming in babies over here. Still, things are moving along slowly – we’ll see how the Gods Of Slumber feel over the course of the weekend.

Functional Friday

Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting things done.

My major focus, Lukas & Nan, is currently at 8.5% for the first draft. I’m pretty pleased with that. Serial 2.0 is currently in the most gooey of embryonic phases, but the broad creative work at the beginning of a project can be the most exciting. The gag comic has sort of stalled, mostly due to a series of funerals which really shook out the funny around here. Hopefully we should be able to get back to work on that in the next week.

Notebooks

Warren Ellis has posted up some notes on how he tends his notebooks that I found rather interesting – although I admit I’m a bit of a creative process voyeur.

I’ve also moved back to doing the majority of my brain thrushing with pencil on paper, despite my trusty tablet laptop. My notebook travels snuggly, provides an immediately accessible interface for both text and diagrams, and allows for weird spatial change ups that a word doc can’t carry off.

The truth is though, in the end I need to have everything digitized and skimmable, (most of the actual construction work still happens at the keys after all,) so I tag most of my entries: Scrap, Journal, Blog, Idea, Fodder, etc. My handwriting is tremendously unreadable, but by making a little effort in keeping the tags legible I can use my scanner and some OCR software to translate things into a relatively easy-to-search interface.

Anyhow, his post also reminded me that I’d meant to point towards Lovecraft’s Idea Notebook, which is another enlightening stroll through someone else’s noggin.

Functional Friday

I’m five scripts away from completing the first batch of strips for the gag comic. Its my intention to kick those out this weekend, and hopefully hassle the artist about getting the first few drawn. It’d be nice to come back Monday with something to post here as a teaser.

I’m completing second edits on the first small ‘arc’ of the serial story, and I really need to start moving the words from their scripts and into the design phase. I want to present it in a series of screenshots: a blog, a news story, I.M.s, etc, and I’m concerned that the story threads are going to get muddled in the transitions. It’s definitely leading me to believe its time to start laying things out and see how it looks. I’m sort of wondering if I should take Scott Sigler’s words of advice, (even though he was talking about podcasting your novel,) and complete the whole story before beginning any of it.