Skip to main content

Episode 1: Getting started.

This is my writing blog.

By that, I mean that I've set my goal on being a full-time writer (primarily science fiction and fantasy, but I have other projects in mind), and I plan to document the trials and tribulations here. So think of the episodes as a soap opera, with humor.

What does the title of the blog mean?

Well, first, it means that I searched the internet and didn't find another blog with that title. Also, No Mongoose in the Mimosa is a short story (sadly as yet unpublished) I wrote, wherein the MC (the Main Character) screws up his romance in Hawaii and then must save his fiance' from a tsunami.

Mimosa's are both a tree and a mixed drink. Mongooses were imported to Hawaii to solve another imported problem: rats. It didn't work. Apparently rats are nocturnal beasts and mongooses prefer the daylight. Interestingly, at least to me, a story in a scientific journal from 1917 suggests that a mongoose uses mimosa leaves to treat itself for snake bites.

Hmm. The blog title may be better than I thought. You can draw your own analogies.

Pretty much that's what I plan to blog about, things I write that don't work out and things I write that seem to succeed; things I plan to try, and hopefully what I learn along the way. I'll also discuss Projects I have in development, and the problems in plotting them. Along the way, I may comment on what other writers have done and how I think they succeeded.

At the risk of self-referential, inadvertent recursion, this blog is a writing experiment in writing, something that I plan to write in and even write about writing in it. I hope that these entries may be cathartic and useful to me , and perhaps interesting to someone else.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2013 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest

I was just notified (March 14, 2013) that my 7700 word short story " Intent to Occupy "  placed second in The 2013 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest administered by William Ledbetter. Mr. Ledbetter just posted the results on his Facebook page , so I assume the results are now official: The winners of the 2013 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest are: GRAND PRIZE "The Lamplighter Legacy" by Patrick O'Sullivan 2nd Place "Intent to Occupy" by Ronald D. Ferguson 3rd Place "Improvising at Branson Six" by Sean Monaghan The annual contest is sponsored by Baen Books and the National Space Society in memory of the founder of Baen Books , Jim Baen. The judges consisted of Baen Books editors Hank Davis, Jim Minz, Tony Daniel and best selling Baen author David Drake. I'm very honored to have such illustrious judges select my story. My first reaction to the email from Bill Ledbetter telling me that I won second place was "Well, I...
My first alternate history novel was  Rogue Knight: Marked by Thor . Rogue Knight takes place early in the ninth century shortly after the death of Charlemagne.   The View from the M öbius Window is my new kindle novel available on Amazon.com . The novel is my second venture into alternate history:         In 1914, fifty years after a forgotten cabal of wizards stalemated the Civil War and overthrew the incompetent Confederacy to establish the Southern Alliance monarchy, twenty-two year-old Lieutenant Maximillian Bontemps saves the newly crowned, teenaged King John from a sniper in Asheville by knocking the boy onto his royal ass. Angry that Max dared touch Him, the King dismisses Max from His Royal Guard. Dejected, Max returns home to New Orleans to start a private Security Service.        New Orleans is the last bastion of wizardry in the south, and there Max discovers he has a rare talent: he is immune to magic. For Max's first...

Repurposing a Joke.

  Jokes are often micro fiction—very short, short stories—but they share some characteristics with longer stories. Most folks label a story as good if it keeps its promises and meets expectations. They may label a story as great if it exceeds expectations, but when it subverts or twists or upends expectations it can be brilliant or terrible depending on who reads it and how. These subversions are the basis of a lot of humor. Humor often relies on surprise, particularly the upending of expectations. Two different people can tell the same joke, and for one teller, it falls flat while for the other it invokes laughter. That is a separate, story-telling issue. When the joke is written as micro fiction, as many jokes are, then whether it strikes someone as humorous depends on the reader as much as the writer. This is why explaining a joke often destroys the humor. Explanations eliminate surprise. Recently, I’ve posted a few repurposed old jokes on Facebook, rewritten as political ...