Arrant Nonsense

To wit: Those suits came apart like tissue paper! They're supposed to be these big powerful things, they stood up to Thor, they got creamed by the Helicarrier engine and still survived! How come these lava people could just tear them apart? Huh? HUH HUH HUH? BAD WRITING! PLOOOOOOOOOOOT HOOOOOOOOOOOOOLE.

Yeah, people do get frothy about it. It's kind of funny to watch, actually.

So, I came up with a metaphor.

Bear with me, because I'm a writer, and it just occurred to me what it would be like if I did something like Tony did, commensurate with my own skill set.

Tony built 35 suits in roughly six months. About one every five days. Once he finished one, he moved on to the next. Then the next, then the next.

Picture a writer. I'm going to go with a novelist, because that's the level of complexity we're talking about here. The average novel in my chosen genres runs 90,000-120,000 words. Let's go with 100,000 words just to be able to round our numbers nicely.

NaNoWriMo is a worldwide event wherein writers pledge to write 50,000 words in one month. It's considered a pretty onerous task, because that's a lot of words--about 1700 per day. I've succeeded once this year, and failed once this year (although "failed" is a relative term; I still got 40,000 words out of it, so I'm happy).

So, our novelist, if he's really dedicated, will take two NaNoWriMos in order to bang out the first draft of one novel. And that's just the first draft. First drafts suck. They suck a lot. They need to be polished, ripped apart, put back together, etc, etc. Putting the final touches on the thing can take longer than actually writing it.

But, if our novelist is Tony Stark in this situation, he's banging out that first draft in five days by scribbling twenty thousand words a day. That first draft? Is going to be positively riddled with errors. Does he go back and fix them? No, he does not. He opens a new Word doc, and starts the next novel. Five days later, he slaps an END at the bottom of it. And then he does it again. And again. And again.

Thirty-five times.

How good do you think those books are going to be?

Heck, I'm surprised the dang suits functioned at all.

I mean, I'm in awe of people who can consistently bang out a thousand words a day. Twenty thousand in one day, every day? For six months?

Hell, I'm surprised that Tony was functioning at all, at that point.

What with all the taxes I did. But it's done. Go, me. I hope I didn't screw it up too badly, like I did last year.

Since the day couldn't get any worse, I decided to print out Hitman!Ben for a snail mail sub, because that's always fun. But I'm out of ink. So that's awesome.

Actually, I take that back. Today was a mix of awesome and awful. On the awful side, there were the aforementioned taxes (and three hours of my life I will never get back). I've had a cold for the past three days and am coughing my head off. Also, you'd think there'd be some kind of conservation of mass going on with all this goop in my sinuses, but I think a white hole has taken up residence inside them and is just... spewing mucus. It's gross, for the record. And my intestines have decided that they are also unhappy with the current turn of events. What fun, right?

On the plus side, we got paid today, so I got to put money in my anteater for MisCon, which I always enjoy doing. One more paycheck will have me fully funded for that. We ate at Famous Dave's, and it was delicious. And I picked up book 4 in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series, which I am enjoying immensely. I also picked up the Iron Man 3 Prelude comic after deciding not to blow ten bucks on Empire Magazine, whose cover story this issue is (you guessed it) Iron Man 3.

I got no writing or editing done. My head hurts and I'm tired and not real think-y right now. I may take a desultory poke at something tonight, but. . . I doubt it, honestly.

Firefox has a new thing. Or maybe it's an old thing that I've just now discovered.

Personas. You can now have Robert gracing your browser. They also have Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man. Or any other thing you want, really. They have Buffy too. Pick a fandom, any fandom. This one's for you, pensive1.

Shiniest. Thing. EVER. The more I use Firefox, the more Win it is made of.

If you are an Iron Man fan, and you have seen IM2, then you need to go read this, right now:

What Happened to the Burd?

Seriously, go. I'll wait.

Back? Who loves you, baby? I do. Which is why I rec you awesome things.

I finally got the chance to sit down and read Almost No One Makes It Out by atrata yesterday, and it blew me away. Iron Man, what-if scenario based on "What if Tony Stark wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had to join the Army?" and it's amazing. 28,000 words and well worth your time. I devoured it in one sitting and may just read it again.

DFKAJ;ADKF;ZKFJ;DKDJFL;KSDJF;AKLDJF

YES PLEASE GIVE ME MORE OF THAT.

IT WAS ALL... WITH THE THING... AND THAT OTHER THING...

*physically pulls myself back together*

Okay, I've kept my fears about this movie to myself for a fair while. I was afraid it would suffer from too-many-villains-itis, that they wouldn't be able to match the first one, that the magic would be gone, that they'd play it safe with the plot because Disney bought Marvel...

All my fears were laid to rest. Is it perfect? No, but show me a movie that is. This is, without a doubt, the best movie-going experience I've had since "Sherlock Holmes." And, yes, I'm saying that having seen "How to Train Your Dragon" and loving it.

WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT.

No, I still haven't seen it.

HOWEVER.

I have tickets and reserved seats for the 2pm IMAX showing on Monday.

Now, if only I can stay away from spoilers until then. I'm still rather unhappy about the trailers spoiling the suitcase armor. Gaaaaaaaaaah.

I've been hanging around on the Yahoo Answers Books and Authors board for ... oh, about a week now. I've answered enough questions and gotten enough "best answers" that I've somehow managed to qualify as a "top contributor" (whatever that means in this context).

But I think it may be time for me to step away from it, at least for tonight. I've been a tad snippy with the last three questions I've answered, and that's probably not good.

Of course, the last one was "Don't you think this story deserves to be published?" with a link to it on Fictionpress. I click the link out of morbid curiosity and note that the author seems to be having trouble sticking with a single tense, sometimes within the same paragraph. I backbutton and note said tense trouble in my response.

The one before that was "Unit test on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?" with a list of multiple choice questions. I don't know if this kid wants us to do his homework for him or what, but my (rather short-tempered) answer was "read the story, it's not that long." Sheesh.

And the one before that is "Can you help me out with my storie?" (yes, spelled just like that, OW THE PAIN), and she posts a wall o'text and seems to be confuzzling an epilogue with a prologue and I may have been a little bit mean to her too, but DAMN, people, at least make an effort at the frelling craft, okay???

*pants*

Writing? What is this "writing" of which you speak?

Also, I don't think I'm going to get to see Iron Man 2 until Monday. This grieves me.

Also? My uterus can quit jacking me around just any time now. The back pain that has decided to concentrate on my knee is most unwelcome. And I'm still not bleeding, even though I probably should have started doing that a week ago. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

Well, that's something, I guess. Everything unpublished that I have (other than the first thing and that really long thing) is out. The first thing...is probably going to go up here, with a tip jar. The really long thing, I'm holding back as (hopefully) a bonus story to follow the novel when it gets published. So, that's a good. I even sent the Werewolf Fic off to a podcasting market.

I've scribbled a little over 500 words in the zombie story. Yay?

And I need this like burning. The problem is that it's ridiculously overpriced (even on eBay, yes, I checked, paint a giant L on my forehead, please). BUT IT'S IRON MAN. AND IT'S ADORABLE. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

And now I'm going to wander into the Word War room and see if anyone wants to play. Someone send me Plot, please.

Just the one. Isn't that enough? Is it May 7 yet?



( 1024x600 image under the cut )

X-posted at robertdowney_jr, along with a bunch of others.