I shouldn't really be blogging right now. I certainly shouldn't be using "blog" as a verb, but that's more of a semantic thing.

I shouldn't be writing this right now, because I have a whole list of things to do.

But, even if I don't get to them, those things will probably be forgotten in pretty short order, and this will remain for thousands of years, accessible by the tiny ear-computers our eventual cyborg masters will forcibly implant in each one of us.

Yeah, I'm in one of those moods.

So anyway, what I said I was going to talk about yesterday. The writing. It progresses, believe it or not, though I'm squeezing it in between interesting music projects and interesting candle-buying binges. I in fact did go nuts at Dollar Tree, and spent 7, count them, SEVEN dollars. But back to the writing, and how it progresses.

For those of you who just joined the program, or better yet, for those of you I haven't quite plugged it to enough, I have this story here. Well, it's actually not accessible there, because I realized 2 chunks were missing from the last page, and with the exception of the Empress, I don't think anyone has even read Chapter 3 as it is supposed to be. Plus, I've found countless continuity screwups and generally nonsensical plot glitches that are a result of the rather schizophrenic pattern of writing that has produced the story thus far.

But, yet again, back to the point. Chapter 4. After I finish it, I'm going to do a thorough cleansing of Chapters 1-3, and hopefully get to a fairly streamlined (for my tangenty style of writing) end result. Then, I'm gonna put the whole shabam back up, in a nice happy new Wordpress format, so people can comment and I can keep track of revisions, and so on yippy doo squirt squirt.

Now, the part of this that may be of interest to one or two people other than myself. Well, there are 2 parts. But they're both part of a master part, or parent part, which has precisely 2 children, both of which are not so much children as parts that may be of interest. Yes, I am actually asking people to read my writing, and doing it in this way.

Early morning Friday, I'm probably going to put up what will later be dubbed as "the Lost pages" of TAB. It's a chunk of the end of Chapter 3 that prepares the reader for the whole slew of new and interesting characters they will meet in Chapter 4, like the Transformers movie, except for the killing of all the good characters that already existed. However, like the Transformers movie, it still introduces them in a horrible way, but I commit a far more horrible sin than killing Optimus Prime; I use an awful, awful gimmick. It is for this reason that this bit was cut from the web-published version, and only one person other than myself to date has read that bit. This chunk will not be put into any later versions of the story, hence the Time-Life-Home-video-esque title of "the Lost pages." I don't know if I am proud or ashamed of how well I pulled off the gimmick, but I am certainly ashamed that I momentarily considered it part of a work I'm generally somewhat keen on.

Now, the other part, the part that doesnt get as much love from the parent part, but will one day thrive on that neglect and become a big star, you know the kind of part I'm talking about. The teasy part that makes all the jibbering actually worthwhile to the people who actually give a damn about the story.

So far, Chapter 4 is suffering from some sitcomitis. There, I said it. It recapitulates a lot of the events that took place in the preceeding 3 chapters. It does so without the hackneyed feel of the first scene in the 2nd act of most sitcoms, but it nonetheless does so.

I never considered myself good at making up names. Most names I come up with seem either like John Smith or Vector D. Adrenamax (the D is for Danger), and sometimes, I sneak in something halfway decent but still very stereotypical, like Westington Q. Forthright. Actually, I think I may use that last one.

Anyway, in my opinion, I suck with names. Which is awful, because I love making characters. If I have my way this thing will be like a Tolstoy novel, but without the soul-crushing heft or mind-feel-stupid-making literary value. So, I like making a bunch of characters, but I think I'm awful at naming them.

This is relevant as in the last post I mentioned General Strummund. I've decided on that name, since I'm tired of vascillating on a relatively small aspect of what will become a central character, and since "Grievous" is now taken. As those of you who've been playing our little game for a while have noticed, I give away the subtitle for the new chapter at the end of the current chapter, and so it should come as little surprise to any of you that a character named General Strummund will come into play in a chapter called The Panic Strikes.

Anyway, that's basically the news. It's going along, sitcom-act-2 as it may be, and there's a guy named Strummund in it, and I am finally settled on that name.

Ha ha, you just spent minutes of your life reading all that for practically nothing. Nyah.

Now, for something unrelated:

This is the statistics section from my wonderful Spam filter, Popfile, which, if you look through enough of these entries, you will see me plug a number of times.

Yeah. 8.3% of my mail is good. 8.4% if you're statistically charitable. Thank you, ye gods of the interweb, for proving that yes, everything good is eventually overrun with crap.

[one moon circles]