SHAOLIN TRIPS by DM

[Drunk Monk]

...wtf am i on this? that's why i need this sounDOOMboard. apart from blowing off steam, there's the occassional check yo package, in a totally fraternal sense, mind you.

i started at
Trips: 46
Monks: 28
Masters: 25
Methods: 24

Trips:
prologue (may totally overhaul)
romanization comment
intro
15 chapters (up to 2007)
14 fragments

Monks: 19 articles (done!)
Masters: 8 articles (15 remain)
Methods: 28 remain

[Drunk Monk]

I'm planning to sort Trips into 18 chapters for purely numerological reasons that Shaoliners will understand (hopefully). Pages are somewhat arbitrary because it'll change dramatically when laid out.
1: 8 p
2: 9 p
3: 10 p
4: 12 p
5: 12 p
6: 8 p
7: 7 p
8: 12 p
9: 5 p
10: 18 p
11: 5 p
12: 4 p
13: 15 p
14: 47 p - will move a large portion to 15
15: 8 p

[Drunk Monk]

...well, sort of. I'll touch up some here and there but the heavy lifting is done. These are archived articles that have been reformatted and updated.
1: 5 p
2: 4 p
3: 5 P
4: 1 p
5: 3 p
6: 8 p
7: 3 p
8: 3 p
9: 3 p
10: 3 p
11: 2 p
12: 3 p
13: 15 p
14: 4 p
15: 5 p
16: 4 p
17: 2 p
18: 3 p
19: 4 p
hmm, maybe i should delete one and go for that 18 again...i might be able to compress 4 into 8 somehow...

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

I don't think I've ever got anyone thinking. It looks like your close. We should see it finished by Tuesday, maybe Wednesday? I want my copy with gold leaf.

[Drunk Monk]

I had been getting bogged down with t14, which got way out of hand. That, plus my eternal February freak-out, stalled me out for last month. Laying it all out so helped me do some re-org. I'm moved some for t14 to t15 and combined t11 & t12 (still need a better transition for the that)to even some stuff out. I'm planning to drop mk4 into mk8 to get my 18 pattern going, and will try to do the same with masters. Still debating about how methods will go. That's a bit of a mess. In the middle of last night I thought about chucking it, but I've reneged on that thought this morning. I'll have to really play with that to get it to 18.

I don't feel anywhere near finished - mostly because of methods. Right now, I'm just trying to settle t16 & t17 so I can pick up with t18, which is happening over the next 2 weeks.

Gold leaf indeed. This is publishing in 2009. It may go straight to Kindle. Publishing a paperback today is as right up there in obsoletedom with opening a fencing store...

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Writing sucks but at least you are writing. mt041

You could always go to Cranefly's. He seems to have struck a deep vein and see what got him going besides Lemon Chicken and Ichi. Or maybe that is the magic recipe?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

If CF struck a deep vein, he'll have a tougher job cleaning up than he thought.

[Drunk Monk]

...Cf taught me a lot about the process of writing, in particular non-linear composition, which is key to my method...or my madness.

[cranefly]

It was Feb. 26, maybe 10 pm. I had this odd idea about fishnets, so I decided to write it up and post it.
But when I wrote it, it came out flat. Still, I'm stubborn. If I think something has promise, I'll work it longer than any sane person would.
So I worked it, and worked it. It reached two full pages, worse than ever. Every poke and prod made it worse.
I must have worked on it two or three hours. At about 1 in the morning I gave up. It was junk, and I wouldn't post it to Doom.
And I was peeved at myself for wasting the time on it. I went to bed discouraged and defeated. Because it was DOA.

The next morning I got up and started checking mail and surfing. But I have two monitors, and the left one still had the fishnet piece on it. I had no intention of revisiting it, and I kept meaning to close the file to get it off the screen. But instead I started tinkering with it. I'd do some surfing, glance over at a fishnet paragraph, and change it. And I kept doing that over a period of a couple hours.
A lot of changes involved consolidation and deletion, and for a long while I felt I was consolidating it out of existence.
But at some point there emerged a core that seemed to work and I built on that, removing all else.

What I ended up posting was one-tenth the size of the junky original -- which I still have, by the way -- and I think it's pretty decent. And I had no idea it would grow into the thread that eventually emerged.

Why am I telling you all this? I guess to make clear I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have a magic formula for writing. And a lot of efforts go absolutely nowhere. I had administered last rites to the fishnet idea only to somehow resuscitate it. And I can't give any insight into how that happened. Because lots of my failed ideas stay dead.

If this is meant as any kind of advice, I suppose it would have to do with persistence. Be persistent when tackling something you feel holds promise. Because writing is a very dodgy enterprise, full of hits and misses, and the more arrows you fire at your target, the better chance you have of eventually hitting it.

This, of course, can take a lot of time.

It also helps to do the research. Don't skimp on it. Order the $1500 doll, try it out. The cheap blow-up one too. Ignorance is no excuse for bad writing.

--cranefly

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

You saw it here first. The key to good writing is a good $1500 Japanese sex doll. I could have really used that for Screenplay class.

[thatguy]

Business expense...

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

but i'm closing in. i just roughed out t16 and started setting up t17. hope to have that in the can before next week. but i'm beat now so i'm turning in early. the time change always throws me off. when my shaolin class started tonight, it was just me and three others, and i realized that i was probably older than all three of the others combined. well, maybe not quite, maybe i was shy a half decade or so, but still...i'm done for the night.

[Drunk Monk]

...and I now have the final chapter. Just got to write it. That, and work out the masters and methods sections. Got to get back to it. Sadly, I've found the counteragent to albatross plucking. It's called netflix. :oops:

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Didn't you start this in the '80s? You can always cancel your netflix account. Not that I could. Don't be daft, man. But you could.

[Drunk Monk]

...but she may cancel it. She's like that.

One of the reasons DM got married is so that someone would watch over his indulgences and hopefully curtail them before it kills him...