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Final (major) edit pass of “Death Rides for Free” done

I’ve finished up my final (major) edit pass of “Death Rides for Free” and am busily putting the edits in to the doc. I normally do my edits on a hard copy so as to compartmentalize my working environments. I use the word processor primarily for the “barf” phase, then edit on hard copy in the “polish” phase in order to avoid the temptation to edit / wordsmith during the barf phase. After a slash-and-burn rampage with the red pen (which is misleading, as I tend to write bare-bones and then augment and add far more than I remove during an edit pass) I type it all in.

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Shakesperean Pie

You’re probably already familiar with Weird Al’s parody Star Wars American Pie, but you may not be aware of another version American Pie performed by Robert Lund and simply brilliant lyrics by M. Spaff Sumsion. If not, and you have any interest in Shakespearean, you must check out Shakespearean Pie. I laughed so hard that I was crying.

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Venture Brothers, where are you?

Oh.  Checking Wikipedia, it seems that (finally!) the Venture Brothers season three is scheduled to start on June 1st, a mere 41 days from now.  It has been far too long since I’ve had a fix of new Venture Brothers, which is the funniest show on TV, bar none.  At least to me (but I suspect it has a certain generational appeal to it).

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“The Unmodified Man” off to a good start

Today I actually got down to it and wrote a bit under a thousand words (which is quite good for me, as today included significant house cleaning and a visit to the library and book store with Merideth) to put “The Unmodified Man” up to about 1500 words in two writing sessions. So it is off to a good start. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it under 4K words as I’m still in the opening scenes and have already discovered that one of the characters is rather loquacious.

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Half way through last edit on “Death Rides for Free”

I’m about half-way through my last major edit of “Death Rides for Free” and is currently at a little under 25K words. I have someone who hasn’t read any of the Chronicles from the Nexus before lined up to read it so I can find out how well it works as a standalone story (being the result of splitting “The Alchemist of Liberty” into two). Hopefully I’ll have a draft ready for copyediting in a couple of weeks.

In other writing news I’ve started a new short story “The Unmodified Man”, which, I think, will be fairly short. I’d like it to be less than 7K words in length, perhaps even 4K words or so. But my stories have a tendency to grow, so I don’t know how successful I’ll be in doing that.