The Blog In Yellow

I'm tilted right now. It's been a long day. I'm hungry, I'm angry, and I'm frustrated by my lack of skill. I remember reading this writing tip list by Dan Simmons. He sounded miserable as he listed why it was so hard to be a writer. I thought he was full of it, I was wrong. Writing is a miserable waste of time. I know because tomorrow, I'm going to try again. I'll spend maybe an hour writing while Brandon Sanderson churns out another book. I'll be burnt out, angry, and unable to read or calm myself down because my autism gives me a short fuse. I can't turn to anyone either. My therapist has left for the weekend and my writing friend is moving. This week, I'm on my own. It doesn't matter anyway, they couldn't have helped me. I finished the first draft of my Cain story and it was like pulling out a tooth with pliars. Is this what King does every day? Four pages of this stuff would kill me, let alone writing one page. I desperately want to b...

One of the pillars of horror is actually mystery. Who's going to believe that a vampire is real or that a ghost is haunting the mansion? It's all malarky. Made up stuff in the your head or the delusions of a mad man. Or better still, the concoction of a drunkard or addict because no sane person would conjure up such insanities. It's one of the great mysterys in horror when you come down to it, why didn't the victims call the police? A notable cliche in the horror movies that there's no cellphone signal or the cops just don't believe you. There is no help coming, you're on your own. Lovecraft does something similar in his own stories to add to the confusion and disbelief of the populace. In The Whisperer in Darkness, a literature teacher named Albert Wilmarth discusses the strange alien sightings seen during a local flood with collegue Henry Akeley. To shrink a long story, Albert is convinced to bring all of his findings to Henry who is a puppet under the con...

I think I wasted today. I'm not too hurt about it but I feel like I should be. I wasted time that I don't have. I played games instead of tricking myself to sit down and write about Cain for a few minutes. I think I'm almost done with Cain. It's not a great story but I'll finish it and go on. I want to write about killer stairs next. Other than that, I had a good day. People were thankful to me, especially the local pastor who thanked me and hugged me when I gave him an ice cold ginger ale. I had plans for today, I was going to listen to more audio logs about the King in Yellow and the game Signalis. At least I organized my notes from those two sets into folders. I think I'll work on Cain tomorrow even if I'm not up to it. I have to write stuff even if I don't feel like it'll be great or I'll never write at all.

Don't expect much today, the day was busy. I thought I'd have time to write but instead I was running around all day doing chores. I had to get an eye exam, first one in five years, to tell if I needed new glasses or not. One thing that didn't change was the optomitrist's iron-like handshake. How is a man that bony so strong that you have to squeeze back to avoid breaking your bones? My eyes are fine despite the new drugs and I'm getting a new pair for the price of twenty dollars thanks to my medicade stuff. After that, they dialated my eyes which made driving home a nightmare. I put my clothes in the wash and went to bed. After that I woke up two hours later and went to dinner with my folks. Then I went home after my laundry was done. See? I don't have much in the tank today.  In other news, the ICS, which is a collection of games, is being shut down. It seems that no one is interested in preserving my favorite hobby. The hands of money are too strong as no one...

I believe Obsidian's new Fallout game will suck. I'm just putting that out there. Obsidian is a game design company behind the famous Fallout New Vegas, which is considered to be one, if not the best, Fallout game in the series. My favorite is still Fallout 3 but I understand that New Vegas is the best in the series, even if it doesn't do everything that 3 did. Xbox has announced that they are laying off hundreds of employees. At least two studios, Double Fine and Compulsion Games, are going back to being indie developers. And what did Xbox expect? In the time since these studios have been purchased, they've come out with a total of less than five games over a near decade. That's not a lot of games from studios that thrive on making smaller games. It's a real bloodbath at Xbox. I've seen posts about people sad that they or their friends have been let off. The worst was perhaps Id who is behind the Doom series. The studio is less than half of what it used to ...

Today I went to the Columbus Book Fair downtown. It's a two day event where authors come to present their work while the famous authors, like Paul Tremblay, get to galvanize their career by showing up while the rest of us normal folk struggle to get published. I shouldn't be so bitter. I've read some of Tremblay's work and it isn't bad, just not my cup of tea. I prefer my tea with a lot of bitter tears in it like Stephen King's tea. My dad and I went there early, around ten before the real event began. I went to find a room where other small time authors would give me their input on writing. There was a line for Tremblay before I got there and it tripled by the time my group was done. I did get some things out of the group. I was lucky to get a seat near the front. The authors there described what their process was like and how they got to be where they are. At first, I thought that only the guy would hold answers for me but there was this woman there who had wr...