My new National Novel Writing Month project is very special to me, but I'm not quite ready to announce what it is ... on purpose.
I recently found this column, which I wrote awhile back (14 years ago!) and put in
my “something to send in if the oncoming winter has me so down I can’t think
of anything funny to say” file. These "interesting" facts have no doubt gone around the world several time since then.
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
This contains interesting “facts” e-mailed to me. The truth is, I
stole -- ahem -- wrote about this stuff so long ago that my readers back then have all died of old age, so think of it as an "I Love Lucy" rerun.
Now, these may or may not be true -- that’s the problem with the internet -- but they’re still interesting:
“A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.”
Surely a federally funded study is in progress?
“In ten minutes, a hurricane released more energy than all the world’s nuclear weapons combined.”
But there are practical difficulties to loading a hurricane into a B-52’s bomb bay.
“On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.”
No, NO--pens. P.E.N.S. There's no "I". Get your mind out of the gutter.
“On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.”
Well, death, doesn’t jump off the ceiling and wrap its creepy-crawly
little poison legs around you in the middle of the night, does it? Um ... does it?
 |
| SPIDER--Oh, wait. |
“Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.”
As a result, the average New Yorkers fears cabs more than spiders, death, or hurricanes.
“Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.”
Any of you ladies want to tell me something?
“Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.”
Do we really want to? I mean, it’s hard enough to adjust to
changing technology year to year -- someone who lived over a century had
to adjust to the idea of flying, let alone space travel, cell phones,
and Michael Jackson turning white.
(I should point out that when I wrote this, Michael Jackson was alive. And white.)
“Women blink nearly twice as much as men.”
This one’s easy to explain. I blink when I hear something ridiculous, and so whenever a woman listens to a man ...
“It’s physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.”
And this is a concern why --? Seriously, what drunk college student first thought, “Gee, I wonder if I can lick my elbow?”
“The main library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year
because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the
weight of all the books.”
Imagine that -- books in a library. At least they’ll have plenty of storage room in the basements.
(By the way, I’m told this is a common urban legend at libraries around
the country. Possibly started by college students who got bored with
trying to lick their elbows.)
“A snail can sleep for three years.”
Never thought I’d envy a snail.
“Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.”
It was made by government contract.
 |
| SPIDER--never mind. |
“The electric chair was invented by a dentist.”
Well, of course it was.
“In ancient Egypt, priests plucked every hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.”
A concept that was invented by a dentist, before electricity.
“Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.”
I wonder how long the inventor of the typewriter had to work to fit in that little inside joke?
“’Go’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.”
Followed directly by “stop”, of course.
“A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.”
How do we know this? Maybe they’re just very polite.
“American on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.”
Not the same Americans every day. I hope.
“If Barbie was life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33.”
How’d you like to be HER chiropractor?
“Barbie would then stand seven feet, two inches tall.”
Wow-- she could put my eyes out with those things.
“No word in the English language rhymes with ‘month’”
And don’t think I haven’t tried.
Putting all these together, I’ve learned that no one knows why a duck’s
quack doesn’t echo while standing under a 7 foot tall Barbie in a
hurricane, but if a snail that’s been sleeping for three years doesn’t
get hit by a baseball, it’s often used to pluck all the hair from an
Egyptian priest who invented the electric chair while on a dental
appointment to fix teeth he knocked out while trying to lick his elbow
in the Indiana University library 116 years ago. Luckily, he had a
typewriter and so didn’t choke on a pen, but instead was running from
his personal ad date’s husband when a New York cabbie swatting at a
spider didn’t see the ‘go’ sign and ran over him and his pet crocodile
in front of a pizza place. During a hurricane.
I tried to fit “month” in there somewhere, but couldn’t get the rhythm right, no matter how much I blinked.
 |
| SPIDER--Oh, for heaven's sake. |
(Before you read this, let me remind you that this is a humor blog. Just sayin'. No, I'm not going to debate over it; let's just have some fun.)
Let the recounts begin!
Okay, so as you read this election day voting hours are over, although the election itself might go on for weeks, months, or, as in the case of some Trump haters, the last one never stopped. But it's over for me, because I'm voting for National Novel Writing Month, which means I have to write 50,000 words on a novel during November.
In other words, I just won't have time for shrieking and wringing hands. Those are my typing hands.
Because of NaNoWriMo, most of my posts this month were pre-written and scheduled for November, including this one--as I write this it's actually October 27th. But I don't want to influence the election, so I'm not posting it until Tuesday evening.
It would be a mistake for me to make any predictions, but what the heck:
Congratulations, President Biden.
Yes, I know, the lawsuits haven't even begun yet. But I'm confident in my position. President-elect Biden has all the advantages of any Democrat candidate: The cheerleading of mainstream media, a stranglehold on big cities and their highly populated cemeteries, and a really awesome hair plug job that makes him by-gosh handsome.
Say what you want about Trump, but he should have gone for those hair transplants. And stayed off Twitter.
Biden also had the advantage of being more likeable than Hillary Clinton, which really isn't all that hard, while also attracting the women's vote with Vice-President Harris. Sure, Biden was an old white man when he got elected, but so was George Washington.
(I just checked, and Washington was 57 when he was first inaugurated. But my point stands, because back then 57 was today's 77.)
Now that he's President-elect and in charge of the Secret Service and the most powerful military in the world, I'd like to apologize for calling him dumb. Yeah, I still believe he's kind of intelligence challenged--which isn't the fault of anyone born that way, after all--but I'm really sorry I said it. It's just that after keeping track of things he said during the Obama years, it never occurred to me that he'd get so far.
Honestly, I didn't think President Trump would get that far, either: Four years ago I predicted we'd be seeing a Clinton reelection in 2020.
But Biden did it, and that takes a lot of work, and Biden should get credit for that. I can barely make it through a whole week without two hour naps, and I'm George Washington age. President Biden will be--what--82 at the end of his first term? (Trump's not that much younger.) It's a rough job for anyone, let alone someone so old.
Maybe I should also start being nice to V.P. Harris. Just in case.
I wasn't going to post this weekend, but I wanted everyone to know that for the upcoming holiday season we're dropping the e-book price of Coming Attractions to $1.99. It's already dropped on Amazon and Smashwords, and within the next few days it'll come down on other sites, also.
You can pick it up on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Attractions-Mark-R-Hunter-ebook-dp-B07KM6JWQC
And Smashwords here:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/908918
Or of course you can always go to the website:
http://www.markrhunter.com/books.html
I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, and aren't you jealous?
No, it's not a yodeling contest in Wisconsin. Sheesh. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, the month being November, and the challenge being to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That figures out to ... let's see ... carry the--ah. 1,667 words per day, on the average.
Doesn't sound like much ... until you try it.
Personally, I would have chosen NaNoWriMo to be in January, which has an extra day, no holidays, and absolutely no reason to go outside. (What, New Year's? Let's face it: That holiday is actually on December 31st. After that a ball drops, you kiss someone through a mask, go home, and sleep late. Start writing at noon, and you're good.)
But the advantage of November is that you can use the excuse to leap up as soon as the turkey is eaten on Thanksgiving. "Sorry, love catching up with the family but Uncle Bert has already started with the political insults and the football game will be boring gotta go!" And you're outta there.
If you're a writer, you have the advantage of being too poor to go do anything else anyway, so why not give it a try? I won NaNoWriMo twice, with my manuscripts for Summer Jobs Are Murder and Fire On Mist Creek, both now quietly accumulating rejection slips in the corner. So I can give you a few tips on how to make it through the month, which is intended to give wannabe writers a kick in the proverbial pants:
Have your story ready to go. Characters created, outlines done (if you’re an outliner), research … um, researched. You should be prepared to type the first line of the actual story at 12:01 a.m. November 1st. (Or 10 a.m., or whenever you start.)
Second, take care of personal matters. Have a talk with friends and family. Tell them why it’s important to you. Make sure they either support you, or your locks are changed. If there’s some TV show you can’t stand to miss, DVR it. Take care to stay hydrated and eat proper meals, and every once in awhile get up and make sure your legs still work. Hire someone to make the meals and do the dishes.
Oh, wait, you're a writer--you can't afford to hire anyone.
Third, clear your schedule. As much as possible, anything you need to do, have done in October. Doctor appointments, for instance. Or, delay it until December. Laundry, for instance.
In other words, free up as much time as possible, and use that time for writing—writing first. Sure, if you cut a finger off you have to go to the hospital, but couldn’t you just bandage up an amputated toe for a few weeks? You don’t type with your toes.
Do you?
Once you get started writing, keep at it--don't worry about typos or other problems, you can fix those in edits. Get your story down.
I'm doing what I've been calling my Untitled Oz Project, which has no title. (My original titles always suck, anyway.) Tell me yours! You've got nothing to lose but 30 days ... and maybe a toe.
If anyone wants to tag along on my trip, or maybe try a trip of your own, my NaNoWriMo account is here:
https://nanowrimo.org/participants/mark-r-hunter
It's a sad, sick day in Tennessee, and something's fishy in Rhode Island, on 50 Authors From 50 States:
https://annettesnyder.blogspot.com/2020/10/tennessee-nashville-at-night-with.html
https://annettesnyder.blogspot.com/2020/10/greetings-from-rhode-island-home-of.html
I was going to make this short: I can't say much about the plot or characters, because that would spoil the first two books of this trilogy. But there's so much going on, and so much to talk about, and so many, many pages, that I'm not sure "short" counts for anything here.
The City of Mirrors is the finish of a thousand year story begun in The Passage. As we open enough time has passed since the second book, The Twelve, that younger members of an apocalypse-surviving human community have come to think the deadly "virals" they've heard of are just scary stories. The last outpost of humanity, Kerrville, Texas, is bursting at the seems in a spreading civilization that harkens back to the Old West.
Both the rest of humanity and the virals seem to be extict, although one small group of survivors have been trying to repair a ship that might take them exploring, and a few others are scattered here and there.
But all is, naturally, not what it seems. At about the same time the survivors learn they may, indeed, be the last humans on Earth, the final Big Bad makes his appearance: Zero, the one who came before The Twelve. And he's got surprises waiting.
There's enough backstory here that you could read The City of Mirrors as a standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it. Justin Cronin brings all the strings together, including the ones you didn't even know were there, and his final act is immensely satisfying to those who've seen the story all the way through. Spreadsheets? Markable walls all over his house, covered with family trees and notes? I don't know how he does it. But I submit that he's actually better at these sprawling sagas than George R.R. Martin, who sometimes seems to enjoy mystifying his readers about who the heck these people are, and where they heck they've been.
My only issue is that there's one huge--and I mean HUGE--flashback involving Zero, the sort-of-villain who's been ahead of everyone else from the beginning. We find out in detail exactly why he ends up where he is, and what drives him. It's not that it's not interesting. The story of Zero's life, and how he ends up at the epicenter of a civilization-ending epidemic, is fascinating. It's just that it goes into an amazing amount of detail that the reader doesn't really need to know, in a book that's already so long that Chuck Norris could stand on it to punch out Godzilla. You could skip a lot of it ... but you won't know which parts, until you reach the end of the story.
Oh, and what is The City of Mirrors? Well, that's revealed, but to give it away would be ... giving it away.
And then, to satisfy the "thousand year" thing I mentioned earlier, we go far, far into the future, to find out the results of our heroes' actions. It's the ultimate epilogue--and it works.
I highly recommend the whole trilogy, and I'm impressed that Cronin clearly wasn't winging it--he knew where all the characters, and his vast story, were going all along.
https://www.amazon.com/City-Mirrors-Novel-Passage-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B015BCWZWW
A trip to the Devil's Soup Bowl in Michigan ... assuming you can see this video from my seldom used YouTube channel. What do I know? But if this does work, I'll be trying to post to YouTube more often in the future. Because I don't juggle enough social media sites.
