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  • Valkyrie

    2025 Writing Event Announcement - Comicality Tribute - Coming of Age

    By Valkyrie

    May 2, 2025 would have been Comicality's fiftieth birthday.    We thought that would be a perfect day to feature a tribute to our beloved friend, author, and mentor.  We're announcing it now so that his fans will have an entire year to work on writing a story, letter, poem, or whatnot on a topic that resonates with them with respect to Comicality.  Coming of Age - A Tribute to Comicality  Due date for submissions:  April 25, 2025 No minimum length One submission per author, c
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I've got me a title!

Woohoo!   Yeah, stupid though it may sound, one of the things that's been holding me up on the sequel to Yankee (besides work, other writing commitments, the straight romance novel, family time, and a serious attempt to make things good with my wife) is the title. I've been calling it "Yankee II" but, let's be honest, as a title that stinks. (Granted, there are worse, but who wants worse than that?) The title helps me, since it mostly sums up the story, at least until it's got enough traction
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Introductions Continued

I lived in the same neighbourhood in London until I was twenty. When I was ten we moved just around the corner into a huge house know as locally as
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Editor

I've had the odd experience of being able to edit drafts of a story I'm reading and really, really like.   On the one hand, it's kind of cool -- I get to read chapters before everyone else. (nyah, nyah! ) Which isn't actually a cool thing all by itself, but I get a fix sooner than I might otherwise, and that's good.   The downside to this is I actually feel kinda like crap about it, and more than a little guilty. And that's because I've been ripping the chapters to shreds. Stuff that I wou
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First post - Introductions

The first post is always the worst. Especially because I'm aware that this is relatively public. Yet not. The people that might read this are at the very least of a like mind, and will not be judgemental... I hope. Even if they are, does it matter? It's true that what people say about what you do or write always matters. But not from the RL point of view of outing me. That is one great joy of the internet. Anonymity.   I'd say I'm probably bisexual with a strong leaning towards men. Not that I
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Strangest places (part 3)

And here's part 3, the last of what's written. Past the end of this (and yeah, it ends in the middle of a scene) there are some sketched out bits, including my first shot at a tender sex scene which really didn't work, but that's about it.   It does kinda peter out and not wrap up properly. I've always had a problem with endings...   And yeah, I'm still arguing with the rich text editor.   Strangest Places   <h1 style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">Scene: Back to school<
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Strangest places (part 2)

Yep, more of the story I'm not gonna finish (I think). Again, more viewpoint shifts and missing sections, so it's mildly but not entirely comprehensible. And I still seem to be freaking the rich text editor widget out.   Strangest Places   <h1>Scene: The kiss in public</h1> [Justin]   It was a nice day. Spring was coming, and the weather'd turned warm early. Tristan and I had met at the park by the library, and were just sort of hanging out.   "So you planning on
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Strangest places (part 1)

Yep, another partially finished draft that I think will go nowhere.   This was the first real gay romance I wrote, done over the course of a month when I was coming out to myself and really working things out in my head. It was therapy of a sort, though it's always a tossup how well that worked. It's got all sorts of problems, the biggest being it switches first-person viewpoints and even throws itself into third person occasionally. Hey, what can I say, I was reading a good chunk of Nifty a
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You know that story you thought I was done writing

Yeah, well... me too. Apparently we were both wrong.   I've gotten a number of pieces of criticism about the last two chapters of Yankee. They boil down to two main points:   1) I didn't like the ending 2) The ending was weakly written   #1 is something to be coped with -- the plot's not going to change. #2, though... unfortunately that second point is a lot more valid than I wanted it to be. The ending of Yankee could have been really strong, but intsead it had Rob kind of wussing out a
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Yankee's done, yay!

Chapter 16 is off to Nifty and Myr, though both folks have plenty to do, and it's 10 AM so I wouldn't expect anything before the morning. Still, I've finished, and feel the need to dance the geeky author dance of completion. This would be a good time to avert your eyes.   Now it's time to dig into other things. Ben and William await, as do a number of other characters who've been grumbling at me lately.
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It's a bloody cascade effect

it's one of those iceberg things. (Or one of those "I need to install this one little package on my Debian Linux system" things...) I've got a simple exchange between two characters, which looks like:   "What do you think, Ben," the white haired man asked. "One of the Great Cities?"   Ben frowned and held his spyglass up to look again. "No," he said after another survey of the city. "I don't think so. It's not from the First Age, either. Second, I think. It's definitely big, but it doe
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Help, help, I'm being repressed!

I hate it when characters get out of control. Well, mostly, at least. I mean, yes, it's useful sometimes, since it means the words flow faster (woohoo!) but it reaches a point where things just start getting out of hand. I mean, it's bad enough when they start going places and doing things, leaving a trail of plot summaries and partially written chapters in their wake, but now I've sat down and started on detailed character backgrounds.   Ghod, I'm even working on rules for the bloody magic sy
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I hate when the words won't come

Or when they do they just don't come fast enough. Yes, I know I'm kind of whining here. Some days the words just flow out. Those days I like. Some days it's a fight for every word -- fighting against other pieces that want my attention, or fighting against a story that just doesn't want to be told right then. Those days suck.   Today's just one of those annoying days. The story's there, there's no real distraction, the words, they're just coming out in small chunks. At this rate it'll take all
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Wedding bells part 3

One last partial chapter dump, so I can clean my brain out and move on to other things. Woohoo! I won't be leaving this story alone (alas the action parts come later and earlier, but aren't actually written) but it is getting set aside for now so I can work on the earlier parts of the series.   This is the third in the set of three I posted. The first one was the middle, and the second the beginning (yay for discontinuity) if you want to go read those. They're all chapter starters and get mayb
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Wedding bells, part .5

These darned characters need to leave me alone, they really do. I think. (I'm not sure, it is fun being able to sit down and bang out a lot of text)   Anyway, I think I can ignore this story for right now and work on the things that come earlier. Since that means this'll likely get ignored for a year or two I'm splatting it out here, well, just because. Probably splat out the beginning of the third chapter soon as well, since that's close to being set-aside-able.   This is uneditited, even b
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Damn those characters anyway

The problem with having a good setting and characters you like is that they tend to get out of hand. You think that you've got things under control and pretty much ready to go and... ha! Surprises happen and it turns out that you don't.   I've a pair of characters, Ben and William, I very much like. They're sweet and sappy, and when circumstances call for it can kick much ass and wreak massive amounts of mayhem, which is always good for some fun. (They're the two in the Wedding Bells snippet I
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Wedding Bells (part three-ish)

First things first, though not necessarily in that order, right?   This is part of a piece I shouldn't be working on, since it's the fourth (or fifth? Sixth, maybe, with the side-stories, I'm not quite sure) sequel to a piece I should be working on. Personally I blame Dio, since he's sick and can't defend himself. (and has the summary of that piece, waiting for a second read-over -- the first time he read it he was altogether too kind and I ended up savaging the plot. It's much better now, but
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Time to go

I dunno about anyone else who writes, but I find that ideas tend to hit me as scenes entire scenes or chapters. Not necessarily complete ones -- they're often incomplete, with bits and pieces missing -- but scenes or chapters. When that happens I open up a new doc in the word processor, bang out as much of the thing as I can before I lose it, and save the thing. If I have some clue as to what's going on I'll have a separate file with notes, character sketches, plot points, and suchlike things, a
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It was a dark and stormy night

This piece started with a gag. Well, two of them, actually -- it does really start out:   It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in Massachusetts that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness   Though I know t
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Fiddly bits

Well, it looks like I'm going to be using this blog for more than I planned, so I went and tweaked things a bit. Added in some categories, changed the titles of some of the entries already posted (made 'em the names of the stories), categorized the things I've posted, and limited the size of what's shown, since the main display page is damned big what with these 1-2K word story pieces stuck in them.   Yay for excuses to avoid real work!
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By Design piece

Right, I know I should be working on the last chapter of Yankee (and the first few chapters of its sequel) but I've been distracted by work and other stuff. This has been sticking in my head too -- I guess I shouldn't ever say "I wish I could write like that, but I can't" since then my brain will nag at me until I do.   I think I'm calling this one By Design, but I'm not sure. It actually involves a lot of landscape architecture, though you'd not know it from this bit.   Anyway, this is on
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Stories I wish I'd written

I've got a houseful of sick people (including me, though not nearly as badly as everyone else) so I've been up weird hours and bored to death, though not actually competent to do anything useful like write. Trolling the shub-internet's a dodgy thing at the best of times, but at 3 AM, well...   Anyway, courtesy of the top site list, I found Wizard and Warrior. And some other stuff that was pretty darned good, but that's for another time.   It's a Michael Moorcock riff, and a damned good one.
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A story in scenes of dialog, part 1

This one's been kicking around for ages. Yes, before you mention it, I write far too much dialog -- with Yankee (and some of the other stories I've got in progress) you see the third draft. The first draft's generally 80% dialog, the second has all the intervening bits added, and the third's the cleaned up version after getting a twice-over from an editor.   This story, for reasons I never did figure out but accept anyway, takes place entirely inside an apartment. That's not to say that the ch
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