Thing Palette Doesn't Understand

1. Why does a razor, which is metal, become dull after cutting hair, which is so much softer than metal? That's like saying knives get dull after cutting butter. WTF?
2. Anything more complicated than basic algebra. There's no joke here, I simply can't wrap my brain around it. The irony is that I can understand extremely difficult mathematical concepts as long as they are explained in English rather than math. I can go on about gravity, and quantum mechanics, and spooky action from a distance, but ask me "Why?" and I can't answer because I lack the mathematical grounding to prove it. Math is sort of an article of faith for me... I know it exists but I can't prove it.
   
3. Pi. No, really. True story: I once told a friend "I don't get the rationale behind Pi." Those of you who speak math are no doubt laughing your asses off at the pun I just made, but I assure you that I was being completely serious at the time.
4. How Vampires replaced ponies for tweenage girls. I remember when liking vampires was enough to get you branded a freak, a weirdo, and have authority figures look at you funny when you walked past because you might be carrying a gun under that coat. I guess this is what happens when fans of Anne Rice have kids?
   
5. Where the past week went. Wasn't it Monday just yesterday? Damn allergy hangovers...
   

A small taste of Friday

I'm working hard on the next portion of Curse/Or and I hope to have it ready on Friday for your entertainment.

So, no real blog post tonight. However, I shall leave you with a phrase which pleases me:

"Someone," she hissed, "needs to tell me, using very small words, what the hell happened back there, with the exploding cat and the weird shouting girl and the cheeseburgers and OH FUCK WHAT HAPPENED TO MY HAND?"

It's the little things in life that bring joy...

Curse/Or: Chapter 3 Revised

As I mentioned earlier, I discovered an issue with the pacing of the big fight scene in chapter 3. This issue was so large it demanded a fairly extensive re-write to make it work effectively.

In order to provide context, I am posting the entirety of Chapter 3 now. I apologize to everyone who is now grumbling about "having to re-read stuff". These things happen when one is essentially liveblogging the novel-writing process. Still there is new stuff here, so I encourage you all to read it again.

Chapter 3: LULZ is the law, LULZ under LOL

It wasn't until much later that Teresa learned the exploding cat had actually been a plush toy with a stun grenade stuffed inside. Surprised and off-balance, the force of the flash-bang beneath her knocked her up and over, the right side of her torso striking the edge of the table with enough force to make her wince.

As she fell, the serrated pain of a cracked rib tearing inward from bone to lung to tumor, she knew -- with an animal certainty which bypassed all thought -- that everyone in the dining room had seen the flash and heard the bang. They had shared the experience. They were all interconnected with her.

They had all been breathing her air, just like the inmates at Frontera.

The magic flared within her at the speed of instinct, burning from her tumor outward through the searing pain in her side, spreading her blindness and deafness and disorientation across a network of arcane second-hand smoke and into the two dozen customers and waitstaff.

As one, the entire population of the restaurant coughed wetly. Their lifetime chances of contracting cancer increased by a statistically significant percentage.

And then Teresa could act again, shoulder-rolling as she hit the floor, coming up into a kind of half-crouch. She could see the girl crouched beneath the table, wiping her mouth with the left sleeve of a bright pink cardigan, right hand buried inside a matching vinyl purse-slash-tote bag. Their eyes met.

The girl looked to be about 12 years old, but the eyes that looked back at Teresa weren't those of a child. They were hard and deep and dark, as black as her glossy Asian hair, a gaze made of obsidian knives. They were the sockets that remained after her innocence had been scooped out with a melon baller.

They were the same eyes Teresa had seen in the mirror every day for the past twenty years.

"OH HAI THAR," the girl exclaimed, and pulled a pistol from her bag. It was the exact same shade of obnoxious pink as her purse, except in anodized aluminum, and the kitty face painted along its extended barrel matched the picture on the girl's dress. She cocked her head to the side and smiled brightly, waving cheerfully with her left hand as the laser spot under the gun barrel traced a hot pink line to Teresa's heart.

"U DIEZ NAO KTHXBAI."

The gun made a soft mewing sound as it fired. Pain blossomed inside Teresa's chest, twice, and then she was falling face-first onto the carpet, oblivion thundering upon her like an oncoming train.

"LOL," announced the girl. "ENDCAT HAZ ENDED JOO." She pivoted smoothly to her left, humming tunelessly as she took careful aim at the still-stunned Esther's head.

Yarrow gasped. "You… !" He was on the floor next to Esther, his hands clawing at the clutter of the broken dishes around him in a feeble attempt to end his disorientation. The girl brightened visibly at this, squatting by his head to regard him curiously, pervious target forgotten. Her grin was feral, her slender body quivering with predatory glee.

"YA ME RLY." She wasn't shouting, but every word that came from her mouth seemed to be at full volume. She poked him in the cheek with the muzzle of her pink kitty pistol. The action was careless, whimsical, like a child poking a strange object with a stick. "WAT U WANT? U CAN HAZ LAST WISH."

Yarrow blinked, trying to resolve the rosy haze above him into some kind of recognizable form. Teresa had taken the brunt of the blast, stretched over the table to throttle him, but even so his proximity to an exploding stun grenade had sent him reeling. And yet despite the roaring in his ears, he was still able to hear the pink catgirl assassin with perfect clarity.

"I… can haz?" he stammered. The young fool seeks me, he remembered. Youthful Folly has success. He thought for a moment, then swallowed hard. "Can I wish that you don't kill me?"

The girl smiled fiercely, and with a casual swipe of her hand broke Yarrow's nose with the butt of her gun. His scream of pain only seemed to excite her, her butt wriggling back and forth as if she possessed an invisible tail and was twitching it from side to side. "SILLEH BUNNEH," she cooed. "IF I NO KILL U THEN IZ NOT LAST WISH. AMIRITE?"

"Just stop hitting me!" he screamed. Her smile widened and she aimed the gun at his head. "Oh crap," he squeaked, mouth suddenly very dry as the blurred form of the barrel slid into his field of view.

(On the other side of the restaurant, a short-order cook who had been smoking all his adult life coughed twice, clutched his chest, and died as the burgeoning tumor within his lungs increased a thousandfold in volume before metastasizing and devouring his heart. He was thirty-two.)

Youthful Folly has success. At the first oracle I inform. "Cheeseburger!" shouted Yarrow.

The girl's body went rigid. "WAT U SAY?" she demanded through clenched teeth. The muzzle of her gun visibly wavered in front of Yarrow's face, her muscles nearly vibrating with barely-controlled tension. The feral Cheshire grin was gone, replaced by a far more human expression of indecision.

"Cheeseburger," he said with increasing confidence. "This is a restaurant. They make cheeseburgers. They're over there." He pointed in the general direction of the kitchen. "You Can Haz," he directed, with as much conviction as he could muster.

At the first oracle I inform.

Behind them, Teresa's body spasmed, as if CPR were being administered through repeated vicious kicks to her chest. Nicotine roared through her bloodstream, jump-starting her body with the fierceness of a habit that would not, could not, be denied. Roaring darkness receded from the edge of her vision, the cancer magic sparing her in exchange for claiming the life of the cook.

"Fine," spat the child. The hollow boom in her voice was gone, replaced by the normal soprano pitch of a preteen girl. She squared her shoulders and drew another pistol from her bag. Even with the second gun, she seemed diminished in some way. "I don't need the LOLcat to finish this." Next to them, Esther moaned.

Teresa felt like she had just walked up thirty flights of stairs. There was a concrete block inside her chest, and each breath was agony. Her arms were wooden, her fingers lifeless cigarettes. Her mouth tasted of ash and the stink of burnt filters filled her nostrils. Her eyes ached with the yellow-brown stain of nicotine. She thought she might vomit.

The girl's back was to Teresa, rising from beside Yarrow's head to a firing position. Her twin pistols were tracing dual pink lines towards the center of Esther's chest. "The Godcaller dies first," the child said to Yarrow. "Then you. And then I Can Haz Cheezburger."

Tommy would be about Yarrow's age, Teresa realized. Another dumb kid, another mother's precious son, another stupid, senseless death…

The rage returned. In that moment the tired, half-dead Teresa was gone, consumed by all the anger and the guilt and the rage of the past two decades. Her nausea was forgotten, burnt away by the rush of emotion. What remained was something pure, primal in its direction and purpose. "Bitch," spat the Camel, pulling the lighter from her pocket to hold before her face. A flame the color of hemorrhagic blood licked into life.

"I will fucking smoke your ass."

She exhaled sharply, and the air before the cancer mage wrinkled as serpentine tendrils of heat writhed towards the catgirl. The child shimmered slightly, the haze wreathing her in an infernal halo, and then she was shrieking as every hair smoldered, every piece of plastic melted and every scrap of clothing on her body threatened to combust.

The girl crumpled into a fetal, screeching ball, the smell of scorched flesh crawling up Camel's nose. For an instant it all seemed intensely familiar, sickening and yet somehow terribly delicious.

*** *** ***

WNW: Date My Avatar

You will be humming this catchy bubblegum tune for days.

Cranky Palette is Cranky

To whom it may concern:


1) Requiem for a Dream is an awesome piece of music. Please, for the love of God, stop hitching it to every banal piece of Hollywood shit in existence (I'm looking directly at you, America's Got Talent).

2) 420 stainless steel is complete and utter shit and suitable only for dinnerware and pocketknives. If the knife catalog only says "stainless steel" then I guarantee you it's 420-440 because if it was anything better, they would say so in the ad copy. For more information about what steels you should choose, go here.

3) There is a special circle of Hell reserved for people who replace C's with K's and I's with Y's, and vice-versa. If you have named yourself Kandi Magyk, I will bludgeon you with the collected works of the Brontë sisters until you learn that there is a difference between English adapting to changing times and being lazy for the sake of sensationalism.


Kisses,

Palette

Fixing my mistake

I had hoped to have another installment of Curse/Or out by now, but there is a slight problem with that:

I completely fucked the dramatic tension in the last installment. Camel recovers from her gunshot way too quickly.

Sure, it seems all right to you guys, because you read it in a serialized fashion and therefore time passed between installments. But when I read the entire chapter in one sitting, she just gets up too damn fast. In movie terms, she'd be down for like, 30 seconds tops.

I need to stretch the dramatic narrative out thusly:

• Camel is shot. Readers go, "Oh shit. Did the protagonist just get shot dead in chapter 3?"
• Focus then shifts to something else for what would be 5 minutes of screen time -- enough to make you forget about Camel and worry about something else.
  
• Then, and ONLY then, do I have her do her "cancer resurrection" schtick.

Because as it reads now, it's not a dramatic "Oh crap" moment. It's a speedbump wherein Camel falls down and then immediately gets better. Ugh.

Okay, now that I've actually admitted to this, I have no choice but to sit in this bookstore and fix the damn scene.

Goldpecker

Once upon a time, there was a plutomancer named Chom Skee. History does not recall his race; he could as easily have been a dwarf as a halfling. But it is generally agreed upon that he was in fact a gnome, because his ideas occupied the intersection of "brilliant", "deranged", and "dangerous use of magic", which is pretty much synonymous with "gnome" these days. Chom, it turns out, was obsessed with chickens. But not just any chickens; no, only dire chickens would do. This was mainly because, as a plutomancer, Chom was also obsessed with gold and magic, and he became convinced that if could concoct the proper alchemical elixir, he could find a way to bestow a plutomantic ability upon his chickens, specifically the ability to lay golden eggs. Dire chickens, being larger and stronger than their lesser counterparts, not only had a better chance of surviving the alchemical transformation but also had the nice side effect of laying much larger eggs. This, as they say, is win-win. After a few tragic mishaps resulting in dire chickens being converted to gold, Chom was ready to give up. But then, as he stared at the golden chicken statues adorning his front lawn, he had an idea. And oddly, it made him think of owlbears. And then he began to giggle.

 

The problem, he realized, was that a dire chicken wasn't sufficiently magical to handle the alchemical transformation of calcium-into-gold within its reproductive organs. But, if he took an animal which was already magical, well then! That should work just fine. The Dire Chickenbear project was an unmitigated disaster which resulted in a hasty night-time relocation, the destruction of a small farming community, and a hefty price put on Chom's head. And the less said about the Dire Perytons, the better.

  But three kingdoms later, Chom finally hit upon his masterpiece: the Dire Cockatrice. In retrospect, this should have been his first choice, since it was already a magical chicken-thing which could turn men to stone with but a peck of its beak. Matter of fact, Chom could have bypassed the whole Dire aspect altogether and just enchanted the Cockatrice further, but by that point he was, as the folks say, "toys in the attic nutso" and fond of wearing a suit of chicken feathers.

 

Thus was born Goldpecker: the fearsome Dire Cockatrice who could turn men to gold. This was Chom's masterpiece, a self-perpetuating species with the potential to generate massive profit. He even thought about hiring himself out as an assassin and/or body-removal specialist: after all, when a body is turned into a gold statue and then converted into loose change, nothing short of a Wish is going to bring that person back. 

Sadly -- or perhaps fortunately -- Chom perished in a tragic mishap involving too much ale, a late-night booty call, and a misplaced Periapt of Proof against Petrification. 

And so, the legend goes, you can hear the dreadful cackle of Goldpecker carried on the early morning breezes of the scrubs and plains as he greets the golden dawn with gold of his own: the freshly petrified body of a hunter, trapper, or adventurer too sloppy to post guards during the night. 

Ask not for whom Goldpecker crows: he crows for greed.