It's been a while, and I've made very little progress on I&L4. Deal with it. I've been busy.
With what, you ask? With "Resolution," of course! Wait, what? No, I haven't been busy writing New Year's resolutions. Those are pointless. Instead, I've been writing "Resolution," my entry in the Zelda Universe Forums' January 2011 Writing Contest, for which the theme was "resolution." The results? Well, they came in tonight, and ...I got second place. Again. I guess I can't win. But hey, last time I entered a ZU writing contest, I didn't rank ("Trust Fall," August 2010). Also remember that I got second place in my first writing contest, too ("Twelve Chimes," October 2009). "Resolution" is a thriller, which is a genre I have never bothered (or actually wanted to bother) getting close to before, but I couldn't avoid it this time. (The following is exclusive information, so be glad you're reading this!) Originally, the story was going to involve an established serial killer writing a list of resolutions, a.k.a. his next victims. (That's pretty much it for the exclusive stuff.) The final product is barely a shadow of the original idea, the only similarity being the main character, William, writing his resolution, which includes a short list of people he wants to murder. Why? William is a patient at the Woodstone Institute mental asylum for post-traumatic stress disorder. He wants to know how he develoed the disorder, but he'll have to stay for a month to give the psychiatrists enough time to figure it out. Well, he doesn't want to stick around in that dump for a whole month, so he decides to escape. Which involves brutally murdering a few people. "Resolution" is available on the ZU Forums (no membership necessary, as usual) in this thread and now on Figment.com. Wait. Figment.com? Wuzzat? To find out you're going to have to...
Figment.com is an online publishing website, not too much unlike the oversized, unfriendly FictionPress.com. The difference? It's smaller, has a MUCH cooler/better interface, and it's more welcoming. Well, I'm using Figment as a new place to publish my works. Don't worry, ZU Forum-goers, I'll still be publishing my stories on ZU, too. In fact, I'll most likely be publishing my new stories on ZU first. So you get first dibs on my new stuff, unlike those Figment people; I mean, who cares about them? Okay, I think I'm being really odd right now. But what else is new? Currently, five of my works are available on Figment: "Twelve Chimes," "The First Hour," "Trust Fall," "A Future Lost," and "Resolution." Unfortunately, Figment is inferior to FictionPress in one way, and that is the absence of big archives/lists of published works. Instead, it only lists the top ten newest works, most recently updated works, and most popular works (by genre), which is pretty dumb. So to find my stories on Figment, you'll have to search for them. At least Figment has a search feature! Well, there's that, and I'm going to update the Master List on this blog with links to the Figment publications of my stories as soon as I post this.
That's about it for now. Maybe I'll finish I&L4 before I'm 2,005,750 years old (which is the end of next month)!
Sayonara. Or how ever you spell the transliteration.
EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot! I didn't win the Best Writer award in the ZU Winter 2010-2011 Awards. I got quite a few votes, though, which I'm proud of. Maybe next time.