Out with the old

Out of the blue (or possibly after reading Neil Gaiman's biography in Smoke and Mirrors) I have decided to change my "biography" (assuming that there is a lot to tell).
The original went something like this

4th guy is aspiring programmer & writer. In his free time he attempts to reprogram his two dogs & make any computer he comes across sentient

It says that I'm an aspiring programmer and writer, but does not say much else (anything of any use at least). Making computers sentient and reprogramming living beings is a joke that has been used once too often in my opinion. It's not as sexy as

Initially 4th guy wrote creative plots for world conquest, but has had better luck with prose. He has 2 dogs, who cry in corners after reading his latest stories

Much better! This one pokes fun at my (so far, failing) desire to change the world and highlights that I'm much better with more subtle things such as prose. It also says that I have two dogs who hate my writings, alas dogs are evil that way. Overall, in my opinion, I believe that the new biography will be more memorable, or at least entertaining.

Burned out

I enjoy writing, but sometimes my muse works overtime and I hardly work at all. Ideas come to me, the good and bad, and I sift through them categorizing them into ideas that are worth pursuing 'now' or 'one day'.
My current problem is that I have written too much fantasy in too short a span of time. (I think, my NaNoWriMo draft is stealthily approaching the 70k mark). The problem is not that I have too much to write, but rather too much to write about.
In my original NaNoWriMo draft, I just arrived to a point where I skipped ahead five years, and then another 15 years. Authors do that all the time, but those initial five years is too long a time to skip. Those five years are there so that the characters can forge relations and their knowledge of the world is drastically expanded. Now I'm at the point where I have to go back to that period and fill in some of the gaps.
To date, this is my most ambitious writing project; I enjoy, and am proud of, the fact that I grew this world from scratch and it works. So maybe the economy won't work in a real-life setting, but the characters give colour to the work.
But, my fantasy muscles are exhausted. I think they were flexed too much (they had been flexing since mid-summer, when I had my initial idea, and continued to work up to now); mind, I'm not giving the project up. I'm just going to finish the current segment (i.e. the five years) and then put away the novel to rewrite the second half of the draft.
I had the idea, I actually want to, write something that is realistic; set in the real world. So far I've never written anything like this and have mainly focused on fantasy and surrealism. There's nothing wrong with fantasy and surrealism, but I can not call myself a fiction writer if I'm unable to write a story without resorting to magic or faeries so that my characters would be able to pull themselves out of a fix. If I refuse to try something beyond my boundaries of fantasy and surrealism, I'll be a fictional writer instead of a fiction writer.
I have a couple of ideas for such a story, but I want to make sure that the idea is plausible in a real world context, but more on that later.

Would you like some description with that?

I've started to work on editing the story I wrote in November. Usually, the way I write, I try to get dialogue in. Descriptions of people, places and actions I put in when I'm editing. You can literary tell an entire story with just dialogue, but the story itself feels kind of flat. There's no emotion.
The problem is that I find it hard to insert descriptions afterwards. It's not an impossible task, but its a tedious process for me. Sometimes, editing is fun. On other occasions, it isn't. Personally, I would like to take my current document and restart the edits, making sure that I have the descriptions all in place. It looks like I'll have to work over time for this one.

Oops, we censored your reprints!

Reprinting material is hardly a new thing. It's done all the time for publishers to re-cash in on those successful story. Something which is 100% acceptable. After all: consumer gets a copy, publishers and authors get the money. Fair trade and all that. That's what Harlequin said that they were doing after all.

The assignment: Go through our publication list (from Day One!) and look at the accompanying covers. Choose six books and reprint them, EXACTLY AS THEY WERE THEN, as a small collection to celebrate our sixty years in business.

What is the problem? Let's scroll further down the page, shall we?

Now for the books: Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

(underlining by me)
It smells of irony, and (sadly) censorship. I believe that in this case, the publisher has no interest in the readers, only in its public image and the money that it could potentially rake in.

Another MusicMonday - The Beatles Never Broke Up

Some time ago I stumbled upon a The Beatles album from a supposedly alternate dimension. While I'm not teh greatest The Beatles fan that ever existed, I appreciate these remixes. As anyone who listened to these songs (and other The Beatles recordings before this) can tell, they are remixed versions of existing The Beatles songs, with added material from post The Beatles albums by the members of the split-up band. After all "All the solo stuff we've done would have been on Beatle records." George Harrison said that in the late 1990s, so it's only fair :P

Feel free to download the album for a listen. Meanwhile preview has been embedded above for your listening pleasure.