Month: January 2013

7s Challenge (And An Excerpt Of My Novel)

/ strugglingwriter / 6 Comments

The wonderful Julie K. Rose tagged me for the 7s challenge: go to either page 7 or 77 of your manuscript, count down 7 lines, then copy the next 7 lines (or paragraphs) to your status. Then name 7 other authors to come out and play. I would like to thank Julie for tagging me and giving me something to write about. I tag Patti Nielson and Shari Green and whomever else would like to participate. If you would like to participate, just leave a comment here and I’ll add you to this list.

Note: I’ve cross posted this to my new blog as well.

This is from the beginning of Chapter 2 of my WIP:

I roll out of bed, grab the hacked up hand-held gaming system Grandpa gave me for my thirteenth birthday, and hop onto the chatternet. He’d boosted the wireless signal on it just enough for me to leech a signal off the guard’s network, so long as I jump on before the staff bogs down the network checking the results of their favorite sports team’s matches from the night before.

Hem’s always telling me how he sleeps in until 5 PM on Saturdays and what a freak I am because I always wake up so early (I’m up before everybody. Always). It’s not my fault, though. Can’t turn off my brain. I’m always thinking about something, and that something is usually a thing nobody else seems to be worried about.

I’m curious as to what’s gone down in PA-16823. How had it started? Had they been successful? Were there more incidents to come?

You can find information on the chatternet that is untouched by the System if you know where to look, and if you catch it at just the right time. A favorite place of mine is the comment section of a news story, early in the morning just after it had gone live.

I’m too late. Grandpa has boosted my signal as best as he could with the materials he could get his hands on, an old coffee can here, and some wire there, but it was no match for the itchy trigger finger of a System moderator.

The propaganda, of course, remains. Real gems like this:

“For the continued safety of the protestors and the System themselves, over 300 protestors will face a full reprimand.

The article doesn’t specify what precisely “full reprimand” means, but it’s not too hard to guess either. Most likely they will be taken out of the System and placed in jail. Real jail. The kind where you don’t get to be with your family, and don’t get to see them again. The kind with the real criminals, Grandpa says. No trial required. You can get in trouble a lot of ways in here, but the worst thing you could do is not do your job. Stuff needed to be made.

New Blog

/ strugglingwriter / 2 Comments

I just thought I’d give you all a heads-up that I’ve started blogging a bit over on my own domain: http://www.paulliadis.com/blog in case you’d be interested in reading some more of what I’m up to.

I’m not 100% sure what I want to do with that blog yet. Right now I’m using it to post cool things I’d normally post of Facebook, but am no longer posting on Facebook because I’m taking an extended, possibly permanent break from it. I’ll explain all of that in a blog post over there sometime soon.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this blog yet. I’m not going to delete it, that’s for sure. I have too much history here. I might or night not import the posts from here to http://www.paulliadis.com/blog . I haven’t decided that yet. For now, though, why not give the new blog a look and let me know what you think. Just don’t delete your links to this one just quite yet.