Shinerdrinker: Blog

Hello, again, friends!

I just wanted to let people know the next chapter of Mayhem in a Pill has been posted to SOL. I thank everyone involved with the site, from the creators to the content makers, that making it the best venue for wannabe authors to try and find their voice.

Some might think this new chapter is a bit slow. And I understand the criticism but trust me, there be a method to the madness!

The next couple of chapters are ramping up for some excitement, and I hope you continue to come along on this voyage with me. (I wanna see what happens next, just as much as I hope you do!)

Oh yeah, as an extra positive, it was pointed out that Mayhem in a Pill is currently number two on the "ongoing serials" list on the home page. I take that as a positive, wouldn't you?

Okay, enough of this jibber jabber! The wonderful chapter 69 (noice!) has been posted and is waiting for you to read. So hurry up and get to it!

Thanks,
Shinerdrinker

Okay, so I did a thing.

Tee Hee. Well, I knew I could, but I sat my ass in the chair and did what Hemmingway suggested. I bled on the paper. I fucked around and found out I could write when I wanted to. Except, it was a computer and a blank page of a writing program. Still, the feeling was there.

I'm itching to go back to the future Tim timeline for chapter 70. Maybe. Maybe not. Dunno. Y'all can fuck around and find out.

Either way, I've sent chapter 69 to my cadre of editors. They, of course, had denied themselves food and refreshments since the posting of the last chapter to please me into writing once again. This time it worked. And I have blessed them with new prose.

(No problems with ego here, eh Shinerdrinker.)

So long story short, I've put the all-important chapter 69 (noice!) into the editing process. Virgins and young animals across the globe are hereto warned of their possible calling.

Hopefully, the rituals are enough to please the ever-difficult readers into enjoying another verse of the grand story again.

Okay, Shiner, I think a trip to popping thee ole ego is possibly needed.

Maybe not. Fuck around and find out. Tee Hee.

--Shinerdrinker

Okay. I had to make a writer's adjustment to the last chapter of "Mayhem in a Pill."

I had to change the birthday that Tim had forgotten about from his sixteenth to his fifteenth. The age change was something I was planning for a couple of reasons. But I have decided to postpone those reasons and replace them with a new idea to try and grow the character a little bit more.

I hope it will work. My outline changes are showing me it will; I've been going by those consistently since I made them AFTER I started writing the story. Yes, it's true. I started writing the story with a slight outline in mind, but the story quickly overgrew my subtle imaginary outline, so I took the time to write out a fuller outline, and I have followed that ever since.

Instead of forgetting his sixteenth birthday, I believe it would be a much more believable story for him to forget his fifteenth birthday. Several have asked why would an American teenager forget his sixteenth birthday, and those arguments have won me over. So I'm making the change.

So I guess the moral of our story is a well-argued point can change minds. That and me coming up with a cooler story path sounded more fun.

On another note, I have read several people not enjoying the story's pace. I understand and agree the pacing has slowed. I'm working on it. But, I also understand that several readers would also like me to post the entire story for their amusement immediately.

I'd love to. But I can't since I write, send it to the editors, and finally post. I don't have chapters pre-written, but I do have scenes pre-written and not thoroughly fleshed out. But when appropriate, I do bring those in. A good example was the death of A-Train. I wrote maybe 90 percent of that scene a couple of months earlier and then filled it out when I pasted it into the chapter.

So fear not, minions, I am working, and I'm also improving, hopefully.

Tee Hee.

--Shinerdrinker

Okay, as the title suggests, I have sent the latest chapter for Mayhem in a Pill to my editors, who, of course, can now remove themselves from their prone forms of otherworldly difficult Yoga poses to try once again and make my words into something palatable or dare I say... good?

Tee Hee. We can wish and dream, can't we?

I would have finished this chapter last week, but I got distracted by something shiny.

No worries, though. It is still a decent chapter, and I'm starting to set things up for the next one. I dunno if the next chapter is continuing the younger Tim or going off the find out what happened to the older Tim and his rescue mission. I dunno. I'll think on it this weekend.

So until we meet again, may your hangover be brief and weakened by your own pure badassery. And may you dream of large women... what they are doing is entirely up to you.

And keep it to yourself! I don't want to confuse it with my own.

--Shinerdrinker

Quick edit: I just read about the passing of Ernest Bywater. This one hits pretty hard. I won't go so far as to say he was a friend. But he was one of the first "big" writers from this site that traded emails with him early on in Mayhem. He encouraged me and gave me some tips I still use today.

He set me on the path of continuing with this crazy hobby and helping others as we all try to share our stories.

Rest easy, Ernest, we'll keep writing I know you'll keep reading!

I did something this weekend I can't believe I haven't done before.

I was writing this weekend. (Yes, I know, I'm as surprised as you are, and no, that wasn't the something I haven't done before!) While writing, I had a question about something a character had done before, and this is when you know this is the first time I've ever written anything this long or involved, I could not remember which chapter I had described what was done. Well, I found the answer to my question after about two hours of rereading past chapters to find the answer. Not a bad thing to do if you asked me, but it was a terrible use of my time allotted for writing.

I got to a stopping place, turned off the computer, and turned on the boob tube. I used about half of it just looking for the answer to my question. After a few minutes in a bad Skin-e-max movie, I had the revelation. An epiphany, if you will.

Why don't I have the chapter's list and a quick blurb about the happenings in that chapter? My epiphany was, why not use some of the other programs that came with the free one I downloaded.

Side rant real quick.

I've been having problems with the OpenOffice I've been using for many chapters. I honestly didn't know if it was my problem or something one of my editors was doing to the filing in transit between us. I thought it wasn't either of us, but I could no longer deal with it. So I did something TeNderLoin had suggested many moons ago. switch to LibreOffice.

It was much of a problem before, and it was just a minor inconvenience. But the last couple of chapters, whenever one of the editors would leave a side comment, a tried and true feature of the program. One I've utilized many a time myself. But now, whenever I came across one of these side comments, the program would crash, and I'd have to reopen the file. I'd get halfway through chapter correction, and my editor wants to emphasize something I liked in writing, and... it crashes again. But in the last chapter, I wasn't even able to get to the page where the comment was before the program hit again.

It was beyond frustrating.

In between chapters and I had not gotten into the next one. So I asked my editors again for their input since it would also affect them. And they both encouraged me to make a move. So I did it. It was a perfect time to do it.

So I did it this weekend. When installing the new program, I noticed the other parts of the suite. While watching fake fornication on Skin-e-max, I remembered one of those extra programs in the new LibreOffice suite, the spreadsheets! (I know, right!) As I was saying, this would lead me to my epiphany.

So I started it on Friday night, and now I have a lovely spreadsheet featuring the chapters, their names, and a little synopsis of what happens in said chapter. I'm also trying to decide if I need to put a character list into the spreadsheet. I do have a separate character list with minor descriptions of them. If I introduce them in a chapter, that is in the new synopsis. I felt so bright for thinking of it, then stupid for not doing it earlier.

I don't feel that stupid about the spreadsheet, but I do when I think about all the time I've spent trying to find out a minor character or action performed in an earlier chapter that I could not remember immediately off hand. So all weekend was spent rereading Mayhem in a Pill and setting up a spreadsheet about said story. I should have had it from the beginning, but I was too busy congratulating myself for keeping up with a minor character tracking sheet and outline of the entire story. Ugh, so much wasted time. I mean, it isn't like I'm wasting all my time writing out long-winded blog entries when I should probably be working on the next chapter. Naw. Nothing like that at all.

Tee hee.

--Shinerdrinker