yup,--haven't officially dropped the story on 406ness.com quite yet. special preview for y'all.

ooh,--a horror short. finish it and post it, i could offer feedback.

if you guys enjoyed this story, i've just produced an audio version that you can listen to here

hella cool.

damn dude i'd probably still say the old man--

i don't want a fucking computer in my skull. nah. tough thing is--what is too far? if i woke up blind tomorrow, and doctors said they could restore my vision with some implant, could i say no? i dunno man. cyborg me would be hella weird.

but looking back on this makes me cringe a little. kind of overt. gah! i'll be saying the same thing about what i'm writing today, a year from now.

suup guys!

someone finish this! i'd be in the dolphin ZONE right now if it weren't for finals.

i'm still around, still writing--more than ever, in fact! hope you all have kept at it.

that story club was dope, for real. i remember that.

My favorite words occupy more thought-space than I'm readily willing to admit. Sometimes I worry that the words mean more to me than the things I associate them with... But hey--I'm drunk as fuck and it's a fresh day of the new year! This is no time for dialectic crises!

I say the word yikes a lot, that's an all-time classic. Just the way it feels, and the shape my face makes when I say it tells you everything about how I'm feeling. The 'y' at the beginning is fun, that 'yuh' sound is underrated. The hard 'k' at the end, it's just explosive and sounds nice and punchy. It's just an expression, it barely means anything. But the sound is just as important.

Rambunctious. I never use this word, but often I'll catch myself saying it so much in my head that it loses all meaning. Truthfully, most of my favorite words are chosen not because of their meaning, but because of the way it sounds, the twists my tongue gets to make and the shapes my mouth is allowed to form.

This is going to sound really stereotypical, but this weekend I experimented with some different sandwiches and this album by Pink Floyd, and you may have heard of it, The Dark Side of the Moon was turned on. Maybe this'll sound sacrilegious to some, but I had never listened to the band before. I knew who they were and all but yo... when Speak To Me/Breathe kicked on... I was transported to another dimension. It was scary at first but I quickly adjusted to my new reality and proceeded to have one of the most mind-blowing sonic experiences of my life.

One thing I really enjoyed about this album was the experimentation. I can't even imagine what it must have been like hearing this for the first time in 1973. Money is ridiculous. The vocals are so smooth and I couldn't imagine any other voice over this shit. And it was great music for the occasion... But I couldn't help but picture another occasion perfect for this album. Sex. This is great sex music.

Can anyone hook me up with some more progressive/psychedelic rock with a similar spacey sound like The Dark Side of the Moon has? I just listened to The Wall by Pink Floyd and while I thought it was great and will surely be listening to it again, I preferred the more psychedelic sound of The Dark Side of the Moon. Admittedly, I was 100% less fucked during that The Wall listen.

Anyone but those fucking Red Sux.

Your instructor is right, that sentence is dope. And you're right too, adding clauses isn't always a bad thing. The semicolon thing is right, too, but I think it's easy to overdo it with those. I guess I come from the minimalist school of thought. But I think the important lesson here (as we've seen with all the different viewpoints and what kleinbl00 said about 'correctness' in our language) is that it's important to switch it up, as you said. Damn, I'm just reading through all these replies. Punctuation and grammar just set this place off.

Yeah, in the Translator's Note in my edition the guy talks about how Camus acknowledged employing this 'American method' in writing the book. "the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the 'tough guy' tone." Kind of interesting, but I wonder why.

Shorter sentences work better. In the 'American method', at least. Albert Camus wrote the first half of The Stranger this way--precise and briefly. You can see how in the second half of the book, he changes up the style again to better illustrate the inner world our protagonist has retreated into.

But it's important to change things up in your writing. If you keep things running on too many times in a row, you'll lose the reader. Each paragraph has its own cadence. Longer sentences aren't any smarter or more adult than short ones are. Probably less so. When I write, sentences always goes from short to long. Then from long to short. And once I'm sure the reader is well-rested I can hit them with a sentence that stretches way out passed its due date, and maybe it even continues with a comma splice.

Tell him/her to read their work out loud. The awkward and breathless comma splices will make themselves much more apparent.

Every night while I'm lying in bed, instead of filling my mind with coked-out naked supermodels desperate to satisfy my every desire, all that ever comes up is me sitting at a table in a bookstore. Maybe there's a microphone there or something. Everyone is really excited! And there's a line of coked-out supermodels stretching all the way out the door and around the block, and they're all holding my book! It's got my name on it and everything. A cool cover. They all want me to sign it. After the book signing I head over to the set of the Today Show, where a coked-out and naked Savannah Guthrie is interviewing me. She asks where I get my ideas. She mentions that I'm at the top of the Times Bestseller List for the fiftieth week in a row. She laughs a lot. Then I fly home on my private jet made of money to work on my second novel.

That's all I want out of life guys.

Psht, and risk catching cooties? MY BODY IS A TEMPLE AIGHT

Keep working hard homie, glad to see you making moves.

Is this dude still taking a vacation off the face of the Earth? Was there any resolution to that whole deal? This looks cool, by the way. I love the colors and the logo is sick.