Tag: Larry Correia

Grammata-Euphoria

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All this Charlie Kirk media madness and the manhunt have depressed the hell out of me.  We live in a madhouse surrounded by awful, depraved people.  So I needed a break.  So I’m writing about something lighthearted instead.  My apologies.  I’m sure on Friday more horrible things will occur to drag me back into the madhouse.

Publishing a book.

Step two complete!  I sent off my manuscript to the one traditional publisher that I’m confident isn’t ideologically opposed to the political position of my protagonist.  Now I’ve got to write a “query letter” and send it out to a bunch of agents to see if any want to represent me.  And I have to make a list of publishers that will take submissions without agents.  Once I’ve done all that, if no one bites then I have to self-publish it and then I have to market it (advertise, announce it on social media, run a Kickstarter, hire a skywriter to put my message over Manhattan, and get a Superbowl commercial).

Well anyway, that will keep me busy for a while.  Based on all the advice for new writers that I’ve read, I intend to disseminate my story for free to all of my friends and try to get as much good word of mouth and favorable reviews as I can when it’s ready to launch.  After all, I don’t want hundreds or thousand of readers and dollars.  I need millions and billions!  Like the holy texts, my book should be in every home in the first and second world.  And dammit why not the third world too?  Surely, I can squeeze the little bit of hard currency that they would normally buy food with and divert it into my coffers.  Yes, yes.  That sounds right.

Well anyway Larry Correia started a monthlong Kickstarter for his new book on Ark Press and within about 24 hours he had $150,000 collected.  And what has he got that I haven’t got (beside thousands of devoted fans)?  Unfortunately, that is exactly what he has that I don’t.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of the unknown author.  There should be a “Tomb of the Unknown Author.”  It could be right past the colonnade of heroic sculptures of Homer, Moses and whoever wrote George Burns’ jokes.  It should have an eternal flame that’s a large hibachi using charcoal brickettes as fuel.  Some residue and aroma from a nice porterhouse steak would be fine and possibly a meat thermometer somewhere nearby.

You know I did learn that writing a story really is just for yourself.  I found parts of the work where I said, “Now that’s exactly how it should be.  Dammit, the writer nailed this perfectly.”  And of course, I know I’m talking to myself but it’s immensely satisfying when the words evoke exactly the emotion you’re reaching for.

Of course, the tricky part is knowing (or hoping) that the scene will elicit that same response from someone or better still, many someone-s who will let the world know just what a genius the author is.  I guess the definition of a great writer is when the whole world (mostly) is moved by what you write in the way you wanted them to feel.

Alright, that’s enough grammata-euphoria.  I’ll only report back when something interesting (publication or a book deal) is imminent.  Until then we can concentrate on the latest hideous atrocities on the streets of our cities and Trump’s latest poke in the eye to the Left and its minions.

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Larry Correia Advocates for a New Federal Agency: THE DOFYJS

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Larry who is an accountant by training (and the author of books about monster hunters) explains why whittling down the federal bureaucracy is a life and death priority and thus proposes forming an agency of accountants to audit the rest of the federal government with the mission to eliminate 90% of it.  He calls it “The Department of F*** Your Job Security!”

Well, I might quibble about the name but the point is well made.  The bureaucracy is a parasite that has finally undermined its host.  Along with the thousand and one maladies that the progressives have saddled us with supporting the useless bureaucrats has become the cancer that will finish us off.

Kudos to Larry for identifying the chemotherapy that is needed to treat this disease.

Larry Correia Blogs That Since Musk Bought Twitter His Account’s Been Unthrottled

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Larry Correia wrote a post on the unthrottling of conservative accounts on Twitter this week.

“So everybody knows about Elon buying Twitter, and we all know that Twitter has been a bunch of biased, censorious assholes.

What we did not know however was just how bad they really were. For years when conservatives/libertarians/non-progs complained, we got gas lit and told it was in our imagination. When our followers vanished, said they didn’t see our tweets, or our follower counts seemed to freeze and never grow, we were told that was just because we suck, and nobody wanted to listen to our evil right wing lies.”…

But now that Musk bought Twitter they unthrottled his account

“Then I started getting tweets from followers who are like, whoa, Larry is back on Twitter!

So I got curious and started asking about this, and then the posts started coming. Dozens of them. Oh yeah, I thought you weren’t on here! I thought you only posted like once a month! I never see you post. So on and so forth. It was remarkably consistent.

I knew I was throttled, but I had not realized just how bad it was. It was way harder than I thought.”

Well, it sounded so hopeful that I opened an account on Twitter.  I’m @orionscoldfire and I’ve posted one of my pictures and of course added my website address and the link to my photo account at Fine Art America (gotta make the donuts after all).

 

Pissed Off Canadians

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Over at Larry Correia’s site there was a post on the Trucker’s Protest on the Windsor Bridge crossing.  Anyway in the comments a Canadian calling himself “The Phantom” had some very interesting comments about the popularity of the protest with the regular Canadians:

“Second, I live almost 2 hours from Toronto and 6 hours from Ottawa, out in the sticks down by Lake Erie. It is farm country, there’s nothing going on around here. Cows and snowbanks right now. So, the fun part is that every time I leave the house to go to the store or what have you, there are Freedom Convoy signs and Canadian flags on random pickup trucks. People have been lining up hay bales in their fields next to the road and painting them with slogans. Idle tractors sitting in driveways have a Canadian flag tied to a hockey stick flying on them. There was a big John Deere parked at the Tim Horton’s in Cayuga on Hwy 3 the other day with a Freedom Convoy sign and a flag.

It’s not just the truckers now. The government has been pissing off the Normies for two years now, and the dam finally broke. Present situation today is that roughly everything you see on Canadian media is a lie, and the crowds of protesters are the regular Jane and Joe Canadian who are tired of lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates. They’ve had it, and they’re starting to look at how they want to piss off the government today.”

Maybe the Canadians will make some changes in their government.

Larry Correia Shows How Mocking Biden is Really Done

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Larry gives a master class in wiping the floor with Dementia Joe’s stupid face.  It’s a humbling experience to see a master of the art apply a verbal smackdown on my favorite victim.

Bravo Larry Bravo.

This is a good bit:

“Biden has accomplished exactly one thing. And that’s demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt to all reasonable, thinking Americans that democrats are total shit at governing. They talk a big game, but it’s all just platitudes, wishful thinking, and magic unicorns farting free shit. Their claimed philosophy is childlike and disintegrates when it touches reality, exposing their actual philosophy, which is draconian control freaks who are compelled to meddle in everything. And the less they understand something, the more they feel the need to fuck with it.”

Yet Another Epic Rant from Larry Correia

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I’m probably linking again too soon to one of Larry’s anti-Leftist rants but this one is just too good.

This was a response to one of Larry’s readers who politely suggested that Larry points the Left with “too broad a brush.”

“If the majority of the left aren’t my enemy, the burden of proof is on them, because frankly I haven’t seen jack shit from most of them beyond paying lip service to principles, as the rest of their fellows go about doing whatever horrible thing they feel like, and the ones who claim to be moral sit there silently and let them.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Larry gives them both barrels.  I have to confess reading Larry’s rants are a guilty pleasure of mine.  He builds up such a head of steam that I just get swept up in his outrage.  It’s volcanic, Homeric!

Of course your mileage may vary.

Larry Correia Exits Facebook Jail and Provides an A to Z Summary of the Last Month

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Larry’s summary of what has been going on for the last 30 days is amusing and a useful marker.  It’s remarkable just how bad the last month has been for Dementia Joe and his clown-car administration.

I especially enjoyed mention of Joe’s various digestive tract outbursts.  Maybe having the first commander in chief who wears Depends will chasten the American voting population next time a doddering dementia patient is wheeled out as the supposedly smart, competent alternative.

Well done Larry.

 

 

 

15OCT2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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It’s funny.  It seems like even the Left is starting to admit that Biden has made a shambles of the country and maybe some of them are starting to sound kind of scared.  Still too early to say if it will effect the outcome of the congressional votes on the gazillion dollar reconciliation bill.  I assumed that all the skullduggery planned was a done deal.  Maybe I’m wrong.  We’ll have to see.

But we will be going through some extended bad times as I mentioned in my last post.  I’m starting to look at my own finances to see what cutbacks I should make.

I was listening to the ZMan’s Friday podcast.  It was on organizing and near the end he was talking about negativity.  And that clicked for me.  What we do has to be building things and living.  Just fighting our enemies isn’t enough.  It’s too long a battle to just hold your breath till the end.  We need to make our thing about living and enjoying our lives.

I’ve been writing this story about a sniper who is taking revenge against the FBI.  I have to admit it’s a lot of fun writing about revenge.  But I want the story to be embedded in a larger frame about building something bigger than revenge.  I want to have it about building a community that’s hidden within the current United States.  So this fictional story corresponds to how I think about the world I’m living in.  And that is helpful when thinking about real life.  The things I write about are larger than life.  We can talk about underground bases and new technologies and secret organizations but even the little things we do on-line can be positive and enrich our lives.  We talk to people and we share ideas and maybe we help each other solve some problems.  And if nothing else we act as sounding boards for people who don’t have one.

So today I am doing some story plotting and re-writing.  It wasn’t strong enough or tight enough.  I punched it up and cut it down and I like it a lot better.  It’s another beautiful day and I intend to go out and take some photos of the fall.  A couple of days ago one of the dogs found a big old Northern Water Snake sunning itself near one of the gardens.  I got some good shots of it and I will probably put it up later as a post.

Fridays are usually pretty quiet on the site.  I’ll put up a post later.  Maybe I’ll review another season three trek episode.  I’m getting impatient with them but considering Shatner’s recent trek into almost-space I guess I should do my part.

Camera Girl is an inveterate crime drama reader.  She reads about fictional crime fighters like Jack Reacher and Harry Bosch and Jesse Stone.  Well, we recently started watching a tv series about Harry Bosch and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well it’s made.  Not everything is to my taste but it’s a quality series.  So at some point I’ll be reviewing it too but I must keep my nose to the Star Trek grindstone.  Duty is duty.

I’ve been listening to Larry Correia’s podcasts on fiction writing, “The Writer’s Dojo.”  and even though not all of the information is specific to what I do I find the experience of listening to these two writers talking about their mindset when they’re writing to be energizing.  For instance, they were talking about villains recently and it occurred to me I was wasting an opportunity by not beefing up the character of one of my villains.  After all good villains are sometimes even better than the hero.  Look at the Joker in Batman.

And this weekend we’ll have some grandkids coming around and that’s always fun.

So bear with me.  I’ll have some good stuff soon.