Today's Word: Wires

The crisscross of metal cables held up the stage. Salvaged from old power poles, the thick cables were black and wet with the sweat dripping on them.

Class update

Everything went very well. Read five pages from chapter one. Felt very much like a book signing event, with yours truly at the podium. Very positive comments with good feedback. Got an offer from the instructor that she'd help me with my synopsis for contest. I need to clear up a few logical gremlins, too. But all in all, a sigh of relief from the man with too much caffeine in his blood.

I have this dread feeling in the pit of my soul that I might have to break down and get Microsoft Word. I hate it. Too damn bulky and counterintuitive, but I'm getting killed in format issues when e-mail my non-Word files from home and put them into my office's Word so I can print them out. Perhaps I should print them out at home and save the trouble, but I'm so addicted to preening my stuff up until a couple hours before class. If I had a laptop that magically generated paper, I'd be printing out assignments in class, as my patient instructor waits on.

Tuesday night did offer a clever assignment to help with a breakthrough I've been needing. Simply put, how do you (or I, in this case) present the backstory of the fall of civilization without pouring on the pages, deadening the reader with what authors call "the information dump." I'm thinking about having it in pieces, sprinkled throughout the novel. Wrote a bit of it with Rayelle last night in an exercise. My exercise buddy, fyi, wrote about the proper use of a light anti-tank weapon, and did it without making it sound Clancyesque. Gallows humor in dialogue works wonders.