Ryan Speck's Internet Thing

I’m trying to actually be productive, but I’m regularly failing. I mean, how can I possibly fill my time with writing (or something) when there are so many games to distract me, so many movies to watch, so many YouTube videos, so much of Reddit left to read? I know, I’m intensely lazy; you don’t have to tell me. But, even when I’m not working on anything (which covers pretty much the past 4 years), I’m still thinking about projects. Of course, I’ll inevitably forget those ideas and be left, like with Rudderless, sitting there with my proverbial dick in my hand when I actually attempt to write something. “I knew I had some ideas for this story,” I’ll think, immediately followed by me coming up with nothing and the wind rushing out of my writing sails.

Comedy is also a hindrance; it’s hard to be funny on demand, particularly in print. Oh, sure, a witticism or quip isn’t hard to come by, but to turn a story into something consistently amusing for hundreds of pages becomes a gigantic fucking burden that you wouldn’t believe. I really need to write something serious for a change. I think it’s time to trot out a novel (or something) that I have in mind; it was actually two ideas that weren’t quite working before I crushed them into a single idea that has more backstory than I’ll ever use or even be able to mention. That project would move along faster if I had a bit of help, particularly from some kindly native Russian speaker that could help me figure out some phonetic terms to use. That obviously shouldn’t hold me back from writing, but I like to have all my tools lined up before I start working.

Maybe I’ll get back to the grind sometime soon. At very least, I’ll probably edit a half-amusing podcast every few weeks, not that anyone listens to it.

Since I never mentioned it here and you never cared to know about it, I figured I’d talk a little bit about a “recent” music-y thing I did that renewed my interest in typing up bullshit on the internet for no one to read, mainly revolving around music I enjoy.

I was asked to partake of David Schock’s “Industrial 101” project, in which he attempted for some unknown reason to have a variety of industrial luminaries (musicians, DJ’s, and journalists) give a listing of their top 101 industrial tracks to make a “definitive” list. I’m not sure why I was asked. It could have been my years spent toiling away, thanklessly, on reviews for various websites, including ReGen, and writing for Industrial Nation. Or maybe it was just because I’m willing to type exceptionally long screeds at 60 WPM into the comment section of other people’s Facebook posts. Regardless, I drew his attention and was invited to participate.

“Industrial” as a genre, he pointed out, was left up to the listener’s discretion to define (something I never would have allowed; though I probably wouldn’t have bothered asking anyone about their opinions on the subject). This is probably what first drew my notice, as people were voting for bands like Lords Of Acid, which is only tangentially related to industrial music. Immediately, I had to weigh the notion of making any form of “definitive” list up against just putting on things I really enjoyed. Obviously the notion of anything about a list of 101 songs being “definitive” is fucking absurd and I knew that, no matter what I picked, there would be hundreds of equally-relevant, also-good tracks that didn’t make the arbitrary cut. Just the idea of trying to prevent any particular band from monopolizing some sort of “best industrial of all time” list was a task unto itself. I decided that lest I browbeat myself about it for weeks, I’d just attempt to best represent the songs I love and try to see them get a tiny modicum of notice amidst the noise of assholes putting cliched and terrible bullshit on their lists.

This process, of course, first began with procrastination. I spent several weeks not working on it while telling myself that I was because I was busily listening to music at my normal pace. Finally, I cracked open an Excel spreadsheet and got to work narrowing down my choices and then arranging them in some sort of order, which became more haphazard and less cogent the further I made it down the list.

The results (as well as an audio playlist of all 101 of my choices) are here for any to read, listen to, and enjoy (enjoyment permitting).

There you can read some other thoughts, details, and (more or less) a lot of what you just read above, though I believe I’m kidding myself to think anyone reads this shit.

When I finished working on it, I was energized, wanted to think and talk about music again, and really wanted to know what the final results would be to this little lark of Mr. Schock’s. Well, he took his sweet time compiling it, during which I lost interest. By the time the results finally arrived in a badly-formatted fashion, I no longer cared to find out that people lived up to the ultimate industrial cliche by voting for (by a wide margin) Front 242’s “Headhunter”. I never knew this was a cliche at all until Eric Gottesman from See Colin Slash (and now Everything Goes Cold) told me it was via mp3.com message circa 2000; I had never even listened to the damned song before that. To this day, I’ve still probably only heard the track 6 times or less and I damned sure wouldn’t consider putting any Front 242 on the list that didn’t come off of “06:21:03:11 Up Evil”.

All that aside, I still haven’t completely lost interest in writing about some of the albums I love and can’t currently think of a better place to put it (though Tumblr is made for posting text in about the same way that radio is made for watching movies). If you stick around, I might soon regale you with some tales about my favorites. And I promise I won’t list 101 of them.

Young adult fiction is obviously all the rage now; everywhere I look, I keep seeing writers talk about how they’re starting a new YA sci-fi/fantasy/romance/whatever series. It’s all becoming very cliche.

I thought to myself “What genre hasn’t been YA-ed to death yet?” The first thing I came up with was “young adult erotica”… I’d like to see someone try to pull that one off.

Well, it seems I fell off the November writing wagon pretty quickly when some scumbag Russians managed to hack my website. I got myself all tied up in looking into that and didn’t pay attention to working on Rudderless. Since I got everything working again, I completely lost all momentum. (And Skyrim.)

But, for those who got shiny new Kindles for Christmas, I marked the Kindle version of my book down to a minimal $0.99. So as not to screw over others with worse e-reading options, the Nook and iBook stores should be marked down to somewhere around $1.25, which is as low as I could make it.

Maybe some new readers will enjoy the book; I sure won’t be seeing any royalties anyway.

Looks like I’m back to actually working on writing.

Rudderless is back in action and hopefully there’ll be plenty more of it by the end of NaNoWriMo. So far, it’s been slow going, but the pace is getting faster every day and I should get caught up on my word count by, say, January.

But at least it’s something. I need to get back into the writing habit.

Haven’t done much in a while. Definitely nothing of merit. Though now I’m trying to get back to writing more regularly, though at the moment that doesn’t equate to any ficiton.

I’ve started MediaGauntlet back up, so if you’re interested in reading reviews or me rambling about MST3K, then there’s that.

I kind of forgot about writing and all that jazz for a while there.

I got sidetracked by enjoying my free time, then the beta of Rift, then Crysis, then Dragon Age II, then Dragon Age: Origins again, then I’ve started sitting around, playing “hidden object games” and listening to music all day.

It’s kind of a sad existence, unless you like the idea of doing nothing but relaxing all day.

Nevertheless, I should probably write something, which is making me want to totally reformat ryanspeck.com. “Why would needing to write make you want to overhaul your website?” I can almost hear you saying. Well, where would I put my writing when I’m done with it? On an ugly website? I’m totally not feeling very Web 2.0.

I might try to start using Tumblr as a place to write my rambling bullshit on a more regular basis, free from fictional constraints and more just rambling and ranting about the things that pop into my head and I think of long rambling soliloquies about that I never commit to virtual paper. We’ll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to start writing bits of Rudderless again. We’ll see how that goes.

“Rape should never be brought up more than three times in the course of a Thanksgiving dinner.”

For those who didn’t notice, I gave up on NaNoWriMo. Oh, I could have finished the story, but it would have been forced, unfunny, and not what I wanted and needed the novel to be. I should have started something new, but, instead, wanted to get something finished. As such, I’ve still got nothing finished and only 8,000 new words to show for the month (aside from actually getting some editing and expansion done on the first half of the novel).

But, out of all this, I got the motivation to finally start my humorous fantasy novel. I’d been putting off the idea for a couple of years, because I couldn’t think of a title. Some would have just gone ahead without one, but I stubbornly wanted to post it on the internet. Initially I’d thought a page a day, but that seems a bit optimistic, given my habit of being intensely lazy. So now I’m just going to try to post what I can, when I can. And I came up with a title as I laid in bed a few weeks ago, one that I should have thought of a long time ago and is more significant than it actually sounds.

Rudderless. I don’t think most people are going to “ooh” and “ah” over that particular title. But it holds a very particular meaning in regards to the place from which the idea gestated, something I’ll keep to myself for the time being. But, having that name, I built the site and am now prepared to launch the novel out into the wilds of the internet, if I actually get around to writing something. (Well, strictly speaking, I wrote one sentence, but it was just “The ship was on fire.” I guess I could post that.)

To say a little about the actual novel, part of it is my vulgar, stupid rendition of the typical fantasy novel, combined with an overall tone of mockery that takes aim at coventions of pen & paper roleplaying games. Or at least the cliches and conceits surrounding them.

Hopefully someone will want to read it. You know how people love genre fiction. Maybe it’ll take off and get around the internet, actually leading to someone giving half a shit about something I write. But I won’t get my hopes up about it.

More details to follow, as soon as I make with the writing.

I’ve been tempted in the past to do an audiobook of The Big Rusty Lie and release it for free on BitTorrent. Anything to promote yourself, right?

Aside from the fact that it would be a decent amount of hard work, time spent preparing, reading, recording, and editing, I’m stopped by the fact that I wrote the book using phonetic accents. They are, of course, used for comedic effect, like Madame Kreuschfach’s over-the-top German accent. It would almost be toned down by me parsing it and reading it for you. The most important thing, though, would be that I would have to verbally commit to Ching’s accent.

The thing I like about Ching’s accent is the fact that, while designed as being the stereotypical Asian accent (much as Ching is the stereotypical Asian sidekick), I’ve never fully committed to it. I’ve avoided the “me Chinese, me make joke”-ish-ness that most accents come to. Ching, through evolution and the process of actually turning a silly concept into a novel, has grown far beyond the Charlie Chan/Fu Manchu “me rikey” accent that I probably would have attributed to him.

Half of the time, Ching’s dialogue is “Yea, suh.” For the reading-impaired, that’s “Yes, sir.” I’ve almost avoided giving a strong accent and made reference to Ching and Bernardo having met in Amsterdam, because I like the idea that while you might think Ching’s accent is Chinese, I’m so all over the place and non-specific that it could be anything.

But, if I record an audiobook, I’m forced to commit. I’ll have to finally decide what his accent truly is, and I know it’ll just become another Asian stereotype.

While my books revel in stereotypes and wouldn’t really go anywhere without them, something about Ching makes me shy away. It’s the one last part of him that’s a mystery. Bernardo is a neverending font of weirdness. Ching beats people up. Once that last question about him is gone, what will be left?

Time will only tell and, as I get farther away from The Big Rusty Lie being a fresh piece of writing, I have no real intention of recording the audiobook. I could be doing so many other things, like actually finishing The Black Smoking Gun Of Temptation (which I’m well-blocked on at the moment). Maybe if there’s ever outcry to warrant reading someone my tale, then I would. But no one is clamoring for my work, so I guess Ching will keep his mystery, for now.