Stuff, and Belated Sept Update

Today I printed out 6 or 7 of my oldest Grandpa Anarchy stories for a coworker who had wanted to read some of them.  She'd read 3 of them before I went home, and liked them.  ^_^

But reading through them myself, I found several errors in stories that I had supposedly edited in preparation for my book.  I know that you can never catch all of the errors, and that's why you need to edit several times with several people if possible, but it was sad to find two misspelled words in one story that I thought I'd spell checked.  In another, Doctor Zero Hour the Third's German accent was inconsistent.  That's not surprising, I'm bad at accents, but I thought I'd been careful to fix it.

Worst of all, I cam across this line in What You Should Know:

"Whoa!"  The boy pointed at one of the largest and least dusty items in the distance.  "What the heck is that?"

"Oh, you mean the Anarchy Saucer?" asked Grandpa.  "Geothermal Jenny built that a couple of years ago."

"Sis never mentioned a flying saucer!"

"Well, that was after Circuit Girl's time, may she rest in peace."

There's just one problem with this exchange:  Circuit Girl dies in Remember This, while Geothermal Jenny first appears in Simple Solution.  But in my book I had Simple Solution coming before Remember This.  The stories are supposed to be in chronological order, more or less.

Remember This has always been the problem story because it's the first I wrote and it wasn't intended to be very funny -- and it isn't.  I rewrote it later to give it more of the same flavor as the other stories, but it still comes off as darker and less humorous than the rest.  Because of that, I didn't feel it made a good first story in the book.  I also had the problem of the story Kids These Days, in which Grandpa is kind of chummy with his old nemesis Carnival Act.  That isn't possible after the events of Remember This, in which Carnival Act has killed not only Circuit Girl but more than 3,000 other people besides.  So Kids These Days had to come before Remember This, but it isn't one of my best stories so I didn't want to open with that either.  So I'd very carefully arranged my early stories to place four of the best first, then Kids These Days, then Simple Solution and then Remember This.  I wanted a story to separate the Carnival-Act-is-chummy story from the Carnival-Act-is-a-mass-murderer story.  But clearly, Simple Solution has to come first, so I fixed that.

I might want to move The Silver Coin or Precisely before Remember This to achieve that separation.  We'll see.

Of course, perfect order isn't possible... my sidekick Lard Lad will appear in the last story of the book as a member of the League of Former Sidekicks, when the story in which he's introduced as Grandpa's sidekick won't be in the book.  It needs too much work.  Eh.

I want to write something new before Writer's Night tomorrow evening.  May take a stab at A Glitch in Time or Unpossible, or one of my many other unfinished stories... I'd like to get Return to Amethyst:  Miles to Go Before I Sleep finished too, since I've written a huge portion of it.

I didn't do an update for September, so here's my mid-October update:


2013 Goals:

Goal 1 - Write a Grandpa Anarchy Story a Week:

January 2013

Jan 19:  DarkFireDragonNinja  (begun several years ago)
Jan 24:  OmniGen Again  (begun Jan 23)
Jan 25:  Veteran of the Bone Wars  (begun Dec 30)
Jan 29:  Nemesis  (begun Dec 10)

February 2013

Jan 31:  Turncoats (begun Dec 8)
Feb 3:  There Ain't No Justice  (begun Nov 29)
Feb 5:  City of the Monkey God  (begun Nov 26)
Feb 7:  Future Me  (begun Jan 31)

March 2013

Feb 10:  Roll of the Die  (begun Feb 10)
Feb 11:  Trouble Focusing  (begun, Nov 21, in theory)
Feb 19:  Dead Again  (begun Feb 18)
Apr 24:  Most Dangerous  (begun Feb 09)

April 2013

Apr 27:  The Thing in the Suitcase  (begun Feb 16)
June 24:  An Inconvenient Airship
June 25:  Continuity Error
June 27:  The Devil in the Details

May 2013

June 30:  Dark Anarchy
July 1:  Ruse
July 1:  The R Word
Aug 3:  Space Kraken

June 2013

Aug 3:  Triple Aaar!
Aug 4:  Take Me Back to Constantinople
Aug 4:  The Chef that Time Forgot
Aug 5:  The Time of Your Life

July 2013

Aug 6:  Endangered Species
Aug 7:  Anarchy Is Forever
Aug 8:  Brothers and Sisters
Aug 12:  Self-Made Man

Aug 2013

Aug 13:  Hackernaut
Aug 15:  Gutbucket Magic
Aug 17:  Questionable Judgment
Aug 17:  Zero Hour

Sept 2013

Aug 18:  Your Stupid, Stupid Minds
Aug 20:  The Statue Got Me High
Aug 22:  Black Moon Rising
Aug 24:  Pick of the Litter

Oct 2013

Aug 24:  Pandora's Closet
Aug 25:  Magic is a Bitch
Aug 26:  Transformation Station
Aug 26:  Youth is Wasted on the Young

Nov 2013

Aug 27:  Historically Accurate
Aug 28:  Curse of the Teenager
Aug 28:  I Was a Teenage Ballerina
Aug 29:  Vows

Dec 2013

Aug 29:  Damsel in Distress

Aug 30:  X Chromosome
Sept 02:  Fate Maid to Order
Sept 26:  Deep House of Horror

2013 Bonus Stories:

Sept 26:  Crystal Weenie
Sept 27:  Arbor of Pain
Sept 27:  A Good Start
Sept 28:  Hero's Sacrifice
Oct 09:  It's a Dirty Job
Oct 15:  That Sinking Feeling


Goal more than completed!

Goal 2 - Write a Tai-Pan Story a Month:

Feb 16  The Pilgrimage of Ian St. Ritz  (January Tai-Pan story, 10,000 words)
Feb 23:  Space Miner Blues
Feb 23:  Banker Blues
Mar 07:  Hair of the Throug that Bit Me
Mar 17:  Cursed Be Ye Who Moves These Bones
Aug 31:  Ballerina Blues

3-4 stories behind my goal here.

Goals 3 & 4

I did not draw anything or work on non-Tai-Pan non-Grandpa Anarchy stories.  Well, technically I worked on my Otherworld Blues stories a bit in September, nothing major though.  I'm sort of planning to work on Girls School again in November.