Moron.

Heh. I was working on this chapter, and I wondered, “Could I be lucky enough to discover that there’s a city out there named Moron?” And indeed there were a lot of them that I found. Most were in South America, however, and had an accent on the o. Same goes for the one in Mongolia. I figured that using any of those without the accents would be cheating, so I decided to go with the one in Switzerland.

I enjoy this intro. Technically, it’s probably the best written of all of them. Neat, concise, with a good word play twist at the end. Unfortunately, it gives me yet another reason to preach to you all. That’s good, in a way, since this book is kind of about that sort of thing. It’s a piece that Alcatraz is using politically, to give him the reputation he wants. That means lots of soapboxing.

Of course, that could just be my excuse for wanting to rant about lots of random subjects.

The Broken Alivened

The Alivened creature here–the one Alcatraz breaks–will probably be making a return in one of the later books. Not book two, however. Perhaps book three. I left him alive to sew a seed, which I could then harvest later, if I decided to.

As for romance novels making Alivened creatures angry and stupid…I jest. Please forgive me. I know there are very good romance novels out there that are quite witty. (The Regency subgenre, in particular, is filled with cleverness.) However, I couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the genre. It’s so big and dominating that sometimes we writers just can’t help ourselves.

Cantaloupe, fluttering paper makes a duck.

We’ve hit what people like to call the Brandon Avalanche. That’s the part of my books where things really pick up, and the ending comes in a tumbling, fast-paced explosion.

The avalanche is getting less and less noticeable in my later books. It’s still there, but I’m better at pacing things over an entire book now, and I don’t have as many plot twists stuffed into the short endings as I used to. I think this way is better, but I do still try to have the endings give a bang to the reader. Things do pick up, and things start to resolve–like the cantaloupe thing.

We’ll keep the pace going fairly quickly from now on. Though, of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t stop for stupid tangents–such as, well, the stupid tangent about being stupid. Again, this is me having fun with the form of a book, rather than just the content.