Thursday, November 29, 2012

Post 2.6.0.0 Small God: Open Source

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.  It's too late to play this year, but check it out to see if you'd be interested next year. 

Many cities have local meet-ups, where you can talk with others who are writing and maybe write with them.  You look for a local meeting on the NaNoWriMo forums.  You can find other support there, too.  One form of support available is a series of Adopt A . . . threads.  The following is something that I posted to an Adopt a god thread. 
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If you are writing urban fantasy, I give you Dead Yans Puy. He appears as a very cheerful eight inch tall zombie, with his zombie-tude ranging from just a little dead looking to nearly skeletal, depending on how revered he has been lately. He hides behind things on your desk and chuckles.

For Dead Yans Puy (pronounced: poo-ee) is the god of really good webcomics that update erratically and not nearly often enough. You know the ones. You know there's not going to be an update this week. There hasn't been an update in months, now. But the comic is just sooo good, and the link is right there in your bookmarks. And you'd feel like you had betrayed yourself if you waited and found out later that it had unexpectedly updated.

So you click every day. When you see that un-updated home page, then is the time to worship Dead Yans Puy in the manner that he craves. You must shake both fists over your head, arch your back, screw shut your eyes, and yell heavenward, "Damn you, Dead Yans Puy!" This is music to the giggling little freak's ears.

I know this is going to sound like a chain letter. But the first group that I preached to were skeptical, and drug their feet. But within a month of the Great Call becoming a habit among them (as a joke, I assume- Yans does not care about belief) Erfworld had returned to twice weekly updates. The artist and writer are still limping a bit, but the text fillers are well written and my now-converted worshippers are not going to slide into apostasy. We will get there.

More recently, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage has begun updating three times a week. It's never updated three times a week. And I would have been willing to click daily on that comic for years in the hopes of seeing more of it. I thought our frustration-devouring little deviant (insulting him is also taken as praise - go figure) would never let that one go. It was an unexpected triumph and a shining proof to believers.

Now for the stick part of the chain letter analogy. My little group may have been bellowing benedictions to the malignant and mangy manikin, but the rest of you haven't been. He's getting a little annoyed with how slowly his worship is spreading. He's taken to cutting artists' hands. Both Order of the Stick and Questionable Content have had hiatuses due to hand injuries. Although Questionable Content may have been the work of a mimic deity. I suspect the Shouting Bird.

Please. I beg you. Take up the cry. We had gotten Goblins back up to twice weekly, and last week Thunt's connection refused to upload. I'm scared. I know he's a miniscule jerk of a god, but these are great webcomics. They brighten the day and gladden the heart and uplift the mind. (Fortunately, XKCD seems to be immune. I suspect that's because Randall Munroe is a physicist. They're resistant to small gods.) Don't risk sending more good webcomics into stuttering delay! Curse him today! Curse him often!

We're all counting on you.

(Sorry if I got a little personally involved. This hits me close to home.)

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