The Thing Strikes Again

Today, the Thing--the Thing where I actually get off my ass and start being a productive member of my own LaLa Land--has struck again.

Once upon a time, I painted a whole lot of Steampunk guns for a whole lot of money. I loved it to bits and had a constant influx-outflux thing going on with new guns in new colors and styles and all sorts of awesome things.

And then... And then I didn't.

I got bored. I got distracted. I started other projects and my Steampunk guns got shoved to one dark and omnious corner of this weird room in my house that's not quite an office, but not quite a walk-in closet either.

Well, now I figure that might as well change.

I've got a huge stockpile of gun blanks in the scary extra room. By the end of this week, I hope to have thirty up on Etsy. By the end of next week, I hope to have sold them. I've just got so much stuff in this house, that I don't even know what to do with most of it. So I'm going to paint all of these guns for the fun of it, and then sell them off for $5 each. That's just enough to cover the blanks, the paint, and the gas to the post office. I want these things gone, looking omnious in someone else's awkward corners.

We'll see how it goes. I'll put a couple of coupon codes either here or on Twitter by the end of the week. Give out some free guns, see how that goes.

Writing

I've been watching documentaries on ants lately. Because I'm a geek, I find them facinating. They've got miles of underground tunnels and that whole hive mind thing going on. I kind of want to write a story about ants now, but I have no idea what it would be about.

Or even how to write it, come to think of it.

Seeing as how the ants function as a whole, the story couldn't follow a single ant. There'd be no he or she unless the ants were considering the Queen, because how could they function unless they're moving through the world as an us. So it'd be a pretty interesting situation, trying to navigate through a story that way.

Also, there'd have to be no discriptions of sight in the story. Which means no colors, no light, no things as we tend to see them. Even if an ant could see and process the world with color vision, I don't think it'd care too much. It'd be more focused on the pheromone scent trails of the different brands of workers, the food scents, sounds from nearby and vibrations.

How would you write a story like that? I'd be so alien. I mean, that's sort of the point. An ant doesn't know it's an ant like we know we're humans. And it doesn't rely on sight, so there'd be no physical discriptions beyond passing mentions to chitin and exoskeletons. The story could well revolve entirely around ants and yet seem like Science Fiction.

Cool, right?

Plot though. The ever present stumbling block. Not much requires a great sweeping narrative in the world of ants. I'll have to figure that one out.