#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 27: Splat?

Kerplunk.

Egg on the floor? Bug on the windscreen? Lower-price sticker on a car?

27. Splat?

"Splat" was the sound when the ice cream fell to the floor. Five-year old Timmy started to cry while Spot, the dog, enjoyed an unexpected treat.

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#ScribesAndMakers 27. Splat?

(Excerpt from my short story Encroachment. Splat not part of original text, but doesn't fit too badly.)

Splat.
The water bottle missed the cage and splashed across the road. My arm dangled until I could muster the energy to pull on the brake. Something odd glimpsed from the corner of my eye lingered in my mind. I twisted my feet to unclip my shoes from the pedals, laid my bike in the grass, and went back to retrieve the bottle.
My cleats clattered against the pavement as I tottered along, my legs spindly and birdish from an idle winter. I glanced over my shoulder and had an inward chuckle, recognizing an overflowing trash can as the object of my distraction.

#ScribesAndMakers 27: Splat?

The infamous gameshow for teens and tweens, Splat aired between 4PM and 5PM Eastern and Central on the Spitoon channel in the late 90s and early 00s. Contestants were splatted with mudpies when they lost. Legend has it that no one ever won the gameshow, which operated on modified Fizzbin rules. This is not correct, however. One teen did win but the episode wasn't aired and significant NDAs protect the details of the episode.

Occasionally, people say that they have seen the NDA'd episode. There is no corroborating proof of this idea. The studio itself admits the episode occurs but indicates that all copies have been destroyed.

(In case it is unclear in any capacity, none of this is true ... in this universe at least.)

#ScribesAndMakers 27Feb—Splat?

I've used many sound descriptions in my novels. Whoosh, clunk, clang, clink, drip, slosh, even a couple of "heehaws" in my WIP. But never splat.

I use splatter in After the Awakening (to describe blood on someone's clothes), but not splat. TBH, I don't know if I would. It feels...icky.

#ScribesAndMakers 27 Feb "Splat?"

One of my favourite ZX Spectrum games was "Splat!" You're a little X running around a scrolling maze. You do NOT control the scrolling. If you get cornered and scrolled off the side, you die. The maze seemed too big to be stored in the 16K Spectrum's memory, so I theorised it was RNG from a fixed seed, or part of the Spectrum's ROM maybe.

I started making a similar game for the Acorn Archimedes but never finished.

#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 27: Splat?

Only if you'll clean it up.

#ScribesAndMakers Feb 27 "Splat?"

Actually: that's very close to the sound my mood made today.

Started out really pretty good, only to hit a wall.

Being told to do something in a particular way, which doesn't make sense to me, with zero justification other than "do it this way" does *not* jibe well with me. At all.

If someone is going to tell me to do something in a way that to me seems objectively worse, they could at least give me a half-way decent reason *why* to do it like that. 😠 🤬

#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 27: Splat?

No good associations.

#ScribesAndMakers February 27th

Splat?

Yep!

A polymorphic blob of intelligent/sentient goop tends to splat onto objects when in a more liquid form.

"George" is an escapee... who kidnaps Thomas 'Tommy' Andrew McNulty and drags him into a space-borne adventure aboard the salvage vessel Resurrection.

And he splats mostly to surprise those who are unaware of his presence! (Sense of humour, right?)

#ScribesAndMakers 2/27. Splat?

#writing #writingCommunity

#ScribesAndMakers
February 27th

Splat?

"Definition of splat (noun) from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

splat noun
🗣️ /splæt/

[singular] (informal)
The sound made by something wet hitting a surface with force."

Can't say I have used it anywhere…

#ScribesAndMakers 27. Splat?

i used the word 'splat' exactly once, during a scene where some wannabe teenage 'witch' is trying to impress her friends by reading the entrails of a dead cat. an unserious word for an unserious exercise.

'Eleanor supposed she ought to be more afraid. But more similarly skeptical thoughts occurred to her as the spectacle went on, and the clumsy pokings of the surgery fell rather short of the drama one expected from the witch's chants and speeches.'

#ScribesAndMakers 26. Do you abandon creative projects? If so, how do you determine when to abandon them?

i'll scrap a project if its flaws are too central to be solved. sometimes, you have to learn when to let go. but most scrapped projects end up being resorbed, and nourishing future, better projects.

#ScribesAndMakers 26: Abandon creative projects?

Frequently. Usually because others aren't interacting with them and wouldn't seem to miss them. Rarely because I stopped enjoying them myself, but did have other projects to attend to. I always try to leave off at an endpoint.

Examples include personified math (serial, revived as webcomic, shelved again), Epsilon (less than 5 votes on plot) and Marmalade Mercury (revived 18 years later and completed).

#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 27: Splat?

Fun word for webcomics and blogs, but I would very carefully have to weigh whether it was the right word for one of my novels.

#ScribesAndMakers day 26: Do you abandon creative projects? If so, how do you determine when to abandon them?

Some things seem like a great idea at the start, then turn out to me more trouble than they're worth. It could be a piece of art, some writing, a craft project. I generally don't toss out unfinished things. I shelve them, in case that particular creative spark is reignited sometime. Fortunately my projects generally do not take up a lot of physical storage space.

#ScribesAndMakers Do you abandon creative projects?

The instant they stop being interesting to me.

#ScribesAndMakers 27/02: Splat?

...is what probably any parent who has never learnt about Warhol, Pollock or Rothko and why they did what they did will say to their artistically curious offspring upon seeing their first grand painting.

(DO NOT DO THIS. It's severely discouraging and damaging to a child's self esteem.)

#ScribesAndMakers day 26: Do you abandon creative projects? If so, how do you determine when to abandon them?

I never abandon projects, but there are some that haven't been updated in a while. I have a problem where I start new ones constantly (looking at my multichapter fanfic backlog), something I didn't know would become a massive responsibility to rotate updates. They will all be updated; it just takes time, and my irl commitments are becoming more demanding, making it harder to update these works. I hope that my readers have the patience and understanding that fic authors do have lives.