Very cool!

So for the first time in I don't know how long, I wrote and actually completed a short story today! (It helps that it was only five pages long.)

I'm not counting NaNoWriMo, since it wasn't a short story, and I didn't finish it.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the story. Gonna tuck it away for a few days, then give it a fresh read.

Sunday night already?

Ugh

The NEED to web surf will always expand to fill the available time. There's always 'one more thing' I want to look up.

No progress on my NaNoWriMo book yesterday - well, not the prose. I did add some juicy details to the outline.

And I changed one guy's name from Roger to Daniel. I mean really, who is named Roger? No one. Not a single person.

NaNoWriMo Day 7

My book is definitely starting to take shape. At this moment, (8am on 11/7) my word count is not where I would like it to be. It should be at 10,002 and is at 6,576. Not as bad as some (Michelle) but nowhere near the crazy word count of others (Kelly).

Actually writing a work of some length (even a few thousand words) is always humbling to me. Somehow, it seems as if it should be easier. Not that it's hard, but I have this impression that I should be writing faster. It's not a typing speed thing, it's not a writers block thing.

It's as if there is a bandwidth limit on my creative process, even when the scenes I'm writing have been outlined. I assume everyone has a bandwidth limit and I assume it depends on the scene that you're writing - some scenes are definitely quicker than others.

It certainly helps if I don't stop writing every five minutes to research the actual type of dog, house, car, or brand of boots that the scene calls for. Simply plugging in "I'm sorry TIMMY'S MOM'S NAME, but Timmy has RARE BONE CANCER. We'll need to test the family for BONE MARROW COMPATIBILITY TERM." Yeah, coming up with good names can slow me down, so often I will use a placeholder, especially if it's a character I didn't expect to need.

Okay, I've procrastinated enough. On to writing! Good luck to my fellow NaNoWriMonians!

NaNoWriMo Day 3

So far so good. I'm plodding along with my story. Since I have the first half of the book outlined, I know exactly where I am going, so that's not a concern.

I did make a discovery - the introduction chapter outlining the whole scene could totally become its own book, though that's not the story I'm in the mood to tell at the moment. Maybe I'll turn it into a prequel someday.

Good Luck, NaNoWriMo writers!

NaNoWriMo Day 1

Well so much for having my outline completely done. Still, I think it will all turn out just fine. And this year, I'm gonna get my free proof!

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo starts on November 1st. I've got the outline for my book about halfway done. This means I have the main plot down and a few minor threads established, along with most of the characters.

Seven days until November 1st.

There's still a lot up in the air, and as usual I have realized that there is a lot more to the subject matter than I thought, meaning I could spend months just researching the thing. I guess that's why books can take years to write, right?

Good luck to my fellow NaNo's!

After a ten minute lecture on the informality of "I'm"

121 Days Till NaNoWriMo!

November 1st seems far away until you count the actual number of days. For the first time since we met, Michelle won't be in the wicked clutches of Retail Christmas Hell during November, so she has no excuse but to participate! Bwa ha ha!

I've learned many lessons over the past few years of NaNoWriMo, and the biggest one is that despite my desire for an 'internal struggle' type story, I'm really bad at accomplishing them.

So I'll need an action-oriented story - not necessarily something action-packed, but something with an external pressure that keeps the story moving from A to B to C.

Without this pressure, I tend to provide ever greater detail about nothing (which is part of the problem of having a daily expected word count - a certain amount of rambling on about nothing can make you feel productive).

I've been toying with the idea of writing a new type of ghost story, but it would involve creating a whole new world (or new layer on our current world, more accurately) and I don't know that I have the energy for that level of creation.

At this moment, I have no idea what I'll be writing about on November 1st, but I will be writing something. It's definitely not too early to start thinking about it.

Yum

Aimee Bender is a writer who writes the way I would love to. There's nothing forced, nothing to prove, the prose is not trying too hard or trying at all. If it's clever, it's because there was cleverness in the moment, with no bold black pen strokes on some outline that said "plug in something clever here".

The writing is so true, it feels that writing it must have been effortless. Surely. Someone did not work and toil over this, it simply is, and is wonderful.

I enjoy writing, but I never manage to finish anything for a variety of reasons, mostly quality concerns. I do QA for a living - perhaps as a result, my standards are impossible? Distraction with new, 'better' ideas are also a problem.

There's typically elements of the fantastic in Aimee's work, and these elements are easy to accept because they're never over the top, even when they should be. Unbelievable stuff is happening to ordinary people, and they know it's unbelievable but there it is. It's real, so the people add this new experience to their world view. An important part of what makes the fantastic elements work in Aimee's writing is that the story is not about the unbelievable stuff, it's about the people.

Here's a snippet from 'The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake'(Aimee typically doesn't put dialogue in quotes, that's not an omission on my part - I like it, but I don't know if I could get away with it. Or maybe that's part of my problem - there's nothing to 'get away with' just do it. Also, I love all the commas:

She ran the sponge along the side of the sink, to clear it of leftover debris. She did not face me, but I could feel the vibration of tears, a kind of pain hive, rustling inside her. As she resettled the knives and forks in their dishwasher cup. As she squeezed the sponge dry. After a few minutes, she looked up, to watch out the kitchen window.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children.

I stood next to her, as if just listening in. Close. She said it out the window. To the flower boxes, in front of us, full of pansies and daffodils, bowing in at dusk. Where she had directed all her pleas and questions to her missing son, over the past few years. It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, hugged and kissed us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit. She wiped her hands on a dish towel, already moving back into the regular world, where such a thought was ridiculous, nonsensical, but I had heard it, standing there, and it was the first thing she'd said in a very long time that I could take in whole.

I leaned over, and kissed her cheek.

From both of us, I said.

I like the writing because it feels so real. I just finished 'The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake' but I'm planning on re-reading it shortly (and my other Aimee Bender books), trying to absorb that wonderful, effortless realness. It tastes peaceful.

Link to Aimee Bender books @ Powells
Aimee's web site

Well okay then

Out of the blue, I'm working on a short story about the first astronauts on Mars.

Devising a decent ending is proving difficult.

(Weird, it seems this is my first post with a 'Mars' label - can that be right?)

Dying since the day they were born

The human brain is an amazing piece of wetware, with a storage and bandwidth capacity that’s difficult to calculate even with current technology.

Something that concerns me about the status of my own bandwidth - earworms.

Songs get stuck in my head constantly – and all I have to do is read a list of titles for it to happen. I was researching songs that were popular in 1993 and 1994 for a flashback scene I was writing.

When I got up the next morning, I was humming ‘Stay’ by Lisa Loeb, even though I did not reference the song in my story – my eye simply skimmed across the title the day before.

Take a good look at these two links/song lists, and let me know if any related earwoms end up attacking you over the next couple of days.

Help For My Writer Readers

Back in May, Aaron Diaz over at Dresden Codak posted a great writing aid:

42 Essential 3rd Act Twists

It's a pretty damn hilarious read - if nothing else, it reminds writerfolk not to take ourselves too seriously, which is good advice for anyone.

There's a lot of great stuff in the store, too - go spend some money to reward good art and good humor!

And hey - Aaron is from Portland, Oregon the land from which all good things come and a place I will live someday! How cool is that? No, we have no current plans to move, but a suffering 40ish never-was boy can dream, right?

NaNoWriMo 2009

Wow, another year has passed and it's time to gear up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) once again. This year I have a few writing buddies in town, which will be cool for the bonding, sharing, competition aspect of it all.

I'm thinking for this year to finish the book I started for last year's NaNoWriMo. Which means I'll have to read the 50,000 plus words I wrote last year (shudder) to prepare myself for where I left off.

Our first prep-meeting is Monday, woo!

First Feline to win an Edgar Award

"All right, I've got that part down. What happens next? Wow, that's gory, even for a cat. Okok, I'm noting, I'm noting - no need for claws..."

a work-in-progress snippet

Is it possible to create a novella-length melodramatic work entirely in the present tense? I'm sure it's been done... How readable would it be? That is, can it hold a reader's attention without feeling too awkward to them?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Green is beginning to stir. His breath is raspy, heavy with effort, wet thanks to a punctured lung.

Gail finds her hands gripping his gun in fingers tight and cold. Her jaw is clenched, teeth grinding. She's overwhelmed by a sense of outrage at his invasion into her space, not just her car, but her space – her tidy world.

Her fingers close on the trigger, and the gun goes off almost effortlessly. She will later convince herself it was an accident. The BANG fills the tiny space to overflowing, and her ears whine an endless E.

The red-haired thug runs up to the car just in time to see his buddy take a point-blank bullet. Red stumbles away, gathers himself up, running off at top speed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Also, can you say these words in the present tense:
punctured
clenched
overwhelmed

Problem in chair

Subconscious: and then some wicked scary shit goes down and then he heads into the kitchen where more freaky stuff be happening and he runs outside screaming

Conscious: All right, and then what?

Subconscious: well its night time in a scary downtown ghetto type place and there are bums and stuff huddled around burning trash cans and they leer covetously at his coat

Conscious: Uh huh... He remembered to put on his coat as he was running outside screaming?

Subconscious: and then he wanders into a field of grain and the sun is coming up and its beautiful and he meets a girl

Conscious: Wait, what happened to the city? And a girl? Why is it always a girl?

Subconscious: girls are nice i like girls

Conscious: Let me guess, she's a pretty brunette

Subconscious: holy shit how did you know
.
.

I'd like to thank Juan Valdez and Lakshmi,

.

I did it!

I broke 50,000 words (50,308 to be precise) at about 11:50PM last night, pant pant pant!

I was sure that the NaNoWriMo servers would be far too overloaded with last-minute wanna-be's like myself - I was sure that I wasn't gonna be able to get my word count validated by midnight, but it worked fine the first time!

Big time kudos to the most excellent dshoffman, my NaNoWriMo co-competitor who finished like 97 hours before me! We both won, YEAH! High Five DUDE!

An generous helping of Negative Kudos to my other NaNoWriMo co-competitor Invisible Lizard, you're a quitter, you quitting quitter you. Tsk, I say. Tsk and pay up. Just send my winnings to charity.

So yeah I did the fifty thousand words, but I'm not proud of all of them. I'm proud of the accomplishment, that I actually had the stubbornness to stick to it for 30 days, and to write when all I wanted to do was nothing.

The inexorable appeal of doing nothing is like unto a black hole, I tells ya. Well I don't need to tell you, you're doing nothing right now. And loving it, I daresay.

The novella I spent November pounding out is titled FAST, which is an acronym for the the name of an epidemic that sweeps the world, resulting in extreme allergies (resulting in anaphylactic shock) to almost all food. It's more about people than the crisis itself, a series of vignettes.

I'll be posting the more readable chunks of FAST on my fiction blog, Anon Fiction... over the next couple of days. If you're interested, take a look. I'll let y'all know when it's up for viewing.