100 word minimum

So, now that we're all done with Harry Potter …

A day that begins with a cat horking up a hairball can only get better. My reflexes are pretty good. I went from slumber to moving the cat off my pretty rug in about five retches.

With that small accomplishment under my belt, I went on to get a little more sleep. Then I spent the rest of the day on mundane activities like buying groceries and doing the markup for my novel.

Yes, at long last, my WIP (work in progress) is no longer a UFO (unfinished object)! Isn't everybody excited? Y'all must be, seeing as how the deafening silence on the Guestbook page of Church Hill, the first novel, can only mean that everyone is waiting with bated breath for the sequel. (I'm not delusional, really. I'm being amusing. I'm amusing myself anyway.)

Please go check it out: The Egyptian Building: More of the same, only with mummies. If the html format isn't your thing, go ahead and download the pdf.

Thanks for clicking!

The palate cleanser

Unoriginal I know, but I needed to get that last book cleared out of my head. This may not be a great book either, though I'm sure it will meet my expectations. Maybe that was the problem with the last book. My expectation of "not suck" was totally unrealistic.

We hadn't really been planning to get the new Harry Potter. Then we were in Target to stock up on kitty litter and we saw how they had tons of copies (only $17.99). Someone had been called away from replenishing the stock and left the "Do not open before July 21!" box just sitting there. Oz pulled out the cellphone to take pictures of it, much to the amusement of the surrounding shoppers, and somehow the book ended up in our cart.

I'm on page 470.

Reading a bad book

I try to avoid bad books. I check out reviews and try to get the book from the library if I'm not sure. But we got this book the last time we went to the bookstore. The cover art has been calling out to me for a while and the story elements appealed to me, so I took a chance.

Not going to do that again anytime soon.

The book was one of those that starts out great. These are the worst kind of bad book. They pass the first page test in the bookstore and get your hopes up for the first hundred promising pages.

Then the author runs out of steam and you can tell the editor did too, because suddenly pansies are being described in a manner completely un-pansy-like. Without a lively story to distract the reader, other wrong details start to pop out (a twelfth century person says, "Okay!") and make you question even the correct details. "Does Bushmill's actually make a single malt?" The plot points begin to depend on the protagonist abruptly becoming a real dumbass. The Big Surprise is totally obvious. Triteness happens. Or worse.

In this book, during a massacre of some (nice) heretics by some (mean) Catholics, "heads were severed from limbs." That is an exact quote. These nice heretics were evidently mutants with their heads growing out of their arms and legs!

Did the editors think no one would get that far?

I wonder.

I read it to the end just to see the full scope of the stupidity. I wish the acknowledgements included the names of everyone involved with this book so I could use that information as a warning label.

(Wow, the moon looks really close tonight.)

How psycho is my cat?

I was lounging on the couch today and I glanced over at the red leatherette hassock (it's an heirloom, okay?), where my manuscript was lying open, mocking me. The light filtered lazily in through the window and hit everything just right.

Perfectly highlighting the fang marks on the corner of the hassock.

The fang marks, I should add, exactly match the fang scars on my leg. I looked over the hassock a little more carefully and found four more sets of fang marks. By "marks" I actually mean "holes that go all the way to the cushy filling."

There's no telling when he viciously bit the hassock, though I suspect the fang marks on the corner were fresh. It's a good thing the hassock doesn't bleed or need antibiotics. Or have a lawyer.

Sparky has seemed much calmer since I put him on the psychoactive meds, but still. I'm glad I'm not a piece of furniture.

And about that MS! That's what my little red pen and I have been working on instead of blogging. I'm mostly copyediting and tightening up the writing to eliminate the verbosity which is a direct result of NaNoWriMo. Thanks to the 1700 words/day requirement I ended up using way more words than necessary. This was a good thing when I pulled out nifty words that I didn't know were there, but not so good when I just used too many words. Still, crossing things out with the red pen is easier than writing them in. Another thing I'm finding is that, thanks to plenty of preliminary plot obsession, I'm not having to do much revision. I will have to do some infill writing, however, to improve my villains.

Enough. I need to go cross out some words.

Red ink

September is the time to start new things, even if you're not going back to school. So I printed out a Work in Progress and put it in a spanking new red binder. I have a nice fresh red pen. Now I just have to start reading and marking.

I guess that's not exactly a new thing, but I've had a four month break from it. I hadn't meant to wait so long, except that I was waiting on feedback which is apparently only going to happen on a geological time scale (and I want to be done with this by November).

I'm kind of dreading the revision process and looking forward to it at the same time. The binder is sitting right in front of me, mocking me, saying, "Go ahead, open me up. Start reading."

As if the agony of my own prose stylings weren't enough, tomorrow I have to finish translating The Article That Saps My Will to Exist. And then hit that with the red pen too.

It rains

I can't think of anything to write and Oz is sitting near me, making little maddening sounds, like breathing. The nerve.

So I've moved to the downstairs computer where it's quiet and no one else is breathing in here but me.

I still don't have anything to write about. I dusted today and worked for a couple hours. It rained and my gutters leaked. I called the guy who I called a few weeks ago about the gutters and left a message, asking if he'd forgotten me. I didn't even cook. I made rice and we had leftover curry for dinner.

As you might have guessed, I was all set to stop lazing about, because it's not terribly interesting, and then Oz told me he was taking tomorrow off.

One fun thing I have been doing is playing with my future world for my cyberpunk story. I don't think it'll be set in the near future, because we're living in the near future and all this wild stuff is everyday life now if you're on one side of the digital divide. So it's looking like a more distant future after all, except that the distant future looks a lot like the past in some respects. I'd tell you more, but I don't know it yet.

Dead trees and electrons

I'm writing on paper tonight, but Edward Albee has some interesting words about traveling to Easter Island.

Also, my brother has upgraded his web presence and even written a couple new entries.

What should I write?

I just finished up my first read through of The Egyptian Building.

And.

It actually didn't suck. However, I read it on screen and mostly after eleven o'clock at night. Who knows how it will stand up to the light of day?

I passed the files on to Oz, who is going to be the long and ever suffering beta reader. (He read Church Hill twice. Twice, people. Is that love or what?) I should probably print out TEB and try reading it myself.

But.

I kind of want to write something else. Like, I should probably get back on the daily blogging bicycle, yes? Except that I have this sort of idea that's been floating around in my head for a few years. Then I read a cyberpunk novel and said, Damn, but I wish cyberpunk novels had plots already. Atmosphere will only get you so far. As I recall, Snow Crash had a plot. But it's the only one I've come across that did. Then Oz said my Rednecks In Space (add your own reverb here) should be cyber-workers, Elron and Jim, who had to jack into a swamp and . But that would be giving things away. Except it would really fit in (surprisingly well) with this other thing.

I still need a plot.

Also, monkey butts:

Yes, I like to check in at the Monkey-cam and see what's up with the monkeys. I'm juvenile enough to be amused by monkey butts. Butts in a row, big pink monkey butts pointed at the camera. You wonder if they understand about the web-cam, but they're monkeys! Of course they don't. Or so I thought until I saw actual monkey sex taking place in front of the camera with the monkeys both looking right into the camera as if to say, Yeah, you hairless primates? Total pervs. Hit refresh again. We know you will.

Where would the monkeys get an idea like that?

Fuzzy

Gratuitous cat picture

I also have a shot of this one trying to fit his enormous butt into a very small box, but I'll spare you.

Flickr's April Fool's joke was to have their random "interesting" pictures be all cat pictures. Am I the only one who found the cat pictures more interesting than the usual slew of sunsets, pictures of sulky models, and landscapes with falling down barns?

Ah, well, even a whole battalion of falling down barns is more interesting than editing patents. I finished the big one today. Yay! While I was putting on the final touches (e.g. obsessing over the use of the word "restriction" vs. "regulation"), the same client emailed me with another patent. Different subject matter, thank the gods, but not the slackest deadline either. Whine, whine. But. Money. So I accepted it.

In the meantime, my fun editing has been going well. Yesterday I breezed by the halfway mark on editing The Egyptian Building. I've had to mark a few spots which need a little more writing (elaboration here, replace a boring spot with something shorter there), but the editing part has been fun. A couple days ago, though, I found a long stretch of chirpy cute dialogue. The question: How annoying is this? I was wondering whether to delete this and replace it with a couple paragraphs of exposition. Oz said, "Oh, leave it." He's the beta reader; if he's willing to deal with it, I'm willing to delete it later.

Speaking of which, I have more words to delete.

The delete key is my friend

First, because I can, a pretty picture:

Richmond skyline of the past

Second, some writing for you:

(Or the opposite of writing?) I think I'm deleting a hundred words, minimum, from The Egyptian Building every day. Since it was written for NaNoWriMo, I was cranking out the words like crazy. Must. Get. Word. Count. Why use one word when four will do? Now I'm editing and saying, This paragraph? Totally adds nothing to the story. Delete. Whee! All these little words? I only need one medium-sized word.

Even with all the excess verbiage, I'm still finding problems with pacing. Some happenings go by whiplash fast. They need more words. Other things may not need to take so long. I'm not deleting everything that seems excessive. Authors who elide too much bother me and sometimes more story is a good thing.

Some things in the story surprise me. Throwaway stuff, written solely for the word counts, ends up being . okay.

Took long enough

Yesterday afternoon I finished the first draft of Unmentionable Things. Go me! It came in at 50,599 words, not a bad length for a Young Adult novel. I cleverly decided to knock a few years off my protagonists' ages, thereby changing the market so that the shortness of the story wouldn't be a problem. But it took over two months to get those words. Okay, I had some time in there when I was sick and not writing. But still, the 700 words/day output? Very lame.

I felt like I really didn't hit my stride with this story until the last third or so. Now I'm going through withdrawal because I managed to end on the upswing of the writer's pendulum (the "Hey, this is pretty good!" as opposed to the "Wow, this really sucks!"). Even so I'm not sure how well it will hold up when I go back to edit and revise. Will I have to rewrite the whole first half again? Probably.

But I don't need to think about that now. It's time to pick up The Egyptian Building again, which I haven't looked at since I finished the first draft in early January. I know the first ten thousand words will need rewriting. I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised by the other eighty thousand words.

Learning by example. Or not.

It hasn't been all tea and chocolate here at the house of sniffles this past week. I also read a bunch of books, including two not very good books. Usually I don't bother to finish bad books, but this time I decided to take them as "how not to write" lessons. And one of them I didn't finish after Oz said, "Oh yeah. That guy is all build up. It takes forever to get where he's going and then you wonder why you bothered."

It should tell you something that the book I picked up afterwards as a palate cleanser was a Stephanie Plum novel, which by contrast seemed really well written.

Lesson #1: Show-don't-tell or Tell-don't-show, but for God's sake, don't Show AND Tell the same thing in the same paragraph!

This was the reason why the book I didn't finish took forever to get anywhere. Every paragraph of exposition had a couple bland sentences of Telling and then a few not bad sentences of Showing what was just Told. I wanted to send the author a pack of red pens and a strongly worded note about using them. A good bloodletting would have been murder on the word count, however, leaving the author with a novella which would have been harder to sell. This was a debut novel from someone who'd been writing short stories. Tough transition to the new form? Egregious padding? Bored reader.

Lesson learned: My red pens are my friends.

Lesson #2: Let's cut the "um" crap already!

In the other bad book, the story was told mostly through dialogue. This does not always make for a bad story, but requires that the author clearly differentiate character voices, keep the attributions clear yet not intrusive, and avoid repetition, especially repetitious speech quirks. Like, uh, you know what I mean?

One of the recent trends in the writing of dialogue is to make it more realistic by including non-verbal vocalizations: um, ah, er. The um is the one I hate the most, but the er is a close second. Ah doesn't bother me as much.

These vocalizations are annoying because they are crutches which a writer uses instead of writing words. Consider, there are two basic ums, the um of snottiness, as described in the TWoP forum guidelines, and the um of hesitation. While literature has been peopled for centuries with snotty and hesitant characters, they've only recently started to say "um" all the damn time. For the past few hundred years, the hesitant characters have been pausing, hesitating, clearing their throats, fidgeting around and looking out the window. They have occasionally emitted the odd " . " The snotty characters have been snotty with words.

Lesson learned: I already avoided um. I just hate it more now.

Other lessons:

Throwing in a couple random drag queens does not a screwball comedy make.

A scene written mostly in dialogue, in which ten characters sit around talking and interrupting each other, is incoherent. If you have one long speech, which communicates something important to the reader, don't interrupt it with ten interjections which add nothing (though they do pad out your line count nicely).

Sometimes bad books get great cover art.

Sporadic. Also, wheels

Yes, I'm working on my historical novel again, so not all the words I'm writing will appear here. This is a way for me to bide my time until I start revising The Egyptian Building. This handily allows me to put off revising TEB, but we won't talk about that right now.

The historical is not getting written (or rewritten, rather) at the same breakneck pace as the contemporary novels. Damn if those details don't keep popping up. When you have to stop in mid-sentence to research wagon wheels, structure of, you just can't write as quickly.

Llike almost anything on close inspection, wagon wheels are surprisingly interesting. One of the things I needed to learn about was the structure of the iron tire in the seventeenth century. I knew that a hoop-shaped strip of iron was bound around a wooden wheel to help with durability. But when? Was it always hoop-shaped? Yes and no. Those crafty Romans had the hoop-shaped iron tires, but those vanished with the Roman empire. Through medieval and early modern times, they attached iron "shoes" around the rim of the wheel. The hoop-shaped tire didn't reappear until the eighteenth century. This I now know, thanks to the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights.

Therefore, my characters are traveling in a wagon with shoes. One of the wheels needs to be fixed.

When you were mine

I just finished reading War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull. It's an urban fantasy written in 1987. I picked it up after I read Cassandra Claire's post on Top Ten Fictional Relationships (Yes, we likes the books with the girl cooties, we does). I agreed with most of her selections, except that I'm just not as into the Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lizzie Bennett thing that most people are, I like Sense and Sensibility better. I figured I'd check out those of her choices with which I was not familiar. Hence, War for the Oaks.

Anyway, urban fantasy. Standard stuff (I should know). What ended up making the biggest impression on me, even more than the love triangle, was the fashion show. When the author describes in great detail what the characters are wearing just about every time they change clothes, that's what I call the fashion show. The characters in this book are mostly in a rock band and very hip. So their clothes, also hip. Hip for 1987. Pleated pants which taper to cuffs! Pink and gray! Men in teal! Waistlines that hit at the waist!

(Today people make snide remarks about "mom jeans" with the high waistbands, and that's eighties jeans they're talking about. But, let me just say, back in the eighties? The only people rocking the plumber's crack were actual plumbers.)

I spent the eighties in high school and college, so I was very aware of the clothes at the time, despite parental prohibitions against wasting money on anything trendy. All through this book, I was drawing the pictures in my mind and, hey, everyone looked really cool.

This brings up an interesting point for the writer who likes to write fashion show. I guess I do a little of that myself. But hip characters dressed in the latest, coolest thing at the time the book is written are going to come off as kind of dippy twenty years down the line. If your book is still in print. Then again, staying in print twenty years indicates a certain measure of success, dorky clothes or not.

Like a jigsaw puzzle

Today we made pie, which we were too full to eat tonight. Pie for breakfast, anyone? Today I did some cleaning. Not the dusting, which I should have done, but laundry and a bathroom. The dust is getting out of hand. It's not just that it looks bad, but when the cats walk around sneezing, you know it's time. Typical laundry list for a Sunday.

But I started outlining the rewrite for my historical novel and finished it up this evening. I'm separating out the two plot lines which kept tripping over each other and never coming together. I picked one plot line and stuck with that. I shortened the timeline. One of the problems was that the two plots wanted radically different pacing. One needed to take place over a few days to make any sense at all, while the other wanted a few weeks. Of course they couldn't work concurrently! I reduced the number of characters and fiddled with their backstories. Crowds might be more realistic, but they're awfully hard to juggle.

This new version will be shorter and I may be able to recycle some of the scenes from the early version. It's not like I'm going to have to write a whole other novel. Not exactly.

I think I've got it all together now. I should . start writing.

Poor productivity

I finally finished up my translation of that really dull (and difficult) article. It would have gone a lot faster if I'd been able to concentrate on it for more than five minutes at a time. My attention span has really gone down the tubes over the last couple months. I have a bad Internet habit. But the next article will be better! It is computer vision, all optics and logic and math.

It's not just the Internet distracting me. I've been playing with my brain again. The characters and plot from my first (mostly but not ever really finished except in a very lame way) novel are insisting on a little more development. More backstory. New names, in some cases.

This is the fun part. Anything can happen. They can be anyone, almost, until the plot starts to do its shoehorn thing and impose requirements upon their actions.

I may have to start writing again sooner than I thought.

The finish line

Last night I finished the first draft of my novel. Sixty-five days of writing (less a few days in December), 93,559 words. Also, a couple handwritten pages of notes made along the way titled "Things to fix." Also, characters who demand more story (I already gave them an epilogue, what more do they want? Another damn novel, that's what.) and plot arc-lets that want to grow! And be free!

Now what?

I'm going to set it aside for a month and then start editing.

In the meantime, I'll . I don't know. What was it that I used to do?

Major milestone

Last night I broke the 50,000 word mark on my NaNovel!

Too bad it isn't finished yet. I keep thinking I'm halfway done. At first I was afraid that I wouldn't have enough story for November, now I'm afraid that I'll always be only halfway done, no matter how much I write.

Anyway, I must keep writing! Blogging will be light for a while longer while I beat my plot into submission. More truthfully, I think the beating goes the other way. Okay, and I should definitely stop there.

Other recent excitement:

I have to buy business casual clothes for a job-related thing. Business casual (no jeans). Little do they know, business casual at my workplace is pajamas! No blue jeans, sure, but how about flannel pants printed with monkeys in spacesuits? So now I must go shopping.

Yesterday the oil cap popped off my car's engine and spewed oil all over while I was driving somewhere. It's really alarming when smoke starts pouring out from the air vents and all around the edges of the hood. I called Oz, who gave me comforting advice on how to open up the hood and check, but beware of shooting flames! I got it to the dealer, blamed the whole thing on Jiffy Lube (and gave Oz full credit for taking it there), and they cleaned it up and checked out the engine. And put in more oil, of course. It seems to be fine, but smoke is still coming off the engine from the residual oil. Stinky.

Holiday reading

I decided to go ahead and put my whole novel online. For you. Now if the holiday spirit gets to be too much for you, you can hunch over a computer in the spare bedroom and read an online novel.

It's right over here.

Enjoy!

I have to go make more pie now.

Progress report

NaNoWriMo thus far: 10,746 words as of the end of Day 6.

That's about a tenth of a novel, but maybe a greater fraction of this one. I'm not sure yet how long this story will be. Think about it, though, a tenth of a novel is just 30 pages of a mass-market paperback. I'm not hardly started, and I don't expect to finish in November.

The writing has been fun, except that the joints in my hands are acting up again. I actually have enough time and energy to write my novel and for this site too, but my hands can't take it. I'm burbling blog entries in my head all day long (I narrate my life constantly, not out loud though, much to the relief of those around me). I don't write them down because my hands are aching and I have to save them up for that earning a living thing I need to do.

Our trip to the museum to review the ancient art collection was not very successful. The museum is undergoing an expansion, and all the parts of the museum that I wanted to see were closed off! Gee, they didn't mention that on the website. This isn't such a problem as far as my story goes because the exhibit that my characters are going to see was radically remodeled over ten years ago and basically no longer exists in that form. But still, I wanted to review the layout and look for places to insert secret passages.

In extremis (not yet)

So far, so good with NaNoWriMo. I am slightly exceeding the 1668 words per day necessary to meet the 50,000 word challenge. The only bump I've hit so far was sheer exhaustion last night. I managed to blather my 1668 words into the computer, figuring that it was going to be utter garbage, but we save that concern for revisions, don't we? And this morning when I went to clean up the dictated file, I found that it wasn't so bad after all. I'm so glad I've got the voice recognition software working (it quit on me without notice on Wednesday). I can blather out a draft in the evening, then give it a revision in the morning while I start figuring out what to write next.

I'm really enjoying the applied daydreaming. I think it's time to do a little footwork. I'm going to convince Oz that we must go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to review the ancient art collection and some of the layout of the museum.

And the sky was just inviting more daydreaming. When we went out to dinner, around sunset, the sky was pale blue with dark blue descending. Dusty cirrus clouds drifting in an aesthetically pleasing manner across a big crescent moon with a bit of earthshine on the dark side and a planet hanging above it. The kind of sky that almost doesn't look real. The kind of sky that Hollywood throws another moon on when they want you to know you're on another planet.

And we're off

I got NaNoWriMo off to a good start. Stayed up too late the night before, finishing up my whiskey and reading a trashy novel. (That's not as bad as it sounds, there was only about an ounce of whiskey left in the bottle. Didn't finish the novel, though.) I couldn't get to sleep and I set my alarm to start early on my work, but didn't quite manage to. I got up earlier than usual, but fiddled around paying bills and such, so I didn't get started till late. Moped around all sleepy and translated a blurry! tiny print! patent for cleansing wipes. Went to swim and got all tired out. I didn't eat enough today and by the time Oz came home, I was sleepy, my muscles were all jelly, and I had a blinding headache. We went out for beer and pizza.

I wrote 1702 words.

Or, rather, I dictated 1702 words. In the morning, as is my wont, I shall clean up the file, after which it will be a few words longer. And then I'll work, run errands, and write some more.

In which I am self-indulgent

My red pen is running out of ink. Because I edit and proofread all my translations and other writing (except the writing for this site) on hard copy, the red pen is indispensable. I thought I had a spare, but it seems that the pen I've been using is the spare.

In order to not be caught out, I went to the office supply store to get another red pen (and a spare). And there I saw a pack of my favorite kind of pens with lots and lots of colors. Colors that I don't need: pink, sky blue, purple, green …

And I bought them. I'll get some use out of them next, oh, February or so, when I revise this novel that I'm going to start writing in two days. (At which point, blogging may become more sporadic unless it turns out to be an effective means of procrastination, in which case I may post more, but I doubt it.)

Then I got to thinking about how I'm running low on whiskey. I hadn't been planning on buying more because I'd just drink it up. While a wee dram in the evening is nice, it is not conducive to writing (no matter what you may have heard, shutting down the brain does not improve its performance). On the other hand, I told myself, it might be helpful to be able to shut off the brain after writing. So I went to the liquor store, all set to be more self-indulgent, and they were out of Laphroaig! Which is what I wanted. I was able to resist all the other single malts, even (or is that "especially"?) the one that comes with a whiskey tasting glass. I already have a great glass: a straight-sided, crystal old-fashioned glass in a princess cut (what else?) which lets me measure how much whiskey is going into the glass so I can't fool myself into mistaking a really-not-wee-at-all dram for a wee dram. No panty-waist snifters here, I tell you.

Anyway, where was I? Self-indulgence. Only not really, because I only came home with a pack of colored pens. I should maybe pull them out now and draw up an outline for this novel. In pink.

Phew! Glad that's done

I just submitted my clichétory. Now I twiddle my thumbs until the rejection arrives. (This isn't negative thinking, it's realistic thinking.) At least, I'll twiddle till November first and then start writing a novel. The story I'm going to write I actually started last December, but the plot has mutated since then and I can't use the 5000 words I wrote. I read it for review and, well, I must have been reading Jane Austen around the time I wrote it. Or someone who writes in long sentences.

The story hasn't changed so much that I can't lightly steal from the early version, but I'll have to rewrite it. That's not cheating in NaNoWriMo terms, I don't think.

I'm starting to get nervous about the almost total blank I'm drawing for the beginning of this story. Things had better fall together in the next five days. Or not. If I had an outline, I'd probably toss it out after the first day anyway.

Oh no! Not more options!

Up until a couple weeks ago I was doing really well with noodling the plot of my NaNovel, fleshing out a couple new characters, figuring out how to put two separate plots together. I also was getting on really well with all the procrastinating that I need to get out of the way now. Then I got busy with working, tired out with swimming, and briefly obsessed with my short story (which I'm still obsessed with, because I have yet to polish it up and send it in, but don't worry, I've got over a week left for that).

That story is the whole problem, it got me thinking. I could take that situation and expand it. Maybe. I started thinking about my Rednecks in Space story and how it might be fun to write spaceships again.

Now I'm being disciplined and remembering all the nifty plot points I thought up, or trying to. It's like carrying water in my hands. I keep telling myself to start making notes, but I goof off instead.

I don't know what I'm going to write in November.

Well, that was interesting

So, I'm not really into short stories. They're more like jokes than anything else, the way they're structured. I tend to think in longer narrative terms. The last time I tried to write a short story, it clocked in at 26,000 words and it kind of sucked, although I can probably recycle the good bits for the Rednecks in Space thing that Oz and I riff on occasionally.

Anyway, I spent the weekend writing a short story that was actually short. It came in at a slender 4055 words. And it was fun. I could see the whole structure of the plot in my head at once. The plot was little, just like a joke, and left me room to play with the words, but didn't leave any leeway for me to run off and get bogged down in a novella. Although, in a non-joke format, the story could be expanded …

(Oh, my eyes! Imagine Jack Black, cleaned up, in a schoolgirl uniform and loose socks, and a liberal application of pale, glittery eyeshadow, and a pink Gerber daisy in his hair. Oh, and Japanese. Imagine four Japanese pop tarts dressed in the same uniform, vogueing and singing backup. Now you have the same picture in your head as is on my TV screen. Yes, it's Pop Jam. If you're not feeling imaginative, you can visit the singer's website or watch a video of the song (RealPlayer). Yes, the chorus (one of the choruses) is "Chihuahua." No, I don't know why.)

Where was I? Things I learned from writing a story this weekend:

I need to get back in the habit of using my voice recognition software for writing, otherwise my wrists and shoulders aren't going to make it through NaNoWriMo.

I may be over the "it sounded better in my head" problem. I was able to write down exactly what was in my head and it turned out to be okay. I guess I've gotten better at putting words together in my head.

I still can't get to sleep after writing fiction. This is problematic, because I tend to write between ten and midnight. I thought I was over that because I don't have any trouble getting to sleep after writing these entries. Then again, my imaginary friends are a bit more exciting than I am.

I have developed bad writing habits. I put on the TV and surf around on the Internet while writing (see above). I must learn to stop this.

Writing is happening

Only not here.

The other night, when Oz and I were shooting the breeze about techno-utopianists (Oz claims he's never heard of Kurzweil, he kept asking, "You mean the early twentieth-century German composer?" "No! That's Kurt Weill!"), The Singularity, and ponies as we so often do, I (or we) had an idea for a short story that would fit the bill for Subterranean's SF clichéssue for which John Scalzi got himself tapped to read the slush.

So that's what I'm working on right now. I ought to be able to draft a 5000-words-or-less short story by the end of the weekend and make it readable by the end of the month, which is the last date for submissions.

If it gets rejected, it will appear here as soon as New Year's day, otherwise you'll have to wait till Spring 2006.

A wee bit of retconning

I registered for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Now that I'm basically recovered from engineering school, it's time to get back to being what I always wanted to be when I grew up, and there's nothing like meeting a 1667 word/day quota to make one really feel like a writer.

Besides, right now the lives of my imaginary friends are a lot more interesting than mine. I've decided to work on the further adventures of my Church Hill gang who have, yet again, a whole world of trouble on their hands. Because I wrote that in 2002 and finished it up in 2003, and haven't looked at it much since (what with having that whole school and near death thing to deal with), I've had to review my own story and make profiles of all the characters just so I don't change peoples' eye colors and so on.

What is really striking to me is how background details have shifted over the past couple years while these people have been messing around in my head. One character's parentage has changed completely as, in a whole separate and still unwritten storyline, the woman that I thought was going to be his mother has steadfastly refused to marry his father and instead has chosen someone else (most sensibly, I might add). Another character has turned out to be a bit more mysterious than I thought she was.

This puts me in the position of needing to make a couple little adjustments to the old story for the sake of consistency. Tiny adjustments. Nobody would notice. I probably shouldn't have said anything.