Author: Don

“Here we go again/ He’s back in town again”

For the past two years, I’ve sworn off National Novel Writing Month. It’s not that I’ve ever turned my nose up at it. It’s just that I’m primarily a short-story writer, for one. And, more importantly, I’ve got a bit of a backlog of stuff that needs to be revised and submitted (or resubmitted). Plus, I’ve always had trouble wrapping my head around the idea of writing a novel. Besides having only one or two ideas that might possibly be big enough for that format, I get discouraged that I don’t have the level of fortitude I see in the novel-writing members of my critique group.

But somewhere along the line, I’ve gotten out of the habit of drafting new stuff while rewriting old stuff. If you’ve read or heard Ray Bradbury’s thoughts on writing, he’d probably tell me, “Yr doin’ it rong.” And it’s bothered me for the past twelve months, which is why NaNoWriMo keeps me coming back.

I’m not too hung up on whether or not I finish. I did back in 2005 and haven’t looked at the thing since, and since I’ve published a few things since then, it’s all good. Basically, I’m in this because my feeble Jedi skillz need work and I figure NaNoWriMo is the best way to kill all these birds with one thirty-day stone.

I’ve got a strategy which involves…

  • Creating a novel of interlinked segments. Yes, you can check the NaNo boards for the endless debate about what constitutes a novel, but if Cat Valente’s In the Night Garden (The Orphan’s Tales, #1) and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Madeleine Is Sleeping are novels, then so is my attempt, tentatively titled Thoughts of Reference.
  • Going through my notebook–I’ve accumulated and tagged all these items, and dammit, it’s about time they started working for me.
  • Channeling Ray Bradbury, the master who demonstrated that it was possible to write a story a week. I’m attempting something a little more ambitious, but at the same time, isn’t. All I’m after are first drafts!

You’re all welcome to join me for the ride, though I make no promises as to how long that ride might be. I’m always glad to offer help & support, but I gotta warn you: I believe in doing unto others as I would have done unto me, so my help & support might look a little something like this…

If you’re down with that, then by all means, look me up!

“Help, I’m steppin’ into the Twilight Zone”

The Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? (Rod Serling's the Twilight Zone) The Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? by Rod Serling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Bought this adaptation of my favorite Twilight Zone episode at the 2009 Rod Serling Conference. Written and drawn for YA audiences, the adaptation is almost too faithful.

When I first saw this episode as a YA, I had no idea how gimmicky the twist was. Nor did I realize that Serling committed a major sci-fi writing faux pas when the alien showed how well he could pass himself off as a businessman but didn’t know what it meant to be “wet.”

I still love the twist, though, not from a plotting perspective, but from a character one. It was a life-lesson: no matter how slick you think you are, there’s always someone slicker, so smugness doesn’t pay. And despite the slight tweaks in this adaptation, that lesson remains.

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Catching Up is Hard to Do

I’ve decided that part of the problems I’ve been having with writing have to do with all the stuff swimming in my psychic RAM that needs to be dumped out. So many blogworthy things going on; so little time to blog them. So, here goes.

1
Just ‘cos there haven’t been my usual Tough Love posts doesn’t mean that I haven’t been attending the biweekly evisceration. I just haven’t had anything to be eviscerated, not by the group, anyway.

2
I’m eviscerating my current short story in-progress, formerly titled “The Six-Hundred Dollar Man.” With every section of prose I clean up, I feel like I’m butting my head trying to stick to the story I want to tell.

You may be thinking, “Maybe it’s not the story that needs to be told.” Except I know in my gut it is.

3
And aside from that, I’ve got 3 other stories that I need to finish revising and send off.

4
I entered The First Annual Brain Harvest Mega Challenge a little while back. The Second Place Winner has been posted. And I have to say, if that’s second place, I think I’m pretty sure I didn’t make First Place. 🙁

5
Last Friday & Saturday, I attended the 2009 Rod Serling Conference. I’m still processing the experience, a weekend filled with scholars, fans, and artists including Serling’s surviving fammily and the legendary George Clayton Johnson on whose every word we hung.

A modern-day John the Baptist, if I ever saw one.

I’ll blog the blow-by-blow later.

6
And now that I’ve taken time out to process my inbasket and tickler files, I can get some sleep and hit the WIP tomorrow.

Shock, But No Awe

Futureshocks Futureshocks by Lou Anders

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The book fulfills part of its mission. The introductory essay is called “The Business of Lying,” and Anders quotes U.K. LeGuin who writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive….Prediction is the business of phophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.”

The collection definitely succeeds in being descriptive. Each writer’s prose gives me a clear picture of the world of each story. I was disappointed that most of this clarity came by way of exposition and in more than one case, shameless infodumping–2-3 pages worth.

But that’s not its worst failing.

The central question, emblazoned at the top of the cover, is “What Terror Does Tomorrow Hold?” My question was “Terror for whom?” To be sure, I wouldn’t want to live in some of the tomorrows presented in this anthology. But when I ask myself what terror tomorrow holds for ME, with respect to this anthology, I’d answer: very little, provided I don’t make the mistakes or manage to avoid the situations in which a lot of the characters of these stories find themselves.

That is, with one exception. “Absalom’s Mother” by Louise Marley stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the stories! It’s the only story where I cared about the characters. I was afraid for them and afraid of their world. Their emotions connected me to that world in a way that I wasn’t to any of the other worlds presented. If the rest of the stories in the anthology did that, I might truly be afraid of tomorrow.

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“Too many voices in my head”

2009-09-19 Mix

I can see the mystery in your eyes
Your voodoo just may fool the other guys
You can write your destiny
But between the lines I read
It’s all in what your victims will believe

-Bill Champlin, “Tuggin’ On Your Sleeve”

All the energy we spend on motion
All the circuitry and time
Is there any way to feel a body
Through fiber optic lines

-Cassandra Wilson, “Right Here, Right Now”

Tough Love

…will return in two weeks. Because it’s been hellish at the dayjob and I think I deserve to enjoy the holiday weekend, such as it is–I don’t get a third day off.

So instead of busting my ass to get something done to get vivisected, I’m chilling out, watching US Open tennis, and a little later, I’m gonna drive out to a cookout with some friends to have, what Laura Nyro calls, a “Stoned Soul Picnic.”

Speaking of, Nyro’s a singer/songwriter I’m discovering again for the first time. Apparently, I’ve been listening to her songs for years, as covered by Blood, Sweat & Tears and other bands on rotation in my playlists. I kept seeing the name “Laura Nyro” come up as the composer–it’s a kind of name that jumps out at you. So I looked her up and now I’m binging on her music!

But I digress. You’ll have to excuse me. I got very little sleep last night and I’m finding myself struggling to gather the energy to get to the cookout that I’m blowing off crit group to go to.

[Edited to add] The day after I wrote this, I found out that I’ve been living in the same town as Nyro’s brother and have seen the group he conducts, Vitamin L, perform several times!

Kinda Dead Inside

X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl TPB X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl TPB by Peter Milligan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I didn’t get as much of a kick out of this as I did Milligan’s original X-Force/X-Statix run. Dead Girl didn’t stick to its premise, which was to take shots at the trope of comics characters dying and come back. Milligan took shots at every trope as it came up–Dr. Strange’s quirks, his servant’s, the supervillain getting repeatedly beaten, etc.–and even threw in some self-referential X-Statix stuff.

It’s good for a single read but in the end, it felt like I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League by Giffen and DeMatteis, a phoned-in return to the good ol’ days.

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Tough Love

Finally finished the work in progress and brought the ending to the biweekly abatoir that is my critique group.

Remember the last few times when the Win list was longer than the Fail list? Not this time, but that’s okay. It’s called a “puke draft” for a reason. Not only that, I brought about 3 times as many words as I’d brought before–of course the Fail list was going to be longer!

For the Win

  • Folks liked my description of the painful way the protagonist “solved” his problem.
  • Those scenes had a “feeling of menace and chaos.”
  • Praise for how I cashed in on a couple of plot points from the beginning of the story. (It’s funny–I had no idea I was gonna do that.)
  • The usual praise about dialogue, prose, etc.

Fail!

  • Unresolved question #1: What are the stakes? (Yikes!)
  • Other unresolved questions:
    • What exactly is the protagonist’s motivation for getting involved in this “strange, new world” in the first place?
    • Why does he choose such a drastic solution to an unclear problem?
    • In fact, isn’t he making matters worse?
    • What’s his sister’s motivation, ‘cos the way she pushes the protagonist and where she pushes him to makes her look like more of a bad guy than the bad guy?
    • What did the bad guy want that was so bad?
  • I definitely strayed from the idea of “cultural tension” that I started out with in the beginning.

The entire puke draft clocked in at over 7300 words, so there’s a lot of tightening and rethinking to do. In a way, this piece is a victory because it’s been so long since I just cranked out a first draft of a “full-length” story with as little looking back as possible.

I’ve got a good feeling about this story though. I know all the pieces are there, even if they’re in a jumble.

Force of Will

Willful Creatures Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I gave it the same rating as Bender’s previous collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt even though I did like that one a little better. I seem to remember it being a little more playful than this collection.

This collection had its playful moments, but I sensed a little more pain in these characters. I’ll have to reread Flammable Skirt again to be sure. The characters are definitely the best part of each story. A lot of them were odd or fantastic, but still relatable, with more or less the same sorts of problems as mundane folk.

Aside from attempting to channel Lydia Davis at times (e.g. “The Meeting), the prose is really well-done, to boot.

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