Wait, That Cant be Right

 Alternate title: "In a Sunken Short Story Folder, Great Fiction Lies Dreaming."

I recently dragged two stories from the various crevices of my laptop they'd managed to get themselves wedged in. One I began writing in fall of 2009. Feels weird to think it's that old, and it;s funny how so much time away from a story can change it for you. I hadn't taken a look since early 2010. Probably January of that year. Somehow I'd deceived myself into thinking that the piece was about 20,000 words. Turns out it's only about 12. Thousand.

I think I would have remembered if it'd been only twelve.

(Note to self: write twelve-word short story.)

So while I'd initially thought I might be able to expand it into a novel, I'm thinking a lot less ambitiously now. A novella isn't likely out of the realm of possibility. I guess we'll have to see.

A few months ago I got an email from a creative writing professor I've kept up with since my salad days (literally. The lines for the caf salad bar were generally a lot shorter and easier to get through.) in the leafy pastures of UMass Boston. She was looking into a story I wrote for a course/workshop in 2009, wondering if I'd be willing to edit it and shop it out to a local lit mag. Man, that story. I remember being so nervous that I was shaking when it was read aloud. But the feedback afterward was amazing. Hoo boy. One classmate ended his comments with "Fuck and shit, Nick. Fuck and shit." Apparently it made an impression.

I think even at the time I realized that it was a sort of proto-story. That is, for any merits it might have had, it had as many defects. It was still something a novice made. Think of that karaoke roundup you went to where you and your friends were all slamming back margaritas, and everyone on stage sucked, and then that one guy who's not ugly but doesn't approach attractive comes on and wows everyone and at the end of the night you've bought him a drink because wow! And when he goes back to his table, people nearby are telling him he should get a record deal. But you know in your heart of hearts that it's not like he's as good as [CURRENT POPULAR MUSICIAN], he's a talented amateur. Side by side with [CURRENT POPULAR MUSICIAN]? guy in the karaoke bar would be completely dismissed.

I don't want to say the story was good because that's not for me to judge and is entirely subjective. It was polished, I guess. A little more detailed than the wood it was being whittled from. I read through it yesterday and today it makes me think of a hinge. I didn't write a better story than that all through my college career, there are little bits of it that sparkle, and yet overall it feels really crude by comparison to the things I'm writing now. The last and best of the early stuff, but wooden and simple by what came after.

In short, I picked up that story thinking I could edit it and get it into shape to send off to the big leagues. Now I'm thinking a complete rewrite is in order. It'll be interesting to see a how [REMAKE OF OLD STORY] compares to creative fiction written in college.

Insomnia

It's late and I liked this wonderful little picture from The Onion.

And yet now I can't help but think about a 20,000-word monster that's been lurking in the deep, dark recesses of my laptop and could likely be expanded into a full-length novel

Describing stories in terms of words always makes me feel like I'm talking about going fishing. Gary Larson once wrote a Far Side comic where old cartoonists were bragging about how they had characters with ears and noses and so forth "this big!" Wonder if there's room for writers in there.?

A Novel Idea

Don't remember how I stumbled across it, but recently my attention was directed towards this New York Times article on why novel writers might take their creations out the backyard, chain them to trees and shoot them. Figuratively of course.

Well, maybe literally in one or two cases. I'd love to hear about those. Anyone?

I tell everyone I know that I've only been writing for a year plus now. I started on flash fiction, moved on to short stories when I felt I had a decent grip on pacing, and moved on and up until now just about everything I write seems to check in around the 10k word mark. I have yet to write a novel, but there are plenty of ideas swirling around beneath my gradually thinning hair. In fact, a few months ago I decided to give novel writing an honest shot.

Two chapters in, going by the glorious chapter-a-month model, I think I'm ready to call it quits. It's not every day that you sit down to write a story and bang out the whole thing in one go. Most days you have a few tinkly crystal moments where you just know what happens next, and if you're lucky it's enough that you can build something off of that without knowing exactly where it's going to take you. This thing? Bloody hell, I have no clue. I have never sat down to work on this thing and ever had even a moment where it's felt like there was a string for me to tug on. That's bad. And it's not like you're supposed to enjoy every moment of your writing life. There are going to be times where you have to trudge on with a project. But this one feels like it's just taking up time and without anything interesting happening.

My protagonist is about the only thing I have a clue about. I like him. Harvey Protagonasto (not the name I've gone with, obviously) is suicidal but immortal. Kind of like Wolverine without the claws, adamantine, muttonchops, fighting ability, attitude or confidence. So I'm left with a suicidal alcoholic masochist. That's really not enough to build several hundred pages on. His evil half-brother makes me want to vomit though. I mean, fuck, evil brother? Hasn't that been done to death? I'm throwing in characters because Harvey needs people to interact with. They're just kind of there without a lot of history or without a history that actually makes sense. There needs to be some kind of sense with character that they are people who would interact in real life, and I don't get that vibe from Harvey, the waitress he knows, his crippled black friend or his evil half brother. (damn it. I even picture him with a mustache.) They just sound like lists of traits.

I like the character and might revisit him some day when I'm older and wiser. For now, it's just not going to work. I'll stick with my stories about mind control crabs and wars between food groups thank you very much.

Hey, who put this amazing manuscript on my desk?

So I'm working on a story I submitted to Vagabondage Press. My project editor has sent the thing back with a few corrections, some notes, etc. I'm reading through it and thinking to myself "Wow, I really like what they did here. This phrase here really put some life into this scene. Huh, hey, that's a clever description."

And then it dawns on me that all of said editor's changes were either in red text or highlighted. I was being wowed by my own work. Apparently I'm an arrogant bastard.

It also turns out that my grasp of commas and semicolons is horrific, which I already figured but have been completely incapable of fixing over the past couple of years. Screw you punctuation!

Douglas Adams Still Dead. To Be Continued...

For Christmas this year I got (actually bought for myself) a cheap copy of the latest installment in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. "But wait," I said to myself, "didn't Douglas Adams already shuffle off this mortal coil?"

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Supposedly he's just on some island in the south Pacific, quite dead and dreaming. I might be confusing him with someone else.

Real answer: Eoin Colfer, Author of the Artemis Fowl series, was given permission to take the Hitchhiker's guide and run with it. This apparently happened in late 2009 and leaves me wondering why nobody told me. I'd feel a little foolish actually reviewing a book that's been out for over a year, but suffice it to say that "And Another Thing"  is actually pretty spot on in tone and humor. My one major complaint is that it ends on a cliffhanger. Adams had said that the fifth book in the series, "Mostly Harmless" ended pretty bleakly and that he wanted to do another one. I was hoping for closure, not continuation.

It's weird to think of another author picking up where one left off. If "And Another Thing" is any indication, it apparently can be done pretty well. But I admit I was hesitant to pick it up even at a discount. Part of it was the notion that a thing is on sale for much lower than its initial price, it must not be any good. But mostly there was that little petulant voice in my head (somewhere around the nose I think) that was whining "This is not really a Hitchhiker's Guide book."

Not to be morbid, but even now I stop and think about what it's going to be like when Terry Pratchett (bless the man) can no longer write. There was a keen sense of disappointment when I got to the end of Monstrous Regiment and realized that (at that time) there was no more Discworld. And looking forward, it's bitter to think that that world will someday lose its vitality. You'd think I'd be more eager to just up and grab whatever material my favorite authors are putting out there, even if they aren't really.

I suppose there's always that chance you're going to be disappointed, and it's hard to weight that against the opportunity to have more of any one thing.

Rock You Like a Hurricane?

Good evening, dear reader. You might have stumbled across this blog from just about anywhere, but wherever you hail from, thanks for stopping by. It was getting lonely in here. This is my personal writing blog, where I'll be hinting at whatever projects I'm working on and pointing you towards those few stories I've let through the airlock. And maybe just musing from time to time on the relation between an author and his work.

I've been at this writing thing for just shy of two years now. It's funny to see patterns emerge in your writing that either confirm or deny what you know (or thought you knew) about yourself. For instance, looking back on the stories I've put together over the past few years, my protagonists tend to be alone, either by choice or by circumstance. I don't know that I've ever written a story where a main character's relationship to another character doesn't seem somehow superficial, at least to start. And villains? I don't know that I've ever written a story with one. Obstacles tend to be amorphous and vague. Horrors are faceless and indifferent. Maybe I've read Lovecraft and/or Kafka a little too frequently. Then again, maybe I've read them because I recognize a view that I hold.

I mean, when did I get so bleak?

Some of the nerdier of you might recognize the header on this page as a quote belonging to a Firefly episode. That ep, "Objects in Space" ends with its talkative antagonist adrift in space, alone, nothing but blackness and little pinprick stars for literally hundreds of thousands of miles. What are his last (as far as we can tell) words? "Well, here I am."  Not that I identify too closely with a space sociopath, but I think that phrase pretty well sums things up.

Here you are.