Has it Really Been a Month?

If blogs were children, I'd be in prison for neglect.

My wife and I are looking for houses, and I wish I had something insightful to say about the process but all I've learned as that I really like old houses and that I don't want a house that doesn't have a basement. And if it does have a basement, it better have a high enough ceiling that I'm not smacking my head into it all the time.

But on the subject of old houses, there's just something I love about all of the little odd incongruities that were either built into the house or that have cropped up over the years as new owners have moved in and out and decided that they didn't need the attic, or didn't need two closets and tore one down for more space in the bedroom. Or decided that, hey, this big empty space in the bedroom would make a pretty nice closet. I have so many damn shoes, Herb! You know that!

The houses we've seen that've been around for about a century or so seem to have grown organically just as much as they've been built. There are dressers and drawers and cabinets built into the walls, and old wood with dozens or hundreds of little nicks in the finish, and little doors here and there that may or may not lead into John Malkovich. We saw a house recently that had a small door (presumably to an attic, possibly to an actor) set twelve feet up into the wall of the master bedroom.

In addition, we looked at one built around 1880-ish that had an all new interior... except for the basement, which had a dirt floor, a fieldstone foundation (just lots of big rocks mortared together) and was propped up by literal tree trunks.

It's kind of a shame that I love old houses, because I'm sure I don't want the problems that go with owning one.

Naked Came the Manatee

I just finished the book in the post title, primarily to get it back to the library as its a week overdue. "NCtM" got itself lost in my luggage during a short vacation to northern Mass and southern New Hampshire, and I was content to let it sit there a while.

The title caught my eye, and the plot is an odd thing involving the head of Fidel Castro and a manatee by the name of Booger, but while I like the idea of a collaboration like this, it just didn't work. The opening is a bit slow, and each of the book's thirteen authors felt the need not to only continue the story as it was, but to add a new element in each chapter. The result is chaotic, especially because none of the writers seemed to trust one another enough to just continue along with introduced plot threads, but instead threw out or trampled on previously introduced material.

The net effect is that what should be a shared story soup comes off as more of a pot luck with little coordination. Three people showed up with napkins, another three with potato chips, and it's up to Debby's modest tuna noodle cassarole to save the day... only there's only enough for six people.

Screw It

I'm ditching "Sinner" and using the rest of September to write something about dwarves. Dwarves are awesome. They drink, they fight, they mine for gold and construct awesome underground cities and construct awesome beards. That and I have an itch to write something pure fantasy. I feel like I'm still watering my writing down to fit some kind of norm, and that ain't right.

Fuck you, Norm!

I Got Nothin'

So I brought Daryl to Cleveland and he's blown up a Mustang at the 50-yard line at Browns Stadium. On the plus side, I know what he wants, I just have no idea how to get him that thing, or what he could possibly do to achieve it.

It's frustrating because in a way it makes sense. I have a character who is stuck and has no idea what to do next, but that doesn't make for a compelling story. So the question is, if you're in Cleveland and you're the last person on Earth, and you want to find someone to go have a drink with, where do you start looking? Probably the bars. But, nah, that's too easy.

You're in Albuquerque...

... and you just finished dropping the last of the bodies in the landfill. You get back to town and the entire places is yours. Just you. Nobody else. What do you do?

It's funny how stories evolve. I'm revisiting a short story I began a while ago--tentatively titled "Sinner"-- and it used to be that I knew the answer to the question above. This story had an ending, but on re-reading it, it just didn't fit. Long story short: "Sinner" is about a guy, Daryl, who wishes the world would leave him alone. It does. Daryl's the only person on Earth for probably several-hundred years (not that he's bothered to count) and he's going pretty mad. When he begins seeing people, Daryl realizes he has a problem.

How the story originally went was that, after murdering the same (illusory?) man over and over again,  he realizes he needs to put back everything he ever broke or moved to get the world back. It's a Herculean task, setting the world right, but it goes by in a few paragraphs. And then, boom, he has his life back.

Way too easy.

So now I've scrapped that ending and I'm trying to find something else for him to do. Feels like he shouldn't have his epiphany so quickly, but I'm not certain where that would come in. I think he's halfway to realizing that he wants people back, but I'm not sure what pushes him the extra step.

Well, at the end of this month I'm going back to my first major edit of "Up in Hell". I've got 21 days to think about it.

I Swear it Isn't Me

Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out

GLOUCESTER, MA—As he neared completion this week on his latest novel, By The Water's Edge, author Edward Milligan marveled aloud to reporters how he was able to flesh out, in meticulous detail, every single corner of his book's vast and stunningly shitty world.

According to Milligan, he spent seven months conducting in-depth historical research in order to conjure, as if out of thin air, the fictional and entirely bullshit universe of Connor's Cove, Massachusetts, including its utterly uninspired lighthouse, the predictably dark underbelly lurking beneath its quaint exterior, and its painfully trite main thoroughfare known as Chance Street.

 Makes me wonder if other regions of America inspire the sort of cliches the article is sounding off on. I'm thinking of the whole "quaint small town" thing. I'll bet the south does. But as a pointlessly patriotic yankee, I'll bet we do it better.

Feet, Shoes, Walkin'

But before all that, I'm happy to announce that my dark fantasy/fairy tale story, "Those Who Came Before" will be published in 2012 by the good folks at Kaleidotrope. Hooray!

I bought new shoes today. The old ones? I could put my hand through the bottom of the left. Air flow is not typically a quality you want in a shoe. It keeps happening though. My wife has had the same pair of sneakers for ten years. Me? Even though I no longer walk 3-4 miles per day, I still somehow go through shoes about every six months.

I enjoy walking, and travel in general. It's kind of a shame that it makes for boring reading. I recently finished George "Railroad" Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series and it seems to me that by the fourth book he's been glad to include lengthy scenes of people going places rather than letting them get there and finding something for them to do. I get it: it's partly an adventure series and so some travel out into the wild and wooly wocales of Westeros is to be expected, but it still feels like this is more of an excuse  to drag out a cash cow a little longer.

Not that I can blame him. If at any point in my life I have a wildly successful series that somehow comes to star Sean Bean on HBO, I might be tempted to have my characters wear out their shoes. I just think back on the efforts of Robert Jordan. Never got past book six of "Wheel of Time", and thought of going back to read all of those just to be able to finish the series kind of makes me cringe.