Reading is Fundamental

I haven’t done a ton of writing lately. I've actually been doing some reading.

Most recently, in that's it's ongoing, I've read Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I started it last night, and I'm almost done with it. It. Is. Fantastic. Narratively, it's fascinating. It has a habit of telling you about things before they come up in the story, but it doesn't make it any less exciting when it does come up. Like, something will be mentioned, and it piques your interest, and you want to know what on earth that's about. Then it gets to that point, and it's still all, "Oh shit! That happened!" I'm explaining this terribly. But it’s fucking great. And it includes all these elements of modern culture, like the internet and social media, that makes it all seem kind of… possible.

Seriously, if you are a fan of… books that are good, read it.

The other thing I read recently was not a book. Not a real one. Not a complete one. I had opened it up when I was looking for excerpts for my last post. It's Cape Nowhere, my 2012 NaNo novel.

Finding a Voice

Sorry there was no post last week. I had a lot going on.

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Narrative voice. That's why we're here today.

I'm sure I've talked about this before, but A) I'm too lazy to verify that, and B) it's an ongoing problem, so it bears repeating.

What I mean is the voice that the narrated bits (not the dialogue bits) are in. If you're writing in first person, then that's one of your characters. Otherwise, it's just this nebulous narrator figure. But just because they don’t have a body or a face doesn't mean that they don't have a personality and a voice.

My problem lies in the fact that my narrative voice tends to have no personality. It's just this flat, clinical description. And when it's not, then it's… wrong. Like a lack of cold professionalism is childish.

Alice in Uni-Land

This post is up very late. Let me make it up to you. Here's a story I wrote last year for a prompt I got off of r/writingprompts: "Alice and wonderland but from the perspective of a university student doped up on caffeine and a massive lack of sleep."

A little something to entertain you with.

Alice stared down at her biology textbook as the clock ticked its way past 2am. The evolution of lagomorphs blurred into a puddle of text and diagrams. It grew bigger and muddier as her head dropped ever closer to the page.

She jerked awake and reached for her notebook. But it wasn’t there. Her dorm room had vanished as well. She now found herself in a forest, and she wasn’t alone.

Filling in Blanks

All right, here's Part Four. Three hours of sleep followed by at least three naps and I finally got it done. A lot of dialogue today. Hopefully moving us into the next part.

“Really?” the girl asked. “Because I just saw you fight an old Asian man, murder him, and then he disintegrated. So please, let’s hear your perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“Okay, maybe not perfectly reasonable.”

She took her phone out of her pocket. “I’m going to call the cops.”

“Are you?” he asked, sounding bolder than he felt. “You gonna tell them I vaporized a guy?”

Getting the Hang of This

If you've been keeping score at home, you may know that we’ve just passed the two year mark. My first post was February 2nd, 2016. I kind of forgot it was the anniversary, so I didn't plan anything special. I hope the next part of the serial story will be enough.

And yes, it's up late. I had to do adult things like buy a new microwave, and then less adult things like watch Star Trek. I'm trying to get back on schedule, I'm just really bad at it.

So here's Part Three:

The dusty remains of the thing settled on the kitchen floor. Patrick looked at his arm. Irregular teeth marks had been cut into either side. He wrapped it in a dish towel and peered out the kitchen window. There were probably more of those things out there. And he was probably supposed to fight them.

That bus station guy had been really vague on the details.

There was another knock on the door. Great, what now?

Forces of Darkness

Boom, Part Two. One I name the damn thing, I'll tag them all with it for easier future finding. Also, we're going to Wednesdays and Saturdays, for the time being.

Patrick awoke on the ground in a pool of blood. Here was his body, right where he’d left it. He sat up. Someone screamed.

The express bus back to Earth. Good for extending your miserable life, and startling passersby who had just seen you die.

He held up a placating hand to the woman in question. “Sorry, sorry. Everything’s fine here.” He stood up and brushed himself off. It didn’t help. He was still covered in blood, people were starting to stare, and distant sirens were growing closer.

This would be a good time for him to be anywhere else, so he did the natural thing, following a near-death experience, and went home to take a shower. He earned a few stares along the way, which was to be expected. What was not to be expected was the face at the corner of 3rd and Main.

Heaven Nor Hell

I did indeed set out to write you a short story based on the vague idea I had the other day. But the more I thought about, the more I realized I was not going to be able to write the whole story in the amount of time I had.

So here's Part One.

Patrick’s arrival at the Pearly Gates was not as advertised. For starters, there were no gates to be found. Rather, he appeared to be at an abandoned bus station in rural Montana in the middle of the night.

Had he stepped off a bus to get here? He couldn’t remember. For a moment, he couldn’t remember anything. He looked around, up and down the empty road. No, that was right. It came back to him in flashes. An uneventful life and an abrupt end. Somehow that had landed him here.

Wherever here was.

Characters and Creepiness

NaNoWriMo 2017 is over. I did not reach 50,000 words. There's a first time for everything.

But along the way, I did have some fun, and I learned some things. We have a lot to go over today, which should be a nice change from my recent rushed posts that trended a little on the short side.

First off, I never did quite pin down Andrea's personality. I went on a whole quest to find her a soundtrack, or at least a theme song. I couldn't find anything. And the music is important because it's how I get into a character's head. It's something they can relate to, and I can understand, so I know how they feel about things. Why don't I just imagine how they feel and cut out the musical middleman? Sorry, I don't work that way.

The Shape of Things to Come

Foreshadowing! Within the first 200 words! And I did it completely by accident.

I was just trying to get a little characterization in, while sending these people on their road trip. Already it's apparent that Tony is a bit of a dick. He tells this whole story about why he was running late for their early morning meet up and…

Here, just read it. And pay no mind to my use of "steerage." That's what I always call the cargo/back hatch area of a vehicle. I don't know what it's called.

A Review on Revisions

As promised, I read over Draft Two of "My Soul to Take," made a few revisions, and here it is.

So go ahead and read that, because we're going to talk about it.

First off, my whole determination to have a proper omniscience narrator didn't really work out. The whole point of that was to explain the soul thing, because most people don't really grasp the metaphysical junk going on around them. But then Evie just says, "…it ripped something out of them. Like it tore their souls out." And boom, there we are. Souls and things that eat them. So maybe I don't need an omniscient narrator. Or maybe I'm still just no good at writing one.

Second, I have some interesting descriptions. I was trying to think outside the box and not use the same tired old phrases. Because I fall back on the same tired old phrases all the time. So I tried to get creative.

Second Time Around

Draft Two of "My Soul to Take" is, for all intents and purposes, done. And I'm pretty pleased with it. Half the time when I finish something, I just want to put it in a box, in a drawer, in a locked basement, and forget about it for a while. But this one… I like it. I'm not angry and frustrated at it.

So, some highlights.

Just past the midpoint of the story, Jake was starting to not be a total selfish asshole. He'd found a possible way out, but then Evie was in trouble, and he decided to go back and he ran in for his Big Damn Heroes moment.

So in all that, I wrote a paragraph. It was just a paragraph, to get everyone where they needed to be for the next scene. But the more I read it over, the more I like it.

The Antihero's Journey

There's another session of Camp NaNoWriMo in July, and oh my god, I'm so excited!

That right there, that's why I keep doing NaNo. If I ever stop looking forward to it, then I guess that's when I'll stop.

So as it stands, I'm planning on doing my Subterranean Detective Romance for July. That gives me a month to finish what I'm doing and get some kind of plan going. There's a lot of research I need to do for this. I have a whole list of things I need to look into. I think I'll get into that next time.

Today, we're still working on that silly train story. I wrote about 860 more words last night, so I've nearly doubled what I already had. If we're going by my little plot arc thing, I've covered the first four plot points, and am about to reach the fifth.

It's been interesting, this antihero business. I mean, usually your heroes are… heroic. Moral and noble, albeit with their flaws. Jake Barlow is… well, he's an asshole. Also a murderer, but I feel like that's beside the point. Well, I mean, he doesn't have much of a soul, on account of all the murdering, so that probably contributes to his attitude.

That was an issue I had in the first draft. He was supposed to be this indifferent sociopath, but he came off more as just a guy who happened to kill people. I've been trying to fix that this time around.

A Tense Post

First order of business, I finally heard back from that local publication I submitted to back in the end of January. They didn't want the story. And that's fine. It's actually good. For one thing, I submitted it under the pseudonym I have since decided not to use. And for another, it means you get to read it here. Right now.

Without further ado, I present "Save Yourself."

This was, as far as I know, the only story I've ever written in the present tense. You might ask why. Well, for one thing, present tense creates a sort of sense of urgency, because it's happening right now, rather than being told in past tense from some  future perspective. But I didn't set out to do that. I didn’t have some grand plan about how this would work, and how the story was best told in present tense.

Rather, when I had the idea for the story, I scribbled down a brief moment, ending with "And… the safety's on," which is in present tense. That's just how I scribbled it. And it wouldn't sound right in past tense. So the whole story became present tense.

I Can Show You the World

I still don't have characters or a plot outline. My parsnips remain unbuttered.

The thing about writing fiction that you always hear is "show, don't tell." In other words, let the scene play out, don’t just summarize it. You want the reader to feel in the middle of the action, every sight, sound, and smell.

What about me? Do I follow that advice? I thought "yes" but let's actually have a look for ourselves, and see if I'm feeling a bit too highly of myself. I always thought I was great at showing, since basically everything is in scenes. But, looking back over some past stories, maybe I'm not as great as I thought.

What Lurks in the Darkness?

All right, I've "finished" "Losing Daylight." And I'm not feeling it. I'm not good at building tension, it seems. Not to mention, there was world building to be done that there just wasn't room for. So it doesn't really make any sense. I mean, yes, it could be longer. It's nowhere near the max word count. But there's nothing else to happen. He's just… waiting the whole time. I don't think I can fix it enough to appeal to a wider audience, so I'll just share the rough draft with you here, as promised.