July 2007

Duh.

The title is set for this one. This was a pretty obvious choice, I don’t think any other options even appeared in my head. I mentioned I had a setting I wanted to use for awhile, and this is it. Simple enough. Although nothing with me ever seems to have only one meaning and…well…you’ll see.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’m supposed to make a story out of this?

I have, basically, nothing. I’ve got a setting I’ve always wanted to write about, and I’ve (finally) got a couple of names. And that’s it. That’s what I started with a few hours ago or whatever it was. Nothing. But you start writing and your characters start doing things. It’s very slow going, extremely slow going. When you have a plot to walk through your characters automatically have to do things and the way they decide to do things starts to define them, but I don’t have much of a plot here. This is going to be a thinky-talky type story. So I’ve got two characters, and it takes hours to work through a few paragraphs, but what I’m doing, besides focusing on the language just to have something to focus on, is making choices. They just start coming. You make one and then you make two and then you’ve got a bit of a grip on one of your guys, because you’re not going to make him a refrigerator salesman or whatever without starting to think about whether he’s good at being a refrigerator salesman, and if he’s good then you’ve culled out a little about him, there’s a few things that go into a salesman’s personality, you don’t need to stress them crazy hard, but they’re there. And if he’s good at his job then you wonder if he’s happy doing it, or if he’s so good that he’s a little high-and-mighty about it and then you’ve made another choice and you write some more dialogue and this starts to come out and before you know it you have, not just two names, but some personality to go with them. Not that I have refrigerator salesmen in this story, but that’s how it goes, and the only way I can think of describing how it happens is that I just relax, stop trying to create and focus on the typing and I just let it happen. I know I’m going to go back and rewrite so I can relax and let myself make these choices and know that I can always cut a paragraph or two where all I do is work through something similar to the salesman thought process above and leave only the real stuff. And I let myself misstep. Those are also important. I let myself finish sentences that don’t seem right at all because when something clunks horribly then you’ve got a clue as to what’s not working and you can figure out what might work in it’s place.

And then you come onto your blog and you babble all sorts of things because you don’t have a story and you want to procrastinate.

Popularity: 3% [?]

What’s in a rose.

By far the part of each and every thing I’ve ever written that is capable of completely stopping me in my tracks is when I’ve got to come up with a name for a person or place. It’s horrible. They rarely pop into my mind easily and I always seem like I wind up with the same name. I wrote three or four stories a year ago and when I looked back over them I was shocked to see that every single one of my main characters was named Frank. Unintentionally. I’m not sure what it is, it’s just my thing but I have a real problem. Anyway, this is the solution I came up with. Seriously. And it still barely works. I’ll spend hours thinking about a name and then wind up using Frank.

At any rate, at the beginning of any new story this is always a problem since I need like five new names in one lump.

Popularity: 1% [?]

How many more of these stories do I have again?

Normally when I write…well for starters normally I give myself more than two weeks to write a story. But also there’s usually a break after the story’s done to put together a mailing in order to submit it for submission. This usually takes an ungodly amount of time because I’m so terrible at putting together mailings. So usually there’s a couple of weeks in between stories. Jumping from one ending right into another beginning is going to take some getting used to. I know plenty of people who do this, I’m not saying it’s all that revolutionary, I’m just saying it’s not how I’m used to doing it. This feels weird.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Can’t believe I made my deadline.

The post below is the story for this week. Please do yourself a favor and open the post up, then click on the “Print This Post” line which will (hopefully) open the whole thing up in a printer friendly version. Then print it out. I, personally, think it’s a little crazy to try to read something as long as a short story on your computer.

I’ll be posting a more in depth recap sometime next week. I don’t know that I’ll do this often, but this story lends itself to a recap. I just wanted to give you some time to actually read it before I go trampling all over your thoughts with my observations.

If you see any typos (and there will, throughout the course of this project, be typos) please clue me in.

Enjoy.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Dr. Frankenstein’s Lesson

There’s a terrible moment not too long after you’ve finished a story where the elation of reaching your ending ebbs a bit and you’re left with the realization that now you’ve got to actually read the crap that you wrote. All those overly flowery sentences where you were being poetic, and all the random piles of details where you were feeling your way into a descent description, all the dialogue that goes nowhere, all of it, it all has to be read. By you. It’s horrible. It’s never a good idea to show your first drafts to anyone because they’re generally so awful, the problem is that at some point I have to read this thing in order for it ever to become a second or third draft.

Nobody should ever have to lay eyes on a first draft. That was his lesson.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Take that, Literary Credibility!

First draft is done. I really just have no idea what this story is. I’ll give it a very brief once over now with the spell and grammar check, then print it out. I might give it a read tonight. On the other hand I’ve got a couple discs of The Wire sitting on my dresser. But all that’s left is a lot of reading. Ideally I would have more time to leave it alone so I could come back to it with the freshest eyes possible, but I don’t have that kind of time so I’ll just let it sit overnight, I guess, then read it over about ten times slowly with a pen in my hand tomorrow night. Exciting stuff.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This is too much fun.

Someday, hopefully sometime soon, I’ll be able to explain to you why I’m laughing so hard right now.

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Apparently it can always get worse.

A few days ago I spoke about how I found it interesting to be writing a story that takes place in the dead of winter during the middle of summer. This was earlier in the week when it was still a balmy 90 degrees out. That seems like a joke to me right now. It’s currently the temperature of the sun’s ass and I can’t even remember what my name is not to mention what it feels like when the weather is cold. I’m going to go bathe in a tub full of ice-cubes and Gatorade and see what happens. God if only…

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I should probably have kept my mouth shut.

I had to go and brag about having only one scene left. Well. That was just stupid. I won’t be doing that again. So far I’ve rewritten part of this three times, taking three different attempts. It was too confusing at first, characters were performing actions only because I thought it would be neat instead of, you know, because it made sense for them to perform those actions. Also, I stumbled onto a character that turned into something more than I expected. That happens. You think you’ve got a character pegged and that they’ll step into the story, deliver a telegram or whatever, then disappear. Only they don’t. And you’ve got this character that won’t act like you want him to, and you know it would crush the entire scene if you forced him, so you just let him go. Large parts of these characters usually get trimmed during editing, but that’s only because I’m feeling my way through them and you have to trim to get down to a normal level. So, yeah, I’ve got one of those.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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