21st century revisions

After an interesting and thought provoking afternoon surrounded by sci-fi writers at the literary science fiction convention, Boskone, then a night of getting hammered w/ friends, I had intended to print a moderately fat manuscript and hack it to shit with a red pen while nursing a hangover. There were problems.

I'd buy that for a dollar! Excerpt from WIP

Aww, jeeze. It's been a while. Believe it or not, there are actually drafts saved for two other posts that I haven't had the time, or focus, to revise and post.

One is a review of Francine Prose's "How To Read Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them," and how its a terribleness has lead me to stop reading books about writing. The process is different for everyone and no one has a unifying theory for writing well. Especially not Prose. I bought the book for a dollar, so I guess it was worth that much to learn this particular lesson.

Meh, fuck it. Here are the only tomes about the craft that I've felt were worth reading, out of the two dozen or so I've read:


"The Elements of Style" by Strunk & White
"On Writing" by King
"On Writing Well" by Zinsser

Plus this brief column by Ken Layne, Wonkette's arbiter of doom.

And now, to to keep this blog from further slipping into mediocrity, here's an excerpt from my current W.I.P. A fair portion of the world read about this Betelgeuse going supernova thing, so I, and probably a million other sci-fi writers, jumped on this money train to BestSellersville. This is the first chapter, the supernova thing hasn't happened yet.

New project ramblings. Finger blasting.

NOTE: There is nothing of value in this post, I'm just getting my thoughts and anxieties out. Also, I'm thinking about rewriting the "Twilight" novels with as many references to 'finger blasting' as possible. INSTANT. MILLIONAIRE. 

In the middle of a snow storm almost two weeks ago --moments before I made my way outside to clean  god's dander off my car and go to work-- I fiercely pushed out the remaining appendages of my novella. Perhaps, it was the fact that I was late to work, but I didn't feel a lot excitement that I had finished something of that length (I should have been, I think).

Name game

Naming characters. For me, it's the most loathsome chore in the whole fiction writing process.

Up until two months ago, I used to spend many precious hours trying to concoct perfect character names. Is it cool enough? Is it bland enough? Is it to cool that it's cliche? Would anyone actually name their child that? As a person who is going through an anti-outline period right now, running a thousand combinations of first and last names through my head is not acceptable when a new character pops into the scene. Especially, when the keyboard is on fire.

As I do with everything else, I turned to the all knowing Googles for help. What I found was not only a random name generator, but an identity generator. FakeNameGenerator.com not only generates a name for any specified gender and ethnicity, but also phone numbers, addresses, descriptions and even fake Mastercard numbers. The level of detail the site gives you on a person that doesn't exists, borders on sketchy. No doubt, fraudulent identities are created day in and day out here.

Outside of the randomly generated names, I haven't used any of the other information for my characters, but I could see this site being great for spontaneous flash fiction. Get your name/identity and go. 1000 words on William E. Turman in 60 minutes.

Unless the character's name needs to have a symbolic value or is supposed to reflect the character's personality or is a magical Zebra that speaks with a Cajun accent, I highly recommend this site for fleshing out those names.

TV shows that give me writing boners

You would think the most obvious type of writing porn would be the novel about the writer or a non-fiction stint about a famous scribbler. The latter is a little better than the former but neither is totally gratifying. The novel feels poisoned by the writer writing himself out of a bad case of writer's block, his protagonist overly self-indulgent. The non-fiction option is either a thinly veiled fan letter to the writer you're reading about, or is likely to lead you down a road of self-loathing and asking questions like, "why is my writing/life not as interesting as this wildly successful, intellectual freak of the world?"

Weirdly enough, just how I like to view my porn, the thing that gets my writing boner up —outside of good writing— is something that is visual. "Californication" on Showtime and "Bored To Death" on HBO are two TV shows about writers. Between them, they cover most of the eccentricities you would like to find in your favorite writers.

Like, when I got serious.

As fate would have it, virtually no writing was done this week. Between snow storms, errands and general house chores that I had been putting off for weeks, nothing got done. It's the longest I've gone with out writing in over two months and it has made me a little jittery. I'm eager to get back to it, but this sort of lull has killed any edge I had on my novella and it really concerns me.

If I figure out how to retain that groove, I'll post it here. I think there will be an exercise or two I try over the weekend.

In the mean time, I thought I would share the first short story I was ever serious about writing. I was 15 years old and my Sophomore English teacher was giving the class weekly assignments where we had to choose 10 vocab words, from a list of 30, and use them in a story, article, poem, whatever. It was one of the best exercises a teacher ever gave me. While most kids would turn in a paper from 200-300 words, I kept turning in these 2000 word monsters. This was the first, and honestly the best, from my high school years. I look back at it and kind of think I was a better writer then, in some way. Less tainted by the dozens of styles I secretly want to mimic.


The story is unedited. I was not a big revisionist then, so somethings have changed for the better.

"I would write if I didn't have to work"

Like most of you scallywags, I used to get up at 6:30AM, muddle through some morning ritual that involved a shower/pants and schlepped to work for 8 AM where there was a big plate of dicks for me to eat everyday. Then I'd go home, hit the snooze button on my life's ambitions and be brainless for the rest of the night before I ventured to the bedroom to repeat the cycle.

I'd have enough energy to be creative once in a while; put together a new blog, write a freelance magazine article, Photoshop a poster for someone, but rarely did that energy survive the next day, let alone the rest of the soul crushing week. It was only when I began this whole career business, that I consistently found inspiration and creative energy at the tail end of a 3 day weekend. As if my head needed exactly 2.5 day to decompress from the office before I could work on anything life changing. But that energy was immediately sapped the next morning because of that whole needing a roof/food thing.

Those weekends really lent themselves to my budding theory that work was the reason I wasn't getting any of my self-fulfilling, extracurricular activities accomplished, as opposed to my die-hard, Methodist work ethic screaming, "IF YOU REALLY WANTED TO DO IT, YOU'D JUST DO IT AFTER WORK." The latter philosophy lends itself to a lot of drinking.

Last November, I pushed through National Novel Writing Month with a 7am to 4pm job, and thanks to my work ethic, I actually accomplished writing a novel. While the overall experience was fulfilling, life changing and exhilarating, the day-to-day was completely miserable. Most nights, I was a zombie at the keyboard just trying to make the word count, making for, what I'm sure is, a very awful novel. The exercise served its purpose, but I still wasn't happy writing everyday after work. The energy was still missing and it was alienating on top of that.

Luckily, I was able to put a little bit of my "work is the problem" theory to the test. My job recently demanded a change in my schedule and I now work from 11:30AM to 8PM. I now sink those open, morning hours into writing. I now write five days a week for 60-90 minutes and the system fucking works! Instead of waking up for The Man and being all, "I'm gonna be late to work," I'm now waking up to do something for myself... and it's electrifying. I go to work giddy, slightly high off the fuming keyboard and ready to eat the plate of metaphorical dicks, because I know I did something worth while that day.

Admittedly, I'm sure this is partially a body chemistry thing, knowing when your brain is ready to do creative business, and I hit the jackpot.