Month: March 2014

Thump Thump

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Amidst all my musings on gouda last time, I forgot to mention the project.  It’s happily chugging along; a thousand-ish words yesterday, thirteen hundred-ish the day before, a solid fifteen hundred and change today.  The momentum is still boiling and I’m thanking goodness for that.  Strangely, it’s been a little bit tougher to get the writing done this week.  Not nearly so many demands on my time, but I seem to be hitting more roadblocks with the story.  But as I’ve detailed before, I’m getting better at throat-punching my roadblocks, which is exactly what I’ve done, which all contributes to the rather monumental discovery that I made today.  Having typed that, let me clarify that the discovery is only monumental on a personal sliding scale.  I’m not curing cancer over here or anything.  That said, hyperbole is exciting!  Fireworks!  Streamers!  Puppies!  Accomplishment!

So anyway, I was happily squeezing out my daily word count over a sandwich at lunch today when I saw my page numbers have rolled over into the thirties.  I use a nice small font and don’t waste a lot of space on the page, so it takes me a good chunk of words to fill a page, though I’ve not yet counted how many words I get on a page on average.  Actually, I guess I have, but I haven’t done the math yet, because fargo math.  I didn’t take creative writing in college because I’m the kind of person who does math for fun, DonDraper it.

That’s a lie.  Numbers are fascinating and complex and, if you think about them long enough, the sheer overwhelming enormity of their significance, could, I’ve heard, devour your soul without a whit of conscience.  (I checked my comma usage in the previous sentence and, rest easy, it is correct.)  (Also, I fully realize that my comma [ab]use is probably the least of your concerns.)  However, being one of those creative types, I prefer to admire their poetry quietly from afar, musing on their possibilities in the way that I imagine an ant knows and appreciates the sun is there without having the slightest understanding that its (the ant’s) entire existence is fueled, nay, POSSIBLE because of it (the sun); in other words, don’t bother me with the goldfinger details.  I will leave it to others to dive screaming into the swirling throbbing depths of the infinitude of numbers, armed with their brains of +4 maths.  People like my brother-in-law, who builds missiles.  That’s right, mother truckers, a real-life honest-to-god ROCKET SCIENTIST reads my drivel and gets his jollies (not all, but at least one or two) from my little pile of content.

Sidenote: rather than a table of contents, I want to write a book that has a “pile of contents”.  Then again, when you think about it, that’s all a book is, innit?

Er, that was a sidenote to a sidenote.  The point is, numbers.

Glorious numbers!  Fantastical numbers!  So-big-you’ll-slap-your-mama numbers!  The overall goal for August is ninety thousand words.  That’s a whole lot of words.  A dauntingly huge amount.  So huge, it’s best not thought of.  So I haven’t thought of it.  But here, at the end of two weeks’ work on the project, thirty pages (and change) deep, I thought that the time for thinking about it might be this time, so I thought about it.  I ran a word count on the entirety of my draft as it stands thus far, just to see where I stood.  The grand total as it stands right now is almost seventeen thousand.

Seventeen thousand words is a haberdashery of a lot of words.  Now, it’s a far, far cry short of the ninety thousand I need to have this thing taken seriously.  But it’s also a far cry from where I started.  It’s tangible, significant progress; progress that is heartening and a little overwhelming; progress that is chest-thumpingly awesome.

There is not only quantitative progress but creative progress as well; the story is organically sprouting tentacles that I don’t even remember coding into its DNA, and it’s now attracting lightning strikes and spawning new lifeforms.  New characters, new plots, new subplots, new complications, are occurring to me all the time, faster than I can write them into this thing.  This is the heady thrill of creative adrenaline, and it is surging.

So this is me, thumping my chest a little bit.  I have almost seventeen thousand words in the bag and a rocket scientist reading my blog.  Sharknado yeah.

Chuck’s writing challenge for the week is a 10-chapter story in just 1000 words.  I’m going to try for it this weekend as I take a break from the Project, but it feels tailor-made to hurt me.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, BUT I TEND TO RAMBLE.  Short choppy chapters are not my bag.  BUT I WILL TRY.

A Word About the Words

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Time-out.

If you read this blog in the past two weeks, you might have noticed that I am a fan of colorful language.  And by colorful I mean rude.  And by rude I mean naughty.  And by naughty I mean werty dirds.  (Fargo, there’s no good way to spell that phonetically.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, my dear wife has pointed out to me that due to the visibility of this little dumping ground of mine (and I mean that as an entendre), i.e. that anybody could see it, not least of which my students (fear for the future), I should perhaps be a bit more conscientious of what I post here.

In my head, I argued that conscientiously, I choose virtually every word I recreate here with love and care, and every word which I write here is exactly the word which I meant to write, unless I happen to be posting from the tablet, in which case all bets and all syntax are out the Goldfinger window.

I also feel that a good epithet is the spice of not just language but maybe also life itself, and by that rationale, saying, for example, that a particular sandwich was “a great sandwich” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “a great Fargoing sandwich,” no matter how much we want it to.  Maybe you like some smoked gouda on your burger, and maybe I don’t – but that doesn’t mean that the gouda has to come off the menu.  Gouda, after all, has only the power we give to it and no more.

However, I also know that my dear wife is smarter than I am, so the rational side of me got my foamy-mouthed writer half in a headlock and eased him gently into sleep for a little while.  And by eased him gently into sleep, I mean clubbed him with a DonDraper two by four to lay him out, and hit him once more for good measure once he was down.  Seriously, that guy hasn’t had his shots.  Keep your distance.

So while the unchecked-stream-of-consciousness-happy id-writer Me was napping, world-conscious, livelihood-conscious Me (Goldfingerit, there are so many DonDraper mes crashing around this joint) did a bit of reprogramming and spruced up the place.  To be specific, I stole a page from John Green and crew at CrashCourse and made some substitutions.  John cleverly uses the names of well known authors to stand in for his favorite unsavories; I like movies.  And characters.  And nonsense.  So I’ll use my own code.

So when you’re browsing through these halls of egotism, and you come across a word that sticks out, that just isn’t like the others, fear not, it’s simply the word fairy hard at work keeping this place semi-presentable.  She’s got a lot of Fargoing work to do, though, because I keep a pretty high level of Sharknado flying around this place at all times.  But we can keep it between ourselves, dear reader, you and I.  YOU know what I’m talking about.

Goldfinger it, THE WORD FAIRY, that’s brilliant.  I need to write that down.  Nobody touch that, I’m totally going to use it later.

Anyway, the words may have changed around here, but the feeling won’t.  I write at my best when I let it all hang out, even if it is thinly coded.  I have to say, though, that there is a certain liberation to cutting loose and letting all the gouda bounce off the walls.   Without actually calling it gouda, I mean.  Sharknado, I think my metaphor’s gotten convoluted.

Aaand now I’m hungry.

Writing at home kinda sucks

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A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

  • Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)

 

Comment Commentary

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My favorite passage from today’s work:

  • He lowered the paper to examine the details of the place, but found that the restaurant had vanished and been replaced with his crummy apartment again.  Even the heavenly garlic bread smell had been replaced with the unmistakable aroma of “please take out the garbage.”  Frowning, he wound the paper back into the typewriter, and the smell hit him again.  His aunt Martina used to make garlic bread that smelled like that, and it always made him think of summer nights in the rolling hills of Salerno, except for the fact that he’d never left the United States and his aunt Martina was as Italian as Honey Boo-Boo.

So, it will bear editing, of course, but it makes me smile.  Also, I formatted that on the fly, and the look of it pains me, but I’m in a serious-ANTZ can’t-be-bothered mood as far as my writing goes today.  I’m getting some sweet Word Count in; ain’t nobody got time for all that flowery make-it-easier-on-the-reader Sharknado.

Except for you, reader.  You’re awesome.

The weekend is never long enough, but this weekend was a good one.  Lots of family, lots of cleaning, the culmination (and pretty fantastic reception) of a big work project, and I even got some extracurricular writing done.  Really happy with this week’s Flash Fiction, and really pleased with today’s writing.

I got 1639 words done today, which is pretty impressive, considering how badly I was struggling to get my wheels turning.  Luckily, for today at least, once I was able to break the wheels out of the ice, it was smooth sailing.  But I’m learning some tricks to keep from getting stuck.

The trick of the day is Comments.  I am growing to love using Comments when I write.  Past Me would, when having difficulty with a passage or a phrase or any other sort of roadblock, sit and stew in front of the screen until he could come up with something at least passable to use to surmount the problem.  It was frustrating, slow, and perhaps more than anything, made me feel inept and uncreative and ill-suited to even be writing.  In other words, I’d get hung up on some insignificant detail and after a few minutes, my inability to come up with a good peripheral character name or clever made-up song title would balloon into WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOTHERING YOU’RE AN IDIOT YOU CAN’T DO THIS JUST EAT A CUPCAKE AND FORGET THE WHOLE THING.  Eating cupcakes is easy and that voice in my head was loud, so there you have it.  (I wonder why that voice of inner doubt is always shouting.  Probably mommy issues.)

Present Me, on the other hand, hits a roadblock then powers up his PNEUMATIC JUMPING CAR (note to the future, invent pneumatic jumping cars), jumps the obstacle/plot hole/misplaced character/encroaching cupcake (okay, let’s be honest, I still eat the cupcake) and sticks a flag in the ground when he lands, warning Future Me HEY LOOK OUT THERE’S A PROBLEM BACK THERE, HAVE FUN DEALING WITH THAT SUCKER, I’LL BE UP HERE STILL WRITING LOL WOO TYPETYPETYPE.  (Turns out my voice of inner writing badANTZery shouts a lot too.  Who knew.)

So my first draft is a Haberdasheryscape of stuck-in comments like “omg this part, help” to “MORE BACKSTORY, WRITE IT LATER” to “jesus, so BORING”.  They say that writers are their own worst critics, and that certainly seems to be holding true at the moment.

In short, Present Me is a Darwin to Future Me, but at least Present Me gets to stay productive and keep moving so that Future Me will have the opportunity to do the same.

Borrowed Time

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Today, a time-out from writing The Project.  I will probably take tomorrow off entirely – I’ve earned it this week!

Chuck Wendig’s latest Flash Fiction challenge is here.  Took a day or so to marinate on the idea, then just let this flow.

Originally I meant to take a sci-fi action angle, but instead I ended up with this sort of cynical, sort of sad moment.  I beat the clock on this challenge, coming in at 945 words.  Haven’t edited it too much because it kind of shook me up.  Maybe I will tinker with it later.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it – and as usual, I welcome any and all feedback if you’re out there reading it.

Borrowed Time

Andres was laid comfortably on his back, the lush chair feeling like a cloud bank buoying him up toward the soft fluorescent light.  The sting of the needle in his arm barely even registered.  It was replaced immediately by a dull, heavy feeling that crept across his body; first the fingers of his left hand went numb, then his shoulder, then his neck, and then he simply felt strangely dense and weightless all over.  The chair sunk away, the drones and beeps of the machines faded into nothingness, the outline of the lamp blurred slightly.

In a few minutes, his mind would empty of all thought, and a few minutes beyond that, he would feel no more.  The fear no longer held any power over him, he was merely curious.

The crowd gathered behind the one-way glass looked on in equal parts satisfaction, shock, and disbelief.  Just days ago, the Collective had all but announced that they had given up hope of ever locating Andres and the rest of the Timekeepers, but now they held him on their table, surrendered of his own free will, about to make his Donation to the powers he had fought against.

A surgical mask floated into his view, a lifetime of experience gazing at him through impossibly young eyes.  Dimly he was aware of questions being asked.  He blinked once for yes, twice for no at her directions.  Do what you will.  He let his eyes flutter shut, felt the fluorescent light glowing through his eyelids.

In moments, the chamber would seal around him, a steel and glass oubliette, and a mist of not-quite-gas would pour in: a horde of tiny nanobots which would permeate his skin, activate the growth enzymes in his cells, and then siphon off all the energy and divided cells, leaving him aged by the space of a lifetime in just a few short minutes.  The energy and the cells would be processed and purified through a bizarre alchemy and used to Reinvigorate a member of the society that Andres would never know.

******

The Borrowed Time Initiative was ostensibly one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.  In virtually no time at all it had gone from a fluke discovery into rapid, frenzied medical testing; within the course of just two years, there were BTI facilities in every major metropolis around the world.  The hook was simple.  Give a little time to make a better time.

At first, the initiative was fueled only by the elderly and the infirm, but the Collective quickly began putting convicts  into the stainless steel chambers, and from there, it was only a few short months before the Donation program was opened, and that was when Andres had started to fight.

The Donation program was innocent enough at first.  Give a year of your life and receive a year’s wages for your family.  The number of donators in the first month flooding the BTI facilities had been so overwhelming that the Collective immediately deregulated the system and allowed each center to set its own rates.  In the suburbs, a year would still get you about six months’ pay.  In the cities, Donators were lucky to get two weeks.

But where did the time go?  The BTI claimed that the stolen time (as it was colloquially known) was rationed out to those who needed it most, with extensively detailed logbooks showing where this inventor or that teacher or some other great leader had been Reinvigorated.  Sick children, cured by an infusion of Borrowed Time, were pasted on the sides of buildings and TV ads everywhere.  But the executives of the BTI stopped having their photographs taken, presumably because they were growing younger and younger, and then the stories began to break: Borrowed Time was being bought and sold like stock options, to the highest bidder.  Great stockpiles of it were found in palatial mansions, dingy apartments, buried in backyards.  There was some outcry, but the overwhelming part was that people kept lining up at BTI centers to make their Donations. It’s hard to get really upset when you can feed your family just by going into the chamber for a few minutes.  Sure, you die a little sooner, but what’s a few years of not wearing diapers and not forgetting your own name?

Andres was one of the first to join up when the symbol of the Timekeepers started appearing in alleyways and overpasses.  He fought the good fight, made a name for himself.  Then he came home one day to find a picture of his ex-mother-in-law tacked to his door.  Old, harsh, her face lined and sunken and her hair faded.  Dead.  What psychopath would send him a picture like this, he barely had time to wonder — until he saw the gold locket that he’d given his wife for their tenth anniversary around her neck.  She had been thirty-eight, and her corpse looked ninety.  Next to that picture was a picture of his daughter.

The next day, he’d given his thumbprint and his blood sample at the BTI center in Washington.  And from there, it was a short walk through hallways painted with clouds to the chair.

******

The steel-and-glass doors closed over his face, inches from his skin.  He could no longer feel it, but he thought of the picture in his pocket.  Not the photograph he’d found tacked to his door, but one his ex-wife had taken on his daughter’s fifth birthday.  In it, she smiled, her mouth a checkerboard of missing teeth, Andres’s face buried in her tangled hair.  A wet droplet rolled down his cheek as the hissing filled his ears.