Wife and daughters in Mason, Ohio for a swim meet. I stayed behind to retrieve our pup post-surgery. Prior to that, I went looking for shoes (once every 5 years; failed. Ordered from ebay), 3 loads of laundry, put towels everywhere for incoming dog, mulched leaves in backyard, restocked at foodstore.
Then, got dog. Drive home, carrying dog about. Early dinner, convince dog to take meds hidden in pork, short walk, bed.
Oh. What didn’t happen? 7500 words, that’s what didn’t happen.
I don’t think I’ve a hand for this, either. I had my wife read the part I just wrote, in italics, below. She wandered off muttering “I like your romance, better.” As if I can effing write romance stories! She praises me with faint damns.
The taxi sat silently in its parking space at the small lot at Okadama Airport. The driver’s side seat was fully reclined, allowing Maya more easy access to the driver’s brain. After finding clothes and money at Neuroi, she’d taken the rail south into Sapporo city. At the main rail station, she’d wandered about until locating the cab station and asked a driver to take her to the airport. Arriving at Okadama, it matched nothing in the memories she’d eaten. The driver said the big airport was an hour to the south, but she’d not been specific! Would she like to pay for a drive there, too?
She’d reached around from the back seat and crushed his windpipe. Maya thought about the next step, ignoring the gurgling as the man slowly choked to death. She scowled slightly; had she not killed him, he could have driven her to the other airport! Ah.
She would learn to drive a car.
She left the vehicle and looked about. There: a small bamboo patch. She inspected and rejected several shoots until she found one of just the right size. Returning to the back seat of the car, she shut the door and dropped the driver’s seat back. He was almost dead.
Maya tore out his left eyeball. With a sharp drop of her right fist, she rammed the bamboo tube through the back of his eye socket. Oxygen deprivation kept him from fighting back more than feebly. Wrenching the shoot up and left, she put her mouth to it and began sucking his brains out.
See what I mean: clinical. This isn’t an horror story, it’s an autopsy report. I don’t know what to do to ‘scare’ the reader. Yes, yes: I chose something outside my comfort zone to push me as a writer, but maybe I shouldn’t have done that in combination with NNWM! The other half of the story, with Chris and Cat, is coming along nicely: romance! Well, sort of. Too much exposition, but cleaning that up is what December is for.
Official Word Count: 9032.
I say jumpstarting as I’m taking a still-born idea from over a year ago and using those characters and location as a rough framework for this novel. Re-writing and re-editing (yes, I know: editing is for December; but if I didn’t do it now, I couldn’t have used any of that material) gave me about 1,000 words, gratis. There was a NNWM Write-In here at the Licking County Public Library – although I’m the only one here – and in the past 90 min, I was able to add another 1,000. Good first day. It’s my typical “start the story in the middle” approach, and even then, I’m jumping about with flashbacks. Still not quite got the hang of horror writing, but I’m sure I’ll work something out. The closing of what I did today is below the fold.
Only fourteen days left until NaNoWriMo begins. About a week ago I finally dug out the script I’d written for what would have been the webcomic, Poisoned Hearts, thinking I recalled it well enough to serve as a first chapter.
Oops.
While I did recall most of it, the characters were already reforming in my mind for the new story; so, personalities are different, huge timing changes . . . at least the locations…. Nope: I’d reimagined what the lab at Neuroi looks like, based upon my horror short.
So as it is, what was a first chapter of material is now a stack of notes for Cursed Hearts. That still puts me miles ahead of where I started two years ago with The Fourth Law: one mental image and a 20-second sound bite. Barring any unforeseen RealLife consequences – as such happened last November – I’m feeling very good about this project. Of course it’s tempting to actively make notes now, but I think that violates the spirit of the month-long challenge. Dreaming, okay; notes, not so much.
My other October project: converting my father-in-law’s oral history into written history, has also not gone as well as I’d hoped. Once I sat down to write all that I recalled as a framework for him to add onto, I realized just how much I’ve forgotten over the past ten years. Sure, I can ‘see’ the images: him and his cavalry detachment caught in the second floor of a Polish cheese factory when a Red Army platoon motors up. Him in a AVO prison, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs to his right and a 2-star general to his left. I think I shall reallocate this to January, when it’s dark and cold and we’re all inside (December will be given over to editing then publishing Cursed Hearts by Christmas).
Not much meat in this post, but that’s what happens when a writer is between project. Expect things to get very interesting quite soon. Cheers!
It’s 2334, local time, on 30 September 2016. Less than 26 minutes shy of my self-imposed publishing date.
To borrow from Arkada at Glass Reflections: “ladies, gentlemen, and others, let’s jam!”
Link to hardcopy once it’s ready. W00t for irrational deadlines!
Got the interior completed and uploaded last night. More clumps of hair out this morning trying to get the front/back covers done. At only 24 pages, there’s no ‘spine’ per se, so had to work around that. Then, the primitive graphics program I was using decided it was done for the day.
The nice thing about flat-panel screens is they go much further once they’ve cleared the glass of the window.
*ahem* After applying the typical IT solution (“Did you restart your computer?”), things were less bad. Images formatted, converted, uploaded. I’ve gone ahead and submitted them for review by CreateSpace, even though I’ve no blurb on the back cover, yet. I want one of their proof copies in my hand: until you’re holding a physical copy, you’ve no idea what stupid things you’ve screwed up (such as leaving page numbers out of my first novel; my then 11 year-old caught that one).
As always, I cannot thank Claudia Gadotti enough for her amazing illustrations. Please go to her place and lavish her with commissions!
Last night was crashing and burning: came home hopped up on coffee (recall: I’ve high blood pressure) to get things done on HBD!, only to be confronted with hysterical wife: “my J-drama torrents won’t work!!” An hour lost there, then another making dinner, I finally sit down to format some jpg’s to pdf’s . . . forgetting that twice 2700 pixels is not 1350, but, in fact, 5400. Re-re-formatting everything, I do a trial upload at 2215. All clear. Time for bed.
Tonight, adding text. As this is a book aimed at 2nd graders, I think there’s about 120 words, total. This issue – ONCE AGAIN – is formatting: my pages are set to ‘bleed-out’ on the edges, so when making text boxes, I have to guess where my perimeter is. That’s been three tries so far. I’d also some issues about ISBN’s, but would rather toss my desktop out my window than even think about discussing it.
Below the fold, a snapshot of page 17. God bless Claudia Gadotti, my illustrator. How she could reach into my mind from my poor, bare-bones description of my characters to make what she did . . . well, just wait until I’ve wrapped this all up in a couple of weeks.
With only seventeen days left to go in my self-imposed deadline, I just now figured out how to format the pages from jpeg to pdf and upload them properly to CreateSpace. I’ve been spoiled: for my traditional novels, I’ve used “Bookwrite” by Blurbb; a fantastic program, so long as you stay within its boundaries. As this is an illustrated children’s book, I needed those boundaries to be elastic, so after a few days, out that went.
Then it was a matter of re-scaling Claudia’s wonderful drawings. That took a couple of days to figure out… glad my wife told me to drink less: I was about ready to throw my computer out the window. I finally got a test of the cropped, resized, and split, pages successfully uploaded to CreateSpace. I’ll – hopefully – reformat the remaining images tomorrow, then add the little bit of text (this is a kids book, after all) the day after. Looks like the wife and daughters will be foraging for dinner the rest of this week!
Provisional cover is below the fold.
In other news, I’ve seen some huge character changes for my NaNoWriMo project this year; I’m quite pleased! Set in a part of MachCiv I’ve not really been to, yet, and something of a horror novel, this should be fun!
This past weekend, I marathoned the series “Man in the High Castle.” It was everything I expected from a PKD-Ridley Scott combination. I was pleased to see Rufus Sewell again, even if he is playing a Nazi. One of my favorite movies is “Dark City,” and he did superlative work in that.
Anyway. At the end of Ep10, I sat and thought a bit and came to the conclusion that – at this point of my life – I simply do not have what it takes to write political-espionage. I am shelving “Crosses and Doublecrosses,” for now. So… what now? I stared at the empty formal dining table, wondering when my wife would come home from her radiation treatments and what the Hell I was to do with my life.
Dated it may be, but my all-time favorite anime is “Haibane Renmei.” A brief review can be found here. A huge, spoiler-laden takedown can be found here. It’s very difficult for me to say what it’s about without ruining it; I could do it with a single word. It’s an extremely complex moral and theological story; amazing that a non-Christian Japanese writer seems to have a better feel for my faith than many of my co-religionists.
Some years back, a chap took the character models from HR and made a 30s video, based on a trailer for “Constantine,” a good, but very erratic movie. You can see the video here. While there are icebergs of story just below the surface of HR proper, just to look at it, it appears to be cute-girls doing cute-things. Guristantine is not that at all. Just as with the two ideas that were the genesis of “The Fourth Law,” the series and the video curled up in my unconscious, and waited.
Going back to our collaboration of 3-AR Studios LLC for our visual novels, my friend and colleague, Will, and I, had long thought of a live-action Haibane Renmei. We talked scenes, locations, actors… but nothing came of it. A few days after deciding to abandon “C&DC,” it came to me (how? how does this stuff just come to me??) to make a live-action series, based on HR; not just an adaptation….
One set in hard-edged Abandoned Factory, not the safety of Old home. One with deeply flawed characters, desperate to understand themselves and where they are. One where violence and sex are – if not out in the open – not pretended to not exist. One where the abandonment of either wing of the human soul (faith and reason) leads quickly to madness. One where… okay; you get it: I saw quite a lot, quickly.
Below the fold is a pretty raw treatment of what you could call a trailer for a six-episode series of 30-minute shows. I’m bricked in to swim meets for my girls all this weekend, and will be writing as much as I see, which, so far, is quite a bit. If any of this tickles your forebrain, leave a comment. I’m planning on throwing a couple of grand of my money at this, at least for the trailer. We’ll see what happens beyond that.
My girls had a swim meet in Mason, Ohio, this weekend, so it was something of a working vacation for me. Vacation in that it was the first time since January since I’d slept anywhere but in my own house. Working in that I tried to get some more story written down. And I do mean written: typing is a bit problematic when sitting on bleachers at a high-school pool. Perhaps I’ll make the NaNoWriMo cut off; perhaps not.
Up this AM at 0400 to get my wife to the airport. She’s off to Houston for tests and consults this week for her lymphoma. It will be a busy time for me, what with day job, girls’ club activities, and whatnot, until her return. Writing takes another hit….
machciv 