Archive for the 'writing' category

Quiet, please

Jul 16 2010 Published by brian under meta, personal, writing

Haven’t had much to say the last week or so. Actually, this is a good thing; it means that the constant rush of events over the previous three months has subsided. Medical issues have subsided, my mother-in-law is doing well, my spouse is back at work, and things are returning to normal.

Of course, getting back to “normal” means getting back to such fun activities as my little part-time research job, as well as looking for the job that will replace it. (Not fun, due to the economy; currently, there are nearly five times as many job seekers as there are available jobs. Professions are a little better but not by much.)

Not to mention my writing, which is slowly sputtering back to life; I’m not producing any words, but I am doing research to develop an alternate-history world that I have good feelings about. I already have one story pretty thoroughly plotted. So, at some point, that should see the light of day.

Meanwhile, all my other interests are currently trying to crowd themselves into my free time, like students in the sixties cramming into a phone booth. There’s my volunteering, there’s studying Chinese, there’s pleasure reading, and now there’s also music (which I will surely discuss in further detail in a later post). I’m not working nearly enough to have this much time pressure in my leisure activities.

Oh, yeah, and there’s also the small matter of spending time with my honeybun. Which of course tends to trump everything else. But that’s okay. I have my priorities, after all.

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Blast from the past.

Feb 09 2010 Published by brian under personal, writing

And now, a fragment of early writing that will never be published elsewhere. (Let us all bow our heads in fervent thanks.)

———————–

At first it seemed that he was simply sitting quietly in his room, waiting expectantly. But then, as the familiar giddiness crept into his head, everything began to change. Suddenly he was lying on the floor, held down as if by invisible Lilliputian bonds; the next moment, he was standing, and he and everything else in the room was a thousand times larger than before. He tried to take a step and moved as ponderously as a mountain. Shortly after, he was sitting crosslegged on the floor, his eyes closed against the distractions of the room. His breathing was deep and calm.

He waited.

—

The eagle fell upwards into brilliant blue sky. It beat its wings in smooth, powerful strokes, pushing, striving for altitude, brushing against an updraft and sliding into it, riding the warm bubble as it rose. Soaring, the bird looked to the horizon and called out in defiance, and was drawing its breath to call again when the buckshot tore through its body, opening its lungs to the air, releasing the breath in a wheeze. Gasping, dying, the eagle watched through dimming eyes as the trees spun up to catch it and

“I don’t know what you were thinking,” I told him, as he took off his shoes. I caught the raw, stale scent of the sweat on his shirt, in my hands. I dropped the shirt into the hamper. “Maybe we should go back.”

He sighed. “Love, it wouldn’t be any better back there, and you know it.” He stared up at me with those blue eyes. God, those eyes. “And we couldn’t be together there. Your mom’d never let me near you. At least here we’re together.”

I looked at him and smiled. He reached out his hand. I took it in mine and

He took a sip of water and resumed typing. Both models provide reasonable scenarios for the emergence of modern H. sapiens. The multiregional evolution model suggests that gene flow would provide the direction for evolution, by spreading new evolutionary changes throughout the species and providing opportunities for natural selection to work differently in various regions. Yeah, he thought, but we can’t connect regional variations between ancient and modern forms. Need to say something about that later. He checked the clock and

So, anyway, Bobby threw the ball to me, and I tried to catch it, but it went a little too high and flew over my head. When I turned around, I saw it bouncing over the sidewalk, and I ran after it, and it only went a little ways out into the street, so I went on after it. When I got to the ball and picked it up, I heard Mom yelling at me to get out of the street, and when I turned around to look at her I saw the truck coming. It was going really fast, too. I started to run and

He barked furiously at the shape in the yard, trying to scare it away. As a result, he couldn’t hear its voice until he paused for breath, and then he heard, “Ringo! Calm down, you silly dog!” Happy and relieved, he walked up to his master and

She pulled the handle and shoved the mower forward, watching with pleasure as the wild tufts of grass were sheared flat and spat out the side of the machine. Won’t take too much longer, she thought. She turned the corner and

Suddenly he had the rope around my neck and was pulling it tight. I felt the skin of my throat tearing under the friction, I felt the pain of the compression, but worse than both of those was the sudden inability to breathe. I instinctively dropped to my knees and rolled forward and

He could smell it as he opened the oven. Perfect, he thought. This is going to be delicious. He reached in with the potholders and

She listened to them shouting at each other for hours. When curiosity finally overcame her disgust, she put a glass up to the wall. She was frustrated to hear words that sounded vaguely like Arabic. She sighed and walked into the kitchen and

I pulled back on the stick and the plane began to climb. Gently, gently, not so fast; good. I hit the switch for the landing gear and

The eggs and bacon sizzled together in a puddle of grease and

Squirt bottle in hand, he crept up behind Chris and took aim. Suddenly Chris turned around and

The dead goldfish floated serenely at the top of its tank and

—

Alex awoke between sheets heavy with sweat. His eyes snapped open, trying to focus on the darkened ceiling above him. His hands were trembling.

–July 25, 1996

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Writing, writing, writing

Dec 10 2009 Published by brian under writing

So, I finished my NaNoWriMo novel with no trouble. Well, with a little trouble; I lost a lot of ground during our Thanksgiving trip to visit the in-laws. Thankfully, with the help of one 5000-word day (on my birthday, no less!), I was able to get back on track. Finished my 50K shortly before midnight on the 30th.

I’m actually quite satisfied with how it turned out. My spouse is reading it now and she says I’ve got the science down, and the plot, while slow at first, is interesting. But I really need to work on characterization. I agree; that’s always been my weakest point, and this book was no different. With one exception, everything said by the characters was there to advance the plot. Lots of telling rather than showing.

But there’s quite a lot of reason for hope. Part of it is that one exception. This book has one character, a ship captain, who entered the story halfway through (after being mentioned several times beforehand), and who quickly became possibly my first fully developed character. There’s a speech she gives early on, about her career, where she actually managed to surprise me. I wasn’t sure where it came from when I was writing it, and it felt like it hadn’t really come from me, but from her.

In other words, she came to life. At least briefly. And I was shocked, and very pleased, when I was done writing it. We’ll see what my sweetie has to say about what happens to her at the end, but I think she’ll like it.

So, where from here? I took a week off from writing after finishing NaNoWriMo, but I’ve started again now. I’m hoping to be able to keep up the momentum, and especially to learn to create more living characters so that it becomes second nature. We’ll see where it goes.

Ray Bradbury said once that you need to be prepared to write, and discard, a million words, before you can succeed as a writer. I’m well on my way toward that, although I’d hope to publish something well before then. But I’m beginning to see his point. Slowly but surely, I’m learning.

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NaNoWriMing

Nov 14 2009 Published by brian under personal, writing

I haven’t been writing too much here, but I have an excuse: National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.

In case you’ve never heard of it: it happens every November. You have 30 days to write 50,000 words. If you succeed, your prize is a lovely batch of bragging rights.

Sounds crazy, I know. But it can be done. 50,000 words over 30 days averages to 1667 words per day. That’s difficult, but not at all impossible. If you’re dedicated, you can do that much in two or three hours. I average around 700 words an hour, so I can write my quota in a little over two hours–if I’m on the ball.

The point is volume and nothing more. You don’t have to worry about plot, or characters, or logic. You can make all the spelling and grammar mistakes you want. It doesn’t even have to be remotely coherent. All that matters is the word count.

Or, at least, word count is the only goal that NaNoWriMo imposes on you. (Insofar as they impose anything. It all runs entirely on the honor system. They have no way of knowing if you’re cheating.) There are lots of ways that people use it to help their writing discipline; I’m using it to try to get into the habit of writing every day.

The interesting thing is what happens when you give up on every goal other than headlong flight toward your 50K. Desperate for ideas, you start grabbing at anything that bubbles up out of your subconscious. People use all kinds of crazy strategies to extend the book–including killing major characters, abruptly shifting genres, inserting long dialogues about random topics. Whatever works to hold the writer’s interest.

My first NaNo novel was called Best Intentions. When I sat down to write it, at 12:01 am on November 1, 2005, I had nothing but an opening sentence:

If you ask me, it all started with that damn fire truck.

And from that, I spun a strange little yarn about two brothers. One of them, mentally retarded, underwent an experimental intelligence-enhancement procedure. (Yes, I ripped it off from Flowers for Algernon.) The other brother, the protagonist of the story, watched as his brother suddenly surpassed his family–and then, as a side effect, began committing inexplicable acts of violence.

Honestly, the book was dreadful. My spouse read it and said there might be a decent short story screaming to get out from inside it. But quality wasn’t the point: the point was the creative act, the complete indulgence and surrender to the creative impulse. I had a great deal of fun writing it, as horrible as it turned out to be.

And now I’m doing it again. This time, though, the work is quite a bit better. It’s called Labyrinths. I went in knowing only that I wanted to write a cheesy space opera. What I’m getting is definitely a space opera, but it’s not particularly cheesy; the writing is below par, once again, but the science is actually pretty strong. (Although I’m sure any physicists reading it would laugh hysterically at my clumsy reinterpretation of quantum mechanics.)

So, I’m currently at 15,079 words. My quota for today, the 14th, is 23,333. So I’m well behind (I started very slow). But today was my best day yet–2826 words–and I’ve just put in a major plot twist that will keep it interesting. I don’t expect I’ll have any trouble keeping up from here on; in fact I expect to catch up with quota over the next 10 days.

We will see. Hopefully, by the time I’m done, I’ll have freed my writing impulse to where I’ll be able to routinely turn out a thousand or two words per day. Onward.

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