Ah, Thanksgiving. Some made up holiday about white people getting food from Indians before betraying all Native Americans with the small pox and the guns and the biff boom ba. This Turkey Day I am thankful for having finished (as of yesterday) the first draft of my ninth goddamn novel, and I am thankful for another year of good health for me and my friends and family. I'll be driving down to Fillmore County to spend it on a crazy pig farm with my friends and their family and my lady friend. And thus, I am actually up early on a holiday as opposed to sleeping in on every work day for normal people.
As a side note, why are we subjected to a Lions game every damn Thanksgiving? And a Cowboys game, too. The Lions always suck and the Cowboys make me feel slimy just watching them. The mix of turkey and boring football is flat out stultifying!
Have fun with those giblets, people!
Pow! Bap! Boom!
The Suicide Collectors will officially be released in trade paperback tomorrow, Tuesday Nov. 23rd. Science fiction thrives in the world of paperbacks and I'm extremely happy to enter the world myself. I don't know about bookstore availability right away, but I do know you can order it on Amazon right now for about ten bucks.
I wonder how much format will affect reading the book. Do people react differently to the same story told in trade as opposed to hard cover? I should do a study. With all my scientific knowledge.
So Sexy Out of Context!!
I've been waiting for someone to realize how damn sexy The Suicide Collectors is!
http://sosexyoutofcontext.tumblr.com/post/175038006
yes!
Speaking of sex, who here has seen that HBO show Cathouse? It's both appalling and enthralling, no? But mostly just gross.
http://sosexyoutofcontext.tumblr.com/post/175038006
yes!
Speaking of sex, who here has seen that HBO show Cathouse? It's both appalling and enthralling, no? But mostly just gross.
Evil!
My friend Mark found last night via email that his short story was accepted by the Indiana Review. This is a big deal to a young writer, getting anything accepted is a big deal, but Indiana Review is high up the journal food chain and thus even sweeter. He sent them back a happy, ecstatic email and went to bed.
This morning he received a second email from them stating that there was some sort of glitch in their system and he'd gotten the acceptance email in error. His story was still under consideration (read: ha ha, sucker, never!) etc. etc. etc.
How evil is that? It could have been just an honest mistake, but there must have been some evil in there, somewhere down the line. Now Mark must pick up the pieces of his broken heart and trod wearily on. Welcome to writing!
This morning he received a second email from them stating that there was some sort of glitch in their system and he'd gotten the acceptance email in error. His story was still under consideration (read: ha ha, sucker, never!) etc. etc. etc.
How evil is that? It could have been just an honest mistake, but there must have been some evil in there, somewhere down the line. Now Mark must pick up the pieces of his broken heart and trod wearily on. Welcome to writing!
The Inner Ideal
Writing fiction is a process of a writer (an imperfect being if there ever was one) striving to capture a particular vision inside his or her brain and putting it down on the page. Inside their own minds, they have a sense of what they want to convey with the story they're telling (if they don't, their story will sort of float around, directionless, until they settle on that sense and then go back and rewrite as if they knew what they were doing all along). The main struggle, besides sitting down and actually writing, is transferring their perfect little vision from inner ideal to something that lives and breathes on the page and people will actually want to read.
When I started writing, about fifteen years ago, I took it for granted that this transference automatically happened if you, you know, edited enough. But, alas, editing is not enough. You have to be honest, too. You need to write what interests you, not what you think is going to sell (not that people don't do that all the time and often sell crap to the crapateers). The big change in my writing, the point it moved from apprentice to professional, came when I finally wrote something that was as dark and wicked as my heart (as it stood at that time). It's hard to be constantly honest in your work and it doesn't always happen, you can slip and go the easy way at any minute, and people aren't exactly going to ask you to come round and watch their small children. And there's a chance you'll alienate your readers (if you're lucky enough to have readers). But what the hell? Being honest is the only way your going to create something that even approaches the vision you have in your mind.
And who wants to spent their lives babysitting the comprimised?
When I started writing, about fifteen years ago, I took it for granted that this transference automatically happened if you, you know, edited enough. But, alas, editing is not enough. You have to be honest, too. You need to write what interests you, not what you think is going to sell (not that people don't do that all the time and often sell crap to the crapateers). The big change in my writing, the point it moved from apprentice to professional, came when I finally wrote something that was as dark and wicked as my heart (as it stood at that time). It's hard to be constantly honest in your work and it doesn't always happen, you can slip and go the easy way at any minute, and people aren't exactly going to ask you to come round and watch their small children. And there's a chance you'll alienate your readers (if you're lucky enough to have readers). But what the hell? Being honest is the only way your going to create something that even approaches the vision you have in your mind.
And who wants to spent their lives babysitting the comprimised?
Keep Your Head Down, Blogagaard!
To say I've been keeping my head down lately is an understatement. For one thing, I'm too broke to actually keep my head up in the first place, because that usually involves spending money in some way. I'm also going down the steep, slanting hill that is finishing a novel. During this phase, I write at least five pages everyday except Sunday, and even on Sundays I feel guilty for not working. On top of all this, the release date for The Suicide Collectors paperback edition is less than two weeks away (Nov. 24th) and the publication date for Wormwood, Nevada is less than a month away (Dec. 8th). Also, my fantasy football team is sucking really, really hard, and all my attempts to right the ship are met with laughter from the gods.
I just put two new short stories up on my Scribed page. "Everything is Okay" is about a frantic family ride to soccer practice and "To Leave This World" is about a young woman who joins an alien cult in California to escape her own life (a very apt story as Wormwood descends upon the world).
I just put two new short stories up on my Scribed page. "Everything is Okay" is about a frantic family ride to soccer practice and "To Leave This World" is about a young woman who joins an alien cult in California to escape her own life (a very apt story as Wormwood descends upon the world).
Let Me Give You Some Advice
Have you ever noticed that, in fiction or in movies, a character giving advice usually isn't listened to? If some weird dude says, "Don't go down that road and turn left into that foggy field or else a demon will rip your eyes out," then of course the other character laughs off this advice (or warning--I guess a warning is just advice with an implied threat of calamity weighing it down) and goes down the road anyway, or in spite of the advice, and gets their damn eyes ripped out. You could actually say that advice in a fictional realm is almost like a backhanded kind of prodding, a way of showing the main character's chutzpa, and the closer to a rouge cop the character is, the more likely they'll really not listen to advice. And usually it's pretty good advice, in the main character's best interest. It's the sort of advice that if you didn't listen to, in real life, you'd probably would be fucked right quick (and there'd be no wacky vindication down the road, either).
Sometimes, to combat this, writers will have the main character listen to the advice and act on the advice, but this is almost always because the advice comes from a ROGUE AGENT. I personally dislike backstabbing characters as a narrative device, not only because they disagree with my sense of fair play in the war of Good versus Evil but because they seem to be a rather easy narrative device. For example, that one traitor dude at the end of the second Matrix movie. WTF?!? Also, as soon as I realized that the new Battlestar Galactica series would turn on the screw of "Who can you trust? Cylons are everywhere!" I just stopped watching. Because fuck it. I don't feel like playing guess who for fifty hours.
Your thoughts on advice? Do you listen to it or ignore it? I, of course, ignore any advice that is good for me, because I invariably do everything the hard way, and I'm practically fictional in my own right.
Sometimes, to combat this, writers will have the main character listen to the advice and act on the advice, but this is almost always because the advice comes from a ROGUE AGENT. I personally dislike backstabbing characters as a narrative device, not only because they disagree with my sense of fair play in the war of Good versus Evil but because they seem to be a rather easy narrative device. For example, that one traitor dude at the end of the second Matrix movie. WTF?!? Also, as soon as I realized that the new Battlestar Galactica series would turn on the screw of "Who can you trust? Cylons are everywhere!" I just stopped watching. Because fuck it. I don't feel like playing guess who for fifty hours.
Your thoughts on advice? Do you listen to it or ignore it? I, of course, ignore any advice that is good for me, because I invariably do everything the hard way, and I'm practically fictional in my own right.
