The writing experiment

First day back at uni. Year two, semester two. Experimental writing; what's it all about? In the words of my tutor, "fucking shit up." Nuff sed. He also said something about the unit being nigh on impossible to fail. So I'm just going to focus on fucking shit up for that unit. I'll fuck shit up so baddd....... (tempted to write an assignment on an empty burger wrapper for the 'avant-garde-ness of it all)

I'm competing with a cold with some pharmaceutical-strong lozengers and a lemon drink that tastes so foul. I'm Mr-Mucus-Face right now, but I'm taking solace in the fact that it could be a lot worse. It's not so bad.

In terms of my writing goals, I started my novella last night and wrote 1,026 words. That's the target. I've had uni this morning, bright and early from 8:00, with a two hour class that finished an hour early. So I went to the library cafe and inhaled a delicious bacon and eggs breakfast before my 10:00 experimental writing class on the top floor of the labyrinth that is the Architecture building. I've got work late tonight, but I'll have a good three hours to eat, rest and write my 1,000 words before midnight. That's my self-appointed curfew because tomorrow is another 8:00 start at uni.

And in my experimental writing class is the Grok editor, who informed me that a segment of a first semester piece of mine is in the next edition of the magazine. First publication of the year. Hopefully, with this new connection, I might have a spot in the next two editions of the magazine.

I'm going to try to keep record of my progress on here, to make things easier to manage. I know not many people read this (maybe just person?) but at least it's out here and all like "hey guys, this is what I'm planning on doing."

Plans

There are two different ways I go about my writing: Planned and unplanned. Basically, a planned piece of writing has a lot of thought put into plot, characters, meaning, that sort of thing, you know, so it's all cohesive. My unplanned efforts are, of course, more spontaneous, more experimental, and more prone to failure. I usually have trouble planning large projects. Sometimes I lose interest, sometimes they just suck, and sometimes they just fall through.

My latest proposal is a little less strenuous than a NaNoWriMo type 50k-in-30-days ordeal, but rather, a 20k novella over the next three months. August, September, October. Then on to NaNoWriMo 2010 (perhaps I'll try writing my JulNoWriMo story again).

So anyway, here's the plan:
I'll have my first draft finished by August 20. That's 1,000 words a day for 20 days, not too hard, considering it'll be alongside uni and work, it's not an insurmountable task. My idea at the moment is an Epistolary narrative of a guy who starts keeping a dream diary when he starts having vivid dreams which are actually sections of a continuous dream from the mind of a young boy in a coma. The working title is "Perpetual Dreaming".

Continuing on the target of 1,000 words a day, I'll go through and rewrite the story, aiming to finish by September 9.

Then I'll spend the rest of September spending time on the weaker parts of the story, tightening the narrative up. That gives me 21 days, three weeks. My third draft, of sorts.

That leaves a full 31 days to spend on editing, going through the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb. I'll probably try to go through it all as early in October as I can, so I can sit on it for a few weeks before giving it one last look-over in the last week of October before submitting it for publication in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

I've been meaning to send something to that magazine since I came across it, but I haven't been able to get a working narrative up and ready. I came back to their site the other day, read through the guidelines again, saw their word limit was 20,000, and I thought I'd take up the opportunity to produce something a bit more ambitious than a simple short story.

I'm also going to send a short story to the Wet Ink magazine by the end of August, so, fingers crossed that all goes well. I'm starting semester two of year two at Uni tomorrow, where I'll be studying writing for performance and experimental writing, amongst other things. Hopefully I'm going to have a busy few months ahead of me.

Haiku: Ur doin it rong.

I am the scarecrow,
the tin man, and the lion,
all rolled into one.

STC and the withering manuscript

He sat at his desk and saw his manuscript for what it was; a series of concentric circles. They're about something, but at the moment, that something is just black lines going nowhere. He listened to music to see if something would inspire, if something would click. It didn't. He tried writing poetry, to take his mind off of things. Nothing. And the days fell away so fast. He found himself clinging to the half-way marker, unwilling to reach for more words, to tip the manuscript over, to spill the words into something more rounded, more balanced, more complete. He looked over the scattered pages, and with less than seven days before his goal dried up, he came to terms with the fact that he wouldn't reach his goal. No novel. Not this time around.

"Maybe," he thought, "I could make a novella out of it. There's time for that yet."
In a world where nothing is certain, he could only hope that bringing his target down would bring his story to an end. It was hard enough starting the thing, with only two characters vaguely identified at the time of the manuscript's conception, and with a plot clutching at a beginning, let alone a middle and end, the challenge was never going to be easy. But when the first draft is done, then his real work will begin. Then the characters will come to life. Then the plot will resonate from within. Then the manuscript will blossom from a scattered and incomprehensible novella into the novel it was meant to be.

Good luck, STC, you've still got a very long way to go. Hang in there.

Some of my best friends are strangers

May I help you,
sir?

May I take
your order,
sir?

May I give you
what you ask,
what you ask of me,
sir?

May I offer
unparalleled value,
and unparalleled service,
and unparalleled flavour,
sir?

Here is your
change,
sir.

May you enjoy
your meal,
your drink,
and have a pleasant day,
sir.

Will you take me up on my offer?

Can I help you,
sir?

Can I straighten
your tie,
sir?

Can I fix
your shoe laces,
and button your shirt for you,
sir?

Tell me about
your sordid affairs,
your stressful finances,
your unfulfilled home life,
sir.

Give me
your attitude,
sir.

May you enjoy
this moment,
with me,
as much as I have with you,
sir.

Take the damn order and have a nice day.

Next.

Novel Excerpt

We pulled up outside the hangar and got out of the car. And I could hear the loud murmuring of conversation competing with conversation. This was a gathering. Gabriel popped the boot. Blindfolded. Gagged. Bound arms and legs. This was Penny. But I'll get into the details later. He lifted her over his shoulder, her short brown hair falling and masking her face.
“Can you get the boot there?” Gabriel called out to me, walking towards the hangar.
I pushed it shut and I looked over at the girl slung over his shoulder, her hair bobbing with each step. I thought of the police, combing the car for evidence. I imagined a group of them pouring across every square millimetre of surface. Finding nothing, finding nothing, finding nothing. Then reaching the boot. A strand of hair. Hers. A set of fingerprints. Mine. A maze of little lines mirroring my own sitting clear as day on the boot. I rubbed the boot where I pushed it down with my sleeve. I didn't want this guy as my enemy. I jogged after him towards the hangar.

I've been reading through my novel sort of as I write it. Like, I'll print out each page as I write it and take it into work and read through what I've written at work. I think this is my favourite paragraph of the novel thus far. Could be a potential opening paragraph (yes, although it is currently in chapter 6, I'm more than comfortable with the fact that nothing is concrete at the moment). I also think it represents the sort of stylised horror that I'm aiming for. Quirky. Bizzare. Because it's not straight up horror, and I think I really need to sort out in the redrafting and editing processes how I want that balance to sit. Because I want it to be as much about character as about plot. That's probably why there's a lot of dialogue in my novel so far. Like, A LOT. I should probably cut down on that a lot and flesh the scenes out more. I guess that's why I like this paragraph. But, you know, it's a work in progress and it's got a long way to go. I'd like to think that people will read my writing and go "that kid's not normal." I'd like that. Because everything else about me is pretty much normal. Or even more normal than normal. Paler-shade-of-grey normal. But, you know, the plan with writing this book is to raise a few eyebrows and maybe suggest a few things. Still figuring out the details though.

88mph

Where we're going we don't need time. Well... time in the linear sense of the word. I'm a measly five-and-a-half thousand words into my JulNo novel Utopia Ltd and I just want to shake it on its head to make all the change fall out of its pockets. I know for a fact that when I write it I will be starting at a different point in time. I just don't know where. At the moment, everything feels on the whole, too linear. When I finish the draft, I'm probably going to cut the story and print it in chapters and do a massive reshuffle of things.

When I first thought of the idea for this novel I wanted to write it about what goes on inside my head, the main character going through an identity chrisis works through his issues which are not too dissimilar to my own. While this may be interesting enough, I did what I always do when things sound like they might put my readers to sleep (my readers, lol), I chuck a bunch of fucking guns in there and see what happens. To make things exciting.

Now it feels like I've got two narratives going on in the one novel, and it's my goal to weave them together. The primary one (primary being more immediately identifiable) is the events of the armed robbery and the rather exciting [insert spoilers here] that follow. The secondary narrative is the one mentioned earlier, the main character's internal anxieties and identity struggles (as externalised through the presence of his psychologist) and his working through that.

I feel like the more I think about it, the more it changes and evolves and grows, and, to some extent, the less capable I am for writing the crazy fucking thing. And now I'm wanting to start at the end and toss the reader around like a ragdoll throughout the jumble of events that occur, giving them a chaotic, yet progressive journey as to how things got to be so out of proportion. I'll get there eventually. I'm actually hoping that once the draft is done, and once I cut it down to chapters and mess about with the ordering of events, I can treat the chapters more like short stories and brush up on the draft, edit through as if it were essentially a novel of short stories.

Fingers crossed I can get into a rhythm where the following forty-four-and-a-half thousand words just click into place. It's definitely been an interesting challenge going into July with minimal preparation (November last year I had character descriptions, locations and whole chapters mapped out before I started officially writing).