Archive for » October, 2009 «
Am I the only one that gets urges to really write during certain times of the year or on certain days, like when it’s rainy or snowy?
Granted I have the urge to write all the time but for as long as I can remember it’s been the strongest always during the fall and right up to Halloween. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because of my love for all things horror and spooky and my jonsing to write the ilk, never mind that it really isn’t my forte. Maybe it’s something about that weather where writing comes in on the wind and falls on me like the leaves.
Whatever it is, how can I mimic it throughout the entire year? Can I? I really don’t think I can because late summer and into fall, especially in New England, has a very specific feel that can’t be recreated in February or June. Maybe that’s why I yearn for the season so badly. Not only is it my favorite, but peak is my most creative peak. Will it go away when I move to California? I can tell you now October in California feels different, very different, than October in Connecticut, and I’m not just talking about the temperature.
You know, I’m making myself sound like I’m creatively bereft the rest of the year. I’m not. I have ideas running through my head all the time, every day of every week of every month. But they’re the most vibrant, the most colorful, the most crystal clear, the loudest screamers, right about now. Is there any way I can pick up Connecticut fall and take it with me to California in a bottle or something? Can I package that smell of rot and tree death in the air that triggers all those ideas? How about an air freshener? A Glade candle? Hmmm?
I really need to get back into my posting regime on this blog. I’ve been slacking big time. How about something from a super rough draft of yet another dream I had, this one involving werewolves. I woke up with such a strong urge to write this one down that I couldn’t resist it. There aren’t any werewolves in this particular part but the overall premise is that this boy moves to this town where it’s all werewolves. I actually ended up switching from first to third POV further along in the writing. It demanded it.
I’d seen these types of places in the movies and one of two things always happened – nothing or something. It’d either put you to sleep (or make Mom cry and Dad bored) or make you afraid of the dark. There was never a middle. There had to be a reason those movie people did that, right? I mean, they’re not called stereotypes for nothing. It’s like urban legends. They had to start somewhere.
The fact that we’d driven through a tunnel drilled into the side of a mountain was the first clue. The second was that the valley we’d driven into looked like a giant had carved it out with an ice cream scoop. I bet my dad my Jeter rookie that if he kept driving we’d have to go through another mountain tunnel to get out. The third clue (you know the kind that slap you in the face) was the welcome sign. There was the mountains with some clouds below the peaks and the town below that. There were some plants and animals drawn on it and the average family with two point four kids (I wish someone would take that literally and, for once, paint half a baby or something) waving us in, standing next to the same sign painted in it. It’s the Brady Bunch mirror from Hell. And the mirror said, ‘Welcome to Drayden, circa 1847, population 1200.’
1200. I think there were more kids in my school than in this town. At that point my goal was to figure out if this was a nothing or something town. If it’s nothing, I knew my Mom wouldn’t be the one crying. But knock on wood and all that black cat stuff, I almost hoped this was a something town. At least then I wouldn’t be bored into a coma.
“Chenzie, sweetheart, I think Jax needs a pee. Take him out, would you?”
“But Ma, we’re almost there. He can hold it. And it’s Vinny. I’m too old for Chenzie.”
“Chen–Vin, that dogs pees in the car, you’re going to clean it with your toothbrush. Leash him. Now.”
Dad was the word of god this time. Him and Mom split the throne whenever they needed me to do something, or punish me for something.
And I swear I’m going to start wearing a sandwish board that says, ‘It’s Vinny’ so they get it. Vincenzo’s a cool name. You’d think Vinny’d be the default nickname. No. Not Vinny. Not Vin. Not Chenzo. Not even Chaz. Chenzie. Sounds like what a yuppie’d name their Labradoodle or something. I needed them to start calling me Vinny before I started to grow a vagina.
Jaz was gnawing on his leash when I grabbed it and clipped his collar. Mom said something as I hopped over the seat and Dad popped the trunk. I think she said something about a monkey but Jax was pulling too hard for me to care.
I hate it when Mom’s right. Even about dog pee. I’d like to think I know my own dog but I guess I don’t got his bladder timed like it should. As he watered the grass, I looked around. From where I stood, it looked like a whole lot of nothing.
I’d never seen mountain peaks like that before except when I was flying over them. From the air they always looked brown. From here they were kind of gray. The tops were the same white though. There was this weak haze over everything, like it was trying to burn off but was too lazy to go all the way. I could tell the sky was blue and the sun was out but the fog glared it out. This was why people weren’t meant to see morning this early. The earth wasn’t even awake yet.
Jax had finished with his grassy toilet and started taking me for a walk. I just followed him. It was easier that way. He knew where he needed to go. I wasn’t the one pissing on the grass. It was only when I’d felt the tug that I realized I’d dazed again. I looked back and Jax’s paws were planted and his collar was wedged up under his chin. He wasn’t moving.
“What the hell, Jax? Come on.”
“Chenzie, don’t swear!” came Mom’s voice from the car.
“Vinny, Mom!”
“Only when you stop swearing.”
“Shit,” I mumbled into my sleeve.
Jax was whining now and had actually laid down, his nose between his paws. When I started walking to him he stood up and wagged his tail. When he started walking the other way, I stopped and let the leash pull. He turned around and tugged. When he saw I wasn’t moving, he laid down again. When I started walking, the whole thing started again.
Weird dog. We walked for a few more minutes. I kept trying to pull him back to where I was standing but he wouldn’t go. Went all non-violent protester on me again. So I walked him further into the field and tried to turn him. No dice. He looked at me as if to say, ‘You think I’m stupid, don’t you?’
It wasn’t until I saw Mom flagging us back to the car that I realized that Jax wouldn’t cross the invisible town line. I eyeballed the path of the sign to me and stepped over it. Jax sat down. I tugged. He tugged back and started to whine.
Definitely a weird dog. What should I expect from something that only ate half of those little green men when I was a kid? Always the heads.
I crossed back over the line and he got up and was all normal. Dogs sensed things and all that. Maybe this was going to be a something town after all. If for nothing more than it made my dog all sorts of weird.
I tried to climb back over the seat but Mom squealed and Dad had to pop the trunk again. I had to take the long way to put the dog back. And then we were off again. I thought my dog was being weird in the field. As soon as we’d crossed that sign line, that’s when Jax started to bark. Bark and whine. Really weird dog.
A former speechwriter under Bush part deux’s regime, Matt Latimer, indicates in his memoir that Bush Duh denied JK Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her Harry Potter books promoted witchcraft.
O_o
That’s how your face should look.
O_o
Nevermind how she pretty much single-handedly reformed young adult reading with her books and spurned multiple generations of readers. Her books promote witchcraft.
Among other recipients of of the Medal of Freedom, Charlton Heston.
O_o
Head of the National Rifle Association = good. Young adult fantasy writer = bad.
Got it. What if I wrote young adult books about guns? Would that work?
Here’s the final draft of the Halloween short I posted last week. At least the beginning’s tighter.
Jack looked into the pillowcase. A sugar high yelled back. The lady in the doorway smiled. You’re too old. Jack looked at his friends. No they weren’t.
‘Thanks.’
He stumbled to the street. He opened the sack again. Everything was twitching. The Twizzlers had a hole in it. Something was growling.
The pillowcase started swinging. It whapped Jack in the leg. He already lagged behind. No one could see his candy spazzing.
The pillowcase wigged out more. The snarling got louder. Jack cringed thinking of hugging it to his body. He couldn’t let his friends see.
Little candy bars jerked and twitched against his stomach. Each poke made his guts flop. Jack shivered. The wet on his neck made the cold worse.
Jack looked behind him. Then in front. The streets were darker. Porch lights were shut off. There were fewer houses to turn to. Jack’s friends still laughed and shoved. Jack shivered.
Pain dug across Jack’s stomach. He sucked in cold air getting colder. It hurt his teeth. He looked down and moved the pillowcase. There was a spot of blood on the sack. The one on his t-shirt oozed bigger.
Home was a green sign on the corner. It flashed at Jack. He beelined down the street. The pillowcase still squirmed. His friends didn’t notice.
Every house was dark. It wrapped around him as he zipped by. It slowed him down. His porch light was on. Ugly orange mums were out. His gut churned.
The curb grabbed his toe. The shadows pulled the sack out of his arms. The dewy grass yanked his knees down. The wet soaked through his jeans. The cold got colder.
A gust blew. Snickers skin slapped his face. The pillowcase was in front of Jack. The shadows gnawed half of it. It bled Milky Ways on the grass. It was still.
Jack’s heart knocked at his ribcage. It pulled at his throat. It beat in his ears.
The blood spot on the sack glared back. Jack touched his finger to his stomach. He cringed. He looked down. He pulled the t-shirt up. The gouge stared back. It was polluted with t-shirt fuzz.
The pillowcase was still.
Jack’s street was stagnant. The shadows stole the noise.
Something poked his calf. Jack swat. He looked at his leg. It was nothing.
Something poked his back. Jack hit. The sting echoed. His hand was heavy. He looked. It was nothing.
Nothing pricked up his arm. He couldn’t look. The back of his neck tore. Pain played dancing stars in his eyes. Skin popped. Little daggers ripped. Nothing was out of breath. Nothing snarled in Jack’s ear.
Nothing stopped Jack’s scream. Jack’s face hit the ground. Babe Ruth crinkled. She caught his fall. Ugly orange mums were out. Jack’s porch light was on.
Jack’s porch light went off.
Comfort zone, that is. And I’m not talking so much about genre as I am about style.
I edited my little Halloween short that I posted last week and whereas I normally end up writing slightly sprawling sentences, the majority of them ended up being exceptionally short. By any standard. It was odd to write but the style just appeared there of its own accord, as if it were meant to be written in short, choppy sentences. Now I know short sentences, given the right setting, convey suspense. But that wasn’t it here. I was aiming for something more. What, I have no idea.
When I got through the first edit, I went through again and shortened up the sentences I felt were too long. Those stragglers. I think my longest sentence had all of 7 words. Maybe. But I can say doing that is harder than drawing out sentences. Anyone can ramble. I’m notorious for doing that. But cutting your words down to only the bare minimum is one of the hardest things to do. So why did it come so naturally to this story?
I don’t get it.
Writing within a word maximum is hard enough. I love my rambling. But why did it dictate and even more stringent style within those confines? The style came so easy but the crafting proved more difficult. How can I have both things for the same work? How can the same words be both easy and hard to formulate? How can it come so naturally but it’s toil to get it right?
Does this make sense? Why did the act come so easily but the technique was so hard? It seems like a juxtaposition. Has this happened to anyone else? Where a certain short dictated a particular style so easily but when they went to write it, it was like pulling teeth? Yet there was just no other way? Please tell me I’m not crazy.
I feel like that’s all I do with my writing – make excuses. I try to reason with myself, convince myself, that there are perfectly valid reasons why I didn’t write today or yesterday or whenever.
For most of this week it was because of a sinus infection from hell. Well, it was a sinus infection fueled by a cold sprinkled with a little bit of a flu. The symptom-a-day was nine different levels of awesome. O_o It started on Monday where I was a little extra drippy in the morning (I have chronic post-nasal drip anyway) but it was nothing. Then by 10 am I started to clog. By lunch time I was full on can’t-breathe-out-of-my-upper-face and I ended up leaving work an hour early. Damn, did I feel shitty.
At about 3:30 on Tuesday morning someone must have shoved glass down my throat because I ended up making a run to a 24-hour drug store to get something to quell the pain. Then I got a low-grade fever and I stayed home from work and drowned myself in Theraflu. That stuff knocks you out faster than NyQuil, I swear. My fever went up to a high-grade temp that night.
Wednesday the clog was a little less, my throat wasn’t screaming but the nausea came and my fever was back down again to 96. I felt like some kind of lizard. The doc said sinus infection and handed me a prescription for this warp speed antibiotic pack. I didn’t fill it. Temp stayed low-grade and I started losing track of the days.
Thursday I made the attempt to go into work. I was still clogged, my temp was still 96 and apparently the more I moved around, the worse I got. Working on the 15th floor of a building is not the best place for a person with an untreated sinus infection to be. Boy did that suck. I lasted about an hour and a half before I said ‘I’m out’ and cried myself out of the building for it felt like my teeth were about to blow out of my mouth from the pressure. The antibiotic prescription was filled. Another symptom introduced itself but I’ll keep that one private. It’s not pleasant.
Friday I was somewhat better but the temp was still low. I was able to run a few errands although I maybe shouldn’t have been driving. Over the course of those few days I finished my Dracula: The-Undead book I was reading and started a new one. I even finished a chapter in my fic last night because I was inspired by another fic writer who was inspired by my own writing. It’s a cycle.
Today I’m still inching along in the better department. Too much moving around still is not good for my nausea factor but I’m slowly working at it. I’ve eaten two substantial meals today as opposed to the barely one a day I’ve been eating the last week. The last anything of substance I’ve consumed was on Monday when we all went out to lunch at work. And I thought I was going to throw it up.
At this rate I doubt I’ll be 100% for work on Monday and I’m sure the elevation won’t help but I don’t have much choice. I think I’m already in the negative numbers for sick days but they’re going to get docked from next year. Plus the work is just going to keep piling up and that sucks. And I’m getting flabby again. Working out might not be in my best interest right now but we’ll see.
I plan on editing that short I put out on Wednesday because I can’t enter it into the contest I wrote it for until I do. For whatever reason, I can’t write beginnings. You’d think by now I’d have some kind of grasp on them but I start all my stories in the same meandering way and it takes me a bit to get a foothold before I find the pace I want. Perhaps that’s my writing curse. Everyone has one, right? Something that no matter how many times they edit and work at it, they still are burdened with it? I think so. It’s like I don’t know where the real beginning is until I’ve actually written the thing and then it sparks into my head where it really needs to start. Hence the massive amounts of editing I end up doing.
And the excuses that I make. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think I make too many excuses. I fully admit to myself that I’m lazy and don’t feel like writing. I don’t need an excuse for that. It’s just that every once in a while I need to justify to myself my laziness.
Holy crap, did this just sound like some sick person’s ramblings or what?
I really wanted to edit this a bit before I put it up here but, you know, I didn’t ask for this sinus infection so what you get is the rough draft. It’s slightly cringe-worthy, at least to me. Typing it in I seemed to pick up the pace that I wanted towards the end but, like always, I ramble too much at the beginning. Thankfully I already know how I want to edit it.
Fourteen was definitely not too old to go trick-or-treating. But believing in ghouls and creatures was. Never mind they were all dressed like them. That was just pretend.
Jack opened up his pillowcase again and random pieces of candy were twitching around. He could see a hole torn right through the middle of a Twizzlers package. When the thing, buried in the sack, started to groan, Jack closed up the top of the pillowcase and dropped it down at his side. It swung a good six inches off his body. Hopefully nobody else would notice his awkward walk. He should have opted for the rubber mask. His fear would have hidden better behind that instead of face paint.
Two houses ago Jack thought he felt something heavy drop into his bag when he was reaching into the candy bowl. When he looked, it was just a pillowcase half-full with candy. He looked at the lady in the doorway. She just half-smiled at him. It was the same look they got at the rest of the houses, because those people thought they were too old too.
The pillowcase started kicking up and swinging around. It whapped Jack in the leg a couple of times. At least he was at the back of the group and they couldn’t see him or his candy spazzing out.
The sack swung wider and wider and the snarls weren’t so muffled by the candy anymore. The last thing Jack wanted to do was hug the sack to him to stop it from twitching. It was either that or hold it away from him like he had a pissed off cat inside.
Something inside was pissed off.
The sack squirmed and twitched against Jack’s body. The candy bars writhed around like fingers, poking and brushing and jabbing. Each crinkled stick made his stomach flop. Beads of sweat were starting to form on his neck. Mixed with the cold air, it made his chills even more violent.
All Jack could hear was the snarling and crunching inside his bag. He could see the smiles on his friends’ faces. They were shoving each other, having fun. They hadn’t turned to a house in a while and the street was getting darker as fewer and fewer houses had their porch lights on.
Something sharp dug across Jack’s stomach and he sucked in the cold air through his teeth. He looked down and already the while pillowcase had a spot of blood on it.
Nothing else mattered except the green reflective street sign that signaled home only yards ahead. The group came to the corner and Jack yelled, “I’m out!” as he zoomed around the curb and bee-lined for his house. The guys said things but it was just static compared to the snarling at his stomach. Why didn’t they notice?
His feet couldn’t walk fast enough as the powered past dark house after dark house. A beacon of light lit his door step like a flood light and Jack’s tunnel vision narrowed in on his own stoop. He’d never felt so happy to see ugly orange mums.
Jack could feel what happened before his brain could process it. The toe of his sneaker caught the curb, the pillowcase launched out of his arms and his knees slammed into the dewy grass.
At first it was just the wet through his jeans he could feel. Then his heart started knocking on his rib cage as a small gust of wind flapped a small candy wrapper into his face. Just a few short feet ahead of him, the white pillowcase stood out in the shadows, its sugary guts spilled out all over the grass. It was still.
The blood pulsed in Jack’s ears as his eyes flashed from the gutter to his side to the shrubs and back to the sack. It was still. Even from where he sprawled he could see the red blot of blood his stomach left behind. He lifted up his shirt and there was the tear in his skin. Blood smeared all around the wound and bits of t-shirt fuzz stuck to it.
The sack still wasn’t moving.
Jack’s street was silent. Not even any bugs.
He felt a pressure on the back of his calf and frantically swat at whatever it was. When he looked over his shoulder, it was nothing.
There was a poke at his back which Jack swat at with a heavy hand. He felt the sting of the hit but when he twisted around to look, it was nothing.
Something scurried up his arm but before Jack could even reach to hit, there was horror at the back of his neck. The pain flashed stars in his eyes. As the teeth tore further into his skin and he could hear it popping under pressure. Jack heard the short, breathy snarls of the thing in his ear.
Jaws clamped harder and Jack’s voice caught in his throat, not being able to make it to a yell. He could see the front porch lit up with a yellow bulb, and those stupid orange mums, before his head hit the ground, crinkling a candy wrapper.
The porch light flared and went black.
