I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about last month.
Most people have already done their National Novel Writing Month thoughts and reactions. It’s taken me a while to get my thoughts together about those thirty days. It was a fun time: I always enjoy hanging out with my fellow Lawrence writers. But it wasn’t a particularly productive time. I didn’t “win”. Officially, I gave up at about 35k words and three days to go, but I’m pretty sure I actually gave up sometime in October.
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When I pissed on my best friend’s grave, I didn’t mean anything by it. I had good intentions. But what can go wrong, will go wrong. I stopped at the cemetery after the reception to pay my respects to Chuckles: the man, the myth, my friend since grade school. The bar had been packed. I devoted myself to drinking for both me and Chuckles and drank roughly the equivalent of Milwaukee’s gross domestic beer product.
After the Sheriff threw me out of Billy’s House of Brews, I stumbled across a goddamn acre of the mayor’s snow-covered corn fields, cutting through to the cemetery on the opposite side. Chuckles had been laid to rest in the Fairfax Community Cemetery after a tragic incident involving a bottle of cheap grain alcohol, a sled, and a Ford F150. The snow drifted in waves across the open field. Patches of bare, trampled corn stalks exchanged glances with windswept snow dunes. Each step was a leap of faith. My feet crunched through the icy crust and jarred against hard soil. Hidden corn stalk punji sticks jabbed my feet. I tugged my ankles from the sucking grip of the heavy, wet snow. I tripped. I fell. I crawled, and I stumbled. By the time I reached the cemetery, my church slacks were soaked through. (more…)
“What’s it’s name?” Britten peered down, bending over with his hands on his knees. His black hair was wild. The garage was chilly but not too cold. Barber had moved his car out into the driveway and Britten had parked right behind him. A single bulb burned in a socket separate from the door opener. One of those twisty, low-energy things. It was enough to see by but not enough to chase all the shadows from the corners.
“He says it’s Arvo. There was a long string of sounds before and after,” Barber said, “but we agreed Arvo was his name.”
“Bizarre.”
“Indeed.”
Britten stood up and planted his hands on his hips, considered the alien held captive in the chair. He paced back and forth, never taking his eyes off Arvo. When he stopped, he crossed his left arm across his chest then stroked his chin with the fingers of his right hand.
“I mean, he understands English.” (more…)
Long Live the Queen (LLtQ) is a darkly cute, somewhat macabre strategy/simulation game. You are Crown Princess Elodie, fourteen and heir to the throne after the sudden death of your mother. You’ve returned home from boarding school to be trained in the ways of court before your coronation on your 15th birthday.
Assuming, that is, you live that long. There are many others who would love to take the throne for themselves. Assassins, rebels, usurpers, monsters and other dangers abound and it’s up to you to navigate the morass and survive to coronation.
Neil Gaiman does it. J. K. Rowling, too. Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare— most of the greats of English literature have done it.
Yet when I tell people that I write my novels in longhand they react as though I am some kind of exotic creature. Writerii masochisteria, perhaps.
I have nothing to say.
Inaccurate: I have a lot to say about how I feel about fiction writing, the goals I have for next year, or even the mild bitterness about my ex-husband’s support of those goals. But my immediate urge is to self-censor all that:
This is a community blog; no one needs your bullshit. You’ve already used that “writing is hard” meme a dozen times. Making goals is a recipe for failure; just go with the flow. Stop thinking in thoughts separated by a semi-colon.
I’m willing to bet if I pull up the Google Machine right now and search “writing self-censoring,” I’ll already find a dozen topics on the ways that writers shy away from opening themselves up on the page. I’m not going to do that, because it would be another reason not to write about it.
In just over a week, we will arrive at the annual End-of-December holiday, one we have been building up to for weeks maybe even months. I refer, of course, to The Doctor Who Christmas Special. With his special event nearly upon us, I thought I would take a look back at the most recent episode to air, the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special.
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I don’t think it would be a stretch to call Cormac McCarthy one of our era’s greatest American writers. He has certainly carried the torch of a variety of writers that came before him, from Hemingway to O’Connor. McCarthy is known for his stripped down prose, and The Sunset Limited takes it even a step further.
If you have read The Road, Child of God, or any of his other books, then you know that McCarthy works as a mechanical minimalist. He uses only the sparsest punctuation and avoids dialogue tags whenever possible. His style is gritty, realistic, and grotesque in a wonderful Southern Gothic sense.
The Sunset Limited has the usual bleak McCarthy tone, but is written entirely in dramatic form. This is essentially a play script. However, its stage directions are more sparse than most plays. Really, the format seems to be McCarthy challenging himself. Whereas a lot of his novels force him to write so tight that there is no doubt who is speaking, regardless of notation, this seems to be an experiment in stripping a novel down to dialogue only.
Been awhile since I’ve been here in any regular capacity. It seems, as I expected, that the Cafe has survived quite nicely and even thrived in my absence. For those who don’t know, here’s the short version: I got sick, really sick, and had to take some time to get healthy before I could think straight about what I needed to do to be a writer. Let me tell you up front that coming close to dying can truly change one’s mindset. Anyway, I’m a lot better and the outlook is good.
All right, enough about that. It’s old news at this point for anyone who knows me and tedious going for everyone else who doesn’t really care. I mentioned it to give some context to why I think about certain things and how they may’ve changed.
Now [rubs hands together], let’s get back to it, shall we? (more…)