The Blue Candle Society

Mere weeks after the thumb drive I use to store all of my fiction quietly died, my whole main computer, whereupon all the backups of the files I’d remembered to make from the thumb drive reside, became an utter basket case of alarms and deceitful warning windows, victim of malware.  Fortunately, somewhere along the line the folks at Microsoft came up with the notion of a system restore, a brilliant tool for just pretending the last few days of your computer’s life never happened.  All Most Some is forgive, Bill Gates!  At any rate, this has finally inspired me to start doing proper backups again.  For real this time.

Posted in General writing things

For what seemed like a whole handful of seconds, Israel was frozen, stuck ludicrously half-way into a yawn, then he spent another few moments he didn’t have to waste trying to decide whether to go for the gun in the glove compartment, roll up the window, or just start the car. Before he could do anything, she was there, leaning toward the open window, hatchet not exactly raised, but hovering near waist height looking like it could come right on through and into the side of his head at a moment’s notice.

“What-” she began, then stopped, mouth open. It was handy at times, having his tattoo right out on his face. It cut down on the sort of circling chit-chat he had to engage in with society members he was meeting for the first time. In this case, it also confirmed for him, if her paranoid alertness hadn’t, that he was looking at a fellow society member. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip, Part 8’

Posted in Serials

I try to keep posts about the Craft of Writing to a minimum, mainly because I have visions potential readers seeing them and rushing off to comics curmudgeon or passive-aggressive notes, never to return again.  But I suppose I should keep the literary tone up a bit, and generate a bit of unique content now and again, so I’m going to put down a few thoughts on this whole serial thing I’m doing.  It is kind of interesting comparing it to my normal writing process (interesting to me, anyway).  It is something of a high-wire act since it is still not done, and I’m just trying to keep a few installments ahead of the snapping jaws of readers out there (I am officially a professional author, and don’t recommend most people attempt this level of metaphor).  This was pretty easy at first, since for the first few thousand words almost anything could be fixin’ to happen, and I had a lot of flexibility to come up with new ideas and change my mind about what would happen later.  Every word I write locks things down a bit more, though, and closes off more possible endings, as well as creating more things I have to remember and stay true to.  Back in the first installment, I could have decided that it would be interesting for Israel to head for the Everglades, or steal an airplane, but it’s too late now (well, I could go back and change things, but that would be cheating).  It reminds me a bit of trying to lay out a sidewalk with too large of a load of cement.  As soon as I mix that bag the clock starts, and I only have so much time to fiddle with one piece, getting it just so, while other pieces are hardening.

This would probably be a different matter for many authors, but I tend to 1) write light on the first draft and add text and 2) have only a vague notion of the plot when I get started.  In other words, rewrites tend to involve me going back and adding in details to make the story work with something I just realized should have happened, as opposed to trimming.  I often wish I could be the sort who outlines, and I sort of hoped this process would push me toward doing that, but not so far.  Anyway, I have a vague notion of how this puppy will end, but that second-to-last bit is proving elusive.  We shall see.

Posted in General writing things, Serials

But what the heck, I’ve had another few rejections lately, so this, from McSweeney’s seems appropriate.  Anyway, I just realized that I haven’t posted in a while, and I wanted to get something out today.  I’ll have a fascinating post on writing serials Thursday, but I don’t have the time to wrap it up just now.

Posted in General writing things

Israel sat in his car and rubbed his eyes. He wished he could remember exactly how he’d gotten where he was. He remembered arriving at the trailer JT Quinn owned early in the morning, and finding it already empty, no cars in the driveway. He’d even explored the burned-out ruins near the trailer, though there hadn’t been much to see there. Now he was parked on the road across from a much nicer place, a big house with a four-acre lawn, in a town he didn’t even know the name of, and it was closing in on noon Whatever had happened in between was too vague for comfort. No wonder, really, considering he’d driven from Wyoming to New York only daring to sleep in snatches here and there. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip, Part 7’

Posted in Serials

This isn’t literary or anything, but it seems that assuming my chainsaw doesn’t fall apart, I have some work for it.  A few hours back I fell rather heavily against one of the many hawthornes cluttering up the back 40 (thrown there by an inconvenient lurch from the brushcutter, which also seems to be holding together).  This hurt enough to startle a few choice words out of me, as contact with hawthornes often does, but being the stoic that I am I shrugged it off until hours later when I thought to take a glance in the mirror, and saw this:

To be precise, I didn’t see the nickel – it is there for scale.  I also didn’t really see the inch-long thorn, just an end-on view of the base of the thing (until I’d grabbed it and hauled it out of my hide, of course).  Normally, I don’t bother cutting down hawthornes because they tend to cluster so close together to one another that when one cuts through a trunk on one it just sits there, smugly supported by the interwoven branches of its chums.  But I think it may be time to revisit my policy.

Posted in Uncategorized

Ana Mardoll has written a post on eye colors in fiction,  something I might have commented on, were I not sort of lazy.  At the very least, she went into a hell of a lot more depth than I would have.  She also avoids the criticism that might be leveled at me: that I, with my boring brown eyes,  am simply jealous of interesting eye colors.

Posted in General writing things

Israel had gotten the idea of where to go from a woman named Nails, who as far as Israel was concerned belonged in the private mental institution the Blue Candle Society ran more than he did. After all, she’d gotten her name by tearing her own eye out with her own fingernails when she’d seen something so horrible she didn’t want the picture to get into her brain, which was crazier than anything Israel had ever done. On the other hand, it seemed to have worked, since she was a lot happier than most of the people actually living at the institution in Kaycee. He supposed she must have been really quick, and had her other eye closed at the time as well. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip, Part 6’

Posted in Serials

There’s still a patch of snow near here that I pass on my way to work, but I’m already sick of mowing the lawn.  I should be living a life of the mind, lolling about and suffering bouts of ennui between furious bursts of writing, not puttering around behind a lawn mower (I once heard a wanna-be author make pretty much that argument to an agent (about why she shouldn’t have to write query letters, not mow the lawn) – didn’t go over well).  Anyway, I’m pretty sure F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t have to mow his lawn.

Posted in Uncategorized

I don’t think this XKCD was actually referring to the same thing I was on my previous post on automation, but who knows?

Posted in Uncategorized