Entries Tagged 'writing' ↓

Sherwood Nation, in green and heavily commented. I’d like to think that this book I began writing in earnest in January 2010 in Brazil is nearing completion, 19 months later, as the sun finally begins to shine in Portland.
Phew.

Looks like that probably won’t be the final title, as there are several books out there already called ‘The Enclave‘

All the same, I’m very happy to have it in a version I can pass off to a first round of readers. It’s been a couple of years of radio silence with it.  It came in at 121k words, though I suspect there’ll be some wrangling yet. Hope you’re having a swell Presidents day.

I’m going to try to do some housecleaning here before we get over to 2011. So effking futuristic are we, no? Except for flying cars.

OK:

- My short story Hamlet was picked up by Bellevue Literary Review and should be out this Spring (here’s BLR on Facebook).

- I believe the Turkish-language rights for Couch have been sold to Domingo Publishing. So if you speak Turkish, voila!

- David Naimon and I are now officially calling our co-written short story, entitled The Voyage, a book. So presumptuous! So exciting! We’re just under 20k words in.

- Laura Moulton’s website is way over-due for an overhaul, which is my spousal responsibility. So in the meantime I’ll mention a few of her goings-on here:

• She was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant for her project StreetBooks!
• She has a great piece coming out in Street Roots soon (< That link searches for ‘Laura Moulton’ on streetroots.org – right now it just comes up with her Brazil article & Project Hamad)
• Her book is coming along – (I’m currently reading the first 100 pages).

- Speaking of novels…mine is still in progress. Laura’s editing the first 75 pages which are considered to be semi-final. There are another 325 pages lying in wait of further edits.

- Taleoh.com is still being coded…

I think that’s it, or all that I can remember presently. Enjoy the last few days of 2010.

My Strange Horizons story Birds appears to have been translated into Chinese and published here, along with a birds graphic. Pretty much a mystery to me.

If you’d rather read Birds translated into Chinese (I assume by a human?) and then back to English again (by Google’s machinery), you can give that a go. The last line in that new hybrid version is “My mind floated the infinite regret.” Which brings to mind the Airborne Toxic Event from DeLillo’s White Noise.

Sylvie, in her infinite 3-year-old wisdom, found this at a rummage sale.

Ever since, it’s taunted me, calling out in its helium voice: “Are you ready to become a smart writer?” Apparently my plodderly, non-smart-writer-footfalls shakes it into sudden, optimistic action. It wants to save me. It wants to pump me up.

Link to file if it doesn’t play
Go head, play it a couple of times. Now a couple of more. Now imagine you’re up in the dark of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell to resolve the inverted convolution that is your plot. That snarled, brambly, thorny patch of chaos? Yes, that one. The cat wants out, the cat wants in, the coffee maker is slowly leaking, and this guy, this guy is asking you if you’re ready to become a smart writer. Well, are you?

Here’s a close-up of his face.

You can tell by his coked-up eyes, he’s quite confident in his own writing ability. He just wants to help you with yours. On the bright side, there’s a button on the gizmo that I’ll be using to write my next book, or possibly I’ll use one of the others to create a smart doodle or a smart shape. The future is mine!

That’s all.

Laura and I are both working on new books and last weekend we put all our our scenes onto post-it notes and stuck them to the wall.

I saw Diana Rowland do this at the Rio Hondo Writer’s Workshop. While hers had way more zombies in it than both our novels put together, it was a very fun exercise. Though made significantly less fun by the fact that no one was eating anyone else’s brain.

Laura’s (and Laura) is on the right. Orange bits represent unwritten scenes — she’s pointing out her strategery here. (you can click the picture to see it larger, but not really large enough to read the text.)

Mine is all in rows on the left, with just those last four pink squares at the end signifying unwritten scenes. Quite by chance our books are at about the same place — just a few short steps away from completed first draft. At one hopeful, innocent moment long ago I thought perhaps that I’d only need a few edit-passes through before completion. Since then, and mid-way through the book, I radically changed what the book was about, so, well, I suppose you could say I’m a lot less innocent now.

I’m not yet sure what I’ve learned from the exercise yet except that Post-it notes make terribly garish wallpaper, and that whenever I enter the room I feel how my book looms there brightly-colored and ominous. Though I do revisit the wall now and then and move the papers around, and then move them back. So I got that going for me.