Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

I am a sucker for Internet narcissism and thus I went through “I Write Like” with the first pages of all my NaNo’s:

My brain-destroyingly terrible sci-fi entry from 2009:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My trashy gay noir 2008 NaNoWriMo, Particular People:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2007′s redneck vampire-centric Tooth and Nail:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

In the Fuck Yes department, 2006′s horror fantasy noir The Palanquin Cat:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2005′s sci-fi sequel Root Shell:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2004′s sci-fi adventure Shell Access:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2003′s poli-sci-fi Life, Liberty And…:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Given that one’s about a Libertarian governor who completely fucks things up, that’s pretty satisfying.

51,600 words and finished in a hurry. I hated it. I’m not linking it. Maybe in a year or two. Bascha or Josh can ask me for a copy via email but dear gods, no one wants to read this. No one good should ever want to read this. Still, digital schwag:

Weekend travels and an overwhelming hate of the book so far have slowed me down. I am determined to finish before Thursday, though, which may have me up half the night on Wednesday but it will be worth it. The Boyf has been insanely patient with my short fuse as I have slogged this far. Things are going to be so nice come Thursday.

Interesting to me is the fact that when I switched perspective characters at 35,000 words, for what I thought would just be a scene, I was instantly more engaged. I can’t make him the perspective character the whole time, but I am going to try to make him the perspective character for as much as I can of what remains. The words, like spice, must flow.

Just over 25,000 words as of today and almost entirely unrelentingly awful. Seriously, fantasy? Never. Again.

I started last night just after midnight. I went to D&D today, so that was a big chunk of non-writing time, but I still made it past the 3,000 word mark. Here’s a PDF link for Bascha.

I face a quandary: write my NaNo using the Dyson Sphere setting invented by my gaming group and friends of ours a few years ago or write another Withrow story?

Pros/Cons of the Dyson Sphere world:

• new setting (pro)
• new setting (con)
• characters that aren’t yet fully defined and the ones that are don’t yet wholly interest me (con)
• a whole world of societies and cultures to create, or at least several different societies/cultures to create (con)
• opportunity to design whole societies & cultures (pro)
• a setting that I find really engaging and interesting after having had it in the back of my mind for years (pro)
• what I consider, on first examination, to be a pretty clever use of the undead in a story (pro)
• a genuinely creepy thing about how the undead work in that world (pro)
• possibly way too much story for 50K (pro & con)
• no idea where the story ends or what it’s about beyond some very vague one-line thematic descriptions, such as “fulfillment is living to see the realization of a goal, not dying in its service” and “to run away from one situation is usually to run towards another” (con)
• five weeks before NaNo starts (con).

Pros/cons of the new Withrow story:

• characters that are pretty much fully-formed and interesting to me (pro)
• it’s a semi-sequel to a NaNo I’ve already written and my one experience with a sequel was terrible (con)
• set in the town where I live, so super-easy to research with many possibilities for field trips (pro)
• too much opportunity for distraction in the name of “research” (con)
• possibly not enough story for 50K words without padding like hell (con)
• a character I already know I love to write (pro)
• a character I’ve already possibly written too much (con)

I’m at a loss. In the meantime I’m trying to do character sketches for the Dyson Sphere world. I didn’t have a name for it until five minutes ago, which was itself almost enough to get me to abandon it. I guess my real quandary is, do I do NaNo to challenge myself (Dyson Sphere world) or to enjoy myself (Withrow story)? No one reads them and I have no delusion of turning them into a great literary career so they really are for my enjoyment alone but I also really do like to approach it as an exercise, not just an entertainment.

Bleah.

Dark Stores from the site Not If But When.

Particular People (PDF link), my NaNoWriMo last year, was set in the very real 100 Oaks Mall – a wonderfully ironic name that made me wonder if that’s how many trees they cut down to build the place or if they instead had installed 100 saplings in containers inside the mall. 100 Oaks was a Nashville, TN, shopping mall that opened and closed repeatedly over the course of its life. It’s now been bought by Vanderbilt and is being redeveloped as medical offices or something. When I asked KJ to get me pictures of it last year she couldn’t because it had been closed off in preparation for that work.

On a practical level, of course, it’s always preferable to see existing spaces redeveloped instead of new projects take up new spaces but were I king tomorrow I would decree that a certain percentage of dead retail and development spaces had to be kept around, unmaintained, as silent monuments to… something. Hubris? Ecology? I don’t even know what lesson is to be learned there, just that there is a lesson there of some sort. That the CitySearch page for 100 Oaks is still up is both amusing and insufficient.

So, I am definitely doing Script Frenzy in April. (Crud, April? That’s really, really soon.) I’m going to be writing a comic book script because that’s a medium I love so, you know, since I don’t know a damned thing about writing a script I might as well enjoy myself while I screw up. I’m currently kicking the following around in conversations:

What could possibly fuel a really serious beef against a university? Assume a full-fledged university with an attached hospital and medical school, the works. Mr. Pink Eyes very keenly suggested someone who might have had, you know, surgery performed on them using instruments soaked by accident in hydraulic fluid rather than antiseptic, such as happened at an august local institution. I like that. I like that a lot. Unfortunately, it’s too close to fact. Variants? Other ideas? Someone cut from a sports team? Someone whose entire sport/academic department/major/sorority/library gets shut down in the shite economy?

Any suggestions are most welcome.

Also, NEVERMORE‘s lineup is out and wow. Classic horror films (IN 3-D!) next to a hilarious shorts collection next to a bunch of new horror and NC premieres? Hells yes. I am ordering a 10-pass if any of the usual suspects see something they’d like to see and I’ve got an extra ticket for it. I’m particularly interested in Blackspot, The Disappeared and Reel Zombies.

Tangential: isn’t it about time NEVERMORE started giving out prizes? Maybe it’s a huge pain in the ass, maybe it requires a whole ado of certification or dues in the League of Award-Granting Film Festivals, I honestly have no idea, but I would have paid extra to get to vote for American Astronaut for best feature the year they showed it; the same goes for The Host and… damn. Now I’ve forgotten the name of that amazing movie I watched last year, the super-cold 1950′s gangster movie. Damn. Anyway, that.

After having read this story when it was linked from Unfogged earlier this week I have been unable to stop talking about the idea of real-life superheroes. Back in the day, Aaron used to run a group story project thing and in it were a few “normal guy superheroes.” Eventually, if I recall correctly, those of us who wrote some of them threw in the concept of there being a sort of combination farm league and trade union made up of all the Normal Guy Superheroes – Flash Gordon, for instance, or Ash from the Evil Dead movies.

At any rate, the more I talk about this idea that real people decide to put on a costume and go bust crackhouses or whatever – becoming, as I said to The Boyf, the middle ground between the saying “be the change you want to see in the world” and Katmandu’s fabulous “be the trouble you want to see in the world” t-shirt – the more obsessed I become with what Durham’s local superhero would be like if we had one.

The way I figure, she or he would pretty much have to go by the monicker “The Bull’s-Eye.” Given our architecture and the general Faded Glory/Urban Decay prom theme we have going downtown, she or he would need to be one of the trench-coated, goggled, fedora-wearing types. The calling card would be the obvious emblem of a bull’s-eye. They would need to be more a criminologist than a ruffian. Durham would happily play home to a Batman or a Golden Age Sandman but not so much a Superman or The Flash. They would be the detective type, collecting evidence and leaving bundled baddies on the steps of the police station.

Now that I think about it, that actually happens in The Dark Knight, doesn’t it? See, that’s what I’m talking about.

Such trains of thought naturally lead me to wonder what would result if this were to happen in the World of Darkness version of the Triangle inhabited by more than one of my group’s tabletop games over the years. Were Withrow to encounter the Bull’s-Eye running around Durham he would be so horribly miffed. What the hell does some crazy mortal mean, claiming to be a superhero? Withrow is supposed to be the brooding superhero, don’t they know that? It would be amusing.

Thus, I may have found the topic for next – I mean, this – year’s NaNoWriMo or, even better, this year’s Script Frenzy.

And finally I can sleep.

I am closing in on Akismet having caught 100,000 spam comments on my behalf. Sweet.

NaNo thus far: 38,495 words.

I created a Wordle word cloud of the text so far. Hell yeah.

20,175 words. Whewf.

This year I’m writing a noir thriller kind of thing called Particular People about a gay insurance agent caught up in the life of a famous client who is a closet-case. It’s set in Nashville, TN, in 1983 and the title is an allusion to the old trick the queer community used to use to identify one another: when they were sitting at a bar, so it is said (and as often it’s said to be untrue), they would leave out a pack of Pall Malls so that the motto – Wherever Particular People Gather – would be visible.

I’m up to 12,923 words as of tonight. I’m only barely keeping pace with the normal progression of 1,667 words/day but tomorrow afternoon there’s a write-in at a coffeehouse around the corner from me so I plan to get way out ahead of the curve while I’m there.

I am linking to a brother’s awesome photoblog of the Annex’s demolition for two reasons:

1) because, as stated, it is awesome and
2) so that Aaron will believe it’s really happening.

Sadly, the age of Photoshop renders (2) a futile effort, as “photos” are no evidence at all anymore.

Also: AnnexCam!

I have finished The College Town. It’s a short story about a small college town on the night the zombies attack. It is extremely silly, but at least I finally finished it.

I wrote a lot this weekend and that always leaves me feeling pretty awesome.