I’m doing nanowrimo* this year. My story’s title is Once I Was You. Here’s the first snippet, from the 1244 words I wrote in an hour this morning:

As if on some silent cue, the doors of the school across the street at the far end of the park burst open, and children boiled out, their laughter too quiet to reach me. The buzzer sounded then, delayed by distance, and the joyful noise of hundreds of six- to ten-year-olds washed over me, a raucous burst of mirth and merriment, and even I, cold now of heart and mind, had to smile.

More to come, but right now I have to get to work. Toodles!

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* the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth.

Part 1 | Part 2

People kept asking me all day — all week leading up to the weekend, really: “Are you nervous?” I’d answer “Yeah, somewhat”, or “Not really”, or “I used to read in church all the time”*. I was a little nervous, though.

Friday afternoon, after the screenwriting session, I went home and — for the first time — read aloud the section I’d intended to read. I timed myself. It took four minutes to read the description of the dream palace erected by the gods at the far end of time. Four minutes. I had fifteen to fill.

Hmmm.

So I read the first half of the story aloud, which came to something like eleven or twelve minutes. That was more like it. The downside was that it was, well, a little sweary. The viewpoint character is a trickster god, named Fox, and he’s … earthy.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, but my mom was coming for the reading.

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Part 1

[Oops. This is long overdue. Sorry!]

On Saturday, I went to two workshops.

First up, Anita Daher delivered a presentation on “Writing for the Young Adult”. This intrigued me, since one of my back-burner projects (also my second nanowrimo project), Salyx, neatly slots into the YA marketeering category: it’s about a boy’s coming of age on a distant colony world. It’s currently sitting at about 55,000 words, and it really needs to have its ending cleaned up. It’s also got some heavy themes in it: teen pregnancy, murder, religion, the friction at the edges of two cultures…

So it was good to hear Anita’s advice: Don’t worry about writing to the market. Just write the story — write the truest story you can — and let the marketeers figure out which slot it fits best in. (It was also nice to hear that 40,000 words is a nice solid number for a YA novel — I was thinking I’d have to add to it, and the story’s all told already.)

Next was Danishka Esterhazy‘s session on Screenwriting. I’m not a screenwriter, but almost everything she told us maps straight across, in my view, to novel-writing. The intertwining of action, interpersonal conflict, and personal growth; the idea that most movies follow a four-act structure (though movie execs will claim up and down that they’re really three acts, split 25-50-25); the concept of growing a screenplay from a solid logline into a hundred-or-so-page draft; all this fits very well with what I’ve learned about writing long-form prose.

So here’s the logline for my work in progress:

Everything that Never Happened is the story of a rudderless 17th-century sea captain, who must battle his undead patroness to save the world — and his soul.

Tomorrow*: my reading.

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* This time I mean it.

This is the first of a three-part story about Words Alive.

When my short story “Heat Death, or, Answering the Ouroboros Question*” was accepted for publication in Tesseracts 14, I was asked if I’d be interested in doing a reading at the upcoming Words Alive festival. The answer, of course, was “Of course!”
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