#NaNoWriWee books are up for reading

    There're here! Tokyo Pizza finally sees daylight!

    The entries that made it in under the 30-hour deadline in the Kernel Magazine's 30-hour NaNoWriWee (i.e. Weekend) competition are up for all to see here. Note there are lots of people accessing them at the moment and Google Docs can be a bit slow, so be patient.

    I highly recommend my own deathless 30-hour thaladomide lovechild of Chuck Palahniuk and the A-Team: Tokyo Pizza. Assuming I can get that link to work right. Maybe try here. I have decided it's satire, but you can read it as a thriller, of sorts.

    Voting is coming soon at Kernel Mag, more news as it occurs. For now, read and enjoy, note your favorites and remember to give them your love come vote time.

     Anyway - I wrote the thing in 30 hours on the miserable UK timeline, so my two writing days were midnight to 3pm on a Fri-Sat. It was interesting and exhausting. I do like the novella that came out of it. At 22K words it fell far short of a weekend novel, but I am anal retentive and wanted to do something of a length I could finish and give a one-pass typo and editing brush-up. I am proud of it, no matter that it has to wear a special helmet. It's my baby.

    I'm going to try to wade through the entries myself as time allows, and will edit this post and add notes on those that impressed me. Not so much as a guide for voting; just out of curiosity.

   For now, get out there and read!

Edit; I promised to list my favorites, but you know, as a competitor, I can't do it without feeling biased. So I won't. Go browse! there are at least five pieces in there that were quite fascinating.

It's not easy

The hardest part of writing is staying positive.

Not in your story. You can torture your characters, be negative and bitter and deliciously despairing – well, unless you’re in genre fiction and your editor likes fuzzy main characters – but in your daily writing life. It’s easy to fall prey to the niggling demons of self-doubt and depression when your fine prose – so much better than all that other junk out there! – doesn’t garner the interest you think it should.

Remind yourself: It’s a long haul, and those who make it to the end are those who keep trying.

It’s not always easy. In the wee hours, when you lie awake, head full of embryonic plots and characters mixed with stress and worry and self-loathing for having the insane egotism to think you could be a writer, it's hard. It’s hard when you’re standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and think “the teenage dropout who can’t make my change properly made more today than I did”. It’s hard.

But no one said anything good, or important, was easy.

You have to remember that what you’re doing has value. It is innately of value, in fact, by virtue of its nature. You are crystalizing thoughts, scenes and emotions that are utterly unique. You are adding to the sum total of human experience and knowledge.

You are writing.

That’s more important than you know.

Not dead, just writing

   I need to give the blog some love this weekend, the poor thing is sitting here, crying out for attention.
   I've just been very deep in the mental morass of editing one novella, and writing another novel while toying with a children's book that would make Edward Gorey flinch.
   Also February is grey and awful. Make it stop.

   In any case, should be an update here Monday on my NaNoWriWee novel "Tokyo Pizza" - which you may enjoy. It's ... different.

Plotting your story

"How much plotting should I do for my novel?" you hear aspiring writers ask fairly continuously on the web and in coffee shop-cum-bookstores during readings.  It's one of those questions that has an answer which depends on the writer, of course, but there are some things I've learned about my own writing process that might be of help to others who work similarly.

Plot, for me, is a blunt instrument that I try to avoid even thinking about except during the writing process itself. I stump along, letting my characters talk and do, and find the plot sorts itself out on its own. I tend to start with the kernel of an idea, but it tends to be vague. "There's a blackmail event and the characters have to get out of it" is about all I used on a recent project. By the time I was 12,000 words in the plot had developed into something that had several good threads and the characters were doing my work for me - they were in trouble and had to get out of it. Easy peasy.

That's not a testament to my plotting skills, I think it has more to do with having characters that are, in the writer's mind, real people. If they are, they'll do what makes sense for them, whether it's logical or not, and the story will progress smoothly.

Not having a detailed plot also allows you to write quickly, which is very important for me. When I write slowly I overanalyze, become stiff and find myself descending into a haze of fact-checking that impedes the ability to tell a story, and telling a story is your job as a writer. Not being stylish, or poetic, or grammatically creative or anything. You're here to tell a story. For me, going seat-of-the-pants lets me tell the story without hamstringing its pace and "feel".

Besides, when you finish you'll edit, plug plot holes, alter scenes and make any fumbles fantastic. That's what edits are for.

          So crack open the laptop, choose a simple idea, build some real, memorable characters and see what they do. It can work very well.

Behind the Ruins review

A nice review for my novel Behind the Ruins from Jeremy Menefee which you can read right here.

Tokyo Pizza cover idea

Just a rough for my NaNoWriWee novella. Thoughts?

 

Version 2 below, and I like it a lot more:

 

 

#NaNoWriWee done. Much sleep is lost, much is learned.

   Please forgive the typos and bad grammar, just coming off The Kernel Magazine/HarperCollinsUK's NaNoWriWee, in which crazy people like me tried to write an entire novel in 30 hours over the weekend.
   Given the time differences between GMT and Canadian PST, the weekend is over and the story - 22,000+ words titled Tokyo Pizza - is in. Once judging and awards are done and I have a week to edit I'll post a teaser. For now, suffice it to say I wrote a lot in a very short period, and wound up with a story and characters I actually like a lot. It's maybe too profane and too odd for most readers, but it has a few bits of real gold in it.
   What I learned is more important than what I did, and I'll try to share some bleary insights.

YOU CAN WRITE A LOT - Yes, all caps, because it's the big one. I just did 22,000 words, doing a light self-edit during composition in two days, across probably 24 or 26 hours. That pace equals a novel in a week. Sitting down and staying at your keyboard generates lots of words.

Plotting is overrated - I knew it aleady, but this proved it. I started off with five fictional characters based loosely on an autobiographical group, fearful that with no plot at all I needed a hook to hang my writing on. By the end of the first chapter I discarded all connection to real events and, 22,000 words later, had watched my characters - who were no longer anyone I knew - build their own plot, complete with twists I didn't expect, and threads that all tied up neatly in the end.

Write what you know - I've lived and worked in Japan, so writing a novella set there saved me days of research and I didn't sound like a complete idiot. I hope. people will complain "but all I did was flip pancakes in Belgium" or whatever. Doesn't matter. I took a 5-month exchange program in Tokyo twenty years ago and turned it into a weird Ginsbergian crime thriller. And it was easy. Someday I'll do something with my other years of Japan experience.

Kill fear - I don't write satirical retro-hipster thrillers with lots of drugs and sex, but I just did, and I did it by discarding fear. Someone (lots of someones) will probably be horrified by sections of Tokyo Pizza, but I don't care. It was fun, honest and educational to write. A lot of friends I've had over the years do act/talk like my characters. Sorry, but the world is a spectrum and so are readers. You can't please all the people all the time, so screw them and do the work. Lincoln said that, I think.

  All right, wobbly sleepy and signing out for the day. Peace, all.

    Edit: After getting some sleep, I'm stunned to report that what I wrote is really quite good, and it will - if not picked up by HarperCollins UK - wind up published (after a mass of editing) on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. It may even breed a subsequent novel or two. It's contemporary satirical fiction/adventure and it's just plain fun in a hallucinogenic way.