I’m back from headquarters. Mozhi and I sat under the bamboo, drank espresso, listened to the blackbirds, and worked out the designs for Boggle and Sneak, Pismo, The Derby Ram and Dirty Northern Book. Happy neurons!
Tag Archive for 'Pismo'
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Happy December!
Boggle and Sneak and Pismo are nearing print-ready status. In two weeks, I’ll be traveling (in an armor-plated all-terrain Chris-Craft) to Mozhi’s secret headquarters, to work with him on the book designs. If all goes well, you can look for publication announcements in January!
As of today, my friend Maryalice (that’s her holiday greeting above) will be doing some of the illustrations for the blog. She was over on Friday, and we got into a speed-drawing contest. I ended up being so inspired that I immediately produced a comic in the form of a deck of ninety-nine cards (Web and print versions will be out shortly).
That was so much fun that I started work on a book of ninety-nine 750-word stories including Azuki Beans, in which a chain-letter leads to love won and a house destroyed, and Saint-Nectaire, in which a farmer digs a hole and strikes soup.
The comic is called BOTHER-Chickens (trust me on this) and the blitzenjammer book will be called The Ox because I needed ninety-nine arbitrary nouns and The Oxford Companion to Food was the book o’ nouns closest to hand.
Thanks Maryalice for the inspiration, and thanks Nana for the child care!
Wish me luck and an inexhaustible source of energy!
The whole world knows November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but I’m at a juncture where I don’t need another month’s worth of first draft. On the other hand, I really could use some time to fix all my busted-ass first drafts and get them ready for publication. I therefore declare November to be my own personal Busted Novel Repair Month (BuNoReMo).
I’ve got baling wire, elbow grease and gaffer tape all lined up on my bench in the woodshed. Wish me success!
Here’s what I’ve got up on blocks:
Boggle and Sneak
This story was formerly known as Troll Story, but the Folklore Enforcers tell me the eight-inch-tall creatures in the story most closely resemble imps or bogles (which is a bit of a disappointment: I was sort of hoping to be able to call them boggarts). They bust into houses and bogotify stuff, i.e. leave stuff on the fritz.
This is really coming together (thanks to incisive reads by Ryeon Corsi, Josh Ferguson and the Bisco Kid) and may just need a push over the finish line.
Pismo
A family of compulsives tries to escape certain death in a car that only turns left.
This is mouldering in manuscript. Once I type it, somebody can read it and let me know how it looks.
Lime (That’s the working title because that’s what’s written on the cover of the first notebook in the stack.)
The CIA’s Directorate of Operations is outsourced to a reality show.
This has a beginning and a middle, but no end.
The Derby Ram
On a visit to the Minnesota State Fair, ten-year-old Al runs off from her parents. Lost, she wanders into the Coliseum, where she discovers a twenty-foot-tall ram about to be slaughtered before a roaring crowd. She frees the ram and the two of them make a run for it– following the Burlington Northern tracks west-northwest toward the mountains, pursued by the furious Butcher and his thirsty knife.
Again: A beginning and a middle, but no end.
Over the River (a ghost story for October)
It is the hottest night of the summer. Nick is parked at Porky’s Drive-In on University Avenue, pretending to tune his 1928 Model A Roadster Pickup (which doesn’t need tuning). Suddenly a rangy, weather-beaten woman rides up on an impossibly-cherry 1914 Michaelson Big Twin, grabs him by the penis, and drags him across the Mississippi to the Underworld.
October spilling into November.
This is the end of the eighth day of writing, so I ought to have finished my sixteenth scene of the Pismo story by now. As it is, I’ve only finished fourteen scenes, so technically I’m two scenes in the hole. But it’s Friday, and the fourteenth scene was the conclusion of Act One, so I’m going to declare victory: One week complete! One act complete! On to Week Two and the first half of Act Two!
The good news: I wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today.
The bad news: I only wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today. There are fifty-six scenes in the outline and thirty days in June. That means I need to write an average of two scenes a day. Two scenes today: I haven’t banked any scenes for busier days to come.
The first scene was easy. I had already given it a lot of thought. The second was maddening. In my outline, I had written, “Exposition: describe the restaurant,” which wasn’t nearly enough meat for an entire scene. A sentence, maybe. I spent half an hour or so writing elaborate curses to myself until I invented enough business to build a scene around. I imagine that will happen a lot. Some of my outline notes are easy to write to; others not so much.
I also transcribed a few scenes from the longhand draft of the troll story using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which worked incredibly well. I used an earlier version of the software in the mid-1990’s to transcribe a book’s worth of interviews when tendinitis kept me from typing. Ten years seem to have brought lots of speed and accuracy improvements. Typing my longhand drafts is a chore. Dictating seems to take most of the sting out of it.
