Editor’s Note: Ah, now I see what these two are up to. Looks like Halton Stoves and Tasty Yumyum are doubleteaming NaNoWriMo this year. The forthcoming anthology Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum will undoubtedly be a joint work as its title suggests. In this installment, Halton replies to a fresh-penned young Tasty for the very first time. If you missed Tasty’s letter, check it out first.
Continue reading “Dear Fiend: February 29, 1975”
Month: November 2010
Bad Dreams, Ominous Phonecalls, White Noise
Gentle Reader,
The first day of NaNoWriMo is over, and I consider it an honour and a privilege to share my first page of Grindstone Baby with you all. You know those times when you’re so hungover or sick that you can’t get to sleep, and every noise in your apartment sounds gigantic, and the light from your alarm clock is practically tearing your eyes out? It’s terrifying! So terrifying, that I wanted to put this godawful experience on paper. The dream is intentionally sparse and cold, but it shall be revisited throughout the novel. Unless I fail miserably, of course. I hope you are at least somewhat intrigued by the next lines. Continue reading “Bad Dreams, Ominous Phonecalls, White Noise”
Dear Fiend: February 26, 1975
Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum recently introduced his new project, Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. We’ve seen the tantalizing Editor’s Note, and now it’s time for the first letter in the collection. Here we meet a naive young Tasty, writing a friendly letter to Halton Stoves with no way of knowing the epic story he was setting in motion.
Continue reading “Dear Fiend: February 26, 1975”
Life Loves Death, Chapter One (Unedited First Draft)
Twenty-two hours into NaNoWriMo 2010, and I’m off to a roaring start with a word count of 2714! A quick trip to my calculator tells me that puts me 5.4% of the way towards my goal of 50,000 words in just 3.3% of my allotted time. I can feel the urge to go back and rework what I’ve done, and I know from past experience that that means I’m probably not going to get any new prose down on the virtual page today. As promised, I’m going to put up the first chapter here—unedited—for the interest of anyone who actually has enough free time to review it. I can’t promise to write the second chapter any time soon, but I imagine I will post other excerpts at some point during the month. For the sake of post-November readers of this blog, the full edited manuscript will be posted on my own blog sometime in December.
I’m feeling pretty good right now. The words are coming pretty easily. I’m sure there are many roadblocks (and writers’ blocks) ahead, but I made a good beginning. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Life Loves Death, Chapter One (Unedited First Draft)”
Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum
Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum has checked in with his day one NaNoWriMo progress. Don’t worry: we aren’t going to be posting every single word we all write. Some days, no doubt, we’ll have nothing to share but a brief excerpt—and other days nothing worth sharing at all. But everyone loves a good intro, and this Editor’s Note sets the stage for Tasty’s new project: Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. Later today, we’ll also be bringing you the inaugural installment in this epistolary anthology. Continue reading “Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum”
Artistic Differences (a last-minute warmup)
This past weekend I found myself eager to get started, even though NaNoWriMo hadn’t begun. Then I realized it might be a good idea to warm up a little anyway, so I set out to write a short story.
When the concept for Artistic Differences came to me, I knew I had to see it through—but I also knew it was in danger of becoming cheesy and gimmicky. I tried with all my writer’s might to stop this from happening, and I’m fairly sure I succeeded.
It was a good exercise because it alerted me to a habit I need to break during NaNoWriMo: labouring over every piece of prose. Read on and enjoy!
Continue reading “Artistic Differences (a last-minute warmup)”
Recap at the Outset
And so it has begun! NaNoWriMo 2010 is already twelve hours in, and I know more than a few people got started at the stroke of midnight. It’s going to be an interesting month.
There’s been a lot going on here at Stranger Than Truth in the past couple weeks, with our writing team ballooning to nearly a dozen—plus injuries, rivalries and more. So I thought now would be a good time to give a quick recap, in case you’ve missed any of the drama or the great short fiction that we’ve been posting in its wake. Read on and familiarize yourself with the incomparable team that is Stranger Than Truth.
Continue reading “Recap at the Outset”