Author: Geoff Micks

Getting ready to go!

I just wanted to write a quick note to say I’m anxious to get started. The ideas are flowing pretty fast and furious, and I’ve already caught myself a few times jotting down a few interesting turns of phrase that I don’t want to lose between now and the First of November. Seventeen hundred words a day every day is quite a mountain to climb, so I’m going to approach it differently: A chapter a day, every day. Maybe that chapter’s a thousand words or maybe it’s three thousand. As long as I hit 50,000 in thirty days, I’ll be happy.

I strongly suspect my first two days are going to be my first and last chapters, so the book will definitely have a conclusion in place by the end of the month. The nice thing about my concept is that the plot will be episodic, so from Day Two to Day Thirty, all I’m doing is building better content based upon what I actually want to write each day, rather than worrying about where I need to be plot-wise in order to complete everything on time. Continue reading “Getting ready to go!”

Notable Quotes: On reading, writing, editing, and the publishing industry

booksWe’re all embarking on this grand project (or folly) together, so I thought I’d share a list of quotes on reading, writing, editing, and publishing to get us all into the spirit of things.

As with most of the content I’ll be putting up here before November 1 —Wri-Day, if you will— this list was posted over on my own blog some time ago, and is published here at the gracious invitation of our kind editor and benevolent dictator. A fun fact? This list has generated over 10,000 unique page views on my blog since it was published exactly 364 days ago, thanks in large part to the picture you see here: It seems when people googled an image search for ‘Books’ a link to my blog’s copy of this public domain graphic appeared on the first page of results for a number of months. Google seems to have some mechanism to spread the love around, because I haven’t seen a disproportionate interest in that particular post in months now, but perhaps we’ll get lucky again here at Stranger Than Truth, and this image will draw thousands of readers to our content.

Anyway, without further ado, the quotes.

Continue reading “Notable Quotes: On reading, writing, editing, and the publishing industry”

A Play: Performance Evaluation

This piece was originally featured on my personal blog, Face In The Blue.

I remember writing this in a single enthusiastic sitting. It came very easily to me. At the time I was working at a Call Centre for Sprint Canada, so the cubicled workplace was more than a theoretical setting for me. I had also just seen Office Space, so I tried to incorporate what I liked about that into my scene. One of my favourite television shows at the time was the old Brit-Com Yes, Minister, so I adapted a line from that too.

It hasn’t aged as well as my other short play, The Artists’ Farce: The passage of time has left Bill Gates and floppy disks behind, but I guess if you keep in mind it was written in the late 90s it works as well now as it did then. A couple of friends and I acted it out in a drama class later that year, and I remember one of my classmates really threw himself into the gag of falling off his stool… We had a lot of fun with it. Anyway, here it is:

Continue reading “A Play: Performance Evaluation”

A Play: The Artists’ Farce

This work was originally featured on my personal blog, Face In The Blue.

I took OAC Writer’s Craft in my last year of high school, and I loved it. A lot of students took the course looking to boost their grade point average, but most of them ran into difficulty producing a coherent and entertaining plot under a tight deadline. I had been writing short stories and a couple of aborted novels for a number of years at that point, so I was pretty good at thinking up something quick and getting it all down in one long rush of pen and paper. Looking back through my notebooks now, most of my work hasn’t aged very well, but there are a couple of things I did then that I still rather enjoy.

The following one-scene play (I guess it could be called a skit…) is something I remember being quite proud of at the time, so I dug it out of a box the last time I visited my parents, and I’ve given it a quick coat of polish to make it blog worthy. It’s a farce between two pretentious artists orbiting around a very fragile, very valuable sculpture. My teacher loved it: In addition to writing, he also taught music, drama, and directed the school musical every year, so big egos from not-so-big talents were familiar territory for him. This play took his fancy to such an extent that we acted it out for the class the next day. Maybe it was the fact that this saved everyone five or ten minutes of actual school work, but it seemed to be well received. Anyway, here’s the play:

Continue reading “A Play: The Artists’ Farce”

Faceintheblue is giving it a try this year

Hello everyone,

My name’s Geoff Micks. I’ll be trying my hand at NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. My profile on NaNoWriMo is called Faceintheblue. My personal blog is faceintheblue.wordpress.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.

I’ve written a couple of manuscripts so far, and one of them is under review by a literary agency at the moment. I write historical fiction, but for the shorter and more spontaneous medium of NaNoWriMo I think I’d like to try something closer to Kurt Vonnegut’s style. I have an idea for a plot, and my hope is that it will prove to be an organic, stream-of-conscious narrative that will lend itself well to three or four thousand words a day. I’ll be sure to post updates here and on my own blog.

I look forward to sweating my way through November hunched over a keyboard. Cheers!