NaNoWriMo 2010 – Page 4 – Stranger Than Truth

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)”

Pages: 12

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”

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”

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!”

“Choo-Choo to Broadway… Don’t get icky with the 1,2,3… Life is just so fine.”

I am a novel-writing neophyte. Although, i have lost a non-novel writing contest before.

Well! i have a tentative course:

A boy reclines at the base of a tree, upon the high bank of a river, ruminating within a sunlit reverie, an idyll suggestive of Huck Finn’s liberty.

“That which cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence.” The Boy, unaccompanied on the river-bank, finds—just as Wittgenstein—there is much which must be passed over in silence. (A mode of paresthesic dream-white translucency envisaged by a Boy prostrated in stupor.)

Uncertain how the idiom will be perceived I have decided to site some context which hopefully facilitates justification: Continue reading ““Choo-Choo to Broadway… Don’t get icky with the 1,2,3… Life is just so fine.””

My Narcissism Reaching a Whole New Level of Shit

November 1st is fast upon us, and there is one thing which I am particularly afraid of.

I love myself far too much to be a good writer.

Ok, so I may have been cheating on NaNoWriMo just a teensy bit. I have indeed written a little—but it is handwritten, very rough, and not more than a few typed pages at this point. Ian, snake in the grass that he is, took a glimpse at my first page and reamed me out for starting with the word “twilight.” So not even my first word is acceptable at this point. Thus, my disclaimer and excuses for why I am not really cheating.

But I have written a bit. And I am shocked and appalled to say, that all of the characters are so far just twisted versions of myself. I’ve got the older gay gentleman version of Liz, the younger gay gentleman version of Liz, Liz as a lesbian, Liz as a crazy lesbian, Liz as her sexy dream man, Liz as a tattooed bartender, Liz as a fucking refrigerator waking you up in the middle of the night. Continue reading “My Narcissism Reaching a Whole New Level of Shit”

Outlining

Outlining. It’s supposed to be amazingly helpful, it’s supposed to help you actually write the novel (in a month or not)… and I’ve never actually done it. At all, for any story, including my win last year. But this year, I’ve finally actually buckled down to Snowflake my novel.

Sort of.

I’m definitely really liking the idea behind Snowflaking my novel, but I really don’t like the idea of actually sitting down and planning it out, scene by scene. That seems a bit too much like micromanaging, to me, haha.

I have, however, written almost 9000 words already on my novel – without writing a single word of prose. I’m expecting to hit almost 15 000 words of research/notes/planning/outlining before November 1st. Most of this planning can be found at my personal blog, though admittedly most of that is older thoughts, and half of that has changed.

Do you prefer to outline, or just fly by the seat of your pants? If you outline, what method do you use? Have you ever Snowflaked?

Injury Crisis!

I’ll keep this quick because I don’t want to hamper my recovery. Friday night my iPhone Challenge was thrown into peril after i fell off my bike and sprained my hand. I can type on my phone still but certainly not to the extent that NaNo requires. Hopefully between now and Monday It will heal, if not the iPhone Challenge will be over before it started.

Our benevolent editor is using his considerable influence and clout to summon the finest hand and wrist doctors in the world from UCLA and the University of Washington Medical School (yes, I’ve researched this) to assess the situation. (Editor’s Note: I only told Ian this to make him stop crying.)

Will I recover in time? Is the iPhone Challenge over before it started? Will I become the Kirk Gibson of NaNoWriMo?