Fiction By Marcus Carab & Friends
Time for the next chunk of my NaNo ’09 effort. In this part we get introduced to some new characters (the first of whom was going to play linchpin at a crucial moment in the story I didn’t even get close to reaching), and also get more from Cam & Jeromy. We’re getting close to the end now, but there is some very exciting action to come.
If you missed them, check out parts one, two, three, four and five first.
Hello! I’m yet another member of Toronto’s NaNoWriMo team—this is only my third year doing NaNo, and will only be my second win, but I’m already part of the Mod team, both as a chat mod and as an event mod. I really don’t know how much this is going to affect how or what I write, but I’m hoping it’ll make it a bit more well-rounded; last year, I largely kept to myself, and while I didn’t dislike it, a lot of my more interesting scene ideas this year have come from sitting in a coffeeshop. =]
I’m really looking forward to joining the team here at Stranger Than Truth—I’ve never been the most regular blogger, so I’m hoping that NaNo—and blogging with a group—will be the kick in the butt to get me in line with it. =b
I’m also going to be quite regularly tweeting about it (and all course of other things) at @Bdoing and possibly vlogging my efforts.
Tonight’s the Kick-Off party for Toronto! Do you all have your novel planned out already, or are you planning on going by the seat of your pants? Let me know! I’m interested! 😀
I’ve decided that in order to reach the 50,000 word goal I should make a schedule and strictly abide to it. Anyone who has tried NaNo before surely knows that in order to reach 50,000 you have to average 1666.66 words a day.
That kind of schedule is fine enough if you want to be the next poor starving slobbish author whose work will never see the light of day, but what if you want to write a brilliant literary classic that will make you rich and be read and adored for decades to come? What if you want to be next great author like James Joyce, Herman Melville, Kurt Vonnegut, F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, or Vladimir Nabokov? That’s easy. What’s the one thing all these great authors had in common?…. They knew how to write a brilliant first and last sentence.
We all remember such legendary opening lines as:
…damn you right to hell.
Maybe some of you don’t know Halton Stoves. Consider yourself lucky. This man (and I use the term generously) once petitioned Webster’s to have his picture placed under (“or in the general vicinity”, his words) the definition of degenerate. Upon Webster’s refusing such an absurd request, Stoves was arrested in Booklore pasting wallet-sized photos of his ugly mug into dictionaries, encyclopedias and even in thesauruses (under the word “gadabout”, for the love of Mutt). His writing, while beautiful and thought-provoking, has been known to cause cerebral Herpes Zoster, or brain-shingles. I overheard him once in a bar calling himself a “modern day mix of J. P. Donleavy and the team who wrote for The Littlest Hobo“. While I couldn’t have put it better myself, I found it to be quite pretentious, especially when considering that he was talking to a gumball machine.
Continue reading “Damn you, Halton Stoves….”
Hey there fellow authors, hope you’ve got your heads screwed on straight. Stoves here. So I haven’t been two hours out of the hoosegow when my agent calls me up & says I’m washed up if I don’t get my ass in gear and write something on the quick to justify printing my name on his lousy agency masthead. It transpires that everything I’ve ever published is now officially out of print, the last 20,000 unsellable crates of Rawest of the Groins having been committed to the pulper just last month. Here’s to that! I can’t say that it’s my favourite work, although my editor did mention she drank only marginally while working on it. I suppose it’s time to replenish the coffers and restore my legacy. No matter, there’s more where that came from.
So I stroll into my agent’s office and say this, with a great deal of flourish and pomp: memoir. Halton Stoves tells all. From the gutters to gilded greatness and back again. Volumes one through twelve, hardcover, gorgeous filigreed spine, gold leaf and the whole kit. He threw up all over his desk a couple times, but I happen to know he’s not a well man. I expect to hear from him with all due enthusiasm very soon. Also the cheque I sent him in recompense for my bail money bounced. I’m sure we’ll be in touch.
Continue reading “Greetings from Halton Stoves”
Editor’s Note: Tasty has a way with the rhyming epic—here’s another lyrical tesserac that Yumyum himself describes “a Seussian exercise in cadence.” Read on and enjoy the ballad of Motorcycle Marley. It’s an uplifting story of passion, determination and thoroughly popped wheelies.
Continue reading “Motorcycle Marley”
A little while ago I opened up a thread on the Toronto board of the NaNoWriMo forums, asking if anyone else was keeping a blog of their NaNoWriMo efforts. There were quite a few intriguing responses, some polite demurrals, one post that I think was a snarky rebuff, and one discussion about Star Trek (check out the thread, if you’re curious).
Here I’d like to highlight some of the more interesting blogs (and one interesting not-blog) I was introduced to:
That’s right, literati. The best author no one talks about, DBC Pierre, has just released his third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland. It is, according to Pierre, the finale of a trilogy. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the first two books seeing as they have nothing to do at all with each other—not characters, not theme, not even style, really. You should read the first book, Vernon God Little. You should run to your bookstore and order it (because they probably won’t have it). Then you should devour it and marvel at how Pierre wraps the story up with possibly the best ending in modern fiction. Then you should try (not as hard) to read Ludmila’s Broken English, his second novel. It is really quite good and if VGL hadn’t been so damned amazing, I would have truly been blown away by it as well. Then you should go back to the bookstore where you were smart enough to have ordered all of these titles at the same time and get two copies of Lights Out in Wonderland, one for your own brain and one as a thank you to me for changing your life by introducing you to such great work. I prefer hardcover, but a nice trade paperback would suffice.
The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that you very quickly learn your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I learned very quickly last time around that I am terrible at writing dialogue. The reason for this is that all of my formative writing experience was writing academic essays in university. I probably didn’t write a word of fiction at all between 2004 and 2009. This means I can formulate an argument well, but I can’t for the life of me write three characters having a conversation without it turning into:
“____” he said
“____” she said
“____” I said
Dreadful.
Continue reading “Lessons from Last Year: Narrative Mode and Voice”
Just got high and thought of an awesome idea for a story about a guy who always gets high and has awesome ideas that would make millions if he could only remember them the next day and act on them. He continuously gets high in order to remember the amazing ideas but never does and/or gets bored and watches Hell’s Kitchen or something equally ridiculous on the talkingbox. When he finally decides to take notes whilst high, he reads some the next day on a blogboard for amateur writers and thinks they are absolute shit. He gives up thinking his plans are awesome. He does not, however, give up weed.