Fiction By Marcus Carab & Friends
You read it here first. Well, you will, soon enough. And good thing, too, because I can’t imagine MASSIVE FUCKJOB is going to be a widely-released literary phenomenon.
First things first, my name is actually Cory McCallum, but I have more aliases than Carter’s got pills, so I have decided the NaNoWriMo moniker should be an old classic, Tasty Yumyum, fictional guitar player extraordinaire from Dank Resin, the best band ever to never play a note.
This part is short and sweet, introducing some important new characters (only one of whom I got to using, though I had very specific plans for the rest). The more I revisit this effort from last year, the more I think there is something worth salvaging here, and I play to give it a go after NaNoWriMo.
If you missed them, check out parts one, two and three first.
By trade I work for Spacing, a Toronto magazine focusing on issues within the city’s public realm. While I don’t get tired of the lavish, opulent life of infrastructure, transit, local politics, and pedestrianism, NaNoWriMo is a chance for me to exercise my penchant for adventure, fantasy, and folk tales. This also provides an excuse for me to offload some previous, forgotten works, both published and un-. So grab your compass, +3 flaming battleaxe, and 10-foot-pole; the realm of swashbuckling and derring-do marches on NaNoWriMo.
While we await more from Mike, check out his take on Apple’s smart bike patent over at the Spacing Toronto blog.
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:
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I think my favourite part of writing fiction is starting at the beginning. For that reason, I have a lot of tenth-started stories sitting around, some of which I think have some potential, others of which definitely don’t.
I hate letting good words go to waste, so from time to time if I find an old false start that I think has some value, I’ll post it in the Writer’s Journal. Here’s the first, from a sci-fi concept I was toying with that was going to explore a world of human enhancement:
Hey everyone, I’m Ian.
I’m also gonna have a go at the NaNoWriMo this year. I tried it last year but didn’t get very far. To be fair though I don’t think I heard about it ’til about a week into November, and I couldn’t think of what to write about for another week after that. This year I’m getting my act together, and I have some themes that I really want to play around with. I’ll get into those later though.
I’m expecting to do a lot of writing on my phone this year. There are a number of reasons for this. Yes, the first is obvious—I’m a pretentious fuck and I’m obsessed with my iPhone. The more redeeming reason being that I actually do my best thinking and get most of my ideas while I’m out walking. Last year I was having to stop and pull out my notebook to take things down all the time so this will actually be a lot more convenient. All the writing I’ve done lately has been on my phone while I was out too, so we’ll see how much many words I actually write while I’m out and about.
…I’m downloading the WriteRoom app on my iPhone as we speak.
If you’re participating too, check out Ian’s NaNoWriMo profile: ianianianianian
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:
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!