Death and the Fiction

Oh, did yesterday turn into the greatest of days–or strangest, if you like your literary feelings that way.

Lots of writing yesterday, nearly all of it taking place in Chapter Two.  It seems to take forever to get out, probably because I haven’t utilized my writing muscles in some time.  Editing–oh, yeah.  I’ve been an editing fool.  I’ve been look at what’s come, and thought about what must be, and turned that into what is.  But cranking out the unseen from my mind?  Not so much.  Not since I finished Diners at the Memory’s End.  Yes, I had a couple of slammer works in there, but that was almost a . . . I don’t know.  Maybe you could call them a bit of a warm up on the jogging track.

Now I’m in the race, and it was making my head hurt.

I was writing about the scene of a death, and why old friends who haven’t seen each other in a couple of years are suddenly together, at the scene of a death, in a city that neither would have expected to find the other.  I had to bring up names and streets, talk of locals that really do exist, but whose names I’m not used to saying, much less write.

This is probably why my head was hurting, because my mind was getting its workout.  Or maybe it was my mind’s way of saying, “You shouldn’t be doing this.  You should be off doing something else, but you should try leaving the writing to professionals.”

So where am I after all this?  According to my NaNo Stats Page, I’m and 6,517 words.  That’s because I stopped writing at some point about 8 PM, and told people I wouldn’t write more that evening–then, about 10 PM, I started working on Chapter Three, because . . . space?  Or would that be . . . airport?  Which is where Chapter Three takes place, by the way.  At the Sultan Hasanuddin International Airport, actually, because my research told me so.

The head hurting things probably came about because of all the flipping about I had to do.  Write in Scrivener, flip to a map, look at a time line, write, get a name, write, check this . . . yeah, I’m stumbling into the first part of the story, where I’m getting everything set up.  It’s been necessary for me to kill off two people already–something I’ve not done a great deal, though if I think about it, there were a lot of deaths in the last story with these two characters–and that means trying to get my set up down right.

It’s work.  It’s a lot of work.  It’s still fun, in a way, when I’m not dealing in death, and my head is hurting, but it’s still fun.

No one will die today, or so I think.  It’s mostly begging and getting facts straight, and a few other things.  In fact, I’m wondering if a chapter I have set up is even going to be necessary.  Oh, wait:  I know what I’ll use it for.  That’s called thinking on your feet, though at the moment I’m sitting on the floor at the local Y, listening to Caribou, by Elton John.  No on your feet for this girl.

Enough talk-talk.

I got words to pen.

The Makassar Shuffle

So Day One of NaNo is over, and Day Two is upon us.  Day Two of more writing, more head scratching and aching, more of a feeling that you might panic at any moment.

Relax.  It’s just a novel.

I did a lot of prep, getting maps of Makassar (the location of my story) and getting the names of streets–and I still came down with a headache from having to look for things while I was writing.  I still managed almost three thousand words yesterday, but the amount of real-time checking I performed was somewhat mind boggling.

This is a complected story, mostly because I’m right in the middle of a real city that I’ve never seen, and my imagination–and a few well-placed pictures–are all I have to help me along.

But that was mostly due to the Prologue and Chapter One being a bit like travelogues, showing the reader around the city.  The next two chapters should be the main characters sitting and chatting, getting acquainted while having something to eat, and less about the local.  In fact, much of what remains of Part One will be that way.

Part Two . . . well, there will be a car chase.  No, really.  Though I wouldn’t put it up there with Bullet or The French Connection.  Probably more like the original Gone in 60 Seconds.

It’s an interesting thing, getting into the writing as I did yesterday, and found myself floundering about just a touch.  Then again, I did the same thing last year.  I found myself hesitating on the first chapter, and I didn’t find my stride until I was well into the third or fourth chapter.  It’s as if I’m looking for my writing groove, trying to find it while laying down words, and then, boom!  There is it.

Time to get writin’, or time to get to hair pulling.

Oh, and don’t do this:

Using a line from a story where only one person will have the odds ever in their favor, and the other eleven people are going to be found with their bodies cooling to room temperature, isn’t really the best way to encourage people to write like there’s no tomorrow.

Contrary to popular belief, writing a novel isn’t easy.  Even if you’ve done this a few times, there’s something very intimidating about taking all this information about people, places, and things, and putting it down inside the medium of your choice in something approaching a coherent form for all to see.  It’s not quite the same at trying to fly to the moon–or even trying to pilot a Cessna to the next town–but it can leave you with your mind, and hair, in tatters.

Get comfortable.  Get set.  Get easy.  You have twenty-nine more days–including this one–ahead of you, and if you’re flipping out now, how do you think you’re going to be come the 15^th of the month?  If you’re playing with a make believe world, as many are, try looking up street names located in a city on the other side of the world.  Yeah, that’ll get your brain cooked in short order.

It’s time to start writing:  I mean really writing.  This blog post?  It’s just a warm up for the fingers.  The real work is coming.

Time to jump into the insanity.

Out of the Station

The NaNo Countdown reached zero, and I clicked on “Play” for Electric Light Orchestra’s album, A New World Record.  Scrivener was already up and waiting, and I went directly to the card labeled Prologue.

The Crazy Train was departing the station, and I had my seat.  It was time to write.

This is my second NaNoWriMo.  Last year–well, most people know how last year worked out for me.  This year, I feel a bit subdued, less chomping at the bit to get in there and crank things out, but I think that’s due more to my growth, over the last year, as a writer, rather than not wanting to write.

Getting the words out is a bit difficult, but that’s because I’m searching for the voice.  Not to worry, because I’m moving forward.  After all, I have this:

Yes, that’s my Scrivener plan for this novel, Kolor Ijo.  And the Prologue is at First Draft status, which means it’s finished.  I’m one thousand, three hundred thirty-eight words in, which means I’m almost at by goal for the day.  NaNo says you need to do 1,667 words a day to hit the winning mark, but I’m shooting for at least two thousand a day.  That way, I can reach sixty thousand, which is what I believe my story will need.

Though I might finish well before the 30^th of November, which I’m good with should it happen.

I was tired last night, but then I was tired last year when I started NaNo at midnight.  Halloween/Samhain Eve was busy for me, figuratively and literally, and I found it necessary to fight to stay awake until the first seconds of 1 November.  I made it, however, and typed out seven hundred eighty words before A New World Record ended, I updated my word count, and then headed off to sleep.

As I tell people doing NaNo for the first time, have fun with your story.  A lot of people lose track of that fact, and after a couple of days the whole adventure of writing a novel turns into a life-or-death struggle–or both if you’re a zombie–that turns a person completely off this stuff.

Don’t let that happen.  This isn’t the end of the world.  This isn’t living on a fault line.  This is a novel, and while some of us do look upon writing as something of a job, it’s also a way for us to loose ourselves in our work.  To allow our imaginations to soar with the owls–because I like owls–and gain a new perspective on the world.  It won’t always be easy, and it won’t always come to you in a way that’s going to make you feel as if you are making progress.  But do it enough, and keep doing it day after day, and things will work out.

You will write.  And you’ll like it.

I’m on my way.  I know I’ll make my goal tonight, and probably make it tomorrow as well, though I might be a bit pressed for time, as I know I’ll be busy with non-writing things tomorrow.  But I will make my goal, and maybe a little more.

That’s the nice thing about NaNo.  I don’t feel like I should write, but I do–

Eventually you get that feeling every day.

Dead Don’t Dance

One of the things I’ve seen happen over the last few years is a huge expansion of what most would consider an expansion of supernatural literature.  Not horror, per say, but literature that has played with the supernatural genre.  Actually, it’s not literature, but writers, who’ve done this–and, if you’re guessing where I’m going with this, not for the better.

It seems that the supernatural has become . . . well, vampires are people you want your kids dating, werewolves are still violent, but they tend to walk around with their shirts off when they aren’t wolves (does this apply to female werewolves as well, cause damn . . .), and a succubus is just one more hot woman in a leather jacket.

I don’t mind any of this, because I’m not reading Twilight, or watching The Vampire Diaries, nor would I let my daughter date a werewolf, because they have fleas.  I’m not like Joe Hill, who says he’s writing a vampire novel where “they go back to being fucking killers,” because it doesn’t mean that much to me–and I’m guilty of writing a sexy vampire character as well.

But there is one thing that just peeves the hell out of me.  One creature that, were I in control of the universe–and in my stories, I am–I would strike from the memories of people for all time . . .

Zombies.

I can’t stand the damn things.  Not because they are horrifying, but because they are about as dumb as one can get, and still have something horrifying.  Zombies are the Deliverance hillbillies of the supernatural world; they’re only dangerous if you walk into their world like idiots and let them rape you.  Otherwise, they’re about as scary as a hangnail.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t popular:  I knew of Night of the Living Dead, I know of The Walking Dead, I watching 28 Days Later–though the later doesn’t say The Zed Word.  I just don’t understand the mindset of people who think living though this version of the End of the World would be super cool–pretty much the same way I couldn’t understand why living though a nuclear apocalypse would be the bee’s knees for some people.

But the whole “Zombie Apocalypse will take out the World!” meme just doesn’t make sense.  Hell, nothing about the Zedlings makes sense.  When you have Cracked.com pointing out how stupid the whole thing is, you’re on the downhill slide, folks.

Oh, sure:  people aren’t watching The Walking Dead because of the zombies.  They’re watching it because Rick kills shit while not using his British accent; Michonne is totally badass; and they’re waiting for Lori to bite the big one in a way that will make them stand up and cheer.  (As River Song would say, “Spoilers!”  Click that at your own risk!) Zombies are just sorta there to make life interesting.

But in, say, the town where I live, why worry about zombies?  I mean, how many are going to come back?  What are “the freshly dead”?  Maybe twenty people over three, four days?  That many cops show up to give two teenagers a speeding ticket in this town.  I’m assuming that if someone crawls out of the ground after three days and begins wandering about the town square, the dead aren’t getting  The Zombie Jesus treatment; they’ll likely get a beat down and a half.  And even in a city like Chicago, maybe a few hundred people are coming out of the ground?  Hell, street gangs would have a field day playing bullet tag with these shambling fools.  Or they’d get hit by CTA buses.  Either way, not a good day for the dead.

Why shoot them in the head?  They’re dead; there’s no cognitive functionality, so the brain controls nothing.  In fact, the brain should have leaked out of their ears after a week, so there’ll be little more than gray goop sloshing around in the cranium.  Take a shotgun and blow off a leg, then set them on fire.  Or better, let them rot in the sun.  Rinse, repeat.  Sure, it’s gonna stink, but it’s not like they don’t smell already.

Why do zombies want to eat you?  Because from what I see, they don’t need to eat to survive.  Oh, sure, they ate people in Night of the Living Dead, but why?  And after everyone is dead, then what?  Go to Dennys’ for brunch?  At least 28 Days Later–”Don’t say the Zed Word!”–had everyone in England, Wales, and Scotland starving to dead after a few weeks.  So zombies want to eat my brains, and then what?  Invent a cure for cancer?

There is a reason why people love zombie stories:  because it gives the reader or viewer the chance to look at the characters are marvel at their massive dumbassery.  ”Hey, look:  a dead guy walking around!  I think I’ll stand here and laugh at him until he’s within arm’s reach, then–AHHHHHH!”  Or you get my favorite part of 28 Weeks Later, where someone is found alive, seemingly unaffected by the virus that’s killed millions of people, and people are puzzled as to how this is possible.  At the moment people are living in a very small, isolated, military-controlled section of London, so what do the people in charge do with this survivor?  ”Lets put her in this unlocked room right in the middle of where everyone is living, and anyone can gain access to her!  I mean, what could go wrong, mate?”  The more one sees of Wile E. Coyote shit like this, the more one becomes convinced that were they to find themselves in the middle of the ZA, they’d be wrackin’ up the dead body count.

Zombies are dumb, literally and figuratively.  But people love them, and it seems all you need to do this day is put the Zed Word on the cover of a book, and you’ve got a best seller a-brewin’.  Brave New World with Zombies!  2001 a Space Zombie!  A Clockwork Zombie!  I mean, if people are going to go ga-ga over some ninety year old dead guy who’s zoomin’ high school girls with self-esteem issues, imagine what they’re gonna do when you’re characters are blowing the heads off dead guys–or unable to keep their kids in the house?  But I digress . . .

What do I know, though?  I mean, I’ve been writing for a while, and I’ve dipped into what I could call the “soft supernatural”–sort of it’s own form of “cosy catastrophe“.  Though you won’t see any zombies in my stories.  Vampires, demons, ghosts, wizards, oh yeah.  But zombies?

I think I could write my first short story using them.  A real short story . . .

The Wait Demands Its Tithe

There is always a moment, after events are handled and preparations are completed, where one feels an emptiness come over them.  What to do, what should be done?  There is nothing, however, and trying to fill the time with something usually leaves you feeling like you even more empty.

Right now I’m feeling that emptiness.  The majority of my prep work for NaNo 2012 is finished, in the bag as one might say.  A few thing to puzzle over, and some street names to add to notes, but that’s it.  So it means that I have no . . . real . . . writing at the moment.

I was in this position last year.  I burned through most of the prep work for Her Demonic Majesty, and with a couple of weeks to go I had little to keep me occupied.  So what did I do?  I wrote a story.  Actually, I finished a story, because I’d started writing it near the end of September, and I finished it up before getting deep into NaNo.

What became of that story?  It was Captivate and Control, and I sold that sucker to Naughty Nights Press.

Is that what I should do now?  Get into another story, knock it out in the next two weeks, then give it a quick edit when I have nothing better to do, and send it out?  Not this time.  I spent the end of October getting Captivate and Control edited, and submitted it because I figured I had a chance to make a sale.  I was right, I did, and the rest is, as they say, history.

The thing is, I am writing other stuff at the moment.  I’ve finished up my story Replacements on another blog, and I have another that is just about to wrap up.  Those two stories–once the second is complete–amount to about twenty thousand words.  Looking at it that way, I’m not exactly sitting on my butt doing nothing.  Well, I’m sitting on my butt, but you know what I mean.

This is where writing plays with your mind.  You get tired of working on a story after a while, and you want it to finish.  You get into an edit, and it feels like it’s taking forever to get things correct.  But have nothing to do for a few days, and you get this itch to create.  You want to find something to discuss, to describe.  You want to show people another world.

It’s almost as if you’re being punished for sitting around.  If you aren’t thinking about writing, you’re writing.  And if you’re not doing that, you’re being tortured by something unseen.  Most likely it’s your conscience telling you to get your ass in gear.

(I know, I could say it’s my Muse, but she is a lovely Muse, save when I’m not doing as I should.  Then she digs the spike heels into my back.  I know, trust me.)

Tonight, I felt like I should be doing more.  I felt as if I should have busted my butt on my novel, when the reality is, I’m pretty much ready to crank out the wordage.  I’ve got a couple of weeks of downtime, and I should use it to relax, because come one minute after midnight, 1 November, I’ll put out at least five hundred words, just as I did last year, so I can get my feet wet.

I know the water will be chilly, but that feeling vanishes after you’ve put ten thousand words to your back.

Ghost of the Writing Past

Today has been one of those that work well with my adage that writing is work, and if you want to get things right, you gotta do your leg work.  Or, as Chuck Wendig says in his piece on NaNoWriMo, October should be named “National Story Planning Month.”  Sit down and begin getting your shit together about what you’re going to dump upon the page for all of November.

Assuming you want to do it right, that is.

My NaNo 2012 novel is a follow up to my story Kuntilanak.  As that was a horror story that took place in Indonesia–specifically, the island of Bali–my new novel is a horror story that also takes place in Indonesia, this time in the city of Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi.  I’m moving around the archipelago a bit, sampling the local flavor, and I’d decided a while back that if I was going to do another story with my Fearless Indonesian Ghost Hunters, I would stage it in an urban setting.

Fortunately for me, I have a few connections with people from Indonesia.  Which means, for about three hours today, I sat in a Panera’s and talked about the city of Makassar with someone from there.  Picked up some information on conditions, locals, greetings, names . . . and learn a few about ghosts and weapons.  Yeah, weapons: because sometimes you just gotta rip up something magical with something sharp.

The last couple of days have seen a lot of work on the next novel.  While thinking about ghosts, I’m feeling the ghost of something I had a year ago . . . something that feels like what I had going a year ago.  I’m excited; I’m pumped.  I’m ready to jump into this work, and maybe I’ll make Indonesian ghosts famous at last.

I finished the time line yesterday about 6 PM.  I looked at it for a while, and in looking at it, I came up with ideas about the story, and even managed to dream up a detail that comes up as a major point.  At the same time, I figured out the motivation behind what’s happening . . . yeah, I’m like that.  Get the basic idea, beat it for hours on end, and eventually, you work it out.  One way or another.

So, what has come along?  Well, for one, the timeline has turned into this:

Yes, that’s twenty-four chapters and a Coda.  When you add the prologue into the mix, I’m looking at a total of twenty-six chapters.  If I do two thousand words a chapter, that’s fifty-two thousand words.  I expect I’ll write more than two thousand a chapter:  in fact, I’ve already set the Project Total in Scrivener to sixty thousand words.

And since I’m starting to move everything on the above timeline to Scrivener, here’s what that looks like:

That’s Part One of my timeline set up on Scrivener chapter cards.  This is how I work; this is how I write.  It might seem like a lot of work, but for me, it makes me comfortable.  It gives me the direction I need so I can perform “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!”  Because with where I’m going with this story, if I simply jumped in and started slinging crap about the word processor, I’d end up with a manuscript that looks like hammered shit.

Not for this writer.

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing, and where I’m headed.  It feels like old times again.

It feels like writing.

Time Enough to Bring the Strangeness

The drive to The Undisclosed Location wasn’t without its moments.  Not only because everyone seemed to drive as if they were possessed by the spirits of old people from Arizona who were frightened to death by some non-white person they thought was coming to do them harm, but because I was able to think things out for a story.

No, not those stories:  another story.

I had time to think.  I had time because to not think would have done a lot to put me in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to be in a bad mood as I rolled into town.  The last thing I want to do is show up at my apartment at 8:30 PM, knowing I have things to do, but to do it all feeling like I should just take a two-pound mallet to my skull, so . . . story time thinking!

I revisited some territory I’d seem before–namely, my character Jeannette, from Her Demonic Majesty.  I’d like her to continue, to carry on, to have many adventure that I can write–and lay around for people to read.  It seems like I do that with most of my characters:  I seek out additional trouble for them to get into.

Jeannette is no different.  After diving back into the final edit of Demonic, I’ve found myself liking Jeannette a whole lot more.  She’s a great character, and I need to have her grow.  So I thought about her yesterday, while I was on the road–

There was a story I once talked about, taking a couple of character close to my heart, and pulling them into Jeannette’s world.  I decided to forget about that particular story, but yesterday I was wondering–what if only one of the characters showed up on Jeannette’s doorstep, and she knew this was wrong, because she knew there should be two, not one.

With that, I was off.

Yes, I had a story there.  I won’t say it’s a great story, or even a good one, but there’s a story there.  It’s all in the telling, as they say, and not by just throwing words out there for people to consume.  By the time I made it to my apartment, I had my cast of characters, I had schools, I had events.  I knew how I wanted things to go.  There was just one point near the end that was, shall we say, a bit sticky?  Yeah, sticky.  I’ll leave it at that and say I’ll need to think about what comes after, because I know it involves something that is likely to pop up in another story.

But, wait!  There’s more!

See, as I headed into work today, something else came to mind.  A line, spoken by Jeannette, as she was sitting in a restaurant:

“This place has always bugged me.  It’s full of people acting big time, and not having the faintest fucking clue what that means.  They’ve tried their damnedest to cover up their hick bullshit with a thin veneer of culture, but it’s a total fail.  What we got here is nothing more than Deliverance, without the mountains.”

I know where this story goes, but that was the line running about my imagination as I headed towards where I park ever morning before work.  It’s a good line–

It could end up being an even better story.

Staking Out the Lines

I’ve been all over Google Maps last night and this morning.  Why?  Research!

The idea I started on yesterday in my blog post has been gnawing at me.  It was on my mind all they way to The Undisclosed Location, and since I have little else to do on the long trip, besides curse idiot drivers, I worked out a lot of the points at the start of the story.  The set up, the hook–it’s there.

Well, it’s getting to there.  I won’t claim I have a full-blown story yet, but I have two characters, and at least a couple who are secondary.  I’m getting a feel for how the house looks from the outside, and I’ve even found a plot of woods where the house can sit.

But there are doubts here.  Hey, it wouldn’t be me if there weren’t doubts.

Even though there was a lot of erotica in Couples Dance, there was a lot of talk about a certain house.  Now, was the house haunted?  Hard to say.  You could say it was, but it could also be said that something happened to the house, and it wasn’t actually haunted, but there was something else going on . . .

With this idea I have from my dream, I’m not sure if I’m looking at a haunted house story, or if there is something tied back to the owner . . . or if there is something else at work here.  I’m thinking along the lines of “something else,” but what, I can’t say yet.  I need to think, to work out, to see what inspires me–

Ah, but the Muse is saying, “Hey, you want breakfast?  ’Cause I’m not cooking if you don’t get to work!”  Ha!  You do that; I’ll just run down to Panara.  As much as I love you, I gotta do this my way, ’cause this needs to be right, sweetie.

This is a strange feeling.  It was like this with a couple of my stories, where I was gripped by something, and just jumped feet first.  In fact, I’m wondering if this is more than just a story I’m getting here–

Maybe this is my NaNo Novel for 2012.

I know I’d had another idea in mind for that, but . . . I just wasn’t getting the love.  Really.  I couldn’t feel a connection, not just yet.  That story is there, ready to go, but I’m not getting the inspiration from it that I’m getting at the moment on this idea.

Maybe that’s what the dream wanted me to see.  Maybe it wanted me to know there was something waiting to be written, but at the time I couldn’t write.

Now . . . I’m different.  And writing is very possible.

Yeah, it’s all crazy, just like this dream.  It’s feeling very bendy-wendy, if you know what I mean.  I still don’t know what’s up there on the one floor, the floor that’s all decrepit and nasty looking, with the shadows that move when you think they shouldn’t.

It won’t be long before I start digging around.

It won’t be long before I find out.

Monster House Boogie

I haven’t had this dream for a while, but it’s been on my mind of late.  Which dream is that?

The Monster House.

Actually, I’ve called it other things, and I’ve talked about it here and here on this blog.  It’s a strange dream, and one that, when I was having it pretty often a year or so back, used to freak me out a little.

But it’s been almost a year since the last time I had the dream, and even though it isn’t haunting me these days, for some reason its come to m,ind a lot over the last few days.

I don’t think it’s the dream that’s causing that; I think it’s the Muse.  I think she’s starting to kick my butt a little.

I’ve been back into Echoes, getting it down with a final edit.  I’m considering self publishing it, just to see if it goes a little better this time.  Or . . . maybe not.  Without the background of the world in which the story exists, it might not make a hell of a lot of sense to a reader.

What’s next, then?

There are ideas, lots of things in my little idea file, but I know the majority of them are going to be long stories or novels.  And I don’t want to get into anything that’s going to whack me in the face when November rolls around and I need to get into the NaNo Insanity.

Does this daydreaming about a dream I haven’t had in over a year mean I’ve got another idea that wants to emerge?  Is this an idea that could end up being a novella?  I mean, cranking off twenty-five thousand words in a few weeks wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  If I know what I’m writing–

Therein lay the problem.  While I have had the strangest feelings from this dream, I don’t know what it’s telling me.  Other than, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  Which I have been whenever I’d had the dream.  Beyond that, however, I know not what is happening.

I feel there’s a story there–one that wants to speak to others.  The thoughts I’ve had are nudging me a little, forcing me to look at it in a more critical light.  To examine what’s happening to the person in the dream, because . . .

What?  What are thou telling me, oh Muse?  What is it you want me to see?

I know what she wants me to see:  she wants to see my ideas come to fruition.  She wants me to get back into some original writing, and stop being a sad little penmonkey.  It is only through writing that we are able to unleash our imagination, and once unleashed, that imagination is going to curl up inside a story like a sleepy cat with a belly full of chicken and milk.  And once it’s curled up inside that story, it’s going to purr its content little head off–

With said purr being heard and felt by others.

That’s where the Monster House is headed.  Or the “Big House”, as I once called it.  Either way–

I think I’m on a trip to find out where it really leads.

Kunti on the Loose

Today I’m doing a guest blog over on the Romance is in the Air, the blog of Linda Bowers Bolton.  Though not a lot of romance today:  I’m presenting an excerpt from my horror story, Kuntilanak.  So pop on over and check it out!

Yogyakarta Bound

Last night was one of my nights out.  I don’t get a lot, but they do come now and then.  I couldn’t stay out as late as I normally do, because I have to depart for The Undisclosed Location rather early today–about 8 AM my time, rather than 5 PM or so, as I normally do–because of work related . . . “stuff”.  That’s all I’ll say on that matter.

When I drive home–this time, about 11:30 PM–the roads are somewhat clear, and I my thoughts can race along with my vehicle.  This latest time, the roads were really clear, and it was pretty much a long stretch of flying through the darkness.  The last month or so, there hasn’t been a lot there to race; the thoughts have been empty, with no inspiration or feel present.

Not last night.  No, not this time.  I had thought, good thoughts . . .

It was time to think of Yogjakarta.

Now, this probably doesn’t mean anything to you.  Some of you, the more geography minded, will recognize the name of a city on the island of Java in Indonesia; some of you might even know the city resides within it’s own special district, or that it sits some 28 kilometers from Mount Merapi, the most active volcano in Indonesia, and the city is pretty much flipping off Merapi on a daily basis, daring it to take them out.

What none of you know, at least until now, is that my NaNoWriMo novel is going there.

Last year I wrote Kuntilanak, a horror story that I self published.  And, yes, it’s a good horror story, one you can find on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.  Originally I was going to write it for a Halloween collection, but after being told the collection was really looking for things about a thousand words long, I decided to strike out on my own because, at that point, I’d already figured on a story that was going to run over fifteen thousand words.

The rest is, as they say, history.

So a while back I started thinking about what I could do for NaNo.  I’m still not certain if I can do it, but I’m going to give it a try.  Why?  Because I want to.  I did it last year, try it again this year.  And it allows me more grist for the mill that might be publication, so why not?

But what to do?  Well, last year I had the notion that maybe I should continue the story of the characters from Kuntilanak, bring them back together and let them ponder another supernatural mystery.  And that’s what I wanted to do . . .

Only last night, the idea began jelling.

I knew how to get my healer from Bali onto the scene.  I figured out how he could meet up with his friend, the woman who is a paranormal investigator and a Muslim.  I figured out much of the set up.  I figured out how the mystery could develop, and how things that shouldn’t be transpiring in Jogyakarta did.

Pretty good for just thirty minutes of driving.

So now, I gotta do a time line.  I gotta do my research.  And, I gotta come up with a title.  ”Cause, you know, November isn’t that far away.

It’s the 21^st Century, and you gotta be ready–if you wanna write.

Prepping For the Big Time

Fridays, how I loath you.  Had to drive home in a haze of mental feebleness that found me almost nodding off at the wheel a couple of times.  Believe me, that’s not something you want to do when you’ll blowing down the interstate at 80 mph.   But I made it home, I struggled to stay away, I felt sick, I felt crazy . . .

I felt like I had a lot of editing to do.

It was necessary to get Couples Dance ready to send out, and I went through the two chapters that required editing, Eight and Ten, and brought them up to a presentable speed.  Keep in mind, there was almost ten thousand words there that needed fixing, and I probably spent a good four or five hours going through those two chapters.  It was some crazy time writing, let me tell you, and I wasn’t sure if, with my head threatening to drop into my lap at any moment, that I should be ripping through so many words.

You might say I was inspired to get the document in better shape.  I know there are part of the novel that are probably a little wonky, but the publisher knows this isn’t quite the final draft–there is that caveat going for me.  Regardless how this matter goes, there will be a final edit.

But the fact they want to see the rest of the manuscript–always a good sign.  And to be honest, the parts that I added to the story, particularly Chapter Eight, will help crank up the weirdness factor they may be looking for.  We will see, I suppose.  Might take a week, or two, or three, but before June is over, I’ll either have a contract or a rejection.  Either is good, because it shows that I’m trying.  I’m submitting.  And if all you do is write and keep it to yourself, then you’re doing it wrong.

Get that stuff out there, kids.  You’ll feel better in the long run.

So manuscript goes out about 10 PM–what to do after that?  Write some more, naturally.

I didn’t want anymore editing–sorry, Jeannette–so I pulled up Diners at the Memory’s End, and launched into Part Three.  I didn’t thing I was going to get a lot done, because by this time my head was dropping into my lap, but I at least wanted to open up with a little on how Albert’s first day in class went.  It also gave me a chance to figure out some of the thing that might happen when it comes to a professor/student interface, and how assignments will be passed out . . . ah, it wasn’t always easy, but it was done.

The thing that was probably the biggest deal for me was renaming a pub.  Yeah, I’m like that.  So the part ended, 666 words later, with Albert sitting in a place named “The Lusty Librarian”, getting ready to reflect upon something.

This should be fun.

A lot of writing this past week, and a lot coming up.  I have something I need to do this weekend, and will likely get to it tonight, and I need to do a quick check on Part Two of Diners before handing it off to Cathy Brockman’s blog . . . jeez, this writing thing, it’s a lot of work, isn’t it?

You’d think it’s almost like a job!