Writer’s Life: It starts!

Photo by Digipam, Creative Commons

The euphoria of Day 1 of NaNoing has set in. 2500 words so far. I have characters! I have kind of a plot! Neither of which existed a week ago. Last night I attended the NaNoWriMo Midnight Write, dragged my half-asleep self across town to commiserate with 50 other writers about our lack of planning and excitedly count down the minutes until we could write on our novels. There was some impromptu brain storming that happened, and mad props go out to Kyle who seemed to have put about ten times as much thought into my novel as I had. We bounced ideas off each other, and a lot of them stuck.

The event went on until 2am, but I only stayed the first thirty minutes past midnight, during which I rewarded each 100 words with the consumption of sweet and sour gummi worms. It was an appropriate reward, as you will soon see. So without further ado, he’s a brief excerpt from chapter one of my yet to be titled space opera.

~~~

Echium Stahl seethed as he pressed his fingers against the giant hickey on his left shoulder. It was tender to the touch, oozed slightly, smelled funny. It wasn’t his first, but he sure as hell hoped it would be his last.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Thebiak said, giving his best impression of innocence. His eyestalks twitched, segments writhed.

“Shhh,” Echium said. His nephew Jole was sleeping not even a meter away– safely, not gnawed half to death by the giant flatworm that passed for Echium’s best friend more days than not. He was thankful for that at least. Thebiak’s poison was already working its way through Echium’s system. He had half an hour to get to the clinic for the antidote. Maybe less.

Echium waded across the dark room, pawed around for his coveralls, then pulled Jole’s gravboots down from the cubby where they stayed. He’d be back before his nephew missed them, either that, or he’d be dead. Either way there was no getting across the station in time without them. As an afterthought, he snagged Thebiak by the scruff and stuffed him into a duffle bag.

“You got me into this,” Echium said under his breath. “If I’m checking into the big curd farm in the sky, then you’re coming with me.”

“It was an accident,” came Thebiak’s muffled voice from inside the bag.

“What part of ‘don’t eat me’ don’t you understand?”

Echium flinched as Jole turned in his sleeping tube. He bit his lip, then kicked off, the barely-gee of the inner ring slums allowing him to glide across the room. He fished around for the grab bar, then silently eased himself into the cramped quarters of the family sprawl. His sister-in-law’s snores echoed through the room. Soft light from the astral aurora broke through the room’s only porthole and bathed her in a faint orange glow.

The room was packed floor to ceiling with her art—crude sculptures made from the found objects Merle would smuggle back to her from other worlds. Most were crap, couldn’t give them away if she’d wanted to. And the ones that would fetch a few beans, she refused to part with, saying they reminded her too much of her husband.

In any case, it reduced her already undersized dwelling to a thin walkway to the front door, and Amina slept in the middle of it all. Echium would have to float right past her, so he took a spare moment to steady his aim and kicked off once again, keeping his duffle bag clutched close to his chest, legs pressed tightly together. He held his breath as he came within centimeters of grazing her cheek with his elbow, but he passed without incident and orchestrated a soundless landing near the door.

His bite wound throbbed something fierce, a sharp ache that set his teeth on edge.  His eyes burned like coals inside their sockets. The way his symptoms were progressing, the fever might kill him before the poison did. Echium forced the pain back and concentrated on the task at hand, though his mind was quickly going to curd. He stared blankly at the door access panel, trying to remember the lock code he’d entered each and every morning for the past five years. Started with a nine, he was sure of that. Pretty sure. Nine-four-seven-one. He typed on the keypad, and the door whispered open in front of him, the stench of the barely-gee slums smacking him in the face.

Echium was about to step into the corridor when he felt a tug at his coveralls. He turned. Jole hovered there, thin as a rail, wearing nothing but his sleep shorts, hair pressed to the side of his face. His eyes were slits. In the dim light, his face looked much like Merle’s had at that age, sharp angles, tight brow–a face worn well past its thirteen years.

“My gravboots,” Jole murmured.

Echium’s eyes flicked to Amina, still sleeping soundly. If she woke up, she’d have questions. Echium couldn’t lie to her. Not that he hadn’t tried, but boy that woman had a way of dragging the truth out of him, and he couldn’t risk her finding out he’d been harboring a man-eating parasite in her home for the last six months.

“My gravboots,” Jole said again, louder.

“I need to borrow them. It’s an emergency. I promise I’ll have them back to you in thirty minutes.”

“My gravboots.” There was something odd about his voice and the way his body drifted lazily, too loose even for someone who’d just woken up. He was sleepdrifting. Jole had done it often as a small child. Poor kid was a bundle of nerves then. He’d grown out of it for a while, but since his father had died, Jole’s anxiety had all but consumed his life.

“Hey, kid. Why don’t you go back to your tube, okay?” Echium turned him by the shoulders, but Jole did a full three-sixty, his spin slowing as he came to face Echium again, arms reached out now. Echium could give Jole a gentle shove back inside, shut the door, and be halfway down the corridor with a strong push. It was tempting. He was dying after all, but he didn’t want his nephew remembering him as a thief who had stolen his most prized possession. If he were fully awake, Echium could bargain with him, toss a few beans his way, but instead he handed the boots over, glancing at the initials stitched into their backs in fraying navy blue thread: MVS – Merle Verne Stahl…his father’s boots.

Jole hugged the boots to his chest, then pressed away back to his room like an apparition. Echium shut the door to his sister-in-law’s sprawl, then laughed to himself. So much for that idea.

“You’re never going to make it,” came Thebiak’s voice from the bag. “Let me out. I can get the antidote for you.”

“The delirium won’t set in for another ten minutes,” he told the flatworm. “Try me again then.”

Echium sped down the hallway, bouncing from grab bar to grab bar, often overshooting or undershooting, leaving him at the mercy of barely-gee to send him slowly forth, wasting away precious seconds of his life.

“I’m serious. I can get to the clinic and back three times over before you can get halfway there. This is my fault. Let me make it right.”

“You know I can’t.”

“You don’t trust me, is that it?” Thebiak’s muffled voice sounded hurt.

“It’s not personal. I owe you my life. So if I don’t make it, I guess that makes us even. Or something. But I’ve got to worry about the rest of the people aboard Vero-Avalon.”

“Most of them are still asleep, if that makes you feel any better. Besides, I just fed.”

The throbbing started up again, spreading under Echium’s arm and down his side. He shivered and clutched the bag close, rougher than perhaps he ought to have. Thebiak rustled inside, but was quiet at least. It was pointless to argue with flatworm logic, and fevering like this, there was no way he could possibly win.

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Tags: NaNoWriMo

Wirter’s Life: Countdown to NaNoWriMo!

Less than a week to go until November 1st!

Maybe some of you are still on the fence about whether to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I love it to bits, but I’ll admit, it’s not for everyone. (My writer friend Patrice is one of them, but I won’t hold that against her.)  NaNoWriMo has done a lot for me, and each year as the acorns pelt me from above and the temperature starts to dip below 90 degrees, I know novel writing season is right around the corner.

There’s a lot to love about NaNoWriMo. For me, I wouldn’t even be writing if I hadn’t heard about the event 6 years ago. It sounded perfect for me. I love insane challenges and random hobbies, especially those that don’t cost a lot. All I needed was a computer, and I had that! Unfortunately, I saw the ad for NaNoWriMo towards the end of November, but I wasn’t about to let another whole year go by before I tried it, so I attempted to do my own version in April where I finished my first “novel” in twenty-one days. It wasn’t crap. It wasn’t great either, but it was good enough to entertain my friends and family. They passed it on to their friends to read, which is just about the biggest compliment you can get.

I got hooked on writing, then, not by the act of writing itself, but seeing people react to the words that I’d put on the page, and I couldn’t wait to write my first real NaNovel. That November, I joined some 60,000 people in a frenzy of creativity. Again I hit 50k and even went beyond, but more importantly, I saw what a writing community was. I got to leave my house and go to write-ins at coffee shops. I met other writers, talked about writing. Made friends — some that I see only one month out of the year, but also some who are very near and dear. Writing doesn’t have to be a lonely, isolated activity. Doing it en masse, you get lots of encouragement, tips and pointers, and stories of come-from-behind victories that can help keep you going. Plus it’s a great excuse to consume ridiculous quantities of caffeine and chocolate.

Don’t fall for the hype though. NaNoWriMo is not all about fun times and slapping high fives with your fellow Wrimos while sipping fancy coffee drinks. It’s hard work. It’ll warp your brain, leave your fingers cramped, and reduce your social life to something resembling a Sasquatch’s. You’ll hate it some days. You’ll be bitter about seeing your friend’s word counts rise exponentially, and secretly gloat about those who drop out of the race before you. The dark recesses of your mind will start bleeding out on the page, and you’ll learn things about yourself that you really didn’t want to know.

But in the end, if you keep at it, you’ll have a 50,000-word draft. It may be pretty decent, or it may in fact be something so hideous that you can’t find a drawer deep enough to hide it in. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve done something people spend all their lives talking about and never doing. You set out to do a difficult task that requires imagination, dedication, and sacrifice. It’s your novel — 50,000 words that came out of YOU — a story that would not exist in this world if you hadn’t brought it into fruition. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Tags: NaNoWriMo

Writer’s Life: A Three-Hour Tour, A Three-Hour Tour

I got to tag along with Space Squid Editors Matthew, David, and Elle on their field trip to visit the Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection at the Cushing Library, located at Texas A&M University. The Collection is the 4th largest in the US, and is made of twelve different kinds of awesome. We got an in-depth, behind the scenes tour which lasted a little over three hours, and encompassed pretty much the entirety of the history of Science Fiction, or at least enough to sufficiently blow my mind.

The Stacks

First stop on our tour is the Stacks, a large temperature controlled, humidity controlled room with its own weather system. They keep it breezy in there to keep dust from settling on the books. My best guess, there were about twenty forty-foot motorized shelves jam-packed with SFF books, magazines, and manuscripts. One of my irrational fears is getting crushed between moving bookshelves, which I must have repressed until actually presented with the opportunity. It didn’t help that our wonderful, witty, and brilliant tour guide Cait told us about the hazardous working conditions of catalogers, and though there are motion sensors, they do sometimes fail.

We checked out some of the pulp magazines from the 1920s and learned that they were printed on the pulpiest of pulp and are now degrading so quickly that bits of sloughed pages have to be vacuumed up a couple times a month. Not even the environmentally controlled room can stop this bit of history from dying a slow death. They’re not expected to last another century, but the good news is we’ll probably all have computers in our brains by then, so you win some, you lose some.

The names of my favorite authors kept leaping out at me, and I felt like a starstruck groupie snapping photos on a backstage tour. Many books were presented in different editions, each with their own personality and beautiful cover art. We got to see signed Ray Bradburys, and though I think we were allowed to touch the books, it felt too intrusive to remove the books from their homes.  Cait’s stories were entertaining, and we got to hear the dirt and gossip surrounding our most beloved authors.

The Exhibit

While the Stacks were amazing, it was really cool to see the care with which some of the jewels of the collection were presented. The exhibit consisted of several glass displays highlighting both local authors and masters of the genre — not mutually exclusive, of course. There were also some rarities, like the first illustrations of Frankenstein’s monster, and a first edition of Harry Potter, which had a print run of 500. There were also timelines chronicling the progression of Science Fiction through the ages and the cultural and technological developments happening concurrently.

The Printing Press

Seeing a replica printing press in action gave me a real appreciation for my word processor. It takes six hours to set the type for two pages, during which your eyes go crossed from trying to sort the teeny letters. The ps and qs look so similar (not to mention the bs and ds), and it’s easy to forget that they’re reverse images, which is where the saying “Mind your ps and qs” comes from. Also, the metal letter pieces are grouped in containers called sorts, and when you run out of a letter, you’re “Out of sorts.”

The printing press itself is a replica, but it still takes a bit of might to operate the thing. Press workers used to pull 12-hour shifts, and although this looks like a great workout, I think I’ll stick to my computer and cheap laser printer.

Saving the Best for Last

Towards the end of the tour, I was scouting for places to pitch a tent and lay out a sleeping bag so that I could stay forever. Three hours wasn’t enough time to see even a fraction of the collection, much less sit down with the books so I could really appreciate them while curled up in a comfy chair. Though Cait certainly didn’t seem to mind giving up so much of her day to entertain and enlighten us, we were sure starting to drag, our once thoughtful and awe-inspired questions about the exhibit reduced to mumbling, crude jokes, and weak puns. And yet there was still more to see, so we pressed on.

The rare books were among my favorite, and it doesn’t get much rarer than this teeny stone tablet — a tax receipt from 2000 B.C. for the exchange of livestock.

These old books look more like artwork, especially taken in together. Huge tomes filled the shelves, boasting beautiful spines, stark contrast to the pulps we saw deteriorating before our eyes. These books were meant to stand the test of time.

The stories behind the objects are sometime just as impressive as the objects themselves. It’s interesting to learn of all the methods for acquiring pieces for the collection, especially on a budget, and hearing about the disputes, frustrations, and red tape that curators have to deal with. We got to see a portrait of Andre Norton, which unfortunately was damaged due to cats urinating on it while it was stored in a garage before the library got its hands on it. (See those black stains on the bottom part of the frame?)

Last, but not least, we saw a second edition of Dracula from 1899. The first edition from two years prior was already checked out, but we hear that this one has better cover art anyway.

Our brains buzzing and our stomachs rumbling, we left the Cushing Library in a daze. After some brief snerking as we passed the Animal Hvsbandry building, we set off on the second part of our journey to the town of Snook in search of its fabled chicken fried bacon. I could tell you about their menu consisting of nothing but fried entrees, or of how I’m pretty sure my salad was smothered in straight up mayo instead of honey mustard dressing, or the grease coma I went into soon afterward, but this post is already way too long, and besides, what happens in Snook, stays in Snook.