Category Archives: amwriting

For Fritz.

Slack Batterton dodged off the footpath, out of sight of his pursuers.

“Christ, that was close,” he muttered, wiping the sweat from his tanned brow. He looked around for a likely place to hide so he could rest for a while. It had been hours since he’d stopped running. Spying a depression in the ground, he quietly edged toward it, picking up some fallen branches that he pulled on top of himself for camouflage once he lay down.

Their eyesight is poor, he said to himself, shaking. They won’t be able to see me as long as I stay still.  Running for hours was not something that Slack Batterton was accustomed to; but fear can be a great motivator. How can I make it back to the chopper and get out of this Jurassic hell-hole? He caught his breath, then dodged from tree to tree, slowly making his way back to the small clearing where, thank God, Cindy waited in the helicopter.

“Get me the hell out of here!” he shouted as he approached the bird, and she fired it up and they swooped out over the canopy.

“Wait, Slack, was that…a chicken?” asked Cindy, not trusting her eyes.

For Cindy and Slack had landed in a remote jungle area that was home, not to reanimated dinosaurs, but giant chickens.

“Remember those stories about the Super Rats in New York City in the 1980s?” he said, over a double reposado, later, in the grimy hotel bar. “Guantanamera” played on the tinny radio.

“Sure,” said Cindy. “They grew resistant to the rat poison, and kept getting bigger and stronger, was the theory.”

“That’s right.  Darwinian rats, getting leached antibiotics from the water supply and scoffing at mere chemical rat poison. Growing two and three feet high.

“Well, something went wrong with these chickens, and I don’t know if it was HGH to make them grow bigger breasts or what, but they were ten feet tall!” Slack downed his tequila and motioned to the bartender for another. “I’m not going down there again, but I think I know someone who can.”

He pulled out his cell phone and checked for service. There was one bar. “I hope this goes through,” he said, punching in a number.

“Who are you calling?” asked Cindy, curiously. “The CIA or something?”

“No,” answered Slack. “The Purdue Company. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. I just hope he’s tough enough.”

 

ETA: Fritz has this thing for giant chickens, apparently.

Spelling.

Scene: Helicopter pad, 6 big burly guys in black uniforms, faces blacked out, carrying dictionaries and magnifying glasses, receive their pre-op pep talk from their C.O.:

C.O.: Men, it’s like this: Someone took an I from definitely, and replaced it with an A [groans are heard]…and then inserted the I into regularly, for reasons unknown.

INSERTION TEAM: (mutters)

C.O.: Somewhere, out there, is a word missing an A. I’m counting on you to track it down for me.

INSERTION TEAM (all together): SIR, YES, SIR!

14 days in…

to NaNoWriMo and I have amassed just a little more than 15 days’ worth of words, giving me a buffer or a day off, or whatever. Which I have to say, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to! seeing as I spent every day until yesterday being behind, at least a little. I didn’t have much of anything scheduled for this weekend, though, so I was able to basically just sit on my ass and type.

My story is moving along; I have a protagonist and a Goth and some thugs and a guy named Jack Fancy, and it’s set in London although I’ve not been there since 2003 IIRC? but lo! these wonderful internets provide me with much help.

Wow that Lo has put me in mind of David Foster Wallace, and the PGOAT. Which just about makes me want to give up on my silly little story, but I will try to persevere.

Onward!

Oh, and the NaNo site gives you lots of great stats but it doesn’t give you an easily accessible daily wordcount, just a daily total, which means I’m going to have to do some subtraction at some point to get an idea of how many words I’m writing each day (it does have averages and such, though, I’m not dissing it, more I’m dissing my math skills :P )

Oh and look, here are more than 200 words that will not be in my novel! Going to bed, now, regardless.

I thought it was yesterday,

…and find that my total is not as close to where it should be as I thought.
:(

(As a matter if interest, if you have any, my cheesy pseudo-literary fiction has become a sort of murder mystery, although I don’t know that the presence of a corpse is enough to make a murder mystery, in the end. I have some fairly interesting characters, at least.)

8991 words down, far too many yet to go.

Oh and may I say, that my Main Distractor, my dear darling adorable husband, is the best cheerleader a NaNo person could possibly want. Thank you, baby! :wub:

À propos de

NaNoWriMo, I have twice now had full-fledged dreams of full-fledged protagonists ready for my writing, and have woken up with nothing but the knowledge that they existed.

Maybe I’ll be able to get them out of my subconscious when the time comes? I’m not particularly sanguine about it, though.

NaNoWriMo

So I’m not sure why, really, but I’ve signed up for this.

It’s not that I don’t have quite enough to fill my days, but…several Wigber friends do it, and I keep having this urge to write that I can’t even put in here. I don’t know if the twitter is sort of robbing me, because if something won’t fit into 140 characters (or sometimes a couple of those), I tend to drop it.

Anyway, I did 500 words for a magazine piece not long ago, and that took me about 3 hours from start to finish, including a lot of cutting/rewriting. I reckon I can manage 2000 words without polish most days, which should let me get up to 50K in 30 days without too much trouble (famous last words, I know! but I’m fairly voluble. Especially if quantity is the main goal. I mean I can write you two or three pages in longhand on doughnuts at the drop of a hat.) and then I suppose I get to see whether it’s actually readable. And edit the fuck out of it, since that’s what I do, especially to myself.

I have a couple of vague concepts that I’m trying to hang onto in Scrivener, but I haven’t really figured out a topic or story arc or characters or anything like that, so if you have any characters you’d like to see immortalized in some grubby pseudo-literary fiction (that’s my tentative genre; it may well change), do add to the comments.

The idea is that I can outline some vague plotlines, and flesh out some characters, but not actually write anything until November 1. Upon availability, I will add a widget to the blog that counts up my daily tally, and you lot may applaud or scold me, as appropriate.