NaNo Update

Hey kids!

Sorry I've been out of pocket for almost the last two weeks.  I'm not really sure what happened.  I guess I used to compose blogposts at work and things have been getting hectic.

So it probably seems a little late now, but here's a little check-in on my NaNoWriMo this year.  I did, indeed, win, as I have every year since I started in 2009.  For those of you interested in my statistics, here they are:

And in graphic form:

Now for a brief analysis as I do every year as well.  As you can see, I started the month just barely squeaking by.  I normally like to get a solid buffer in the first few days, ideally after midnight Halloween night when possible.  That didn't happen this year.  Around November 5 I did finally begin logging a little extra each day.  The biggest spike came on November 18, the first Friday for some reason that I really managed to sit down and pound out a couple of writing sessions.  I had intended to do that every day of every weekend before that, but as you can see I couldn't get it to really click until the 18th.  I stayed way over expectation up until I hit 48,500 words on the 24th.  That was the weekend I was at Chessiecon in Baltimore, and then went home to Philadelphia the Monday and Tuesday after.  So Friday the 25th I did just a few hundred words before heading to the con, then it's a flat line for the con, where I wrote nothing.  I pounded out a few hundred words when I got home Tuesday, then finished the project Tuesday evening, with one day to spare.  So, not exactly a banner NaNo, but a win's a win.

Since NaNo loosened up their strictures and allowed that 50,000 words of writing counts as a win even if it's on multiple projects, I've been enjoying the process a little more.  Do you ever get sick of working on that one project and start another?  There used to be no room for that in NaNo.  Now that there is, it's a bit freeing.

So this year I was working on SLASHVIVOR! which is a contracted manuscript I owe to Sinister Grin Press in February.  I somehow suckered our good friend Stevie Kopas into collaborating with me.  But I knew that since we were batting it back and forth, there was no way I was going to get 50,000 words done on it in a month.  I did get a solid 15-20,000 done on it, and we are so close to the finish line I can taste it.

My backup manuscript this year was the sequel to THE GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO, tentatively titled NOTES FROM THE UNDEAD.  I've now worked on NFtU for three solid NaNos: 2012, 2014, and 2016.  I've already winnowed out two short stories from this, "The Man With Four Scars" which appeared in AT HELL'S GATES II, and "The New Dark Ages" which appeared in FAT ZOMBIE.  I also did something this year I've never done before: edited out large chunks of the text as I went.  More than once I wrote a solid thousand words, chucked it into my tally document, and started over.  You're not supposed to edit during NaNo, but, surprisingly, I found that having that word count as a goal meant that major editing, as in, cutting out a huge chunk and starting over as I described, was actually beneficial.

Since I've worked on NFtU for three solid NaNos, you'd think it would be a monster of a document, and even bearing in mind how much I've sliced out, it still is.  And it's still not quite complete yet.  I'm thinking it'll take at least another thousand words to finish up one chapter I left hanging.  And then there's the question of whether there's enough ligament holding the story together, or whether I'll have to flesh (ha!) some of that out as well.

I have a lot of work ahead of me.  First my author edit, which I should put off for at least a month or six weeks, assuming I even do it then, then I'll probably pass it to my good friend Mike Lerman, who beta read TGA and who I've always intended to tap for this project as well, belated though it may be. 

I don't know if the story is going to be published at its current length (over 125,000 words even before the beefing up I just described.)  TGA was a solid 119,000 words, which is on the longish end of novels.  I'd like to cut at least ten thousand words out of NFtU, but I'm not sure there's enough fat to trim that much out organically in the editing process.  It may just turn out to be a doorstop of a book.  Time shall tell.

How about you?  How did your NaNo go this year?

Nano Update #3

Okay, I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say today, so let's spice things up by taking a look at the old leader board.  This might be (mildly) interesting to those of you who don't NaNo, and therefore don't know what, exactly, we're looking at every day, staring at us, mocking us.

 



So, this is a snapshot of my graph as of today.  Obviously, the x-axis is the number of days and the y-axis is the wordcount.  The gray line represents what you need to make par (1667 words per day, or enough to make up that amount.)  The brown bars represent what you actually typed.

So what are we looking at in my particular case?  Well, as you can see I basically made par or just barely over every day for the first week.  Day 7, the first Saturday of the month, represents my turnaround.  (Duh, it was a Saturday, I had time to write.)  Day 8 the lead improved, and things went swimmingly up until the 13th, which as I've mentioned before was the Friday when I only managed to knock out about 800 words. 

The 14th and 15th (Satuday and Sunday again) were two more banner days and put me back on track.  The only other day since the 13th when I failed to make par was yesterday, Day 22, when I wrote about 1300 words.  It doesn't really matter at this point unless I completely lay down on the job, because I'm at about 43,000 words and par for the 23rd is 38,000.  I'm not exactly setting the world on fire but I'm a scoche ahead.

The only other interesting thing on this chart is the flatline from yesterday to today.  If it's not otherwise obvious, that's because I haven't written any words yet today.  But I will (barring any unforeseen circumstances) so the bar graph shouldn't remain like that.

Here's a look at the stats the NaNo website provides us with:

In some ways this is more interesting than the chart.  In other ways it's less interesting.  For instance, knowing that I average 1881 words would indicate that I slightly overachieved.  It doesn't reflect the two days I fell down on the job and the four days (all weekends, I might add) when I excelled.  And, again, this chart is a bit skewed because it considers the amount I wrote today as 0, rather than, say, projecting what I'll probably write today.  Which means my actual average is probably a bit higher, etc., etc.

What is interesting about this stat bar is it always tells you your estimated rate to finish and the words per day to finish on time.  So if I had some crazy banner year and pounded out 10,000 words a day, it'd guess I'd be done by November 5.  A lot of people, of course, fall behind NaNo, and let it really affect them.  I've never been in that boat, so I don't want to be preachy, but the nice thing about NaNo is that it never rules you out.  Let's say I had only written 6000 words by today. 

He he, I just plugged that in and the result is pretty hilarious.  It projects that at my current rate I won't finish until May 11, 2016.  (Hey, that's what I get for only writing 260 words a day.)  But more to the point, it tells me I can still win if I write 5500 words a day for the next week.  I mean, that's daunting, that's especially daunting to me since I've never written that many words in a day before, but the NaNo bots never count me out.  I think that's pretty cool, all things considered.

All right, so, again, barring Fate deciding to make an ass of me, I should be well and truly finished in the next few days, with plenty of time to give you guys a full report on how I ended my run on next Monday's update.  See you then!

NaNo Update #2

HAWM, fellow NaNoers!  If you are not already, make sure to friend me over on the NaNoWriMo site.

So, after last week's update I'm feeling pretty good about the blog this year.  I've been reporting in about NaNo, but also keeping up the regular posts, and that makes me feel good.  This might just be the sweet spot I'll be going for in future years.  In the past, November's often been either me frantically talking about nothing but NaNo, or the exact opposite, I'm so sick of it that I want to talk about anything but when I'm on here.  I think weekly updates is the sweet spot, though, so I'm going to try to remember that for next year.

So what is this week's update?  Well, I'm happy to report I'm standing pretty at about 31K words.  By the end of today I'm supposed to have about 27K (and I anticipate, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I'll be at about 33K.)  So, for all intents and purposes I'm about 6K words ahead of schedule.

Now, you'll remember I was fretting last week about just barely keeping my head above water and how I had been gunning for a "beautiful day" - 5K or maybe even 10K words to just boost me into the stratosphere.  Well, as it turned out, my strategy shift away from that stupidity succeeded.  Last week I just tried to steadily have 2K word days, and a few times I clocked in at 3K, almost two days work.  I never had a "beautiful day," not even on one of the 6 Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays we've had so far this month. 

I did have one day, Friday, where I just absolutely fell down on the job and only clocked about 800 words.  I hate doing that, and it's one of the reasons I hate getting too far ahead, because the temptation to say, "Oh, I'm ahead, I can take today off" is very great.  So let me give you a word of advice, fellow NaNoers: never (and I mean never) take a day off because you're ahead.  It will inevitably bite you in the ass.  It will lead to two, three, four days off and then you're behind.

So I'm treating Friday as a fluke.  I didn't mean to underachieve, and I didn't set out to take a day off because I was ahead, it just sort of happened.  And those days will just sort of happen, which is precisely the reason you need to do a little more than the bare minimum as much as you can.

Okay, so what else?  Well, some of you may be wondering what I'm working on.  The answer is I'm working on HUNTER OF THE DEAD, which is actually a contracted piece for Sinister Grin Press.  HotD originated as a script I wrote in 2002/2003 at a time when I was sick to death of artsy fartsy bullshit in vampire movies - yeah, this was way before TWILIGHT - and it was my ode to the folklore.  It's changed quite a bit since then, as these things do, and it had dropped off my radar for a long time, but my good friend John Waxler has always insisted that this was my best work and I had to make a novel out of it.  To that end, he fronted $100 to "hire" me to write the HotD novel. 

After a few publisher implosions and other things that I don't want to get into publicly, and almost two years later, it's finally happening.  So, something I've been struggling with for a solid two years, something that's existed for thirteen, something I've started over and scrapped completely at least 6 times, is finally coming to fruition.  And it's doing so because of NaNo.  Because I'm forcing myself to jump through these hoops, and as I do, the novel is crystallizing before my eyes.  The NaNo process is even forcing solutions into places I didn't know where there. 

This is why I NaNo, and when folks pooh-pooh it, I always remember that this month is when I do my best work.  It doesn't have to work for you.  It just has to work for the folks it works for, like me.  Okay, I'm starting to get a little preachy here so it's probably time to sign off.  Toodle-oo and good luck, everybody!

NaNo Update #1

Okay, I made a couple of promises last week.   The first was that I wouldn't abandon normal blogging this month entirely, and after Friday's ass-chapping post and even Wendesday's cover reveal I'm feeling pretty good about that one.  The other one, though, was that I would keep you more up to date on how NaNo's going this year. 

In the early years of this blog, when I didn't have a whole Hell of a lot else to talk about, I talked about NaNo a lot in November.  Now I've got so many irons in the fire, I noticed last year I barely talked about it at all.  So, going forward let's try for a happy medium.

I'm happy(ish) with my wordcount right now of 16,025.  My target wordcount for today is 15,000 and I haven't started writing yet, so actually I'm closer to two days ahead of schedule than one. 

So how's it been going?  Well, not glorious.  My first few years I really sat down at midnight on Halloween and tried to crank out a few thousand words and get off to a good start.  This year, I didn't do that, and I was scarcely ahead of the bell curve at all this week.  I'm satisfied that I haven't really blown any days off, or come in under schedule at all, but I usually don't like to be playing it this close to the bone at all, and I'm not happy that after 9 days I'm still playing it this close to the bone.

All week I kept saying to myself, "All I need is one beautiful day."  And I do.  But I still do.  I was hoping to make that Saturday and Sunday this past week, or at least a combination of the two, but only being two days ahead of schedule was not my goal.  I wanted to sit down and crack out ten thousand words one day.

Realistically, though, that's not going to happen.  The most I've ever written on one day, and this was when I was fired up and sat down for nearly a solid uninterrupted eight hours was five thousand words.  So I know the day I write ten thousand words, well, it might be coming, but it's more of a pipe dream than anything else.  It's something I keep telling myself will come.

All that being said, I think I've finally passed through the gunk phase.  I may talk about this more, but I think last night I finally figured out what was clipping my word count.  I was struggling to try to put together the beginning of a story I've started and restarted several times.  Last night I realized maybe I was going about it the wrong way.  Maybe what I really had to do was recreate the ending, and then spool it back from there.  Without all the same mental issues of hitting a barrier so many times with the ending (which is the issue I kept running into with the beginning) I feel a little more space to breathe. 

So for those of you who question the value of NaNo...this right here is why I do it.  Forcing yourself to jump the hurdle every day forces you to think about new ways to do that, which forces you to think about new ways to solve your story problems, and new ways to approach your story.

So now what I'm thinking is, maybe instead of going for one beautiful day, I'm going to have one slightly overachieving week.  If I go for a solid two, maybe three thousand words every day this week, I should be a lot closer to where I like to work for NaNo, being a good five-to-ten thousand words ahead and clocking out ASAP on the 25th.

And...with that, what I was expecting to be a very brief update turned into a regular-length post.  Maybe I really do have enough thoughts about NaNo to keep it interesting this year.  Oh, and of course, if you are participating this year, make sure to friend me!  We'll see you on Wednesday for...I'm not really sure what.  But we'll find out then.

NaNoed!

Hey there, cats and kittens!  It's November, and you know what that means alllll across the writing community:

NANOWRIMO!

For those of you who don't know, every November is Na(tional) No(vel) Wri(ting) Mo(nth.)  The rules are simple:

30 days.

50,000 words.

Now, a lot of people, including some professional writers, like to pooh-pooh NaNo.  "Every month is novel writing month for me," they'll sometimes say or, "50,000 words isn't really a novel," or "writing isn't a competition."  It's all well and good if you can't or don't wish to participate.  Hey, people have shit to do, and not everyone can wrap up all of their business on October 31 and dive into a month of writing.  Hell, I spent the last two weekends in a mega-marathon of editing to try to knock some semblance of order into a novel I'm contracted to release in December.  (More on that later this week.)

For the most part, though, I think of this attitude as akin to saying, "Why watch the Olympics?  I can watch athletic competitions any time at the local Y."  Yeah, man, I get it.  Not everyone is into this stuff.  But for those of us who are, NaNo is an event.  It's about the camaraderie.  It's about the commiseration.  It's about sharing what is otherwise a lonely, often bitter calling and/or profession with a world full of comrades.

Yes, a lot of them are n00bs.  So, what, are you fucking Obi-Wan Kenobi?  Then go help them out!  Be a fountain, not a drain.  Obi-Wan didn't say, "Oh, Luke, you are such a fucking loser for still being excited about Force pulls and shit." 

I don't even mind dealing with the n00bs.  You know why?  Because their attitude is so positive, they are so not yet ground down by the publishing industry, that they remind me of the spark of why I started doing this in the first place.

Oh, yeah, and all three of my published novels were NaNo babies.  Now, that being said, I sure as shit didn't boot the 120,000 word GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO out the door the day after NaNo.  But still, NaNo has been good to me, and NaNo has been good for me, and if nothing else, at least for one month out of the year I have no excuses to just watch a little more TV instead of writing because writing is hard.

Anyway, perhaps the lady is protesting too much.  So let's just say if you're participating this year, I'd be just tickled pink if you'd add me as a buddy.  Personally, I love having buddies to compete with  My insanely competitive nature really drives my word count into the stratosphere.

I'm not going to abandon the blog for the month.  I'm sure things will still grind my gears in November, so you'll probably get at least a few regular blogposts, and the Year of Interviewing Dangerously is far from over.  But for the most part expect some low-key, low priority posts, probably appraising you of my NaNo progress or thoughts on the whole matter.  That's where my effort is going to be directed for the next month.  Hope to see you there!

Allow my to step on my soapbox (aka blog) about NaNo this year...

So, you've probably noticed I haven't been talking much about my NaNo novel this year.  I usually don't, if you've followed this blog, because I'm usually so burnt out by doing it that I don't even want to think about it.  This year I was burnt out by NaNo, yes, but much more so by lumping NaNo in on top of the Hundie Challenge, in on top of publishing two books, in on top of...

Etc. Etc.

Anyway.  Did I win?  Yes. 

I always post my stats so you can get an idea of what my erratic behavior is like in the month of November.  So, here's that:

KINGDOM, of course, is far from complete, and if you've followed me here for some time you may remember the year I wrote ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE KINGDOM for Script Frenzy (RIP) and you'll know that it is an epic.  KINGDOM will be an epic if I ever finish it, and converting it to the steampunkesque milieu I have in mind may be an even more titanic feat, but, I think, will save it from being humdrum and banal.  (And I am nothing if not against being humdrum and banal.)

Anyway, there's another reason I kind of waited to talk about NaNo.  And that's because I've noticed, just this year, apparently, that people are kind of being dickish about it.  Let's be frank: I don't really need to do NaNo, I don't really get a whole lot out of it anymore, I've proven to the world (five times in a row now) that I can buckle down and churn out 50,000 words in a month.  Really the reason I do it anymore is to be part of the writing community and to maintain my street cred.  (Because, yes, if you're an author, everyone will ask you if you're doing NaNo this year.)

Which raises the point of community.  NaNo is supposed to be about cheering on people who aren't really writers or who are still just novices and encouraging them to finish their damn books.  But for some reason (and it may just be me, and I may just have a totally skewed perspective) I feel like this year it has all been about people trying to prove they can outdo each other.  Look at me.  I got to 50,000 and set it aside because I had other shit to do.  But I see half the writers in my social media going on and on about how they've hit a quarter of a million words and ha ha ha and the other half weeping and feeling excluded by the first half.

Let's be real here.  If you're writing these ridiculous amounts you're either cheating or you don't have a day job.  And good for you, I wish I didn't have a day job, either, and could write all day every day.  And if you're cheating, who the fuck are cheating for?  What are you trying to prove?  The people that NaNo is really geared towards are the harried, sad, unconfident people.  Let's try not to wreck up their confidence any worse, shall we?

Anyway, it may just be my burnout talking here or I may just be castigating people needlessly, but I did not enjoy the community this year, so I apologize for not being a good member of it.  But if I'm totally wrong feel free to call me an asshole in the comments.  Back to the Hundie Challenge tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo - IT'S ON!!!

Good morrow, my friends!  With all the BJ boosting that's been going on around here lately, you may not have realized that it's NaNoWriMo season and once again I'm doing it!  Go ahead and buddy me if you're doing it, too.  This year I'm working on a little dalliance called KINGDOM...a recajiggering (as the old lady from Futurama would put it) of a high fantasy I started working on during the war.  More to follow, but for now, to your typewriters! 

(Also, don't forget I'm in a big Review Rumble with the dreadful Melissa MacVicar this month...so go ahead and write me a review for BRAINEATER JONES so I don't have to write a paean to...shudder...romance novels at the end of the month!)

So Whatever Happened With That Whole "NaNo" Thing?

I'm glad you asked!  The answer is, of course, as with every year, I completed the challenge.  However, let's put first thing first. 

Q:  What did I end up calling my work in progress?
A:  Notes From the Undead

Yeah, it was honestly probably going to be that anyway, although I was looking forward to some audience input that never came.  (Wow, that's like the story of my whole time as a blogger in 11 short words!)

Anyway, a few words about this year's manuscript before we take a look at the graph.  The story behind "Notes From the Undead" was actually developed before "The Ghoul Archipelago" way back in 2003-2004.  Back then it had the working title of "Flesh" and I still think of it as the Flesh Series, although given the naming convention I stumbled upon later, I'm thinking of calling it the Gore and Peace Series if it ever actually gets published.

So, back in the early days, when I was just getting into zombies, when all we really had was the Holy Trilogy and a few other odds and sods ("Dead Alive" and the first "Resident Evil" movie spring to mind) I thought it would be really cool if someone wrote an ongoing TV series about the zombie plague, so we could see, for instance, what happened to Peter and Francine after they got on the helicopter.  Clever me, right?  Shit, I could've been a millionaire if I had more clout back then.  Damn you, Frank Darabont!

Anyway, the sketchy part-prose, part script (I think I went back and forth on whether it had to be a smash hit novel before it became a TV series, but TV series was always the goal) version of what was then called "Flesh" focused on a righteous young Armor officer proving that 2LTs weren't incompetent the way everyone seemed to treat them.  I guess I had a chip on my shoulder back then, and you can tell it was old because he wasn't even a Field Artillery officer yet.  This must have been 2003, come to think of it, because no character I created would have been a tanker after I got my first taste of redleg life in 2003.

The other main character was a German (or Swiss, I think I hadn't decided) priest.  I was still a pretty heavily practicing Roman Catholic back then, and I thought the idea of a badass priest was the greatest.  I think the original concept of "Flesh" (now "Notes From the Undead") was a bit of a Catholic apologia, in fact, since there was also some anti-abortion stuff with zombie fetuses and the like.  Although the zombie fetus decidedly crawled out of the belly of a personal enemy of mine, so it seems sour grapes as well as the Catechism were driving me in equal measure a decade ago.

Anyway, you can see the fertile ground from whence sprang our heroes 2LT Ojeda and Fr. Daley.  (For a little taste of Daley's adventure, check out the "Notes" excerpt here.)  And an exciting idea was born.

So what held me up on work for nine years?  Well, put simply, pop culture happened.

The "Dawn of the Dead" remake came out in 2004.  Then "Shaun of the Dead."  Then, well, you know the rest.  A whole flood of zombies, a veritable zombie plague of varying degrees of quality.  As a fan I was in Heaven, but as an artist I was slowly starting to despair.  Suddenly my simple tale of a band of survivors making their way across America in a sort of modern day BSG on earth started to feel stale.  And when "The Walking Dead" hit the airwaves in 2010, as a fanboy I creamed my pants but as the one who "had that idea first" a little part of me died.

"Flesh" as a concept was unceremoniously buried and forgotten about, killed by its own instant status as an imitator.  And it probably would have stayed that way if it weren't for a delightful character by the name of "Howling Mad" Martigan.  And so, like the revenants which it features, "Flesh" staggered out of the grave and back to life.

You see, "Flesh" was always meant to be a TV series, and as a TV series I knew I had to have a plan for a season 2, and potentially seasons 3 and 4.  So I sketched out the whole series as I was fleshing out (ha!) season 1, which would eventually become "Notes From the Undead."  And season 2, to switch things up, was going to be a nautical-themed adventure.  Here are my notes:

High Seas.  Sailing island to island they find an enclave of pirates who rule the Pacific. 

That's it.  That was season 2.  That and a picture in my mind of a shipwrecked crew and their scraggly-bearded captain who had missed the whole zombocalypse by being stuck on the modern-day equivalent of Gilligan's Island.  And so, as you may already be guessing, "The Ghoul Archipelago" was born.

What was great about "The Ghoul Archipelago" (and still is, at the time of this writing) is that it finally takes zombies to a place where they've never been before.  All the tropes of a Joseph Conrad novel or Horatio Hornblower on the high seas haven't been done to death by the undead genre.  In fact, except for a not-quite-what-I-was-doing little book called "Dead Sea" by Brian Keene, I'm not aware of any nautical zombie novels.  So, for NaNo 2010 I wrote mine, and didn't even feel bad about it.

And, as I've often said on this blog, "Archipelago" may be my magnum opus.  It may be the greatest thing I, or any other writer, has ever written.  (Take that, Faulkner!)  And of course, being as it was meant to be season 2 and a side story to the original "Flesh" story well, those stories had to be told, too, didn't they?  Else the tale would be incomplete.

So, there you have it.  If "Ghoul Archipelago" (which is now first, chronologically and dramatically) is a big success, "Notes From the Undead" may, nay, will see the light of day.  And if not, well, I've still got 50,000 words closer to becoming a publishable writer and got to spend time with some of my favorite characters, including some old friends and some new ones. 

So, that being said, here's this year's graph.

So, what's interesting about this?  Nothing much.  Day 3 was a banner day and every day after I did more than the 1666 minimum, and I was finished by Day 24.  (For some reason it says I will complete on December 13 because I downloaded this image on December 13.)

I was considering trying for a 15 day challenge this year, at least that was my intent, but I never had any other banner days after November 3, so it never panned out.  Also different this year, for the first time ever I had NaNo buddies, and I found I was strongly encouraged the whole month to not let my buddy be nipping at my heels (even if he did beat me in the end, the loathsome slug.)

So, any thoughts on this year's NaNo?  Mine or yours?

Well, it's that time again...

Hey kids,

Well, it's that time again.  You probably won't be hearing much from me this month, so hopefully you can enjoy catching up on the archives.  When was the last time you re-read The Terrifying Revenge of the B-Movie!!!?

Until then, though, why not weigh in on the title of my NaNo manuscript for this year?  Here are the choices, and if you can decode my clever naming convention, you can even suggest some more names in the comments.

1.  Notes from the Undead
2.  Notes from the Above Ground
3.  The Insulted and the Interred
4.  The Insulted and the Disinterred
5.  Gore and Peace
6.  The Master and Morgue-arita
7.  The Wight Guard

What should my new novel be called? 

YOU DECIDE!!!™

Billy and the Cloneasaurus Wrap-up

So, you might be wondering what happened with the whole NaNo thing.  Remember?  I mentioned it earlier this month?  No?

Okay, well, anyway, you might be wondering about why I haven't posted an excerpt or a cover or anything on the blog, and if you clicked on the link above, you might've noticed there's no excerpt on my Nano page, either.

You might even be wondering why you've been staring at an embedded video of a brilliant cover version of Carmelita on the blog for the better part of the month instead of reading updates about my magnificent progress.  (And I do mean staring at the embed, apparently, instead of watching the video.  Only 46 hits?  What the fuck?  It's really good.  Seriously.  Make it a point to watch it sometime.)

So...

Yeah...

About that...

Now, don't get me wrong, I did it, all right.  I got my winner's stamp and everything:

I won NaNoWriMo for the third time.  I'm batting a thousand, I guess.  And there's even a cover that already exists (thank you, internet!) because my title was an awesome reference to something else even awesomer:

It's just...

I hated it this year.  I hated how Billy and the Cloneasaurus turned out.  Hate-hate, too, not like, "Oh, I hate that dress on her."  It was sort of a combination of disappointment and disgust, because I had such high hopes for it.  This was to be, at one time, my grand, nihilistic, satirical masterpiece.  A scathing indictment of the modern world, a 1984 for 2011.  It was going to be great.  And it was great.

In my head.

As soon as I put my fingers to the keyboard it all turned to crap.  For one thing, there were no characters.  Every character was identical, and that was purposeful.  It was a world full of clones!  What could be a better satire of our modern society, where we're valued no differently than machines? 

And yet...

See, the thing about good stories is you like the characters, and you like seeing them interact.  Chewie, Han, or Lando are great on their own, just standing there.  But when Han starts arguing with Chewie, or Chewie starts choking Lando, it just becomes great.

And then there's Billy.  Purposefully frumpy, dumpy, middle-aged and balding, without a distinguishing characteristic in the world, because he's the perfect cog in the machine and would never make any noise.  And when he has his great epiphany, he, well, doesn't really change that much.  And the only people he has to bat this personality around with...are identical.  (Because they're clones, see.)  Change the characters, and the whole underlying metaphor of the book gets tossed.  Don't change the characters, stay true to the vision and the book sucks.

So, the book sucks.  I stayed loyal to my crappy vision.  It's done.  There was someone (I think it might've been Mark Twain) who once said, "Manuscripts don't burn."  Never in all my life have I felt more like testing the veracity of that phrase.

One last point of "interest."  My graph for this year:

You can compare it to last year's graph if you want.  But you know how you can tell I despised writing this book?  Because there are no peaks and valleys.  I just forced myself to write the bare minimum every day.  See on Day 15 how it seems there was a valley and then I made it up the next day?  Nope.  Just didn't update the wordcount until after midnight.  Then, at the end, when I could taste the breath of freedom from this awful, awful mistake, I stepped it up a little so I could finish.  Compared to the wild excitement and breathtaking grandeur of The Ghoul Archipelago this was a grueling tread up a slight incline.

So, sorry.  No excerpt.  Ever.  It's nigh unreadable.  Of course, remembering the mission statement of this blog, that might not mean anything sometime in the future when I'm a little less angry at Billy and his damned cloneasaurus.  Suffice it to say, they both died at the end.  They made roast beef sandwiches out of the cloneasaurus.

NaNoWriMo: An Unfortunately Named But Pleasant Experience

I hate to have a second interlude when you're all no doubt sitting on pins and needles looking for the last entry on the Dread and Breakfast series (you are sitting on pins and needles waiting for that, right?) but this period of the year is just full of all kinds of crap.  In addition to Halloween being yesterday, today is the first day of the unfortunately named but still pleasant National Novel Writing Month, or (shudder) NaNoWriMo. 

If you haven't followed us in previous years, NaNoWriMo is the...

Yeah.

Whatever. 

If you're reading this blog, you know what it is.  And if you don't know what it is, that's what Google is for.  Anyway, 50,000 word, 30 days, I enjoy it, follow my badass progress here, have a blast, happy November.

A Couple More Interesting Pictures

Here, incidentally is the "pulp" version of the same cover from yesterday. It adds that Joseph Conrad feel to it. As always, check out Greg's website for more.

Here's another interesting graphic that I don't want to lose this year. This is the graphical representation of my wordcount over the course of the month. Notice I was technically a little bit behind in the beginning of the month (mostly because I often work past midnight), then for a while it evened out, then for some reason I pulled ahead on the fifteenth, never quit, and finished a few days early. No idea if that says anything about my habits, and now I'm upset I didn't save the same graphic from last year, but I do know this: I certainly didn't finish before the 28th or 29th last year.

Incredible Cover Work

Another magnificent coverpiece brought to you by Greg. And, for your personal edification, another excerpt from the now semi-completed (but over 50,000 word) Ghoul Archipelago:

Something tumbled off in the distance. Not too distant, the hold wasn’t immense, but it didn’t feel immediately close. Then again, the echoes of the chamber were deceptive with regards to noise.

“Mr. Mo?” Jim tried to shout, but found that his words were coming out in a feeble whisper.

He heard a clank, like something metal or wood striking the deck, followed immediately by a squishy sound like a bag of peeled oranges being dragged across the floor. Jim shrank to the deck like a turtle retreating into its shell. The noise recurred. He was not alone in the hold.

“Captain?” Tuan Jim said, a little louder this time, “Mr. Mo? Anybody?”

His voice sounded pitiably small in the dark chamber, but it was certainly loud enough to draw the attention of…whatever. A clank followed a squish, then again. Step. Drag. Step. Drag.

Slowly, pressing his hand to the wall, Jim forced himself to his feet. He pressed his back to the bulkhead and backed away from the sound (or what he perceived to be away from it…who could tell?) and snuck along the wall taking special care not to step hard.

Step. Drag. Step. Drag.

Tuan Jim paused mid-step and listened to the empty silence so hard he could feel his ears flaring. In a way, he almost wanted to hear that telltale moan pierce the air so he would at least know what he was dealing with. A little tiny part of him held out hope that it was an animal or one of the regular crewmembers pulling a hazing prank on him. Not enough that his hackles were lowered any, but enough that he had a distant outside hope in his heart that he might not be about to be devoured by some infernal man-devil.

But there was no moan. No sound of breathing, labored or otherwise. No scratching or pecking of an animal. Just that infernal step followed by that endless drag. Step. Drag.

Jim decided there was nothing for it. He plunged his hand into his pocket and fumbled around until he came out with a small cardboard box of matches, the windproof/waterproof type that cost a little extra but always turned out to be worth it when a squall was blowing out everybody else’s pipes and cigarettes. He only had three matches left. He didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to signal his invisible enemy, couldn’t, knew it was death to do it, a guaranteed death sentence from anything that wasn’t a hoax, but he had to know, it was eating at him, gnawing at him, he couldn’t die without knowing, he’d rather know and die than anything else and suddenly he struck the match.

Two tiny glittering green eyes reflected the matchlight deep in the black of its pupils. Jim was mesmerized by those eyes, but they weren’t the dull, gray, empty abscesses of a walking corpse. In fact, they were bare centimeters from the ground and…

“Hisssss!”

“Shit!” Jim shouted and jumped back, although the rat darted off in the opposite direction.

So it wasn’t rabid. Thank God for small favors. It did drop the morsel it was feasting on, though. A human trachea. Jim wouldn’t have recognized the tube for anything more than an organ if a bit of a skin wasn’t still attached revealing an Adam’s Apple, like the whole throat had been gnawed away and ripped out together. Jim bent over and, with a shaking hand, plucked the gruesome vermin delicacy from the floor. The dried, rotting skin still bore a recognizable tattoo, a butterfly.

“Mr. Papillon?” Jim said.

A puff of air on the back of his neck alerted him to the presence of the creature. He did a quarter of a somersault away and saw Papi, his throat gouged out and teeth outlined with dripping ichor, desperately and violently attempting to groan in triumph without a throat. In the same instant, the flame reached his finger.

“Ahh!” Jim shouted, dropping the match and waving his arm wildly in the air to ward off the pain.

The blackness closed back in like the ocean claiming a castaway. Jim felt Papi reach out and clutch at his clothes. He fell almost totally backwards, and grunted as he fell on his coccyx. Then the horrible sound of the step-drag began again, and for the first time Tuan Jim knew what it was: the Papi-thing throwing his crutches forward and then dragging his desiccated leg along with it. Without a leg, the creature was incapable of regular ambulation, or even of Papi’s crippled movement, but it had found its own brutish way of pursuing what prey was down there. And right now that prey was the poor swabbie Tuan Jim.

Jim felt the thing’s hands, stronger even than Papi’s had been in life, scrabbling and clawing at him. It caught a good lock of his hair and began to pull. At first Jim began to shout, but thought better of it, deciding it wasn’t a dignified way to die, even for a simple swabbie like himself. Breathing deeply he reached out, felt the twisted bamboo of the former Papi’s crutches and with a swift kick knocked the crutches out from under it.

It was the worst pain he had ever felt in his life. The creature fell with the full weight of its carcass, but it refused to let go of Papi’s hair. He reached up and felt his scalp bleeding, a big chunk missing. No time to worry about that now, except inasmuch as the trail of blood would no doubt attract the creature. And the rats. But, then again, the creature was fully hobbled now and would be easier to deal with.

Jim took a few steps in what he assumed was a safe direction and lit another match. The Papi-thing was on the floor, lunging like a swimmer trying to use one leg to kick itself forward, and pulling itself with its arms. It continued to gnash its teeth and attempt to hiss, but no noise emerged from its empty palate. Finally watching how much was left of his match, Jim looked around, trying to survey the situation.

Just outside of the circle of light his match was generating, dozens of little eyes glowed. Jim shuddered at the thought of all those rats feasting on the meager stores they had gathered from the island before leaving and fishing since. They were going to starve because of these unwanted stowaways. And speaking of unwanted stowaways, Papi seemed to have given up on his theories of a sunbaked island paradise and snuck aboard.

As the match began to flicker, Jim chocked up on the shaft (if choking up was the right word for a shaft so tiny) and began to look around for something to use. There was hardly anything except their long term stores. Nothing really headsmash-worthy. Mostly tropical fruits, some edible grasses and salted fish and crab. He was actually standing next to the last of the canned stores from the Sulaco.

The match went out. All but silent, Papi was still scrabbling along the floor. Jim sighed deeply. His next match was the last. He took in a long breath, knew his composure would be fine, and lit it. Papi was scrabbling at his shoe. He grabbed a jar of peanut butter out of the last of the Sulaco’s stores and scooped about half of it out onto Papi’s head and into his gnawing mouth and along his missing neck. He glanced at the rats.

“All right,” he said, “He’s all yours.”

Sneak Peek: The Ghoul Archipelago

***Lest I be deemed The King of Empty Promises (don't worry, a guy I work with already owns that title) since it is halfway through November I figured it was time to give you, my beloved fans, a sneak peek at my NaNo entry for this year. I did, ultimately, decide on The Ghoul Archipelago and before you go off on me, yes, I know I'm starting to pigeonhole myself. So, here it is, completely out of context, an excerpt from The Ghoul Archipelago.***

Nodding, and lowering the pistols he had been so gungho to carry only scant moments before, Candiru ducked and bobbed back down into the hold. Martigan returned to check on Mo. The mechanic seemed to be falling into what Martigan would otherwise have described as shock, but there seemed to be no physical malady. Great. Now his crew would be terrified and no good to defend themselves, he had to dress down his first mate in the middle of a supernatural pirate attack, and his chief engineer was a vegetable.

“Things are looking up,” Howling Mad Martigan said to no one in particular.

One of the creatures, a Hawaiian shirt-clad former tourist with what seemed to be an old broken camera around his neck, staggered to the front of the line, clutching at Mo’s shirt and pressing his pulsing black tongue against the inside of his jar. Howling Mad leveled his pistol at the thing’s head, cocked his head to the side to avoid the ricochet, and squeezed the trigger.

Click.

“Shit!”

Martigan dropped the empty pistol to the deck and snatched the flare gun out of Mo’s caught hand. He had to actually grab the creature by the collar and use two fingers to separate the glass jar from the creature’s skin to leave enough room to jam the flare gun into the gap.

“Stand back!” Martigan yelled, shoving Mo back harshly.

The flare went off and the captain had to jump away from the heat, leaving the flare gun jammed within the creature’s jar.

“Damn it!” Martigan snapped, sucking on his finger.

The creature stood there, holding a scrap of Mo’s shirt. The flare burst inside the jar, presenting the two sailors with a magnificent fireworks show in a bottle. The creature seemed to be screaming or howling, trying in vain to follow the swarm of spiraling flame red sparks as they flew about in the contained maelstrom around its head.

Its eyes melted, literally melted before Martigan’s eyes, spilling out of their sockets and leaving a trail of white mucous down the creature’s slowly heat evaporating cheek. The inside of the jar turned black with carbon, and for a split second nothing was visible, until the jar visibly cracked and exploded outwards in every direction. Martigan grabbed the mechanic and pulled him down to the deck, throwing himself over his crewmember to shield him as the glass tinkled down around them, an out-of-season snowstorm in a strange tropical summer.

Looking up, Martigan saw the creature’s head was on fire, flames licking the horizon like Ghost Rider, and tiny, slowly caramelizing shards of glass forming a criss-crossing network of now knobs, now warts all along its face. Then, finally, either a glass shard pierced the skull or the fire finally sucked all the oxygen out of its brain, and it collapsed to the ground in a spent, sooty heap.

Martigan looked down at the man he was straddling.

“Well,” Mo said, “That’s two down.”

Hiatus

Hey, cats and kittens, thanks for stopping by for one last hurrah before the hiatus. I've mentioned this here and there in the pre- and post-ramblings on the last few entries, but now that "Fistful" is complete, I'm retiring from the manuscript burning game for at least a month. With the election season in full swing, I'm workng on a new project, a podcast of sorts which I hope you'll patronize, but since it's political and has precisely nothing to do with the content of this blog, I didn't feel comfortable housing it here. You all come here for the writing (right?) and not the proselytizing. Besides, nobody wants to hear my voice, unless it's giving you a long-winded, semi-coherent policy rant.

That being said, I'll be out of the loop with the podcast until at least until November 2. And once November comes around, you know what time it is. Anybody joining me for NaNo this year? My handle will still be Redleg. I expect a few updates to the blog during November, but, alas, still no manuscript burning, just a few how-ya-doins regarding the month of Hell. To be fair, I'm kind of looking forward to it. I've hardly written anything this year. I've concentrated on querying, and that's more soul-sucking that anything I've ever been able to imagine. I did start working on a little remake of "The Seventh Seal" but I kind of got stuck on the big lightsaber battle between Antonius Block and Death (and if you think there's any hint of tongue-in-cheek in that statement, then you don't know me at all.) But, alack, "The Eighth Seal" is not a novel, but a screenplay, and novels must as the devil drives. I've got a few ideas on tap, and if you are so inclined, you can tell me what you would most prefer to see exist come the end of November. Although, as usual, decision will be made by fiat and not in any kind of democratic fashion.

a) The Ghoul Archipelago - the story of a freighter that gets caught up in the internal politics of a zombie-worshiping trading nation established by pirates in Maritime Southeast Asia.

b) The Party - a group of Dungeons and Dragons players decide to take up baseball bats and fireworks and go off for a real adventure, to walk the earth and help the hopeless.

c) American Bolshevik - the early adventures of Sidney Graves, the man who liberated Puerto Rico and established the People's Militia of Central Pennsylvania in the wake of the Second American Revolution.

Or, just spitball your own ideas. What the hell. I've never written a novel-for-hire before. So, hey, we'll see you all again in November. Thanks for sticking by me.

The Saga Begins...

With NaNoWriMo complete, I thought I would show off this magnificent cover design for Braineater Jones, brought to you by http://www.greglynnmurals.com/. And, just to cap it off, a brief little excerpt from my far-from-finished product:

October 31

I woke up dead this morning.

Shit. It’s after midnight. It wasn’t this morning. Better start over.

November 1

I woke up dead this morning. Yesterday morning. Whatever you want to consider it.

Not dead tired.

Not dead drunk.

Dead.

Dead dead.

As in, no pulse, no breathing, dead.

I mean, I’ve woken up a lot (I think) and who really thinks about whether they’re breathing or not? Who notices their heart’s not beating? It’s not something you’re totally aware of. It took me a while to figure it out.

It took me less time to figure out I was stark, bare-ass naked.

I guess they did that to me. Whoever killed me. They must’ve stripped me. I don’t know if they wanted my clothes or my money. Or maybe they just didn’t want me to be identified. But then, why didn’t they smash in my teeth or burn off my fingerprints or something?

Who knows?

I was floating face down in a swimming pool. I lay there for a long time, with my eyes open, starting at the bottom of the pool, before I realized I wasn’t breathing.

Here’s the other thing: I have no idea who I am or how I got in this state.

I’m keeping this journal so I can get my thoughts straight while I try to work this all out.

Here’s what I know so far.

First of all, somebody killed me. Did I mention that already? I think I did. Anyway, after I woke up naked, one of the first things I noticed was the big gaping hole in my chest. I could stick my finger through it. I probably could’ve stuck my fist through it.

I don’t remember much about guns. Of course, that’s assuming I ever knew anything about them. But what kind of gun does something like that? One thinks not a handgun. Maybe some big brutal hand cannon. Or a shotgun. But, then, aren’t shotguns scattered? It was a solid hole.

So. Somebody killed me. Presumably for a reason, unless they really did just flip out and strip me naked and didn’t plan any of it ahead of time. So what was the reason? Well, I aim to find that out. Let me put that in my list of questions.

1. Why did they kill me?

I guess while I’m doing that I’d better figure out who it was.

2. Who killed me?

Duff Gardens...hurrah!

Braineater Jones is complete! And not a moment too soon! Here's to doing something other than writing in December.

Braineater Jones Glossary

Here's a little something just for fun. Braineater Jones had a much shorter worldbuilding process than some of my other works, but I still stopped to make a glossary.

Glossary

braineater – a derogatory term for all zombies, but used more specifically in the zombie community to mean a zombie nearing the five year mark where their minds collapse and they become mindless creatures; compare “dim” or “bub”

bring across – the process by which a zombie comes back from the dead; see also “turn”

bub – thinking zombies, of the type most of the characters are, prior to brain collapse brought on by insufficient alcohol use or the passage of time; compare “braineater;” see also “dim”

deadhead – most common term for zombies, as “zombie” was not in common usage until the 1960s, sometimes considered derogatory and less commonly used in the zombie community; compare “our kind”

dim – alternate term for “bub”

double dog dead – term used mostly by Braineater Jones to refer to a zombie’s destruction; compare “put down”

morgue mates – zombies killed or resurrected at the same time, sometimes considered to have fraternal or sexual relationships

put down – more common parlance for destroying a zombie; compare “double dog dead”

turn – alternate term for “bring across”

our kind, our community, and variations – euphemism used within the zombie community akin to “cosa nostra” in the mafia; compare “deadhead”

unbirth – the process of being turned, sometimes treated as a holiday in the zombie community, as in “Unbirthday”

unliving – collective term for zombies, relatively rare in the actual zombie community; see also “deadhead,” “our kind”

Braineater Jones

So, in honor of National Novel Writing Month, commonly shortened to the saccharine and incomprehensible "NaNo," I thought I'd talk a little bit about the history of my novel.

Braineater Jones has been with me as a name for a long time, but that's about it. A name. Not a character. Not a story. Not even an idea for a while. Just a name. I suspect, though I'm not 100% sure that it came to me in a dream one night after watching "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." (You may already see where I'm going with this.)

You'll probably recall a scene from this movie where the interchangeable Nazi warmonger is in his tank, chasing Indy through the desert, and suddenly, inexplicably, yells out "Wo ist Joooooones?" I'll use my four-year baccalaureate degree in German to translate this for you: "Where is Joooooones?" Anyway, forever after that night some guy yelling out, "Braineater Jooooones!" has stuck in my mind.

The name had only one logical character type, and after a while I knew he was a zombie. But why name a zombie? Why nickname a zombie for that matter? Well, he'd have to be intelligent to have a name, for one thing. And I wondered what an intelligent zombie might do for a living, and it occurred to me that unless he was a criminal he would probably be a P.I. I toyed with a subtitle of Zomb-I P.I. or something along those lines, but as of yet I haven't been able to make it work.

The only problem is I'm not a mystery reader, I don't watch film noir, I really have no idea how to construct a detective book. So for a long time Braineater Jones just sat on my hard drive with I think these exact words:

"An exercise in zombie noir."

"Also: humans spread through the galaxy, alien life is mostly parasitic resulting in vampires, zombies."

Not sure where that second part came from. I think a SciFi Channel movie of the week. (Ooh, sorry, I meant "SyFy" of course.)

Anyway, after a while poor Jonesy was relegated to my pile of neat but useless ideas. I thought it might make a neat video game, that is, until they released Stubbs the Zombie which had evidently the exact same plot. I despaired. Poor Braineater Jones was all but double dog dead. I made an obscure reference to him as being the star of a video game in another one of my books. It wouldn't make sense to anybody who wasn't me, but it was one of those Vonnegut-type throwaway ideas that I decided to just throw away and I decided that would be about the closest poor Jones ever got to the light of day.

Then a funny thing happened. I was sitting at work daydreaming about my work-in-progress at the time, a little story about the Second American Revolution. (No, not the secret one.) I was brainstorming, working on some worldbuilding, when all of a sudden Braineater Jones reared his ugly-ass head. A new list of zombie rules rolled past my eyes like the opening scroll of "Return of the Jedi."

He wasn't an alcoholic. He needed alcohol to preserve his brain. (The cigarettes were just to be cool.) But was this just a mini-Bender here? No, there was more. It wasn't as easy as all that to just get booze, because of Prohibition. Prohibition, in fact, was a cudgel the administration used to clamp down on zombie activity. In fact, that was the whole reason the zombie subculture needed someone like Jones. The cops wouldn't help them, but Braineater Jones would.

It was like it was all clicking into place. I guess that name and that abandoned idea had sat somewhere down in the reptilian depths of my subconscious simmering in a little stew of gestalts. All of a sudden it just came screaming to the surface. I didn't write any of the Braineater Jones story, just a little bit of the worldbuilding, and vowed that would be my next novel. Then I heard about NaNoWriMo, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And they're off!

So, now that it’s November 1, you can officially go to my NaNo page. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Check out last week's announcement.

As I mentioned Sunday multimedia events will be lighter than usual (not that they were ever particularly heavy before) at least for the month of November. I'll probably just plan on keeping you updated on the NaNo novel, Braineater Jones. There is an excerpt up now, just a short one that doesn't really tell you anything the summary didn't, but at least it gets you inside the protagonist's head.

Here's to a proflific month. Incidentally, if any of you artistic types out there are interested in designing a dust jacket for Braineater Jones, let me know. I'm not much good at that sort of thing.