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Category Archives: Writing

A Farewell

“I loved him, and I love him still. I can say those words without regret now. Losing Liam somehow gave me the confidence I needed to say what I should have said three years ago.

“I still remember the day we met. He was radiant, ostensibly searching for a text on medieval literature. I was living a terrible cliché, an aspiring writer working in a small, out-of-the-way bookstore. I knew the book he wanted immediately, and found it for him with minimal effort. He smiled and called me his hero (he told me that he’d checked two other stores first and, like most of our clientele, preferred to give his business to a local store rather than some website) and paid for his book.

“I felt a brief twinge of guilt as I asked him for his ID to run his credit card at checkout. It wasn’t our policy to do so at the time, but I wanted to learn as much about him as I could before he left, possibly never to be seen again. I told myself at that moment that I’d hit the jackpot. Liam Reynolds was six months older than me, and he lived close enough to my store that I could expect to see him come in again. Subtle stalking complete, I handed his license, credit card, and book to him, and wished him a great afternoon. In the wake of his ‘See you soon!’ I was struck giddy by the thought of how green his eyes had been.

“Fast forward a year and Liam and I had gone on three ‘official’ dates. He’d come back to the store once a week to talk with me, planning his visits around my lunch breaks so that we could have more time. He was going to grad school for a master’s degree in literature, something I’d never had the courage to consider since my BA had cost so much and done so little for me. I told him that I’d been interested in him since that first  meeting, and that his stopping by to share a cup of coffee helped me to get through each week. He told me that he’d heard about an unbelievable clerk at my store from a friend who was always looking out for him. He’d come in that first day just to see me…

“I’m sorry… I shouldn’t be crying right now. We were so happy back then. Liam was a hopeless romantic, having spent most of his life at that point looking for but never finding love. When I agreed to go out with him, I was showered with more attention than I knew how to handle. Love notes written in a messy scrawl inside the cover of books he bought for me, flowers, home cooked dinners (always a nice change from my ramen and sandwiches and frozen pizzas). Then we celebrated our first anniversary, and he said he wanted me to meet his parents.

“I panicked. I’d never met a boy willing to take me anywhere near his family, but Liam wrapped his arms around me, kissed me, told me how much he loved me, and made me feel like all was right with the world for the first time since middle school. I was scared because I knew that my parents would never accept Liam the way his welcomed me, and not just because he wasn’t Christian and he had tattoos and a lattice of pale pink scars on the inside of each thigh that no one else had ever seen.

“But I went with him. He gave me courage then, just as he does now. We spent a full week with his parents that summer. I met most of you that week, and I couldn’t believe how willing you were to welcome a complete stranger into your lives, and I can never thank you enough for being for me after…after… No, I’m fine. I’m almost done.

“Liam would have loved to see you all here, celebrating his life. He told me that he wanted this when he died, that he wanted a wake. He said that the idea of a funeral was too depressing, and that he wanted his family and friends to remember the good times. Now I think he’d hoped we’d have been a little older before that happened, but life is like that. You never know what you’ll find around the next corner.

“The last time I saw him, I told him I loved him, and he gave me that Han Solo half smile he would always do, and said ‘I know.’ I think he knew we all loved him, no matter what he’d been through, no matter what we’d managed to say to anyone else. He wasn’t always strong, but he was always strong for me, and now we have to do the same for him. That’s all I have to say, other than this. I loved him, and I love him still.”

Community

Do you read magazines targeted at writers? I read a couple of different ones in my job at the library. I’m not about to claim that it makes me a better writer, but it does help me find some inspiration from time to time. I don’t only read magazines, though. I read blog posts by fellow writers. I follow them on twitter, published or otherwise. I do try to avoid books on writing, but that’s another matter altogether.

There’s an incredible community that is present in the writing world. We’re competition, yes, but we’re also the support network (yes, we have a support group for writers, we meet wherever there is booze). Without this community, I would have given up on my dream of being a writer a long time ago.

There are three things that I’ve learned that a writer must do in order to be successful.

1.) You have to write. I know it might seem self-explanatory, but we have a tendency to get caught up in the distractions of every day. Social media, research, the siren song of google and the endless labyrinth that is tvtropes. All of these things can keep us from doing what we need to do, whether it’s putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard (and both of those analogies began to sound dirty inside my head the minute I typed them, damn it). I know that I personally am over a week behind on NaNoWriMo right now because of various concept changes and plot shifts and other things keeping me from doing just what I set out to do.

2.) You have to read. It’s been said time and time again that reading is the only way to learn how to write. Find your favorite authors and read their works, early and late. See how they evolved over time. Study how they create characters and build plot events; how sentences are structured and how the story is shaped. Learn what works for you as a reader. Find the authors you don’t like, see what missteps they make so that you can avoid them.

3.) You have to live. Not like breathing and heart beating (though that generally is a prerequisite for numbers one and two above, and anyone finding out about a writer not being alive and still putting out new material should notify me right away). You have to experience things. Without channeling a certain amount of your own life into your characters, they’re going to come across as flat and boring. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing science fiction and have never been to another planet, or if you’re writing fantasy and have never fought a dragon with your bare hands (or in some cases, your bear hands). Everything you do can be turned into an aspect of a story. Did a conversation you had make you laugh? Recreate it in a setting-appropriate manner between your characters. Did you walk home from the bar in the dark last night? Take what you can remember of that walk and channel the emotion of it into your work in progress.

Thank you, fellow writers, for being part of the community that has taught me so much over these last few years. You’ve been great.

NaNoWriMo: Round Two

November of 2012 marks an important point for me. I’m going to be attempting my second National Novel Writing Month. Last year, though a failure in terms of actually reaching the goal of 50,000 words, was still a great success in that I poured out over 30,000 before losing steam at Thanksgiving.

This year, a lot of things have changed. I’m now working two different jobs, and my overall amount of free time for writing has been greatly reduced. There’s also a lot of uncertainty thus far about what this next attempt will include. I’ve been debating several ideas, and even today I shifted completely from one genre to another. Never mind the fact that I’m still in the process of finding a (semi) permanent new place to live. All of this could be occurring this month.

Did I mention that this month is also going to see the release of Halo 4, James Bond: Skyfall, Wreck-it Ralph, and a host of other games and films I want to play/see? Dethklok and Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts? Thanksgiving with my family? Christmas shopping? Dungeons and Dragons campaign to finish running? A presidential election? Okay, now I’m just ranting. Point is, it’s a busy month. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got less than five hours to crank out my 1600 words for today. These 200 or so don’t count.

Hallowe’en

My entry for my Hallowe’en Writing Challenge is here. Thank you participants, and Happy Hallowe’en.

“The Last One”

The fire had died down too much during the night, but it couldn’t be helped. I’d been in desperate need to rest after three straight days of running from them, and Marcus had been caught by them partway through the second day, so there was no one to share the watch. His screams had followed me, even into sleep.

As soon as I woke, I scrambled for a handful of twigs, leaves, and sticks to rekindle the flames, knowing that they were the only thing that would really keep them away. Once the fire was beginning to burn in earnest, I checked the gun I’d managed to grab from the facility guard’s body, a Colt 1911. “Only four rounds left,” I sighed as I checked the magazine. The .45 had been effective against them so far, but there were so many of them. Only one of us, me, now that they’d gotten Marcus. I sighed again, managing once more to hold back the tears that had threatened for the last day and a half, and chambered a round.

“He’s gone. Get over it. Get up, and get moving.” I added a small branch to the fire, watching as the flames kissed and embraced it, growing larger and brighter. As I listened for footsteps in the distance, I reflected on the past few days and marveled at how quickly everything had fallen apart.

We’d joked  for years, about how we couldn’t wait for it, and how our lives as video game geeks had prepared us for this exact situation. Well, let me just tell you that nothing, and I mean nothing can prepare you for the sight of your best friend being swarmed and eaten by those…things. We said that we’d make it through together, and now…I put my first three bullets into their heads. The fourth went through Marcus’ eye when I realized he wasn’t going to get away, when he realized what would happen if I didn’t.

The fire had scared them away, we didn’t know why, and I still don’t. I had the Zippo Marcus had given me for my eighteenth birthday, even though I didn’t smoke. I told him his habit would kill him. He said my nagging would be the death of him. Well, we were both wrong, but he was closer.

A crack of a twig breaking snapped me back to the present. They were here. I’d not gotten the fire started in time, and now they were here. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, grabbing the burning branch in my left hand and the Colt in my right. They were getting closer, surrounding me, but there was no way in hell they could know what my plan was. I knew I wasn’t going to survive, but I was going to take as many of them with me as I could. I fired my first three shots as they came into view. I dropped my torch into the dry leaves and raised my gun to my head.

 

 

October Writing Challenge

Halloween is nearly upon us, with NaNoWriMo close on its heels, and that thought absolutely terrifies me. In the spirit of the season, I’m taking a page from Sonia M and asking my readers to take part in a writing challenge. This is the first challenge I’m hosting, and so it is going to focus on my favorite holiday. Craft a piece of horror-themed microfiction. Think Poe, Lovecraft, King, Machen, condensed into roughly 500 words.


The rules are simple.

1.) Theme: Write a horror-themed piece of microfiction.
2.) Genre: Other than the overall theme, there are no genre limitations. Write a steampunk/horror story, or a horror/romance, or science fiction/horror, just for some examples.
3.) Word limit: 500 words (approximate).
4.) Deadline: October 31st, 2012.
5.) How to submit: If you have a blog of your own, post your story on your blog and share a link in the comments on this post. If you don’t have a blog of your own, feel free to post the story in the comments here. If you do this, I will post the story in a separate post and re-link it here.
6.) Prizes: The reward of a job well-done and the knowledge that you managed to finish one more short piece before diving headfirst into NaNoWriMo.

Our Obsession

With the unfortunate continuation of the rise of “unscripted” reality television shows, it seems like every conceivable topic is getting at least one series dedicated to it. Some things are apparently even big enough to warrant entire cable/satellite networks dedicated to them. What’s that? You collect Beanie Babies and you’ve purchased ten of each one that came out since 1993 and your house is now in danger of collapse because you’ve knocked out supporting walls to make room for your little stuffed friends? Better go on Hoarders. Like tattoos? There’s Miami Ink and L.A. Ink. Friends with someone who loves the bizarre and macabre? Point them toward Oddities or Oddities: San Francisco.

It seems as though there’s something for everyone, right? Well, not quite. What about us? What about the writers? Where’s our series showcasing authors and libraries and bookstores and the pains of staying up all night for a week to try to meet a deadline? Apparently I’m not the first person to think this way. Back in May, Entertainment Weekly’s Stephan Lee (@EWStephanLee) proposed a concept, laying out a manner in which such a thing could be done. It’s sort of like televising your progress through Nanowrimo. I’m now debating running this as some sort of surreal web series. Watch my sanity slowly slip away as I attempt to craft a novel in thirty days! No, on second thought, don’t do that. Webcam will be hidden away. Fear not, dear readers.

In all seriousness, this is reality TV I could stand to watch, and might even actively follow. You’ve gotten everyone else, network execs. Where’s our obsession?

Tourist

Have you ever been a tourist in your own town? It’s amazing what a slight shift in perception can do for you. For example, I’ve been living in Colorado Springs for the last six years. In that time, I’ve done almost none of the cool stuff that visitors do. Why? Because it’s been just me.

In the last two weeks, however, I’ve been changing that. When my sister was in town, I finally took the opportunity to visit Garden of the Gods. Ever been there? I lived down the street from there for four years and never went. Four years. There’s no price for admission, and it’s open almost all day every day. Over Labor Day, my parents were in town, and we drove up Pikes Peak. I’m a Colorado native, and I didn’t go up my first 14er (mountain with a summit altitude of over 14,000 feet) until a few days ago. I feel a little ridiculous, but simultaneously accomplished. There’s nothing to give you perspective like the view from 14,110 feet. Anyway, dizzying vistas aside, it’s quite inspiring to have made the ascent. Luckily, I have just the outlet for this. Time to write.

Thirty

I am challenging myself to do something I did three years ago (oh good god, was it really three years? Now I feel old). Back in 2009, I was a senior in college, and I was having the time of my life. It was about this time that I remembered an old rhyme. It goes something like this. Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear, And twenty-nine in each leap year. (wikipedia) This floated into my head just before September started, and so I decided that I would turn it into “Thirty Poems Hath September” and write one new poem for each day of the month. It was kind of like Nanowrimo before I knew that Nano existed (it was a dark time in my life, despite my earlier statement). At any rate, I composed a LOT of poems that year, mostly during the medieval literature class that V and I were taking at the time (sorry, Dr. Napierkowski-no offense to you or your class, that was just when I usually felt the most inspired). Some of them were complete nonsense. Many of them were haiku, because I would realize I only had five minutes left in the day to write a poem. Some of them were really good. Regardless, the idea got me to write, and to focus on some creative energy that was otherwise fairly elusive. I would recommend you try it. Thirty Poems Hath September. Get ready.

I Write Like…

Several months ago, and courtesy of V, I came across an awesome little utility called “I Write Like.” It’s a neat little tool that compares your word usage, syntax, and other stylistic choices to those of numerous famous authors. Ever curious to see if that fantasy piece stacks up alongside Le Guin or Lewis? Now you can find out. There’s something incredibly satisfying about knowing that your own fiction (or non, iwl isn’t picky) is similar in tone to the stuff you read all the time when you were younger. Don’t know the author they’ve given you as a comparison? “I Write Like” includes a link to that author’s works on amazon. Give it a try right here.

Corn: Summer Writing Challenge Entry

This is my entry for Sonia’s latest writing challenge. The summer competition gave us the goal of writing a short story (500 words or less) based on a photo. Here’s “Corn.”

 

Green is everywhere. It’s the first thing I see when I wake up. There’s been rain recently, and I can feel the moisture in the soil, smell it all around me. Rain’s scent lingers in the gentle breeze. The thunder’s rumble in the distance matches the one in my stomach, and I realize how far the storm has gone and how long ago my last meal was.

Corn. That’s the other overwhelming smell. Damp corn leaves. The corn is tasseled, but the ears on the stalks are still immature, still some time away from being ready for harvest. Good. I don’t have to worry about some poor farmer coming across me when I’m in this state. It’s unlikely that anyone will be coming through the rows this time of year, though. The stalks are far too tall for any wheeled vehicle to come through without crushing them, at least aside from a combine, and again, the maturity of the ears has already eliminated this possibility. I’m not certain where I am. The sun is still all but invisible behind the heavy clouds, but its position tells me that it is early evening. The worst of the storm must be moving on to the east of me, carrying with it more than any farmer would ever want. A heavy green tint to the rear of the storm system hints at the hail that lurks within. I turn my eyes toward more immediate dangers.

My backpack, or more accurately a backpack with my name on it, is on the ground, a row to my right. Examining it for any signs of tampering, I find none. It seems to be fine, so I open it. Inside, I find a flashlight, a jacket, a pocket knife, and a plastic bag with a piece of paper in it. The paper is folded four times and is written upon in black ink. The simple script reads “You have until sunrise tomorrow. You know what you have to do.”

I shrug and nod, fairly certain now that my every move is being watched, despite the apparent solitude.

Without further thought, I shoulder the backpack and stride into the green, vanishing between the rows. I leave boot prints in the damp earth behind me, following the setting sun.

I hope that I can make it.