Facebook & google+ status updates part XXII (Nov. - Dec. 2013)

“No stuffed bear should tell you they are a bear of very little brain but have a large...” Charlie trailed off. “I need a drink. I need several drinks.”

.... this line will not survive into the second draft of the story :)

We love people for who they are, not who we desire them to be, or we don’t really love them at all.
... today's interesting line.

The last thing his grandfather told him:
"I wish I was old enough to start forgetting you."

Writing goes well. Did 15K yesterday, going slower this morning as I feel out a new scene and get back into one character's voice as follows:
I have a list of stupid sayings I hate. Number one is ‘if you love something, let it go’. Hell with that noise: if you love something you hold it, keep it, cherish it. The world is littered with things we can’t hold, or stuff that slips away from us. There’s not enough love or things we love to go around tossing it aside. I think men invented that one, when I’m being mean, since it’s easier for them to just toss stuff aside, loved or not, and move on – as long as they can dodge child support payments.

From this morning's output thus far:
No other questions, no pushing, no desire for answers. I am a magician and there are few things in the world that scare me more than the depth of Jay’s trust in me and what might happen when I fail it.

From this morning:
“You’re chained up underneath the church,” I snap. “Of course we came here seeking answers; It’s not like you’re on a list of tourist attractions for Sunny Creek. ”

I felt fine, but I knew that didn’t mean anything at all. I could be eating enough radiation right now to kill me in four days and I’d never know.
We were made to survive. That don’t mean we were made to come back home.

This is Josh's sanity speaking. I am alone now. I am so alone. He tried to sleep. I forced him, at midnight. He got back up at 2 AM to write and begin the one story AGAIN. Help me. I don't add to his word count. I think my time is limited.

The aliens were not what we had expected at all. We had been prepared for armies, for E.T., even for abductions.

We were not prepared for the boy band.

YAY! Done fun scene. Sci-Fi story set in the far future. The characters have found remnants of one of the original colonies on the world, and the tech is so beyond primitive to them that they're convinced it must have been an alien settlement :)

“People aren’t monsters, even the worst of us.”
“That’s not what the war taught us.”
“The war ended. That should have taught you something as well.”

Total output at work (for a later scene):
"You misunderstand: I don't hate you. I do not even pity you. You are not worth that much notice. I suppose I may mildly regret knowing you exist at all."

I know six phrases in Atlantean. but they're all Yo Momma jokes.

“You have driven the universe to many monstrous things.”

“Maybe the rest of the universe just needed an excuse.”

“That is possible, yes. I do not know. I am – no longer capable of trusting my own judgement in these matters. I believe it is why I allowed you to find out about me.”

My new nano (I know...) is going to involve a bitter washed-up author murdering Chris Baty and the entire nanowrimo board of directors [who might be ninjas] under the belief that nanowrimo is an assault on Literature and an insult to real authors while he desperately tried to get his thriller novels that died out with the fall of communism revamped to fit into a world he no longer feels he belongs in.
He may, or may not, be having a mental breakdown.

My daughter thought writing 50,000 words in a month would make her an author. It was like finding out one of your children had decided to become a neonazi or a libertarian. The worst part was knowing Jeremy Burke would have handled it better: when he discovered that The Mongoose might have successfully killed and replaced a fellow CIA operator, he coldly began setting a trap for his enemy, certain that a man who believed he was destined to destroy ‘the cobra of capitalism’ would make errors in the end.
I was not the protagonist I'd written in my novels. I just wanted a drink. I had no plan beyond that.

Her eyes narrowed. “Also, Riley crashed mom’s car into the overpass at two am.”
“A shame about the overpass.” I sipped my coffee.
“And I’m pregnant.”
“As long as it’s not with the antichrist.”
She sat back at that. “I’m considering sending the three thousand words I wrote last night as a short story to the New Yorker.”
I sat my coffee down. “We aren’t discussing this.”
“Yes, we are. Nanowrimo is about setting goals and achieving them, dad. I don’t see why you hate it so much.”
“You cannot write 50,000 words in a month and call it a novel. Not a real one that can get published.”
“I know that.”
“And you’ll still know that when you’re done? If people ask if you’ve written novels, you’ll say, ‘Oh, no, just some drafts that weren’t any good’? False hope is not better than no hope at all. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.”

Best line from last night's writing at Chapters....
"Christopher is a first-year student whose nanowrimo novel is going to look like a five year old trying to write Lolita.”

From today's writing output:
CASPER: Centre for Secure Poltergeist Elimination Research

It is a bad sign when you try and google a conspiracy theory you vaguely recall to use in a story, manage to recall it and realize you know more about it than the entire wikipedia entry ON it :p

All I want is to tattoo these words

On the inside of your dreams.

A short story in sex six words.

He found her burning her novel draft in the garage. "What are you doing? You worked all month on that!"

"I know. It is better this way. You'll want to read it and I put you in it." And she smiled, bright and glassy. "You don't want to see what I did to you in my story." She laughed, short and sharp, her whisper carrying just over the burning flames as she said again: "It is better this way."

He moved to a newer country because there would be less history to study in school.

He looked up from the local paper. “Dear, it says here than in 1970 I could have placed you in an institution just on my word alone. Food for thought, eh?”

“If it was the 70s, I would have wanted that,” she snapped back.

Does any holiday exist for which the deadline to it does not terrify some like unto the end of days?

“She was like a mother to me.”

“Ah. She was your mother.”

“I know. That’s what I said.”

After the blinding, he was no longer able to see anything save for corporate logos.

New loss, same hope.

The only time he was ever struck by inspiration was the time he was struck by lightning. Taking up golfing was the only logical conclusion.

“It is not that your poem isn’t good. Far from it. It merely requires a wheelchair ramp.”

“What?”

“There are laws, my boy, and your poem is not accessible.”

“It is a sin before God and man!”

“I really don’t think you understand what 3-way stop means.”

“I lied, I lied, to get inside,”

The devil said with a broken smile.

“If you could let me out of you

I would be much obliged.”

Why is everyone so concerned about robots rising up against humanity and taking over the world? Don’t they realize that housecats did that years ago?

When her son counted the number of people on the bus, he always added one.

“Not wanting to exist forever is, I feel, a sure sign of sanity.”

We are all fragments of unfinished poems: the lucky ones are rhyming couplets.

“What if art is not a reaction against man’s fate in the universe?”

“Art if creation. To create for its own sake is art.”

“Perhaps so. But consider: nothing exists in vacuum. All art is a response, a reaction. One cannot make a statement without having something to state.”

“It might just make me happy.”

“I’ve no doubt it does. But to be happy must there not also be a sadness you again against?”

Sometimes we can sing in ways even gods forget to dream.

Every monster has a human side to them. This is what makes them, in the end, so very monstrous.

If poltergeists were real, wouldn’t security alarms go off more often without any discernible cause?

Everything is bigger when you are a child and sometimes – not often, but sometimes – some things always remain that way.

If we can make it through the failure of our dreams

about ourselves, each other, the world entire –

if we can fall through that but hold together

with fingers, worlds, whispers, promises.

If we can hold together with cracked hearts.

If we can make each other whole

Our dreams won't matter then.

No one speaks English over a tannoy system – there is not a one of us who hears the same words.

I love mornings that are my own, coffee brewing in a pot, the world quiet outside my apartment and a day free of distractions such as work. I love stories that come quickly and poems that can take days to form, the long waiting and deep relaxation of time that is my own to waste or spend as I see fit. I love how things can hold together even when they fall apart and that we are all stronger than we know but so seldom have to learn that.

“You plan to steal a car even though you said stealing is wrong?”

“I plan to kill the owner first, so it’s acquiring,” he says triumphantly. “Dead people don’t have stuff so it’s not stealing.”

She realized she was becoming too much a fan of Doctor Who when her little cousin asked if Grandma was coming home from the hospital and all she said was: “Spoilers.”

“I hate how much I need you.”

“Woof?”

“I know my master, the Lord of the Undying Wastes, was supposed to wake and ravage the lands of the living and the death – all of that, yes. But no one set his alarm and he really could use some coffee first. Perhaps we could reschedule this for the next time there are two blue moons in the sky and the sun bleeds in the heavens?”