on writng certain events

If you have not experienced X, you should not write about X.

Every author writes about things they have not experienced. This is the nature of writing, of placing yourself into the heads of characters, into the events they have experienced. No one copes with events in quite the same manner, no one deals with shit in the same way as everyone else does. To say that someone should not be able to write about events they themselves have not experienced strikes me as censorship of the worst kind. No one owns events. No one owns concepts, or ideas, or even pain and trauma. Nor the expression of it.

Whether one understands a situation/concept/group better from the inside or the outside is an old, old debate, and one never likely to cease. But telling people they should not even make the attempt, that the way they put their own pain into words is invalid because it is not your way, strikes me as dangerous ground to walk on. Yes, some things should not be glorified, but telling people they shouldn't be able to write about them is not a solution at all but perhaps an even worse problem.

No one is going to write about anything in the same manner, or see the same events with the same eyes. We will hurt each other: we can't not hurt each other. But writing can be an act of understanding, a fumbling toward truths in one's own way. And it seems to me to be a poor and narrow thing to limit others because they do not see the world in quite the same way as one does, to say nothing of deeply insulting to imply that because someone turned pain into a kind of poetry that they never experienced said pain at all.

Prompt: Write about a ghost

Whether it is one you met last night, the household haunt, or a memory from your past, write about them.

Dear diary,

I never had a diary before, so I did the usual password-and-encrypt, only a different one than my hard drive. Not that my dads are likely to read this, but it just sounds stupid. See, last time a ghost appeared in my bedroom: all translucent in a suit and tie, probably some Christmas-future idea gone bad.

“Jeremiah,” the ghost said. Everyone calls me Jeremy, but there you go.

“I’m busy,” I said. And I was: I’d just downloaded the latest Bioshock game and I wasn’t about to ruin it for anyone. I’d locked my door, put a sign on it and everything. So I was going a night without sleep and a lot of red bull. Still felt real.

“Jeremiah,” he said again, even louder. Cut right through the headphones I had on and everything.

I turned and looked up. The ghost stood, floating a few inches above the carpet, blood dropping from his fingers.

“Oh, real original,” I said.

The ghost paused. “I have come from beyond the grave to speak to you.”

“Yeah? Houdini never did. His wife waited years on him. Also,” I said, ticking items off on my fingers, “Atmospheric interference, hallucinations and sleep-deprivation. Have you ever heard of electromagnetic interference?”

“What?” the ghost said.

“A lot of ghosts result from that, also infrasound. That’s low-frequency sound, like how a tiger roars at 18 hertz and that’s why it shakes us. If I said I saw a ghost, my dads would probably convince themselves they had as well: collective hallucinations and hysteria, to say nothing of half-glimpsed shadows and how humans are pattern-forming —”

“I am right in front of you,” the ghost said, but had at least stopped the blood.

“And? Even if you were real, I have real things to be worried about. My GCSEs, which college I’m going into and whether Jennifer is ever going to want to go on a date.”

The ghost stared at me with an expression that reminded me of a few of my teachers and then vanished. I got back to my game, but when I got up this morning there were small red stains on the carpet where he’d been.

I figure I spilled something and made the ghost up to explain it.

Gotta get to school. Might add more to this file later. Probably not.

Why I need a clone...

Writing novels is work. It takes time, effort, energy. Investment. I was glancing at my backlog of stuff while reading the authonomy faq and realized just how much stuff I still have to fix or finish. In no particular order ...

Rites of Exorcism, which in my head was going to be 3-4 books long. Various drafts of books 1  and a couple starting book 2 exist. (There's also the half-finished second draft of book 0, which is pure back story now.) My attempted redo of it last year hit 30K in total as an exit/rewrite so I probably need to take a long, hard look at it again and restart the first draft from scratch as I have to change a few characters up a fair bit.

Dogs of War is a plotted-out YA trilogy. Two drafts of book 1 exist, a small part of book 2 and the whole thing was plotted out from the get-go. It stalled out because I felt I was falling into typical traps (my personal tropes used in a story) and needs more fleshing out before I delve back into it.

Boy & Fox. This is, probably, my favourite story if only because it is so unlike most everything else I work on. It is also, bar none, the hardest to write. The first ~10 pages are done. I even have the ending done in my head. But the bridge between them keeps falling apart each time I write it. Something is missing, and later this year I'll need to write out a detailed plot structure and figure out what it is. Mostly because doing that while writing the story is a recipe for insanity. Which is what I was doing before.

Adventures of the Miskatonic Elemental School Kids. My definitely a comedy story. Probably my favourite piece, next to Boy & Fox, for much the same reason.

Ghoulish Series. Aka what I am working on now. I will probably finish book 2, do basic edits to book 1 and work on one of the above while considering book 3. At least, that is the plan ....

Emily's Story

Sometimes, when he thinks we're alone, Daddy listens to the radio. Mommy says, soft as sadness, that the Monster is always listening.

"What great big ears he has," Mommy says, "and eyes." And she laughs in a not-funny way, and drinks more pills. She says they are her happy pills.

Sometimes my friend is mad when Mommy calls him the Monster, or Daddy yells at him. The whole house shakes until I yell at him to stop and then we play in the yard. Mommy and Daddy cry when my friend growls at them, and I don't like seeing them cry. Crying is for kids like me.

Sometimes my friend is hurt. The neighbours all moved away, but still people try and hurt my friend. Our yard is huge now and my friend can bound and play without anyone yelling at us at all. Sometimes I hear planes overhead. (Just like in the war, Daddy says in his not-daddy voice, hard and ugly.) The island is quiet now, but still people still come to hurt my friend.

I think, sometimes, that my friend scared people away. That might be why our yard is so huge now. He's always ever so big and clumsy, but Mommy and Daddy just laugh and say everything is okay and we shouldn't move. I miss my other friends.

My friend is hungry all the time, and the nice butcher doesn't bring by meat anymore and my friend has to go into town for good. The last time I went to town on his back they had soldiers and guns and shouted at us from over the broken bridge.

Everything looks broken down; sometimes my friend gets ugly cuts on the bottoms of his paws, broken windows no one has cleaned up at all. I don't understand it.

When he is hurt, my friend's cuts are the colour of his fur. I clean them when I can, but he won't let anyone else near him.

Everyone else calls him the Monster now, but to me he'll always be Clifford.  

Good analogy, this

“Writing is kind of like having a poo, basically. It’s really hard if you don’t want to go, but there’s a time when you have to go. And that’s what it should be like. You’ve just put so much stuff in your subconcious, you’re just so excited about writing it that you have to sit down and get going. And that’s really the secret, that’s why people falter, because they start writing too soon.”
— Graham Linehan

Writing tip of the $timeperiodthatisnow

If you are unable to afford an editor for your work, do the following:


leave every typo in, add a few amusing ones, and sell the results as post-internet literature.  

Where the writing is at ...

Currently I'm working on two projects. The Book of Going Forth by Night is the modern urban horror story that had a draft finished during nano. I wrote about 20K of the sequel to get a feel for it and then jumped back into this to redo it. I'm only 5 pages into but it's at least taking form again, albeit in present tense. I'm having fun fleshing out the character of Cindi and working on making the MC even more of a jerk since he basically is one at this point in his life.

Boy and Fox (aka Falling Toward The Sky) is on 11 pages and going a bit quicker, mostly because I am keeping a lot of description from previous drafts to use in it and I also have 60 handwritten pages done during travelling that shall be worked into it. (Or, realistically, about 10 of those pages.) I'm having fun fixing and keeping things and looking forward to reaching the point of New Plots vs. reorganizing old plots and concepts and meshing that together as the start. The other project is more fixing up plot and streamlining it; I'm not adding anything new in that sense so I figure it will be slower to write overall.

Beyond these, I'm trying to ignore other novel and story ideas wandering into my head so I can focus on this. How long that'll work is anyone's guess.

On characters, some thoughts

I'm working on characters for a novel, getting a feel for how they work in my head again. It's been a while since I looked in on them, and the story and the characters have shifted and changed a lot over that time. I've written sequels to their story that failed, tried to write their story a few times to have it die on the page. Sometimes change is good, both for the story and the character. (For example, the 'sequel' idea failed utterly because the one character simply could not be the other as an adult. Which has led to re-thinking both characters. Again.)

I have found that I tend to approach characters from the central question of what lies they tell to themselves and to other people. The starting point, in my head, is where they are the most dishonest, how they fake honesty and so forth. We're different people depending on who we chat with and when, and why: in a lot of ways, we never let go of our masks, or we convince ourselves we do so well that said desire becomes a mask in and of itself. As an author, the fun part is finding the bits of myself in each character, and building -- or removing -- masks around that as the story and character dictate.

So I am looking at their masks, at the lives they choose to lead, the lives chosen for them and the costs (and sacrifices) of such things, sure in the knowledge that no one truly believes themselves the villain of their own story and wondering what would happen if someone did....

September Writing

It seems my latest method for novels is to combine things from other stories that have stalled or failed and see what works. As a result, what is now 'The Book of Going Forth By Night' was once, in no particular order, the Rites of Exorcism novel [now a backstory], the BOGF rpg idea that sprung out of Rites and a story I'd only called 'zeth story' about what happens to a man after he's lost everything.

The end result has been pretty fun and odd so far, so I'll see where it goes.

sort of an update

<Chaos`^> sup?
<alcar> I is writing. Just began chapter 7, Parents Don't Exorcise Jell-O.
<Chaos`^> what?
<Chaos`^> you write the weirdest damn stories...
<Chaos`^> can't you write something while NOT on acid?

Facebook Status Updates

I've fallen into the habit of posting bits of writing on facebook as status updates. Some are just lines jotted down in a file, others are bits and pieces that may (or may not) end up in a current WIP and some are short stories seeds for stories I will never actually write.


Bob knew he was being fired if he didn't upgrade to BrainBot 6.0, but all his education and programs worked with 4.0. Her'd avoided 5.0 by claiming it was too buggy, and now it was too late. Pushing thirty, he didn't even know if his brain could handle the upgrade. But he had no choice.

He told everyone he was a paranormal detective, but really he just liked seeing naked ghosts. Almost as much as watching them have sex.

He stepped out of the time machine, staring at his mantle clock and thinking it had worked, that he had moved an hour into the future and time would be his for the plundering. And then he read the paper, and damned daylight savings time with a heartfelt bitter sob.

"Why did you invent the time machine? To see the battle of Waterloo? The birth of Jesus? To meet Genghis Khan? Find out about the dinosaurs?"
"I wanted to go to my high school prom."
".... For the record, I'm writing down Jesus."
"I can't visit Jesus with a death ray!"
"What death ray?"
"The one I'm taking back with me."

The secret of magic is this: every work of fiction is really a travelouge. Understand that and you know all of magic you need to learn.

"Sanity is nothing more than proof your mind is a virgin," the man in the lab coat said with his cheery smile. "It will all be better soon. Scapel."

Cassie shrugged away Terry's question, her response light and dismissive: "We have an infinite capacity to bear the pain of others."

Jared smiled crookedly. When he spoke, his voice was terribly gentle. "To forgive requires a kind of judgement too."

"College girls?" The vampire managed to look paler than normal, like wamed-over oatmeal. "You don't go after them, little fledgling. What do you mean, why? They have mace! You want to know what it will feel like when the sun burns you to a crisp, get some mace in the eyes."

"Catching the pack of werepoodles was quite easy," Detective Christensen told the press conference. "We just went to pet stores and found out who was buying an excess amount of flea collars."

"You have to understand, mom and dad. I paid Joe Chill to kill you. I had to. There was no other way to become the Bat. The Bat needed your sacrifice for me to grow strong, to become the Batman, to fight crime. Because I couldn't do that with the vast fortune you ... left ... me. Oh."

"It is not that the dead don't wish to return; it's that they lose their way in the other world, lost without a Starbucks to guide them back through the darkness to the day."

There is a moment before the burning begins. The brief, fragile hope that you might escape, might not burn, that even fire can be kind.

"I don't think I get it," Terry said. "I mean, you've helped create a goddess. Doesn't that make you spiritual more than, you know, religious?"
Jared grinned. " Spirituality is just the privatization of religion."

Another mythology ramble

I'm currently poking at a novel involving angels, demons, and exorcism. The one mentioned in the previous post, really. It brought to mind my other issue with mythology in novels/tv series/etcs.

Generally, you tend to get All The Stories Are True. Or at least there's some basis for them. And guess what? The characters learn The Truth(tm) and things end however they end. But in the real world, no one myth is inherently superior to any other. And, in the real world, no one finds out they are Right.

So no one will in this novel. The MC had the working hypothesis of his parents to go by, others will be added as the novel goes along, but which -- if any -- contain a grain of truth, and what that grain is, will remain unknown. It won't stop Aiden from deciding one theory IS the right one, just not ensure that he is actually correct.

Mythology and novels

Several years ago (in the wilds of 2005) I turned a poem into the start of a novel. The result was Waking The Dead, which was about the dead waking, gods, mythology, and other things. One of the reasons I began it was to make use of a mythology -- in this case a blend of Sumerian and Haitian -- that wasn't common in modern urban fantasy. Generally without exception the cosmology is either:
A) Christian
B) Native American
C) Ireland/Fae/what have you
D) Japanese of late

And it bugged me that some of those were taken as flat out 'this is the order of things'. So I did Waking The Dead, and decided to avoid making use of any Big/Trendy mythology as the way of things in any future novel.

That was then. This, however, is now. And 20K into one novel, the plot of another -- one involving angels, demons, and a passage from Genesis -- is saying hello and refusing to shut up. Mind you, my take on all of it is decidedly somewhere left of normal, but it is still a very odd thing. And shall be interesting to see what comes of it.

Random idea I'll never use

If you had a world with a genuine Good vs. Evil war, where the lines truly were clear cut and so forth*, could a war get funded entirely by donations? It probably works best if each side believes they are the side of good, though you could have the side of Evil funding themselves via conquering other nations and so forth.

*It'd be fantasy so one can get away with such laziness.

After the end...

I never did do a post-nano post, did I? So....

"New Fires" ended up as 50K and change, and I successfully resisted the urges of people who wanted me to try for a THIRD nanowrimo for the month. I might have been able to, but it wouldn't have been that much fun.

Am getting back into the Trilogy, posting poems on the other blog, and mostly relaxing for the rest of the year. Next year, I plan to finish the trilogy and probably do another modernish novel. Nanowrimo may well be the detective mystery in haiku, but I'm not sure yet.

The poetry blog is going to change to me posting a short story there every couple of weeks rather than being a poem a day. I'll still post some poems there, of course, but for 2007 it's going to be a short story blog. I have no idea what it will be the year after that :)