Bloody hell (a post about writing)

So .... the folder containing Rites of Exorcism stuff contains the current finished first drat (70K, nanowrimo of this year). I'm 20K into the sequel. The rest of the folders within it contain another 151,768 words. Various novel drafts, setting notes, character notes, write-ups on creatures, other attempts at the setting and so forth.

This is damn depressing on a number of levels :p

The worst part is that I have one other novel that, in various iterations totals 201,227 words. The actual novel that resulted from all that -- Monsters & Miracles -- was 67,000 of those words and is entirely impossible  to compare to the first draft of the story, which is kind of cool in its own way. Almost nothing from the first drafts survived at all, which is at least proof of a kind of progress even if it, too, can be seen as depressing.

I also have a trilogy in progress whose accumulated word count is 137,000 words which seems reasonable enough as it includes one finished draft of the first novel, 4K of the second novel, partial revised draft of the first and notes for the entire series.

(For the curious few, Boy & Fox is over 80K, not including 50+ handwritten pages I've yet to type up. Which isn't surprising given there are entire chapters of the first draft that no one else ever saw. It was very strange to be submitting a story to a writing group and editing entire chapters of the future story out of it in the process, which is one clue why it stalled so very badly.)

OTOH, the accumulated word count of some of the projects in some way forces a finished draft, as it did with M&M and has in many ways with the Rites series. I tend to be the sort of writer who leaps from idea to idea and concept to concept, seldom bothering to ever really go back and edit/revise novels since the new is always luring me on. However, thanks(?) to the writing group I tend to stop novels mid-stride, revise it as a new draft and what emerges at the end of an absurdly large word count is at least a more functional finished first draft.

Or so I am telling myself right now :)

nano progress, day 1

Having decided to not do The Empty Book, I am working on Monsters & Miracles (another version/variant on) from the first person. So far I've done a shade over 10K for the day and worked up a mental game plan for the month.

Week 1: 10K a day for 5 days, weekend 'off'. (If I don't make the count, I can make it up those days: no big deal deal.)
Week 2: 30K for the week, thanks to work and everything else.
Week 3: Repeat week one.
Week 4: Repeat week two.
That leaves me with the tail-end of the month as a buffer and no real stress in all of it. Or so I tell myself :)

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."

A ghoul and his mother, a conversation

"This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

Terry held the phone in his hand and said nothing. She always answered the phone like that, a family joke that now seemed strange, forced now that her husband was dead.

"Terry, I know that's you," his mother said on the other end.

"How?" he whispered.

There was a brief pause. "Call display. What did you think?"

"I don't know. Sandra called, about dad."

"And?"

"You know." Terry took a breath. "His body was missing."

"Ah. Missing."

"Mom," he began, the urge to confess choking his voice.

"Don't," she snapped. There was a longer pause. "I did tell you this call may be monitored, didn't I?"

"That's always a joke," Terry said reflexively, mind racing over the conversation; he didn't think he'd said anything incriminating yet, and nothing to tell people he'd eaten his father's corpse. He remembered to hang up a moment later, fingers trembling a little. Real police work wasn't hollywood; Ethan had told him that long enough. They'd have traced him, if they wanted to.

He set his phone down on the counter carefully and turned. His fist hit the wall before he'd consciously considered it, drywall cracking as he hit it again and again until bones broke, the smell of his own marrow easing something inside him. Terry shuddered slightly and watched the hand mend itself and pretended his tears were only from the pain.

Mister Disaster

(In response to writing prompt 167.)

Mister Disaster doesn’t know he has that name. In folders that are classified 36 levels of security above the President (and this is the real one, not the show one that gets elected), there is a very thick file with his real name on it, and this one as well.

The file contains every trip he has taken in his life. And at each one, precisely two days and six hours after he leaves, a major natural disaster happens. No one knows why, but he had been awarded ‘free’ vacations in the mail and sent places the secret government wishes to damage. Sometimes he goes, othertimes Mister Disaster does not.

Despite the danger he could be to both king and country (and there is always a king, as long as there is a country), no one has ordered Mister Disaster suicided, because there are levels of government more secret even than that, where nothing is written down and only steel-trap memory records their comings and goings; and there, they worry Mister Disaster is something far more than a mere man, and keep a careful watch upon him.

And, naturally, they never vacation where Mister Disaster goes.

Novel research

Useless fact of the day while researching surnames for novel: Parents are not permitted by Urhobo cultural practices to count their children. The number of fingers often represents a count of one's children.

What the heck? you wonder, and rightly so. All I needed was to find out how common Johnson is as a surname in Canada (I was pretty sure it was #2 in the USA, though did check to make sure that was actually correct). Which led to the interesting oddity that the Canadian Census does not release that kind of information, that Li is the most common surname in Canada, and from that to the reason behind the few Chinese surnames, and from that information about Welsh, British, Irish, Urhobo and Byzantine naming conventions.

I surfaced from that with a deeper understanding of some oddities in such conventions, how they change over time and if the next fantasy world I do will even have surnames, beyond son of X and so forth. (Probably not.) The Chinese practise of giving everyone kin region C the same surname made me wonder about applying that to said settings but for now it's going to the back corner of my mind and the MC's last name is, simply, Johnson.

Mostly because another main character has Smith as hers and she's going to complain about it a fair bit, while it's never occurred to Terry to even really think about his.And for this little tidbit of characterization, the internet stole half an hour of my life :)

WIP fun

Oh, that was sad. I spent 2 minutes wondering, seriously, if one of the eventual antagonists of a WIP would wear briefs or boxers. To say nothing of considering sherry vs. beer in terms of beverage of choice. OTOH I did come across this

while looking for the proper VW for another character to drive.