Hey all. This’ll be a quick one. While at AWP I was talking with a horror writer and we were sharing setting ideas. We both have personal history in rural settings, and after I described my setting and a general idea to go with it, he full body shivered and told me to write the story. ASAP.
Now that thesis is in, I think that’ll be a good mental reset before I finish drafting the novel. I’d been thinking about the theme of it, and the tone, and my mind went back to a Stephen King story I’d read ages ago, The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon. In my mind it was a short story, probably because I’d read the pop-up book version. Lo and behold, the actual book was on my bookshelf. Points for being a book collector.
So I grab the book, stick it in my bag for the hotel (my wife has a work event in Kentucky and I’m on baby duty), with the expectation to carve out some time to work on it. Then I see this in the hotel:
It’s not exactly the Overlook Hotel, but the vibes are definitely there. Here I am, planning to read Stephen King, and I walk into this hotel. To top it off, I go into the bathroom, and the shower looks a lot like the one Rosamund Pike uses in Gone Girl to wash off all the blood.
I wanted to write a horror story. Looks like I’ve got plenty of inspiration to work with. Maybe instead of sitting in the lobby downstairs or at the desk in the room, I’ll just camp out in the hallway, cross-legged, and let the periphery mess with my head as my fingers work.
Until next time.
Also, what’s with these libraries in Kentucky?! I feel like they’re doing them very right, or very wrong.
Hot off the press! Atmosphere Press reached out to me a few weeks ago about doing an interview about me and my current project, and it’s now live. Give it a read, and stay tuned for more regarding Dreamfall. I’ll be looking for beta readers soon.
Happy Holidays to all! If you don’t celebrate, hopefully you at least get some time off. I’m writing this during my last prep period of the year. I managed to kick out 5000 words the other day so figure I can take the time for another post.
First order of business: upcoming publications. On December 26 a short story of mine will hit the internet on Spillwords.com. I’ll probably do another post then to remind you all. 🙂 It’s a Christmas story about a divorced dad trying to connect with his daughter during their first Christmas with just the two of them. There’s kookiness, drama, heartbreak, and that warmhearted feeling you get this time of year. And bananas. Somehow, there are bananas.
I also just signed up to be on the editorial staff of Water-Stone Review, so I’ll have a healthy bit of reading to do over the next few weeks. I’m expecting a wide gamut of genres and themes, so hopefully it’ll be a fun time.
On a non-writing note, I’ve decided to apply for the next season of LegoMasters. That translates to Fall 2025 because of filming schedules. I need to build five sets of my own design for the application, so I just finished sorting the 90000 Lego pieces I’ve accrued since childhood and am partway into the first build (and already running out of the right color of pieces).
Don’t judge yet! It’s not done! If all goes according to plan it’ll balance perfectly on the beak, like those toys from when we were younger. But instead of being three inches across and made from one piece of plastic, it’ll be over a foot wide and made from hundreds. Given my piece limitation, it might not look the prettiest, but the goal is creating that perfect balance. I can do pretty on a different build.
I have faced some other distractions these last couple of weeks, though I like to think them the good kind of distractions. I had an idea for an educational chemistry game for middle and high school and developed that a bit. I fortunately have subbed a few chem classes during that period and was able to get very positive input from chem teachers, so yay!
I’ve also been thinking a lot about AI’s role in brainstorming and story creation. I obviously don’t want it to generate anything, but I think it could be very useful in organizing thoughts and characters and stories and a whole lot more I won’t delve too far into. Based on what research I’ve done, I don’t think AI is sophisticated enough to do what I want, but in a few years…
I’ll close out with the acknowledgement that I tend to bite off more than I can chew. AWP is coming up in just over a month, and I’m a going to send the first five pages out to agents as part of their Writer to Agent program. But that means I have just over a month to get this story into ship shape. While also building Lego. And working. And designing that game. And prepping for a new baby. And running a D&D campaign.
It’s a good thing I don’t have any hair, else I’d probably be pulling it out.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year. Enjoy your time with loved ones and remember that diets don’t count on holidays.
With all the Thanksgiving prep, I’ve written zero words today. Which puts me exactly today’s required words behind on my word count. For me and my Nano track record, not too shabby. The main reason for my staying on track: high school.
High school how? Well, a year and a half ago when the market dipped, I, and many other coworkers, got the axe. Some of us were in the industry more than twenty years. But I had already started my MFA, had talked about making a career of writing. So we decided to give it a shot. But I still needed supplemental income. So now I’m a part time substitute teacher.
High school has been great because for the most part the kids sit on their computers and do their work and I can type away. Middle school… not so much. They’re more fun, but are more hands-on. So, Champlin High… thank you.
As far as content goes, this story has made me smile from inspiration more than anything else I’ve written. Part of that is due to the lack of planning. In general, I’m a planner. My novel I’m taking a break from before editing was meticulously mapped out with bullet points and sub points and color coded post it notes with corresponding sharpies. That was great for always knowing what to write, and I could argue a lot that the during-writing inspiration was instead planning inspiration. But the during-writing inspiration has a different feel to it. An in the moment “god damn I’m brilliant” feel.
For my Nano project, I went into it with four characters, only one of which had any amount of thought into their personality. I had a problem, an antagonist, a few settings, and a couple of moments I knew should happen. That was it.
The result so far is a crazy amount of Wayne Brady caliber setups and payoffs that my subconscious plans without me even knowing it. I’m making character choices that are great in the moment and give me solid foundations for growth and/or defeat. I’ve created a magic system that is both highly theoretical yet completely accessible. I don’t know that I could have done that with my normal planning method.
I’ve mentioned before that I have aphantasia, or a lack of a mind’s eye. This past summer I started playing around with MidJourney to create imagery to reference (examples shown throughout the post), since my brain’s not wired that way. I think I can attribute part of my current success to that as well.
Going into a scene, or thinking about a character, I know what I want to happen, what themes or motifs should exist. By inputting those into MidJourney, I’m provided with images that while they don’t always turn out how I expected, they often provide enough of my expectations that I can use it for repeated reference, but they also serve as spring boards for other tangential thoughts.
With a word count in the low thirty thousands, I’m just over halfway through the story. Of course there are areas that will need some work, but there have been surprisingly few writing sessions where I knew I needed to revisit down the road. I’ve come out of many feeling very good about the results and I’m just hoping that when I re-read it, that feeling won’t change.
That’s all for now. Need to allocate writing time appropriately. I wish my fellow writers good luck in their Nano/WIP, and happy reading to non-writers (I just started The Olympian Affair and am super excited). And of course Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all can spend quality time with friends/family/loved ones.
One of the benefits of having a kid in kindergarten is the random bits of inspiration they provide. Sometimes it comes in the form of misused words. Sometimes they make a joke that makes zero sense but it hilarious to them. This time, it came from Bananagrams and Pokémon.
Last night Westley brought the kid’s Banagrams set to the table and organized all the letters and letter combinations (kid’s Bananagrams combines common letter pairings like sh and ai). He then started spelling out Pokémon. First was Ratatta, then Raticate, then Rapidash. He got through the r’s and did Sandshrew.
Here, he made sure to tell me it was a compound word, sand and shrew. The inspiration came from how he said shrew. I can’t really explain his exact tone since my mind was already headed in a different direction, but as soon as he said “shrew” my mind went to Taming of the Shrew, and then to Taming of the Sandshrew.
Now, being an English and Theatre major, Shakespeare is firmly in my realm of interests. Two of my plotted out future novels incorporate The Bard heavily, and I once considered making Shakespeare themed clothing (like women’s underwear that says “Out, Damn Spot!). I also have played Pokémon off and on since the very first games and very first cards (Tyler, if you’re reading this, I hope you kept that first edition Charizard). And I still play Pokemon Go (My 100IV maxed Tyranitar dares you to laugh). Combining the two has more than just tickled my fancy.
Since I only just started thinking about this last night, I haven’t fully mapped anything out (more about that later), but my favorite so far is The Taming of the Sandshrew. I imagine Katherine the Sandshrew being a prickly local Pokemon that all the people avoid. The most unruly Pokémon in town.
Enter Petruchio the Pokémon trainer. He loves all Pokémon and patiently trains them to be their best versions. There’ll be the back and forth you’d expect from this parody, and instead of a romance it’ll be a friendship. Throw in a tournament to keep with the Pokémon world and voilà, Taming of the Sandshrew.
A couple other thoughts that popped into my head were Macbeth in Lavender Town with Gengar as Banquo, Romeo and Juliet but Zangoose and Seviper, and A Midsummer Night’s… something, but with Jigglypuff making people fall asleep. Super fun thoughts, but also super problematic in a budding writer’s world.
As my wife was quick to point out, “there’s no way to make money off this.” There are the obvious copyright issues. Fanfic is a thing, but there’s not a not of monetization with that. And given the amount of time dedicated to getting my novel done and short fictions published, allocating time to this project might be counter productive, meaning this blog post is likely all the attention this idea will receive.
So what to do? Hopefully put a smile on the face of whoever reads this. The Venn diagram of Shakespeare readers and Pokémon players might not have significant overlap, but it’s there. Hopefully this prompts someone else to think of something clever combining the two.
Aside from that? Nothing. I’ve already come to terms with the fact that I can’t write as fast as I can come up with ideas. Since my last post I’ve plotted out two more novels, one of which could easily start a trilogy, and I probably won’t do anything with them for a decade.
Sometimes a fun idea will just end up being a fun idea. But I don’t think I’ll ever not want to see Hamlet talking to a Marowak skull.
PS: The pictures all came from MidJourney. I use it a bunch to come up for visuals for my writing since I can’t picture things myself. It’s super fun, though never give you exactly what you want. Here’s a preview image I’m using for my last short fiction piece before going back to editing the novel:
Eric Taveren 