Oh So Close

Just passed the 70, 000+ mark.

Some of my short stories are 30, 000 words. Damn, this is getting into home stretch territory now…

The Genius Thing My Fiance Said At The Bookstore Today:

“Why don’t they ever give you a decent cover until you’re dead?”

Classic.

And I’ve got soooo much writing to do…

Whoo Hoo, Snazzy New Joint…

Right, so instead of waiting a couple of weeks to maybe, sort’a, kind’a debate putting up a new site, it appears that much Midnight Oil was burned and the crazy thing is ready now.

Of course, since I’m not published yet, have no interviews, awards, or other neat things to put on display, this new site is depressingly empty for the moment, but hopefully that will change sometime with the next decade. Or two.

Anyway, welcome to the new blog. It’s a darn sight neater than the old one, but I am happy to report there are no horrible MIDI tunes, nor does your mouse cursor start sprinkling magical fairy dust where ever it goes.

Have fun, kids.

An Incredibly Boring Saturday

Nothing much to note. Woke up late, wrote. Went out to get something to eat, wrote some more, went out for mundane every home items like soap and Sara Lee strawberry swirl cake, and wrote some more.

Actually I’m still writing, but I only just noticed it’s getting close to midnight.

There is some minor news, that being the fiance has decided that since this particular novel is being ridden so hard by the muses, she’s going to take the chance and assume that there will come a time in the distant-but-not-far-flung-future where I might actually require my own website, and since her past jobs have included being an HTML code monkey, she has volunteered to start putting it together.

Well, that and it gave her an excuse to ignore some work she didn’t want to get to.

So there is a chance that some time within the next couple of weeks, this particular site address–though not this blog–will die. And it will move over to a new website with my name on it, and, gods willing and fate smiling upon me, in the months to come I will have to start filling it up with all kinds of neat things like a FAQ, bio, and other assorted things that Writer-ly type websites incorporate.

My only request at this point is “Please don’t have the mouse turn into a bunch of magic fairy dust while a cheesy MIDI rendition of the The Last Unicorn plays in the background because I will forcibly and repeatedly YAK.”

Jury’s still out on that, though.

Anyway, back to writing. Up to 66, 000+ words, and I’d like to get it up to 67, 000 before bed.

The Countdown Continues

64, 000+ words, 36, 000 to go.

A quick doing o’ mathematical thingies reveals that if I can keep up this pace, then the novel could potentially be done within the next 12 days. That is assuming the momentum continues. And that the novel really does end up being 100, 000 words or less.

Which it probably won’t.

Sigh. Oh well…

This Is Always Scary When It Happens

I sometimes wonder if it’ll always go like this, or if, eventually, I’ll just run out of steam, or the lights will go out.

I now owe a huge debt of thanks to the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet near my place. They just finished my book for me. Or at least, I was in their premises when the book got finished. The Fiance ended up coming home to work because her computer at her office couldn’t handle the load. So I went out to get lunch for us, and she wanted to be self indulgent, with the nearest self-indulgent fast food place being the aforementioned KFC. So there I was walking over to it in the mid-day heat, and going through my usual internal litany of “It’s fucking HOT, it’s fucking HOT…” when I started to feel pieces of story moving through my head and clicking into place.

Up until now, all I’ve known is that the story will end “somehow”, and will involve the key characters and quite probably a lot of mass destruction. I’ve always had a kind of shaky faith in my subconscious, because when I write these stories, I often feel as if all I’m really doing is taking dictation, or transcribing the movies that play out in my head that my brain plays for me. I rarely feel like I’m making this stuff up, so much as being just another viewer or reader who is having the story told or shown to me. Sometimes this happens in little snippets, and other times full blown scenes play out, and in this case, the entire last half of the book suddenly played out in fast forward.

It all came to a head as I was placing my order for the food, and I probably puzzled the counter girl quite a bit as I was saying, “One fillet burger meal and… and…”

And I wasn’t looking at her anymore, so much as a point above her, where I wasn’t seeing the kids working the kitchen, I was watching this huge chunk of movie rapidly unfurl in front of me, and there were people screaming, and people dying, and people doing what had to be done, even though they had tried to deny it for years, and then the aftermath, the way the world would be, and how the people that had lived through it coped.

And it was almost as if there was some voice in my head that was saying, “There. It’s done. I’ve given it to you. You know what you have to do next.”

And I do.

So even though there’s still something like 39, 000 words worth of story that has yet to materialize in my computer, the book, at least in my head, is now finished. The momentum that was building has sort of exploded and now it’s just a matter of trying to stay as true to that atomic mushroom cloud of story that’s still even now settling in my brain.

I’m just not sure whether this makes what comes next easier or harder. But it makes it far more certain.

This Burrito Costs HOW MUCH?

Twenty Five dollars, is the answer.

And that’s not a bunch, and they don’t add any magic ingredients, that is for one ordinary, though somewhat square-ish burrito.

But then this is what you get for being foolish enough to eat at the many fine restaurants on Boat Quay, the boardwalk of bars and eateries that likes right beside the Central Business District. They know high paid expats and tourists with no sense of the exchange rates go, and so they charge appropriately.

The fiance is sick.

I think this has to do partly with having not eaten supper, but mostly to do with the fact that she was enormously stressed out over having to work late at the office because client demands. If you’ve never worked in the creative/marketing/design field before, the way it goes in Singapore is:

A) Client comes in wanting something.

B) You try to nail down what they want.

C) They say they don’t know what they want, but they’ll know it when they see it.

D) After numerous trial runs, you finally get something they like. They approve, and leave it to their assistants or lower management flunkies.

E) Lower management flunkies and/or assistants, gunning for a promotion or trying to justify their obscene pay checks start making numerous arbitrary and superfluous changes that more or less render the original concept unrecognizable.

F) They approve the new work.

H) Original manager sees the final output and is horrified because this isn’t what they wanted.

I) Lower management flunkies/assistants scramble to find a scapegoat. You’re it.

J) You go back to the drawing board and do original design, or something completely different (The managers may have changed their mind after receiving advice at the bar or over golf).

K) Begin contemplating suicide at this point.

So because she was working late, I kept her company, then afterwards at the ridiculously expensive TexMex restaurant, and then came home where she said her stomach was bothering her. So I went out for some traditional Chinese medicine they call “Po Chai pills”, and when I got back, she was already comatose in bed.

I am going to let her sleep, and I am going to keep writing. I’ve already got it up to 60, 000+ words, but I sense I’ve got maybe another 1,000 left in me before bed.

Is Capcom On Acid?

I gotta’ ask, because in light of their recent games, I’m convinced they’re either certified geniuses who are pushing the boundaries of gaming, or else upper management is on something and no one has the guts to rebuke their suggestions.

Like at the moment I’m playing a game called Killer 7. I’m three levels into this beast and still have no clear idea of what’s happening because the story is so fragmented, creepy, brutal and downright psychotic, that even though I’m compelled to play to see what happens next, I can’t piece together any kind of narrative that makes sense. All I know is some guy in a wheelchair named Harman Smith has the ability to manifest his other 6 personalities, and they are all–just like him–stone cold killers, each with a different specialty. Over the course of the game, I’ve seen people having conversations get their heads blown open, only to continue the conversation, even though their scalp is dangling on the back of their head like an open lid, with brain still on it. I’ve seen women slit their wrists and spray blood all over a wall just to destroy it. And I’ve shot a guy’s traditional Japanese theater mask, only to have him put it on afterwards while giving me the finger with both hands.

It’s fun. It’s insane. I have no idea what it’s going on.

And then there’s Haunting Ground, also by Capcom. Straight out of the horror movie conventions, you play an incredibly hot and helpless blonde by the name of Fiona who’s largely incapable of defending herself from her pursuers in a huge gothic castle, the chief pursuer, Debilitas, is a large, brutish oaf type with huge dark eyes that make him look like some kind of steroid mutated baby. It’s obvious he likes Fiona a LOT, but it’s so creepy being a girl chased around by this guy that my fiance can’t even watch me play the game because it just makes her WAAAY too uncomfortable.

When I see games like the above two, Clocktower 3 (Which is another horror game involving a helpless female) and even Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube, I begin to realize that Capcom is taking some mighty insane chances playing with the form of games. It’s all a little hit and miss (I STILL can’t make up my mind whether I actually LIKE Killer 7, but it sure is interesting) but I gotta’ give ‘em credit for at least being brave enough to take the path less trodden and give us something new.

Oh and 58, 000+ words today.

Crap. 42, 000 words left.

Being Famous Means Repeating Yourself. Ad Nauseum.

I’ve been spending some minutes in between writing doing stuff like stalking Alan Moore and Neil-O on the internet again, doing stuff like reading their interviews. Neil-O is definitely the easier of the two to stalk since on his blog, he actually has links (Assuming you’re willing to slog through his archives) to websites and other places that have taken the time to compile the various articles and interviews he has given over the years.

I was kind of curious about this, because on day two of Neil-O palooza one guy was telling me after his one on one interview with Neil-O that the guy never repeated himself, which completely floored me as I’d expected that this was impossible. It turns out it is.

This is not to defame Neil-O in any way, but it just seemed inhuman to me that someone could find a way to answer the same question differently every time it was asked, and I was grateful for confirmation that Neil-O is indeed mortal when I started noticing the same answers being given for various interviews over the years.

And really, I can’t blame the guy.

I mean, if you’re going to have different people over the course of your career always asking similar questions, it’s just logical that you’re going to start giving the same answer, because A) a well versed answer comes off as extremely clever once you’ve nailed down the phrasing and B) there are only so many ways you can fumble through “Where do you get your ideas from?” before it starts getting really, really old.

In the near-miraculous event that I ever find myself in a situation where I am interviewed and people are asking me questions, I’m not sure how I’m going to answer most of the questions, but I have this mean spirited idea in my head that the high-falutin’ literary questions will be answered with total agreement. IE:

Interview 1:

Interviewer: It seems that The Pale Summer your message is essentially an existentialist one, espousing themes of choice and control of one’s life.

Me: Yup, you got it. That’s good, I wasn’t sure anyone was going to see that.

Interview 2:

Interviewer: Face it, The Pale Summer was your ode to fatalism, wasn’t it? I could see it all over the plot.

Me: Yup, you got it! That’s good, I wasn’t sure anyone would notice that.

I figure after about 10 interviews someone is going to finally realize what I’m up to and sue me.

It has been another boring, yet remarkably productive day. Momentum continues to push the novel along, and it’s still coming out like I’d hoped, with the occasional surprise here and there.

55, 000+ words. Wow, only 45, 000 words left to spend. There’s a chance this thing might actually be done by the end of August.

And then the line edit and the rewriting.

Oh.

Joy.

Slogging Away

A quiet, if busy day.

Script work was reluctantly, painfully done. And the main event was, of course, the novel. It’s the halfway point of the book, but also the big set-piece chapter. Lots of things happen here, and I just hope it comes out close to what I have in my head, but of course, there are no guarantees. And of course, strange things keep happening which I never accounted for when characters say or do things because… well, because they feel like it and that’s what they wanted to do at that time.

This particular chapter takes place in Malaysia, specifically the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. It’s a relief to me to be here, because I’ve been to KL before and still remember what it feels and looks like, so suddenly it’s a hell of a lot easier to write, because I’m not relying on imagination so much and falling back on memory a lot more. Of course it’s also a wee bit nerve wracking in that mild, I’m-in-no-physical-danger-whatsoever way because, well, this is supposed to be a big chapter. I just hope I can pull it off.

Incredibly boring, no?

This is what happens when you sit down and say to yourself, “Okay, I’m just going to finish this damn thing.” Your life, or at least the interesting parts of it, such as they are, disappears. It’s just you and your brain, and one page after another with things that never really happened, and all it costs you is time that could have been spent, I dunno, doing volunteer work, or helping to make the world a better place somehow. Or even just going out and hanging with friends.

But then I guess that’s one reason why writers are writers. I know there are exceptions to every rule, but I think the mindset most writers have is that they’re not party animals to begin with. I mean, if you really DID find hitting the bars every night and the club every weekend to be the most fulfilling thing in your life, then you’d have very little motivation to sit down with only some music in the background and the clicking of keys to keep you company as you spend time with unreal people in unreal situations.

You are, after all, spending all this time constructing a huge, ornate lie. It’s a lie with all kinds of bells and whistles, and maybe a fundamental truth or two if you’re really lucky, but still, unlike a blog, unlike a news article, unlike a magazine column, it’s pure, intentional fiction. It’s lying for fun, and possibly profit.

The only difference is you actually own up to that in the first place.

Right. That’s my sage observation for the day.

52, 000+ words. And people are about to start dying.

‘Night, everyone.