My Progress

Oy, lads 'n lasses!
No, no that was dumb... let me try that again...
Arrrr me hearties!
Shit, I don't like that one either....
Well, hi there Mr. and Mrs. Internet trolls!
Eh, too "Leave it to Beaver"...
Suuuuuup boiiiiiii?!?
Shit... no....
Hey guys, got a quick update on everything for y'all!
Perfect... perhaps without the y'all, but we'll roll with it.

Today is Friday (sweet, sweet, glorious Friday!) and I am psyched! I'm psyched because my girlfriend got into town last night (love you!) but I'm also psyched because writing is just becoming something that is part of me. After these last three months or so of writing damn near every day, I have become so accustomed to getting my one thousand words a day in that it becomes almost a second nature... let me explain with a little story.

On Tuesday, I put down my pen and texted E___. It said, essentially, that maybe I'm burned out on this, y'know? I write so much that maybe I should just give it a rest. Refresh my writerly well of creativity, and get a grip on my life beyond the strict confines of one-inch margins. I asked her what she thought of the idea...

I don't think she really cared, honestly. She said something about 'well, do what you want.' I can't blame her... I talk about it with her more than I should, I'm sure it's rather aggravating, but I know that she just wants me to be happy, and if taking time off would help -- then she would be all for it. So, I picked up a book I've been aching to read: Dan Chaon's you remind me of me (ostensibly all in lower-case as to make sure everyone knows that the book is a serious work of literary fiction... which it is), and read the whole thing in a period of two nights.

"Wow!" thought I, "what a tremendous book. I would like my book to be that beautiful!" So then, on Wednesday night (so I guess it was only 1.5 days of not writing) I spat out like, three thousand words without feeling the bottom of the well. It was like the whole thing was somehow magically refilled to the brim with silvery miasma that is... whatever it is you need to write. Is that drive, creativity, or something else? I don't know. I just call it like I see it.

Then, still drawing from that well last night, I wrote a ~3,000 word short story about a man who suffers from batophobia, or, the fear of standing next to something really tall; which I just found absolutely fascinating. I stuck him out in the middle of the grasslands and put him in a small ranch house -- all alone and ornery.

And now it's Friday. I don't know if I'll write anything today, but I would imagine at one point, I'll pick up my pen and jot down notes that will get me really keyed up. Then by the time that work is over, I'll be so bursting with story that if I don't tell it, I'd be liable to burst at the seams. Now that I write that, it seems an awful lot like foreplay... odd.

Anyway! I'm signing off. I think I may start posting stories on this sight that I don't really think will make it to competitions or publications. I do a lot of character peices that are only to help me think of new characters that I might use later as a sort of toolbox. Anyway, if I do, you'll start seeing those on here. If I decide not to, you won't. Enjoy your Friday, and get ready for the fete that is the weekend!

-Ken

Totally Didn't See This One Coming...

So, I'm sitting at home the other day, happily scribbling on my yellow legal pad, minding my own business, getting a lot done on the manuscript, feeling all happy with the way everything is going, and then, completely unprompted, one of my main female characters just comes out and says "I love a woman," and means it.

"But… I had no idea," I said to her, laying my pen down and wrapping my fingers against the legal pad. "When did this happen?"

"Oh, I'm not really sure. I’m quite as surprised as you are by this recent development."

"I see… Does she make you happy?"

"Well, yes, but as you can see from everything else that has happened…"

"Yes, that does make it all a little harder, doesn't it?"(*)

We were quiet for a moment, afraid to say anything stupid. What do you say to the character who has just come out of the closet to you? I hadn't really planned on what I would say. I didn't think this would come about especially in my first novel. Maybe my fourth or fifth, you know? I wasn't quite sure how I would go about it. I asked her.

"Just write me like anyone else, I think," she said, dolefully. "I mean, I'm still human, I just have this monster crush on that other chick you paired me with. Does that somehow make me intrinsically different from anyone else and their love-affairs?"

"No," I said. "It makes you just like them." I paused, taking a look out my window and sipping on my tea before I continued, "I think, more or less, I'm scared about writing you like this because of the ramifications of it."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, you know, being a guy, how would it look if I went around touting a lesbian character? Wouldn't it come off like I was just perv, getting off to some girl-on-girl action?"

"I don't think so," she said thoughtfully, "I mean, you haven't written anything like that this far into the novel. It would seem odd that all of a sudden, just because I was gay, that someone would rail on you just for putting down the truth about me. In fact, I would go so far as to say if you didn't portray me correctly, that it would eat at you for a long, long time. See?"

"Okay," I concluded. "You are totally now going to be a lesbian, and you are going to be awesome."

"Good," she said, smiling. "Now would you mind getting back to the story? I've been driving in this goddamned car for like, three paragraphs now. It's getting kind of boring."

"Sure," I said. I picked up my pen, and continued her story, one word at a time.


By the end of the conversation, I was very excited about the development. It is a part of her – the same way that other characters love members of the opposite sex. As it stands, it hardly takes up any place at all, but I think that in these times, one must be able to approach matters of sexual orientation with steadfast confidence that sexual orientation only makes up a small part of a character in the same way that it does with a hetero-normative character. She has already taught me a lot, and I think there is still much to tell. This is one of the perennial joys of story-telling: Letting characters that you thought you controlled doing something completely different, and ending up teaching you something. It makes me wonder if these aren't real people on some other plane, letting me borrow their own lives for some small moment, documenting their trials and tribulations, and asking only that I do it with the utmost conviction towards art and sincerity.


-Ken

*What does this mean? Oh, wouldn't you like to know…

Christening.

Now, gentle readers, starts my nervous hand-wringings and contemptable snappishness.... if that is a word.  I have one short story that was mailed this morning, and another waiting breathlessly to be sent out, both harboring that inextinguishable desire of wanting to show a glow so formidable that when the readers at the respective lit mags lay their furtive glance upon its pages that they cannot help but run to the nearest blackboard and write, in large, swooping hand, "A+++++++++". 

I think that they are good stories.  Probably two of my favorites.  For that reason, I am setting unrealistically high goals for them, namely, getting published.  The chances are slim (I have sent them to highly selective publications) but my hopes for them are anything but.  I should hear back from the one I sent out last month within a month... and the other one about the same time.  Stay tuned for more fumings, rants, ravings, and maybe a particular shade of joy should the story get published.  It will more than likely contain size 72 helvitica at some point during that blog post, should it weasel its way past the editors and into a magazine.

I imagine this post as the glass bottle of milk or champaigne being cracked against the hull of a ship that is departing the harbor for the first time.  So come with me as I begin the slightly painful journey that is "doing this for a living."  The water is treacherous and deep, and the bottom is lined with ships that didn't make it.

-Ken

This may come as a shock to you...

I'm writing some fun stuff right now, and I think I have stumbled across what may be the most providential moment in my writing history.  It is like a precipice that propels friendship down down down and dashes it against rocks.  I think it is so perfect, it may almost be in the realm of cliche.  It's just a simple sentence, but it does several things that I think make it so great, and I wrote it yesterday, so pardon the idiosyncratic nature of this post...

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking _______.

See?  How fucking wonderful that sentence is?  It's like a writer's madlib.  Just put in whatever, wherever when you need a big punch, and it works out great... here's some examples that I just came up with:

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking rubber ducky. (Bert finally letting Ernie have it in their three-room flat on the lower west-side.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking revolution. (What Benedict Arnold should have said to George Washington.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about your motherfucking last name.  (Admittedly not as poetic, but equally as effective utturance delivered by Romeo Montague to Juliet Capulet outside her bedroom window. The phrase is changed slightly.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking e-book pricing structure. (Macmillan to Amazon)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking rules on what constitutes "decent fiction". (Micheal Chabon against the literary fiction monsters that love to hate.)

 Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking fear of what others think about you. (Roarke to Keating in The Fountainhead.  That is essentially the Ken's Notes to the entire friggin' book, in case you were wondering.)

... and really, it all goes on from there.  Pretty heavy stuff, right?  Anyway, this wasn't too serious of an entry... but you know... you get what you get.

I have 3 followers now!  I feel like I'm heading places, Jerry!  I'm headin' all the way to the top!

That is all. 

-Ken

P.S. -- The thoughts and views shown in this blog do NOT portray the views of any other person other than the author of this blog.  Anything said here was a fictional representation and meant only to be funny.  

New Year's Resolutions and the Whats-Its That Coincide Therein

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.  - Heather Armstrong

It is undoubtedly too late to wish everyone a happy New Year.  It is, in fact, about nineteen days too late -- give or take a few hours.  So I won't do that.  You've already doffed the celebratory paper cone from your head, so saying "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" will only make people wonder if I had lost my mind.  I haven't.  In case you were wondering.

Much has happened since I last wrote here.  Almost an entire month has passed, and so far my inability to keep a blog has been a frustrating spur in my side.  It's not as if I don't think about the blog, because I do.  It's just that I am always so busy.  I am writing more.  More than I had last year, thanks to the Inkygirl's 1000 Words A Day Challenge.  Many people don't like the idea of chaining oneself to a chair and forcing a thousand words out where nothing is to be found, but I've found the excersize to yield considerable results thus far.  Let me tell you a little about my experience twenty days in...

Self-Congratulatorialism

My reading has been thwwwwppppting out recently.  It's like all the air is releasing itself from my writerly sails and im just coasting through life.  I sit down to write and BAM! nothing -- whereas before, I'd sit down and it would feel like I couldn't write fast enough.  Damn this mid-story lag!  I know this is something that will haunt me throughout my career -- making people do things for logical reasons.  I want them to run around, explore, go through trials and tribulations that build to this exciting climax... but it has to make logical sense, and these equations are what is killing me at the moment. 

I wrote a page yesterday.  After I wrote it, I looked back at what I wrote and realized I sounded angry at the reader.  It sounded liek "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, OKAY?  GET OVER IT BECAUSE IM NOT CHANGING IT."  Today I'm going to go back and change it.  I can be such a bitch.

What's with the title, you ask?  I don't know.  I guess I want to be able to pat myself on the back and say "Great job Ken, you really perserveired and wrote something worth while today..." but I can't.  Nothing is working right now, the train is off the tracks and I am getting nowhere.  It'll be okay though.  I'm still not bereft of optimism.

The Very Short Prologue.

I have a theory on prologues: they shouldn't be too long.  They should, in fact, be short.  A prologue should be succinct and to the point.  In this vein, I have constructed one for my novel -- Southern Hospitality. So what we have here is the prologue to my WIP (Work In Progress).  I believe it accomplishes what any good prolouge is supposed to, which is to entice without giving much away.  It is a taste and a nice little bite-sized chunk of my novel.

Without further adeu, Southern Hospitality:

Old Tawnee Road was never very well known. It seemed like from the moment that it was laid (from anyone’s best guess it was around the time of the Van Buren administration) it was forgotten. The old road linked two major highways and could save travelers upwards of thirty minutes if they had spotted the street sign that hung slightly askew on a metal pole when it bisected with their path. It was unfortunate then, that the entrance to either side came at a particularly difficult intersection to navigate and so, for the most part, the road remained unchecked for the better part of a century. Traveling southeast along the byway, a traveler would have seen a distinct dichotomy between the two sides: on the driver’s side was untamed and unbridled forest – Georgia Pines, smothered with kudzu and a few bushes skirted along the underbrush; to the right, there were the scant signs that civilization had once prospered in the area – old and rotted clapboard plantations, white and periwinkle paint peeling from the shudders and tiles missing from the roofs. Old Tawnee Road stood as a barrier between the virulent wilderness and the long-forgotten memories of what was.


These skeletons of the past harkened back to a time when slavery was the norm and a house without a bustling team of Negros would be deemed inefficient and quaint. But with the Emancipation Proclamation came an unsustainable business model. The southern rural aristocratic society was born, raised, and died among the shackles of the slave ships that hailed from the shores of East Africa. The great families had long disappeared from the plantations and taken the crops with them. The fields that once bore black-eyed peas, corn, wheat, peaches, and cotton were now fallow, and surrounded the houses that were now mere husks of their former selves – the corpses of the extinct southern gentry

Despite the gentle beauty and glimpses into the past that one could have found on Old Tawnee Road, its ability to keep the forest from encroaching upon the plantation side of the road and the small amount of decay that had come to the structures lining it had created stories about that twenty-five mile stretch of largely uninhabited roadway. The locals spoke of ancient evils that lurked beneath the ground, and ghosts of slaves that lingered in the fields, waiting with scythe in-hand to lop off the heads of any white person dumb enough to walk into their domain. Other stories spoke of specific houses and the histories of their residents, and of murders and infidelities of those residents that branched out to other families and created a web of intrigue and malice that terrified its listeners to the point of taboo.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of those stories wasn’t the variation, but rather the constant. Despite the innumerable ghost sightings and ethereal experiences, there existed one unimpeachable and absolute fact that pervaded every story told: On some nights, at two o’clock in the morning, at 455 Old Tawnee Road in the upper left-hand window, there is a flicker of light where the silhouette of an old woman is seen in a rocking chair – slowly going back and forth, to and fro. After exactly four minutes the wavering, dancing light would extinguish with unnatural abruptness. If one had been unfortunate enough to see that rippling, fiery light through the window, they would not hear, but feel the grating sepulchral lament of that woman as she screamed and moaned in great convulsions of pain that mutilated their senses and coursed through their very being. It would be followed by a feeling that was so brief yet so intense one wondered if they had actually felt it: the cold edge of a steel knife piercing their breast and rending their still-beating heart.

This was the only fact in the lore of Old Tawnee Road. It was never questioned by any of the locals because, at one point or another, they had all had their very essence shaken by that old woman’s death rattle.

Probably still not in its final form, but I like what I have so far.  Thanks for reading!

-Ken