Meanwhile…

“Shades of Red,” the apocalypse story I wrote this past year, has been accepted by A Thousand Faces, a journal of superhero fiction. It’ll be out around April, I believe. If you’re a fan of superhero stories, check out their site. There’s some good stuff in there.

I want to send big thanks to everyone in my writing group and a handful of other people who helped me revise the story. For anyone keeping track, this will be my first publication.

In other news, my soon-to-be failed attempt at NaNo begins tomorrow! I am completely unprepared, having squandered the last few weeks on a Secret Santa story and last-second tweaks to “Shades of Red.” But really, how hard can zombies be? ….right?

I discovered that one of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie, will be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin next weekend. That makes it time for a road trip! As a bonus, The Onion will also be there. (Can we elect a ruling council of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion for president? I smell a write-in campaign coming on. Based on what I’ve seen in the news lately, we could elect an actual onion and be better off than with the knuckleheads running for leadership. But I digress, as usual.)

I discovered Alexie years ago when I was forced to read his second novel, Indian Killer, for a class. Turned out to be a fantastic book. There’s a structure to the book and certain themes about the characters that reminded me strongly of comic books, and when I brought up the possibility to my teacher she was a bit mystified at first. But the presence of a character, a little boy, in the book wearing Daredevil pajamas was enough to get my “out of the box” cylinders firing (anything involving Daredevil fires my cylinders, but that’s a whole other post). We worked on it a bit together and ended up coming up with (I believe) a completely new interpretation of the novel. We were supposed to co-author a paper about it, but it fell through when she left the university unexpectedly. Actually, I think she still has my copies of the first Astro City and Preacher trades, heh.

Anyway, I highly recommend any of his books. Also, the film Smoke Signals was based on his work and worth a view. I haven’t had a chance to see The Business of Fancydancing yet.

It feels odd to be so pasty and be such a big fan of an American Indian’s work.

Update: I have discovered that the hardcover version of Indian Killer is out of print. O cruel fate! My battered paperback is a poor offering for an autograph. I’ll have to hit up the used bookstores this week and see if I can find one.

I just have a moment, and haven’t had a chance to post much here lately, so I’ll post a short bit of what I’m currently working on, the Sevastian Dušan story. It’s shaping up pretty well in my mind, so I’m hoping to finish it before I have to launch into Nano next month. This is still very much a draft and work in progress, so don’t be too hard on it. Continue reading

We’re just a few weeks away from this year’s NaNo. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, thousands of people across the country (world?) get together and brow beat each other for the entire month of November to write a new 50,000-word book by the end of the month. It is insane! We have little spreadsheets to chart our progress and everything. Last year I threw myself into it rather at the last minute. I started off strong, but soon stalled out and ended the month with something like 10-12,000 words. And even that was a mess.

I have a simpler story idea this time, and over the next few weeks I’ll be attempting to come up with an outline. When you’re trying to pump out a couple thousand words a day there’s not really time to stop and think about your story.

Unless I come up with something different, I’ll be writing about the protagonist of “Daughter” and his quest to find his lost daughter in a land overrun with the undead. The time is now, and the setting is here, so there won’t be much in the way of world building necessary. I can jump right in with the story. If anyone has a Texas locale you want to see overrun with zombies or other horrors, let me know.

I have no idea why I’ve been on such a horror kick lately.

The upside of this for you, my gentle readers, is that, in theory, I should be posting something here every day. Each evening, perhaps, or morning, I’ll post a few hundred words of what I’m writing. It’ll probably be out of context and make no sense, but it will be something to read nonetheless. Also, there’s a strong chance it will be crap. When it comes to NaNo, quantity beats out quality.

If you’re a writer and joining in on the NaNo craziness, feel free to add my as a buddy. I go by flakbait.

Writing exercise: Write a scene/story about a person getting a tattoo.

I like the promise in this. I’ll need something to work on for NaNo this year (next month, yikes!), and this might be just the thing.

Continue reading