News of the Day: Tin Tin Can Update, NaNoWriMo, Fender Stitch, The Weird & More

This will probably be my last post for the month of November. Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I'll be spending much of it in my hometown. I'll be back in December with the year-end Best Of lists. In the meantime, I'll leave with these (hopefully) juicy tidbits:

Tin Tin Can

We've nearly finished the mixing the process of the record. By the end of this month, it should be on to the mastering phase, and hopefully in your hands shortly after the new year! A lot of the artwork has already been sorted out, and we're throwing around titled for the record. It'll be 9 songs. We're all very excited to get this out. It's been one hell of a ride.

NaNoWriMo

I've faltered a bit on this front, but not because I didn't like what I was writing. There are definitely elements that need to be fixed. To be honest, I'm not sure I like the narrative voice, which means I'll need to start from scratch, but I'm okay with that. Since Clarion, that's usually how I write. I will get 6-10K words written and realize the voice isn't quite right, then in "revision" (in quotes because sometimes my revisions are a complete overhaul of the story), I'll fix it. A few sentences usually remain an the overall concept is similar, but I have to find the right voice to tell the story in. This is what makes writing so much fun! (On a side note: Once I've completed this novella/long short story, my sister Mandy Monk, a gifted artist in her own right, will be doing drawings for it. Very excited about this too!)

Fender Stitch Magazine

A new online magazine has opened for submissions. It's called Fender Stitch, they pay pro rates, and have an interesting, interactive experience for reading on the internet. Elliot Turner, the owner/editor of site, is a friend of mine and I'd like to see this thing really take off. So, any of aspiring and/or pro writers out there, go their site and submit!

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories

This anthology covering 100 years of Weird Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, is out now from Corvus Books in the UK, which you can buy here. Though it isn't scheduled to be released until 2012 in the US, you can purchase it here and there is no shipping fee. This is a must-have for fans of Lovecraft, Borges, Kafka, Krohn, and lovers of anything Weird in general (and for those who just like to see how a genre, if you can call it that, evolves over time). The Vandermeer's have also started a fantastic site dedicated to chronicling All Things Weird (including a wonderful comic on Reading the Weird by Clarion chum Leah Thomas): www.weirdfictionreview.com. 

Upcoming Fiction from Yours Truly

I will have stories out in New Dawn Fades Anthology from Postmortem Press (available around Black Friday), Shimmer (forthcoming in 2012), and a review of Tim Pratt's Briarpatch forthcoming in Bull Spec #7. Expect updates as these become available.

If this doesn't get you through the holidays and all that turkey and tofurkey, I don't know what will. Have a good'n. See you soon.

NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Claw & Eye

The following is an excerpt from the novella I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. This is a pretty rough draft and already I can see where certain things need to change, sentences need tightening, bigger and bolder descriptions necessary, etc. In the interests of sharing and seeing how 1,667 words a day looks like (at least for me), however...well, here you go then:

Claw & Eye

By Dustin Monk

Worship of the ascendant eels begins beneath the city, in the Temple’s underground pools. Here is this man, Baldahlbrus, wearer of bowler hats, long coats, various beards (tonight is matted gray), with a limp he got fighting, and who dreams most every night of hiding in the thick, oily stalks of burningroot while around him the sounds of dying and short blasts of rifle fire carry on the wind, feeding an addict to the ascendant eels’ babies. The phosphorescent baby eels—who look like cold, white leaves and are sometimes called drifters because of the way they seem to float in the water when not eating: aimlessly, causeless—now nibble at the body like an angry mob, floating over him, illuminating his yellowy hair and knobby fingers and open, dead eyes with their phosphorescence. Their tiny, sharp teeth are stained ruby red.

            The addict must’ve died in the morning. Already his body stinks. Or maybe the stink is from the luminescent nerves twisted and knotted and thick as tree roots pulsing, clinging to the walls. The nerves smell like curdled milk.

Baldahlbrus stinks too—he smells of gasoline and vomit—but he will not bathe in this pool. The drifters will eat the living as heartily as they eat the dead. He watches. After a time the baby eels drift away from the addict’s carcass. What is left—shreds of meat and gristle and bone—sinks beneath the muddy green waters. He does not want to think about the amount of bones littering the bottom of the pool or what sort of monster they have formed.

He has knelt throughout the feeding. Now, he stands, feels out the limp in his leg, pulls his bowler hat closer to his eyebrows, straightens his long coat. The nerves along the walls pulse messages in bluish-gray but he cannot decipher what is said. Perhaps the message is: not so long ago we left and we are not coming back because we are dead. It might say that.

            His boots echo loudly on the stone tiles of the cavern dumb priests built to worship the ascendant eels in the bellies of their home. No one worships them anymore. He walks up the winding steps, click-clatter-clatter-click-clatter. Part of the roof of the grand chamber of the Temple has caved in. Large chunks of ceramic tiles lay scattered across the floor. Half-dead nerves—their ends the color of charred bodies, which Baldahlbrus has seen enough of—snap and fizzle like blown-out fireworks. Sister moonlight shines upon the gaping mouth of an ascendant eel painted on the floor. Once there were great sermons held in this chamber; a great many people knelt on the mouth of the eel. Now it glistens, lonely, as if mocking Baldahlbrus. I will devour what I please. Whatever was once treasured in this place is gone: chalices, painted windows, golden and gray curtains, the holy bowl.

            He pushes open the large wooden doors of the grand chamber, exits into the inner chamber and washes his face and hands in cracked clay bowls he’s found abandoned in alleys and filled with river water, and limps through the Temple’s smaller entrance into—

*

Nerve City. Night. Argana a pinkish pearl in the sky, looking down upon her thrumming, bleeding city, the cruel crater of her heart shimmering in streetlamps and in the eyes of addicts. Her twin Argala hangs behind a cloud in the shape of a frown. You were always the forlorn moon. Baldahlbrus gets out in it. Buildings rise like stark, bluish-gray tendrils—like thickened, widened mirror-others of the same nerves that cling to their facades—almost as if they too long for the ascendant eels’ return. The cobbled streets bustle in the dark.  Baldahlbrus steps around horse-pulled carriages, shit, and broken bottles. He averts his eyes from passersby: it is not good to know too many. Yet, he is not oblivious. Shadows stalk alleyways: half-illumined dealers form question marks against corners of buildings. Do you? Do you? Do you? Addicts get cold in the night too. In front of the brothel is Carakhi playing viola. Bevendraj’s eyes bulge as she looks at a huge clump of dirt in her hands. On the other side of the street, accosting passersby like the idiot he is is Galat, showing off his new silver tooth. A spiky-haired addict Baldahlbrus doesn’t recognize, shuffling back and forth in front of an abandoned grocery store, asks if he’s got it. He doesn’t.

In all the books he has read—and he hasn’t read that many—this is exactly what the end of the world looks like. It isn’t the end of the world, it is the beginning. It is the beginning of the world. That is a loop he gets easily caught in. The world spins as it sometimes does when he limps too fast and Baldahlbrus wishes Maj was here. He liked to lean on her and she let him sometimes. She hadn’t minded his limp either. Yes, I am in love with her. Almost as much as I am in love with getting so high the drifters talk to me. This isn’t how I find her. This isn’t my pining. She was a girl and I was a boy, once, and we were both soldiers and, hiding in the burningroot, we sometimes held each other. That is the kind of love I know.

It's NaNoWriMo Time, NaNoWriMo Time - NaNoWriMoWithABaseballBat

November nears and, for me at least, this means it's time for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I will be participating again this year (here, here, here, and here are my posts from last year), though my goal this time around isn't to hit 50K words (though that'd be nice) but simply to get through my long story/short novel, which I've tentatively titled Claw & Eye. (Uhh...yeah it's the same title as last year's story, but totally different, I swear.)

The problem with last year's event was that, though I managed to make the 50K goal, I didn't really like anything I wrote - the prose was sloppy, the characters not-so-well thought out, and overall just plain limp as far as story goes. This was in part because I had made a conscious decision not to plan any detail out before I began the challenge. Well. That might work for some people but, what I discovered in the process, is that it doesn't really work for me.

Instead, over the last couple of months, I've been jotting notes, chiefly concerning world-building, characterization and action in larger scenes, as well as writing different entry points - a piece of advice I picked up from author Jeff Vandermeer during Clarion - to the story. I've also completed a short page-and-a-half synopsis of events.

I will be uploading the story here two or three times a week throughout November (and into December or later - basically, until it's finished) for your perusal, should you wish to read this thing I'm writing.

Clarion +1: A Year of Writing

This time last year I was on an airplane, nervous with anticipation, for a 6-week writing "boot camp" in San Diego. I was on my way to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. It is an intensive workshop taught by some of the best writers in the field. The instructors during my six weeks were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, Dale Bailey, George RR Martin, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. Their insights, as well as the insights of the seventeen other classmates (all of which I'm proud to call friends and who are some of the smartest writers you'll ever read), have inspired me to not only understand what it is I do better but, simply, to do it better. With that in mind (instead of waxing nostalgic in this post because, let's face it, I miss those Clarionites every day), I'd like to post a few of my accomplishments over the past year.

Since Clarion, I've had two short stories published in Aphelion Magazine, Prime Mincer Literary Journal, and one forthcoming from Digital Science Fiction in July. The story published in DSF is a revised Clarion submission story; and the story published in Prime Mincer was the story I submitted during the final week of Clarion.

Not including these three stories, I've completed 13 short stories - most of which are in the 4,500-5,500 word range, though some are longer, nearing novelette and novella status and some are flash fiction pieces, less than a thousand words. A few of these pieces have been submitted to various markets and are awating rejections/acceptances from editors and, though some have been trunked indefinitely, most are still in the revision process. Altogether, my total word count for short stories is approximately 47,500 words.

In November, I joined the National Novel Writing Month competition, completing half of a novel at 51,180 words. To be honest, I didn't finish it because I had decided to go into the competition without a game plan. It was actually a conscious choice - I wanted to see what it was like to write without knowing anything about the story or, at the very least, having the vaguest, roughest of outlines. The outline wasn't plot-centric; the character description was for only one charater, named Moo, and it went something like this: "Moo is a thief but he doesn't know it." Beyond that and a couple of names for worlds (this was a multi-dimensional galaxy spanning story), I had nothing.

What I've done the past few weeks, however, is returned to this novel to see if there was anything worth scraping. There is, in fact, a lot worth scraping, but I don't think the novel (or half the novel) works together. About two-thirds of the way through I break from the main characters to focus on a character that, though he was secondary to begin with, kept creeping up in the text to the point where 9,000 words was dedicated to telling his story, though his story had nothing to do with the main action. Reviewing the novel has shown me that there was a lot of interesting things going on that didn't have much to do with one another and, rather than try to tie it all up in some forced bow at the end, it seems the best way to handle the situation is to create two or three novellas out of it. This is exhilarating to me for a number of reasons. Chiefly, because it has been a long time since I've written anything over 10,000 words, and I've always enjoyed longer works (yes, I am obsessive over word count). I'm also excited because I really love the voices of several of the characters - Moo, Tok Willow, Nyanna, and Balador - and am looking forward to getting back into writing about them.

One of the other lessons learned from NaNoWriMo is that I need to plan if I'm going to attempt a novel. Between short stories, I've been jotting down notes for just such a task in a faded green notebook with a bird on a limb that I markered in black permanent marker. By the end of July, I'd like to seriously start working on it. (I've always read more novel-length works than short stories anyway and, in much of the feedback from editors and beta readers, I've been told there is enough material within some of my short fiction to extend into a novella or novel. Let's hope that's true.)

My sister Mandy and I also worked on a moleskins project together. This consisted of me writing a very short story (sometimes more than one in a single volume) in a moleskin notebook, leaving blank pages at certain intervals in the tale. Mandy would draw pictures to coincide with the themes or scenes from the story. I think we made eight of these. Several sold at Spencer Bell Legacy shows my band, Tin Tin Can, performed at.

Currently, I am working on four stories. Two of them are science fiction, a third is horror, and the fourth has elements of heroic fantasy though it isn't quite that. The first of science fiction pieces, tentatively titled "The Contra-Tuba's Soul," is coming along nicely though it, like a lot of my fiction, wants to be longer than I initially thought it would be; the other science fiction piece, tentatively titled "Sleeping Bird," is in its beginning stages, even though I had the idea for it the fifth week of Clarion. The horror piece is a story I wrote at Clarion, titled "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Aye," but I never submitted it for critiques because it really wasn't a story yet - it was a piddly thing of no significance, full of gratuitous sex and violence (instead, I wrote and submitted a terribly sentimental piece about an elderly lady taken to a sock hop by an alien and which caused Jeff Vandermeer, co-instructor that week, to exclaim, in full lambasting glory, "It's as cheesy as Beaches!"). After some thought, however, I've decided to retool the story because, despite most of the action, I'm fond of the narrative voice. The sort-of-heroic-fantasy story concerns a small island village and the soldiers who return home from a war. It is a melancholic piece. It's the kind of story where all of the elements fall into place and the world is so vividly realized for me that all I really have to do is type.

Looking toward the future, I'll be working on the above-mentioned novel from my bird-on-a-limb notebook, as well as piecing together - or pulling apart, rather - the two or three novellas from the NaNoWriMo half-novel. I also have several ideas - some of which have been floating around in my head since December (and one since 2005, eesh) - for a few other novels, so I'll begin writing notes for these soon. I also hope to continue writing short fiction: thankfully, every time I fear I'll run out of ideas for short fiction, another one inevitably comes along.

So. The final word count - it always comes down to the final word count, doesn't it? - for the first year post-Clarion is 98,680 words. I've had 3 acceptances, 4 currently pending, and 43 rejections. Before Clarion I wasn't serious about writing - I had written one and half novels when I was 19, five short stories in college, and two since graduating that were rejected from one literary magazine each and trunked. In fact, I'd only decided to get serious about writing shortly before being accepted to the workshop, starting off by writing something - anything - every day, no matter what. I've done that, almost without fail, for over a year now. But, since Clarion and my wonderful classmates' and instructors' techniques and insights, I do so with a better understanding of the craft and labor of writing. Thank you all.

NaNoWriMo - Week Four: I'm Finished

Four weeks writing 50,000 words is kind of like when, in the film There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview bludgeons his rival to death with a bowling pin and then declares, "I'm finished!"  That's how I feel after having completed this project:  51,180 words, which is about halfway through the actual story, give or take a few thousand.  I'm tired, I'm thirsty, my legs have the jimmy-jams, my beard fell off, and I have a gray hair.  Was all of this worth 50,000 words in 30 days?  In a word: sure.  Because NaNoWriMo did teach me a few things about writing and about writing novels, sepcifically.

When I started the novel, tentatively titled Claw & Eye, on November 1st, I had only an inkling of what I wanted to do.  I knew that I wanted one of the main characters to be in an a cappella group; I knew I wanted the setting to be something like 25,000 years in the future; I knew I didn't want typical faster-than-light travel or spaceships, even; and I knew I wanted the tone of the novel to be noirish.  Beyond that, I knew nothing of my story: no plot, no secondary characters, no understanding of the world(s) I was building.  This, of course, wasn't a particularly thoughtful way to start a novel.  You run into a lot of contradictions and unknowns writing a novel from scratch; however, many of these problems can be taken care of in later revisions and if I hadn't allowed myself the opportunity to "just write" - if I'd had it all planned out - many of the exciting turn-of-events that did occur within the story may not have seen the light. 

Writing without a net, so to speak, also allowed me see the glaring mistakes I was making firsthand.  If on page 120, Nyanna Ogadevu says something about the manikin warehouses that makes more sense than what Yqe said about them on page 68, I'll go back and change it or rewrite Yqe's lines or write it out completely.  I was aware of the threading of the novel more because I was making it up as I went along.  Whenever I've completely world-built a novel in the past, the story, at least, becomes kind of boring and I'd lose the threads because I knew what was happening and I didn't care anymore. 

However, writing completely without that net, as I did for NaNoWriMo, won't help me finish my novel either.  What works best for me is to build the world around me, mold its shape, find a story worth telling in there, thread the plot here and there, write down a few big scenes for the main characters but not how you get them to it, and then begin writing.  I've already started revising the first half of Claw & Eye and I'm doing this completely different too: I'm writing longhand, something I rarely do, and I'm loving it.  Part of what bugged me about the initial draft of the novel was that the voice was too loose; around thirty-five thousand words I began writing in the narrative style that I think suits the story better: more plainspoken with an occasional embellishment in the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Writing longhand, for reasons I'm not sure of yet, helps me keep this voice, perhaps because I write slower than I do with a keyboard, so I have to think harder.  Once I get a few thousand words written in my notebook (the real kind, with lined paper!) I revise it in the Word document on my laptop.  It's a hell of a lot of fun seeing what words are kept and which are lost from original printed draft to notebook to laptop.

I finished NaNoWriMo on November 23rd, a few days early, and began worldbuilding and revising in earnest: five hours a day, every day.  By doing this, I discovered the futuristic setting didn't really make sense and was even a little cliched for the story I wanted to tell; so I've revised the world into the near-present.  Immediately, I steered away from post-apocalyptic settings: more cliches will abound.  Instead, I settled on an isolated State, cut off voluntarily from the rest of the world (some might see resemblances to North Korea, but I'm working very hard at disspelling any sort of mirroring; in no way is this story a metaphor for the troubles with Pyongyang).  Because I had to change the setting, I also had to change many of the characters' names.  Knowing the world I've created better and understanding the narrative voice with which to tell these characters' stories has already helped me invariably with the revision process.

NaNoWriMo got me started on the first novel I've started that I think is worth finishing in a long time.  Along the way I hit some bumps - particularly plotwise - but the experience of writing 50,000 words in a month was certainly worth it, especially because I got to know these characters so intimately.  You don't know want to know how many fake conversations I had with Moo or Daniel Yu: you'd have to keep a light on at night, you'd be frightened so badly.

The burning question: will I do it again next year?  The answer: probably, but I hope I won't have to - I don't want any more gray hairs.

NaNoWriMo - Week 2: Recalibrating

I am a linear writer by - I was going to say "nature," but I think it's more "habit."  That is, I like to write from Chapter One to Chapter Twenty in order.  However, during the second week of NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), I wanted to try something different.  The NaNoWriMo idea is an experiment, in my opinion, of how much you can write in a month, and, signing up for this project, I knew I also wanted to experiment in the ways I write, partly to see if how I write is what's working best and partly to see how interesting my story could get.

There are four parts and an epilogue to my novel.  During the first week, I wrote halfway between the first part, Levee Camp Moan, and, though I finished Part One during the second, I found the words did not come as easy for me as those first 12,000 in Week One.  Part of this was because I began writing scenes out of order, in Parts Two and Three and Four and a section of the Epilogue.  I call this type of writing "scatterbrain," because that's exactly what it feels like to me.

It was interesting to see where my characters have ended up and I'm excited to see just how I get there with them, but finding the words this week was much harder for me and I wonder if I haven't inadvertently created several problems in the text.  These may be easy fixes as I write more and more sections and get closer to the end of the story or they may not be fixable until revision.  The enthusiasm for the novel hasn't died down even a little, for which I'm glad because I really didn't know what would happen if I left the very safe confines of linear writing.

That said, I think writing in a linear fashion is what, for the most part, works best for me.  There are times, however, when scatterbrain writing is useful because, in a sort of roundabout way, it requires thinking ahead.  I think, for instance, if I'd had a particular scene in my head and knew it came later in the story, it would be good to write it out, get it down, even if it's just notes on what happens.  I've also found scatterbraining to be a highly effective tool for my imagination, putting characters in wildly different situations from the point they are in the linear story. 

Part of the experience of NaNoWriMo, of course, is not knowing what happens, not planning this story out, seeing where it goes on its own, and that, I think is a somewhat linear process of writing, letting these characters end up where they will in a faux-natural fashion*, without any forethought on my part.

NEXT WEEK: Novel Notes on Napkins (and the annoyance of alliteration)

Words to Date: 27,139


*I say faux-natural because when writing a novel not under the pressure of 50,000 words in 30 days, I hope to flesh out more of the storyline and the characters, to be able to scatterbrain write freely, knowing full well most of what's going to happen, but to make it all seem as though it's happening naturally.  There's nothing really "natural" writing for NaNoWriMo, but it is a lot of fun.

NaNoWriMo - Week 1: Thoughts

As many of you know, I, along with many of compatriots in the writingsphere, have taken on the NaNoWriMo project (http://www.nanowrimo.org/): writing 50,000 words during the month of November.  I've decided to document, in some fashion, this process, by blogging about at the end of each week.

This is quite an undertaking as anyone who is doing it will tell you.  Fifty thousand words in 30 days is a minimum of 1,667 words per day, without breaks; that's about half of a short story every day (15 short stories in 30 days then, yarz?), when a lot of writers take a month or more for one (1) short story!  Of course, there are naysayers to NaNoWriMo.  They'll tell you all you're going to write is crap for 30 days.  The thing of it is, they're at least half-right, but I can tell you from experience most of what I write is pure crap anyway.  Even so, any writer worth his or her nickel knows there is always always something worth keeping in the mudpile: an idea, however small; a turn of phrase; a line of dialogue; something. 

I chose to participate in NaNoWriMo for a number of reasons, but mostly because it would require me to write every day, regardless of my mood, my schedule, the mad ravings and finger-pointings at the short story I'm currently working on ("Why don't you have an ending!" "How dare you eat that pizza, Johnny Gorgeous!" "Mr. Frenchman, must you be so Phantom of the Opera-y?").

So, this is the end of the first week then or thereabouts.  It's Day 5 and I have 12,201 words written in a crazy, whacked-out novel.  Here's the premise that I full right to change at any time, without notice: Fish that can travel faster than the speed of light.  A bounty hunter obsessed with her lost lives, past and future.  A baritone in an a cappella group slash smuggler who just might be the guy to wreck the whole space travel thing.  A philosopher decrying the doom of mathematics.  And a drug dealer forms an uneasy partnership with a dancer to pull off the biggest heist in human history: matter theft.  Welcome to Poro, city of claw and eye.

I have no clue how I'm going to pull any of that off, even with 12,000 words written, but I'm getting closer to understanding how it all works in my mind.  Also, I'm not sure I want to pull it off.  The interesting part of doing this, for me at least, is writing it out, the act alone, letting my brain go, whatever comes out is what's written down.  Already, I've introduced a character I didn't think would matter and, as it turns out, matters very much.  It's a wonderful moment when the story takes control.  It's not something that happens much when I'm writing short stories.

Okay, though, the story in control of itself is only going to work for so long, I know that.  The other really fun part of this is that I'll have a novel at the end, one in which I can go back and reassert my control.  I'll revise, finding the parts that are worth keeping and disregarding the parts that aren't, working out what's cliche and what's original, however many revisions that takes.  For now, the story is on auto-pilot and it can take any turn it wants, even ones I don't agree with (at any rate, maybe the turns I don't agree with are the ones I should be keeping).

No matter what happens, at the end of first week, I can say without hesitation that this is a blast and I highly recommend everyone try it once.  It's really not even about getting those 50,000 words.  I don't think you win anything except a NaNoWriMo ribbon on your profile and the prestige of having completed 50,000 words.  If you don't make it, it's no big deal.  So long as you don't not make it because you're obsessing over the little details - you can do that in revision.  That's not what NaNoWriMo is about.  It's about writing every day and having fun doing it.

I'm Floored by Stephen Fry