Month: October 2013

Zombar and Tavern

I was wiping down the counter at the bar when a group of zombies came in. A few of them wrinkled their noses when they got here, which was a little weird.

“Oh man… smells like somebody died in here,” said one of them.

Oh great. Not real zombies. Just what we needed. Still, it’s best to be polite.

“Can I get you fellows anything? The headcheese on rye is the special today.”

“Um… can I just get a coke. With a straw. Don’t want to have to redo my latex.”

I leaned forward and said, fairly quietly, “You boys realize that this is a zombie bar, right?”

“Yeah, we’re just on break. The director said we should check out a real zombie bar before we get back to shooting. He wants it to be a realistic as possible.”

I snorted. I’d heard that the crew of Dead/Alive 3: Back for More was going to be filming a few scenes here in town. I didn’t realize that they were hiring human extras to be zombies. That’s what I get for not paying attention to the news.

I took the rest of their orders. Mostly just drinks. Apparently the lead makeup artist was a bit of a terror, and none of the extras wanted to incur his wrath. I was about to suggest a table on the side of the room closest to the door, but before I could, one of the group wandered into the middle of the room and snagged the table

Every half-rotted eye in the room was on them. And they were oblivious.

Buster, one of the bigger regulars, staggered over to their table. It was hard to tell if he was angry, since most of his facial muscles weren’t connected to anything. “What you think… you… humans… doing?”

I was surprised that he remembered to lift his pitch at the end of the sentence to signify that it was a question. His speech center is decayed enough that tonality usually escapes him. He must have been thinking long and hard about what to ask before he stumbled over there.

“You have… human… face. You wear zombie face. Why?”

The one with the coke swallowed nervously. “Umm… we’re in a movie. We’re extras in the movie.”

“Buster know about movie. Buster went to cas-ting a-gent. Cas-ting a-gent says Buster is too dumb to take direction. Buster think that director is too dumb to direct zombies.”

“They were just looking for people in the background to play zombies.”

I could see Buster stiffen, or at least the parts of him that still worked stiffened. “Hey! That… our word. You say different-ly anim-ated.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know… he said it a minute ago,” the guy said as he pointed at me.

“He works with us. He knows us. He allowed to. You. You wear zombie face. You pretend to be us in film where zombies not allowed. You not allowed to. Is our word.”

“Sorry, man. We just got hired to play parts, that’s all.” The guy looked genuinely nervous. I think it just hit him that he was surrounded by actual zombies. And they didn’t seem to like him much.

Buster leaned down to eye level with him, and I saw the guy trying not to recoil. Also trying not to breathe through his nose. Buster grinned, a horrific sight to see from a distance, let alone up close.

“Look at him. He thinks we going to eat his brains.”

There was a general chorus of ‘brains’ from around the room.

“Buster not want tiny snack,” Buster said as he walked away.

The group of humans filtered out the door. I sent a bowl of chicken ganglia to Buster’s table. On the house.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo for the first time

This is my first NaNoWriMo. At the beginning of the month, I began planning for my first novel. At the beginning of next month, I will begin writing it.
This is a big step for me. Up until now, I’ve never even attempted anything more than novella length. And most of those attempts fell short, and ended up being on the longer end of short story length.
To keep myself writing when NaNoWriMo starts, and to ensure that the story doesn’t derail, I’ve been planning. Plotting. My planning process seems to be something between the super fast style of the pulp fiction of old, inspired mainly by the writing advice of Michael Moorcock, and the much more detailed and complex style of the snowflake method. Twelve pages of planning, notes, ideas, seven of which are purely an outline.
And I’m not done yet. I have two more weeks to work on planning, and I intend to use those two weeks to my advantage. When November starts, I will be ready. Despite the fact that the second half of the month is bisected by both a holiday and the busiest time of the year for my job, I am going to win the NaNoWriMo competition. And I am going to try my damnedest to actually finish the novel itself, since the contest only requires 50,000 words, and my novel will probably be somewhere in the realm of 80,000 or more.
The practice runs I’ve been doing with the fan fiction I’ve been writing have proven that I’m capable of hammering out 4000 words a day easily, as long as I know what I’m writing and I don’t have to stop and figure it out every few minutes. Which means that the planning I’m doing should be enough to provide fuel for the fire.
And if I can finish the novel in November and edit it by the end of December, I very well may decide not to bother with a New Year’s Resolution this coming year. Because I’ll already have a novel ready to submit to agents.

Fractal storytelling

I’ve started planning out the project I’ll be working on for NaNoWriMo. And somehow everything fell into place to make the entire story structure fractal. Since I am shooting for a fairly simple action/adventure pirate story, I read a bit of Michael Moorcock’s advice on how to churn out an action/adventure/fantasy story in a short amount of time. Some of the advice might work for my project, some not as much. Either way, I did take his advice on how to structure the entire novel. Four segments of about 15,000 words each. First segment, introduce the character and get them into trouble. Second segment, pile on a little more trouble. Third, pile on so much that there doesn’t seem to be a way out. Last, have them claw their way up through it all and make it to the end. Simple enough.

However, as a way of getting a bit of practice and getting myself writing a lot of words on a daily basis, two weeks ago I started writing some fan fiction. Something simple, mindless, character driven. Plot didn’t really matter. Just something I could churn out. If you’re really curious, it can be found here. I’m not planning on putting it on this site because I’m not sure I want to deal with any copyright issues on a site where I’m hoping to sell some of my work. But at the time, I’d been watching the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, and I decided to just continue along with the same character during the gap between Episodes III and IV. No real plot, just character driven stuff with occasional plot happening to drive the character’s decisions and actions.

Somehow, I found myself falling into the habit of writing episodically, much like the TV series. Every four chapters seemed to be a single half hour episode. With a similar format. Introduce, pile on trouble, more trouble, finality. So I found that to be a good style that worked for me, allowing me to churn out plot points that way. So I decided to use that format for my novel, only instead of short 1000 to 1600 word chapters, I’d just collate all four into a single chapter.

Moorcock recommended doing six chapters in each 15,000 word section. However, with the style I was going for, four chapters fit that expectation. And, of course, as I sat down today to iron out my outline for the first quarter of the book, I found that I followed the same pattern: Introduction, trouble, more trouble, resolution.

So it appears that my novel’s structure will be fractalized all the way down to the chapters themselves. This, of course, makes me want to start planning for a quadrilogy.

… after November, of course.