IT HAS BEGUN

The third major rewrite of Weathermen is underway. I’m aiming to have this one done before the end of the year so I can start shipping letters off to agents. I’m sure there will be further drafts and revisions, but this one is going to be the last major change of scene and characters.

The first and most important goal for me has been to punch up the intro, which was vague and languid in draft #2. So, here’s what I have to far. If you read this and feel like you want to read more, then please leave a note. It means I’ve succeeded. If you can see any way for me to punch it up even more, then do tell!

If you’ve never read any of Weathermen before, here’s all you need to know: A Weathertower, a 4km high self-contained superstructure built to manipulate the weather, has collapsed. There are very few survivors, and they have never been outside the Tower walls.

That’s just about all you need to know.

My eyes are so tired

Quick update:

The MWF was good fun. Learned some interesting things, met some interesting folk. More details incoming later.

Also broke the 100,000 word mark on the Funfair story, which is nice, because I’m also up to the final scene. It’s like 100k was destined to be the first draft goal. Hitting 100k on my first novel took 30 months of writing. This time it only took 3 months and 2 days, which says a lot about how I’ve taken up proper writing routines since 2005. I’m putting it away after I get this scene done to concentrate on getting Weathermen ready for submission to agents, but I think it has promise lurking somewhere within all those mangled scenes.

And yes, my eyes are abominably tired. Bedtime ya’ll.

Generic Update #1 (and me all excited for the Melbourne Writers Festival)

Okay, so:

I’m about to hit 100k with my Spooky Funfair novel – AKA “The little book that wouldn’t shut up.” It was only supposed to be a 40k children’s story to keep me occupied between drafts of Weathermen but it JUST WON’T STOP.

Also got a nice idea forming for a Running-Man esque sci-fi short set aboard the Titanic. I’ll have to slot ideas together over the next few days, but I think it has promise.

Finally – I’m attending the Melbourne Writers Festival tomorrow. I’m headed to a full day seminar called “The Whole Shebang” A quick blurb from the website:

In one event-crammed day you will: following the book’s journey through a publishing house with author Toni Jordan, editor Mandy Brett and publicist Bridie Riordan; get an overview of industry issues and organizations with Joel Becker (Victorian Writers’ Centre) and Jeremy Fisher (Australian Society of Authors); hear of the different paths writers can take to publication with novelists Susan Johnson and Simon Cleary find out how freelancers balance their creative and professional lives with David Astle; get tips on finding someone to publish your work from Kerrie Harrison (Wetink magazine), Aviva Tuffield (Scribe Publications) and Nikki Christer (Random House); and learn the value of having an agent from Jenny Darling.

I’m excited!

Epiphany Toilet

So I’ve been struggling with the concept of doing a third draft of Weathermen, namely because it’s the first chapter that bugs me the most. It’s a mish-mash of scenes that all seem to repeat and new characters being thrown around willy-nilly. I’ve been struggling with this problem since April now with no idea of how to fix it.

So today I got back from shopping and had a cup of tea, and cups of tea always relax me, which means I end up having to go to the toilet. I went upstairs, dropped the seat and did what I had to do.

While I was sitting there a single phrase floated into my head.

“When they found Tobias he was still screaming.”

Thankyou, epiphany toilet! Chapter one now has direction, and the rest of the novel will follow.

Well, damn. I think this is turning into a thing.

The short snippet I wrote yesterday was fun. DAMN fun. So I imagined it as a scene from a novel and then started imagining the opening, and this is what came out.

I hope this isn’t gonna turn into an actual novel. I’ve got enough on my plate. There are only so many hours in the day!

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Boston in mid winter is a Disney-On-Ice extravaganza of pine-forests coated in crystal and storefront eaves groaning under the weight of powder snow. Boston in summer is a sweaty jockstrap left unwashed so long that hookers wearing plastic tiaras and schoolkids on coke have started to grow in the creases.

The only good thing about the two weeks I spent in Boston last January was that the bullet passed straight through my left pectoral and hit a kid on a skateboard. He had pre-torn denim’s and a strawberry mullet, and was mid-way through some obscure trick when his knee exploded. He hit the ground face-first and started screaming. There were chunks of gristle spattered all up his shirt. I hadn’t heard a kid howl like that since Saigon.

I don’t remember the ambulance or the first day in hospital. The nurse told me later that I talked in my sleep pretty much non-stop, except for when they gassed me to sew my left lung back up. I asked the nurse what I’d been saying. “Lots of stuff,” he said. “You talked about Maria a lot. And some numbers.”

“What numbers?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t write them down.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” He grinned, and affected my voice – quiet, smoky, tired. “‘That’ll teach him to skate on the sidewalk.’”

It was four days before they let me out. I didn’t sleep much. Too many things to think about. Too many questions. Police turning up at all hours. They didn’t know much. I told them I was a freelancer. It was close enough to the truth.

I gave Boston the finger through the porthole window of an Airbus A300 and swore never to go back. It didn’t work out that way.

Cold Days, Breasts, short fiction.

It was a cold day out today. I saw a lot of nipples. Being the single-minded male that I am, this all came together on the tram-ride home. I guess it’s an attempt at 80’s noir?

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Three t-shirts and my snow jacket couldn’t stop the wind ripping down the alley. Newspaper broadsheets and movie-ticket stubs fluttered past my head. I hunched in, shoved my hands in my pockets, shivering hard enough that my teeth clacked.

I checked my watch, waited. The movie was about to end.

The back door swung open and Maria stepped out, slowly, cautiously. Cherry-red six inch heels. Fishnets over pale flesh. Her legs were slim and long, legs destined for catwalks, built to strut and prance. She was wearing a skirt ten years too young. Tight black weave, barely covering to mid-thigh. A short black jacket with power-shoulders, unbuttoned, fluttering in the wind.

She turned back to the door without seeing me. “Rudy, it’s freezing out here,” she said, and that was when I kicked the door shut. Her hands flew up to her mouth, eyes wide, pupils shrinking to tiny points. She saw the pistol in my hand. “Barker, you shit,” she said, but made no move to run. Classic Maria. All flash, no action. I slipped between her and the door and clicked the padlock.

“Good movie?”

“Piss off. What do you want?”

“I missed you.”

“I thought you were in Boston.” Her eyes kept flicking from the pistol to my face, then back down.

“It wasn’t so great. Unfriendly folk. Got shot, in fact. You know how much that hurts?”

“Piss off,” she said again, and I thumbed the hammer back. The wind was loud enough to cover the squawk of car horns a street away. Would it mask a gunshot? Her breasts were torpedo nose-cones underneath her shirt, nipples standing stiff in the cold. I had a sudden image of her naked, the scratch of her pubic hair against my leg. The way she bit her lip to bleeding when she climaxed. Times long past.

Rudy was hammering on the door. I ignored it.

“Who shot me?”

“Screw your mind games. You know I set it up.” She strained to pull her jacket closed. Again I saw her naked. I imagined biting into one of those sculpted torpedo breasts and it exploding in my mouth in a geyser of silicone shrapnel. “This it? You’re a shit, Barker. Killing a lady behind a Cinema-fucking-Nova. At least they did Lincoln at the theatre.”

“Gonna cry about it?”

“You shit. You shit.” The first tears. Lines of mascara began to run to her chin. The banging grew louder. “You want to know why I did it? I won’t tell you. I won’t.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I want to know who did it.”

“No.”

“Who did it?” I raised the gun, sighting right in the centre of her chest. My fingers trembled, but only from the cold. “Come on.”

“What do you care?”

“He was a damn good shot.” I moved my left hand to touch the spot below my left collarbone where the bullet had exited. The knob of scar tissue stung when I pressed it, even through all those layers. “I need him.”

“Bank job?”

“Something different,” I said, and grinned, making sure to show all my teeth. “Now. His name.”

“You gonna kill me anyway?”

“Probably not.”

Her eyes flashed, furious. “Alright.” She swallowed. “Ja-” she began to say, and then the cinema back-door burst open in a hail of splinters. Rudy stooped in the shadows of the corridor. He’d grown a goatee and an extra three feet since I’d last seen him, and he had something black and deadly in his right hand.

We fired at just about the same time.

Hallinan, and things falling into place.

Budding author Merrilee Faber (whose blog you should visit and give some well-deserved love) unknowingly linked me to the website of author Timothy Hallinan, specifically his excellent Writer’s Guide that details the writing process in fantastic detail. I read through like the info-sponge that I am, and one section that really clicked with me was when he spoke of letting the story fall into place as opposed to planning it meticulously beforehand.

I’ve always agreed with this. When I wrote Weathermen I started with a list of character names and a post-it note saying “The tower is 3-4km tall. I think they all die.” I set out blindly and wrote at least half a million words over four years to get it to the stage it is now, and all of my characters quirks and foibles have emerged while writing as opposed to while planning. In truth, the entire crux of the novel evolved from a misinterpreted line in the second chapter that a friend found strangely chilling. I took it, ran with it, and built a novel out of it.

I was busting out the daily 1k for my funfair novel(la?) today and had a similar eureka moment. I reached a standstill, hands hovering over the keyboard, and suddenly realised that the only possible solution to my problem was a twist I’d never anticipated but which worked perfectly within the context of all my characters. It means going back and doing a lot of re-writing, but isn’t that the entire point of second drafts?

So, the question for today – who has experienced a eureka moment where your characters suddenly decide the path of the story when you were completely stuck? Who plans their stories scene by scene and who just starts writing, waiting to see where your characters end up?

One Month of Wordcounts

Out of curiosity, I decided to track my daily wordcounts over a month period. I’ve never done this before – the only previous measure of my output was during last years NaNoWriMo, where I was 100% certain that I wrote 55,000 words in 30 days, but not how much I wrote each day or how faithful I’d been to the daily regime.

So, here we go.