Monday, March 29, 2010

On a roll/school musings/an amusing anecdote

Just wrapped second story. Looking like a series of four linked pieces. This one was fun to write as the main character is both bigoted and not all that bright. The lesson from Joss Whedon and Jayne -- everybody thinks they're the hero of the story. It's fun to tell a series of events from different perspectives in different voices. (Pssst, Mittens -- I'll email them to you if you are interested in reading them, just for fun (I'll accept critique if you are so moved, but really I just want to share them with ya ;) ))

It's been too long since I wrote anything serious. It's time. J and I have plenty of stories to tell, and I think we'll be able to tell them better now than we could before.

I have advising day coming up soon for State college, followed by registration a couple days later. I need to talk to an advisor, as I'm a little bit torn right now -- do I go for a B.S. in Community Psychology, or do I get a Bachelor of Elective Studies, which will allow something along the lines of 2 majors, a minor, and a couple elective courses? Decisions, decisions.

So this afternoon a car pulls up in front of our house. J sees the driver give a passenger money, and the passenger gets out and walks to a nearby house. Gets a nervous/guilty look when they see her watching. So F and I and our guest P go sit on the front porch to smoke. When the buyer leaves the house, rather than get in the car, motions to the driver (who has been sitting in front of our house with the engine running for 5-10 minutes by this point), walks to the end of the block, where they drive and pick them up. I mean, come on. Can you make it any more obvious what you're doing? Just drop the buyer off and drive around until a predetermined pickup time, or pull up to the house you are visiting and everybody go in for a few. My problem is that they involved me. If something were to go wrong, then I have to deal with the fallout in front of my place, or if they get busted, they might think I'm the one that called it in, which I didn't. But how could I prove that? Leave me out of it, people. Please.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Been a while

I just submitted a short story to the college Literary Magazine. It's a bit of pulp noir set in the fictional city J and I have been constructing background on for the better part of a decade (1 trunk novel that died in rewrite, a few thousand words of assorted vignettes and fragments, and a piece we're playing around now with that may become a novella, a script for a comic, or a screen/play). This story serves as a sort of prologue to the longer piece -- the main character of the long piece is a supporting char in this one, and we'll probably have some reference to the aftereffects of this tale.

We're really leaning toward the pulp, the noir, the caper. It's a fun genre to write in, and the conventions are so well-established that you can find ways to push them and still keep the intellectual rigor of the boundaries.

The writing I've been doing for school seems to have primed the pump. Good deal.