Going Down - Part 2

So far, so good, so generally coherent.... in the first episode, Colin's life was falling apart having lost his job, his girlfriend, his iPod and finally, his bank account. BUT, it's time to fight back.....

The Bank Manager was scared, because a customer had actually found him and because he was hanging over the edge of a tall building.

“I want my account back,” snarled Colin.

“They won’t let us.”
“Who won’t?”
The Manager shut up, more scared of “them” than Colin.
Colin left him hanging. In the Manager’s office he found some “floppy” disks.

Back at Colin’s flat, there were some serious Goons around. It had come to this; somehow, Colin always knew it would.

Two days later, in a hideaway in the Orkneys, Colin fired up his Atari ST and inserted the disks.

New Zealand Spec Fic Blogging Week - Post1

Seven days - seven drabbles (being a story EXACTLY 100 words long).

And these seven drabbles will be seven, 100 word chapters of a daily serial story. The challenge is that I refuse to make a plan ahead - I'll write each one each day and have to make it work. So we will see..

So here goes with Chapter One of what I am calling "Going Down":

It was a bad week. Made redundant, broken iPod, girlfriend defriending him on Facebook. Then he opened the letter from the bank.

His account was closed because he failed to respond to two letters that he never received. He called the bank.

After a couple of hours, an actual human spoke to him.
“You failed to respond, we closed your account.”
“Where’s my money, then?”
“But you don’t have an account.”
After an hour of this, Colin realised that he wasn’t speaking to a human after all.

But they’d messed with the wrong man. It was time to fight back.

The sweet smell of rejection....

Ah well - last month I promised my Monster Hunter story would be out there by now - it went out there and came right back. To be honest, it was written because there was a deadline, not really from a sense that I had a story to tell, so it couldn't help but be a bit clunky and odd.
Also - my tale of rock'n'roll'n'zombies got spat back - at least not actually rejected but the anthology that it was intended for has been put on hold for at least a year...which is a pity because I quite liked that one. We will see where else it can go. Suggestions welcome.
The anthology that "Trip Hawker and The asteroid of Vengeance" was supposed to be going into seems to have frozen - no updates, no replies etc for months.
Hopefully my superhero story will make the final cut for its anthology (and hopefully there'll be updates for that soon..).

HOWEVER - as I said last time round, the Spec Fic meet-up fired up my writing muscles and I have started on The Novel - called, at least at this stage, "The Power". It's meant to be Ian M Banks meets Jack Kirby - superhero schenanigans with some blunt edges. I had the idea of writing this piece of prose in a series of chapters like a series running through several comic books, giving me the chance to bounce between the major viewpoints as we go. I did a load of rough, rambling background and have now got stuck in. I've managed 5500 words in six days, and WILL write at least something every day on this until its FINISHED. And lo, it shall be so.

Unless Spec Fic Blogging week gets in the way. From next Monday 19th September, I'll be blogging every day for a week along with a 7 episode drabble story - 100 words an episode for 7 days - I wonder what I'll end up with?

Today's Drabble - inspired by the continual lurch between financial crises that the US and Europe seem to find themselves in these days..

It seemed that the shovelling was nearly finished. The shift leader, Gork had realised that there hadn’t been any massive trucks for at least an hour. Nothing new had been added to the pile.
“Nearly finished, lads.”
The boys got stuck in again, shoving piles of paper and metal into the hole.
Gork’s phone rang. He listened and groaned. “Sorry lads, they agreed to give the Government more money.” They heard trucks approaching.
The trucks tipped out more good money. It didn’t take long for it to rot down to bad money. It all got poured into the bottomless pit.

Spec Fic NZ Wellington meet-up & general update

Last Saturday (6th August) I organised the Wellington Spec Fic NZ meet-up, as Anna Caro was away in Europe. It was great to meet several other New Zealand Spec fic writers.

Stephen Minchin, who is starting up a New Zealand publisher, Steam Press for speculative fiction, was greatly enlightening about the difficulties of getting books published and sold in NZ.

Craig Gulow writes graphic novels and the pair of us indulged in some Alan Moore appreciation (well, as we both said, the Man is God) - we also discussed just where the space programme had gone wrong (the Space Shuttle basically), and Craig recommended "The High Frontier" by Gerard O Neill - a roadmap for what the US could have done after the Apollo programme.

Also attending were Alicia Ponder and Kay (apologies I didn't catch the surname).

Craig also extolled the virtues of Scrivener - a classy piece of writing software. Alas, it doesn't actually do the writing for you (but where would be the fun in that), but does provide lots of neat little organising functions.

As for my writing....

Monster Hunting story - frankly, I'm fed up with the damn thing, but WILL finish it. Thanks to my wife, who pointed out a shedload of problems with my 5th draft, the 6th draft may actually have a bit more coherance. I think it's helped that I walked away from it for about three weeks. Re-reading draft 6 reveals that it's not so bad, just needs those final dew tightenings, and a bit of a final punch.

Superhero story - remains in limbo as we wait for the final culling on the anthology.
Trip Hawker and the Asteroid of Death - accepted some time last year, but the project seems to be a little stalled...

BUT - having had the Spec Fic meet-up, I realise that I'd sunk into a bit of a funk with my writing, lacking the willpower to sit down at the keyboard - however, chatting to other writers and bouncing ideas around has reignited me a bit.

So next time I write this, there will be a Monster Hunting story out there, yearning for acceptance, and hopefully a couple of other things too.

AND - my novel will be lurching towards some kind of start....

Today's Drabble - if you worry that your project at work is difficult, think how bad Noah had it...

There was a problem with the spiders. There were 40,000 species. Noah had been instructed to get a pair representing every living creature.

Even forgetting the extra deck the Ark would need, and finding a pair of all 40,000 types, how was he going to stop the females from eating the males?

And the little buggers scared the crap out of him.

And that was just the Spiders. The other million odd invertebrates were hardly less difficult. At least they were small.

He reviewed his project plan. The hundred thousand vertebrates were going to need a lot of space too.

How low can they go?

The tabloid press in the UK have always been gutter scum - but the latest revelations about tapping the phone of a murdered girl show they can sink to even lower depths. Further vile revelations are following, including taps on the relatives of victims of the 7/7 bombings in London and the parents of the murdered Soham girls:

News of the World hacked 7/7 Family phones

One hopes that heads will roll over this, frankly Rupert Murdoch himself should stand down. In the meantime - don't buy The Sun, don't buy The News of the World, don't buy The Times or Sunday Times, stop watching Fox, cancel your Sky subscription, even, stop watching The Simpsons.

Half acceptance....

June was spent mostly writing a new short story which will be getting submitted to Triskaideka Books for their "Masters of Horror: Grave Grimoire" anthology. It's an undead themed anthology - my story is a mix of sex, drugs, rock'n' roll and the living dead. For once I did not have to write the whole thing and then figure out what the story was actually about and write it all again...

As is often the case though, the minor character who was there to provide a vital body organ turned out to have a lot more going for her than I realised, which is all part of the fun of writing. The story is with my current grammar/ punctuation nazi, which is always necessary, considering the way I use semi-colons in particular. Hell, leave out the semi-colon, just write two short, sharp sentences - c'oh!

This month, I will do a story for another anthology, wanting stories about Monster Hunters - I've been writing rough "treatments" - already it has switched from a story about a grizzled werewolf hunter, to one about a lady monster hunter who's after something that might be, or might not be a werewolf. Actually, I'd better pull my finger out on that one.

Some good news - my superhero story "The Girl who blew his mind", starring the Man with a Million Brains, has made the first cut of the anthology, but the Editor still has to make decisions around how much space he's got to play with.

Today's Drabble continuing the story of Oog and Sog, is partially inspired by Christopher Hitchen's "God is Not Great" - he's very angry about the whole thing, but frankly, does make a lot of valid points.

Oog and Sog gazed at the night sky. There were lots of stars but no-one had invented numbers so no-one knew how many.

“Where did they come from?” asked Sog, ignoring his hunger.

Oog thought. “Either, a burst of energy sent out lots of stuff which bashed into each other to make lots of bigger things. On our big thing, lots of that stuff mixed together over lots of time to make us, sitting here, looking at lots of other big things.”

“Or?” said Sog.

“Some bloke just switched it all on.”

“Could we ask that bloke for more deer?”

Submitted, rejected, being written and consequences..

A status update:

"Trip Hawker and the Asteroid of Vengeance" is waiting to be published in "Rockets, Swords and Rainbows" anthology.
"Trip Hawker and the Point of Death" is currently "in process" with RayGun Revival - meaning it's been read by a slush reader and is waiting for an Editor to peruse. So someone thought it worth pushing along the chain, which is nice.
"The Big Three-oh" was finally let go by "Andromoda Spaceways Inflight Magazine" - it was accepted but didn't fit in with their upcoming issues. They were good enough to give me some kind feedback, so I'll need to see where else this can be submitted.
"Everybody Goes to Hell" has been submitted to WilyWriters competition for members of the Masters of Horror group.

Work in progress:

I'm working on my submission to Masters of Horror: Grave Grimoire - an anthology of undead fiction. My story is a sick little number about pop stars, groupies and weird voodoo priests. It's rolling in at about 6500 words at the moment, but my first re-cut should trim it back to 5000 (lose the more obvious exposition and get rid of the adverbs etc) - then we'll look at the re-jigging and beefing up and toning down. Hopefully a good title will occur to me at some point.

After that:

I am determined to have a go at a novel - BUT what to write....I have several ideas but the fact that nothing has made me run at it (or maybe I'm just daunted by the whole prospect), makes me wonder if that they're just not the "right" idea. Or perhaps I should just get off my lazy butt and write SOMETHING.

Current notions:

Carrie Black is Dead - being the tale of an embittered corpse and a ball of hate.
Strange Days in the Budaland - sword and sorcery in a hot, desert landscape.
What's it all about? - far future society and the search for meaning.

And recent mind-vomit splurged up overnight:

A Boy and his Dog - in a screwed up small town, an abusive father chucks his son's dog out to the mercy of the weird things in the woods. But the dog returns...

Hell, one thing at a time - let's get the voodoo/ popstar story finished and sent off...

Todays drabble is inspired by the life and achievements of Thomas Midgley Jr - who I read about in Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything. Midgley was one of the pioneers of putting lead into petrol, a dangerous process which nearly killed him (when he demonstrated how safe it was to journalists). They made the process safer but the longer term consequences of leaded petrol took many decades to address.

However, Midgley topped this considerable acheivement by inventing CFCs - one of the main contributors to Global Warming. To be fair, it took decades before anyone realised CFCs were a problem, but it makes you wonder about how much we might consider the wider consequences of our actions...

Oog was freezing. No matter how many skins he heaped on himself, he was still cold. He rubbed sticks together to keep moving and warm. Suddenly there was a spark and then a flame.

He felt warmth and added more sticks.

Sog arrived with a deer. There was something orange by Oog. He sat down.

“It’s warm,” said Sog.

“Neat, eh?” said Oog.

“We should do more of it,” said Sog.

“We need wood,” said Oog, “we’d need to cut down some of these trees.”

Sog shrugged. “There are millions of trees. We’ll never run out. What could go wrong?”