Sunday, August 09, 2009

Beginnings

Life seems to have a mind of its own. You plan for this and you plan for that, but it does not always work out exactly the way you wanted. And often times, what you hadn't planned for turns out to be the right thing.

I never set out to be an author, but here I am with two short stories published, a novel in its third draft, and two novels on the back burner. Who is to blame for this? Well, I could blame the good Sisters of my parochial school or the Jesuit priests and lay teachers at my high school for giving me a good education. They did get me excited about reading, but they didn't push me towards writing. Putting pen to paper and getting it published was something that happened years after my formal education ended.

So how did I become a wordsmith / mercenary writer / word-slinger? I mostly blame it on two people: Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo, and Del Howison, owner of the horror book and gift store Dark Delicacies. Sure, I'd written a few things here and there, but nothing I'd ever have dared submit for publication. Then a few years ago I heard about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) - the Write a 50,000 Word Novel in 30 Days Challenge. I thought, How hard can it be?

Turns out it was a little more difficult than I'd initially anticipated. To come up with a complete novel with a minimum of 50k words in thirty days, that works out to roughly 1700 words per day you have to be cranking out. That's about 7 pages of writing, with 250 words per page. When you're not used to writing much beyond a typical email to family and friends, that is a lot. So you pretty much need to get a caffeine IV going to keep pumping out the words.

Okay, so I decided to take the challenge, then what? Well, I couldn't just bang out 50k words of gobbledy-gook. What would be the point? I needed a story. Over lunch one day at work we got on the topic of people we knew who had weird or creepy names. One name was brought up that I thought was pretty cool, and the seed was planted. Based on that, I came up with a rough outline for a story. I had a beginning, an end, and a few plot points I wanted to hit along the way. I was set to go.

Come November 1st, NaNoWriMo began and I started slinging out the words. I was on my way! Then a funny thing happened - the story took on a life of its own. The characters and the main plot were there, but somehow the story started going where it wanted to go. I would finish writing several pages and think, Where the Hell did that come from? It was as though someone else had taken control of my body and I was just along for the ride.

In the midst of all this, I'd sometimes get stuck for what was to happen next in the story. When that took place, I'd save (and triple back up) what I'd been doing then take a long walk to clear out my mind. I also brought along a pen and a pocket-sized notebook in case any ideas came to me while I was out. On one such walk, the ideas came to me in a flood. I needed some place to sit and write it all down so I stopped at a favorite local haunt to have lunch. That's when I ran into Del. I was so engrossed in writing my notes I brushed past him without a word. "That's okay," he shouted sarcastically across the room, "just ignore me."

I finished scribbling down my thoughts then went back and talked to him. I explained what I was doing and Del's eyes lit up. "Two of the writers in my writers group are doing the same thing. We're having our monthly meeting tonight. Why don't you join us?"

That night I joined his group, The Dark Delicacies Writers Group. I found myself rubbing elbows with a talented group of authors whose genre of choice is horror. The funny thing was, I'd never written a horror story in my life.

By month's end I met the NaNo Challenge, and then some. When I submitted my manuscript for an official word count, I clocked in at over 65,000 words. But the story was nowhere close to being finished. I took a breather from the frenetic pace of NaNo-ing and tried my hand at writing short horror stories. I wrote one or two, but felt guilty that I hadn't truly finished my novel. I wrote a few more short horror pieces then went back to writing the novel. There are few things so gratifying as writing two simple words: The End

I did it. I wrote my first novel. I kept my beginning, middle, and end, and even worked in a few other plot twists along the way, and it all came together in the end. I took another break from the novel and wrote some more horror stories. One of them ended up in the 2nd issue of the horror e-zine Necrotic Tissue. My offering was Booty Call, a flash fiction piece that per the submission guidelines was to be exactly 100 words, including the title. My first published piece!

Since then I've been alternating between writing horror and editing my western novel. Yep, you read that right. The NaNo novel is a western set in pre-Civil War Missouri. Durning that time I proposed that we, as a group of writers, put out a collection of our works. A calling card if you will. It took time and patience, but the result is the horror anthology Midnight Walk. It has received rave reviews from Hellnotes, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Horror Drive-in, and Fatally Yours, among others.

My piece in this collection is The Measure of a Man, which has been singled out repeatedly by editorial reviewers. They've raved about it saying "...Tired as I am of zombies I was fully captivated by the vivid The Measure Of A Man, a superb story...", as well as it being "...absolutely fabulous...", "...very well written and a fine example of this type of story..." and it was twice picked out as one of the faves in the anthology.

So, I'm off and running in my writing career. I have one or two more horror stories I'm shopping around, but right now my main focus is editing my western novel. During a recent writers workshop I attended, one of the faculty there, a publisher, raved about it as possibly being this generation's Tom Sawyer. Those are big shoes to fill, so I have some work ahead of me. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to editing.

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