Pace vs. Prose

I recently (like ten minutes ago) read a post on a writer’s site about this subject, and it spurred me to examine my own thoughts on pace & prose, and where and when to use them. This is what I came up with:

There’s a time for pace, and a time for prose. Each is merely a tool used to carve a path. Here is an extreme example:

Say your mc is currently racing against the clock – dodging bullets, pedestrians, rush hour traffic, and two or three heat seeking missiles – in order to save a hog-tied damsel who has a bomb strapped to her chest. The clock is ticking, so there’s no time for shit and shenanigans. Prose has no place whatsoever within this portion of a story.

Okay, say the mc made it there ten seconds too late and the damsel is naught but a black powder burn on a patch of pavement. Now is the time for prose; he laments, he cries, he tosses out that rubber he’ll never get to share with her and her sister Babette, he swears blood vengeance upon the person responsible, and does it all from beneath a heavy fog of prose.

Pace:
anger, lust, rage, excitement, fight, flight, character interaction (i.e., dialogue, phone conversations, sports, etc.)

Every golfer knows the term ‘You drive for show, but putt for the dough’, and here’s where it applies to you and I as writers. You’ve got the reader’s attention with the chase, the crazy cabbie who spoke a language you thought only trekkies knew, the barking dogs, errupting flames, shattering glass, the falls, the ever-present tick of the clock, and now you need to slow down and allow the reader to take a gulp of air while their heart stops racing.

Enter Prose:
Scene and character descriptions, back story (if any, but not huge chunks at once, cuz the last thing you want to do is have the reader forget where they are in the story), character inner monologue – their hopes, dreams, petty piss-offs – and setting.

None of this is according to some book. This is how I do it.

Bitches

Writing Exercises

Creative Writing: Exercises for Writers

More Exercises:

1. Write the first 250 words of a short story, but write them in ONE SENTENCE. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct and punctuated correctly. This exercise is intended to increase your powers in sentence writing.
2. Write a dramatic scene between two people in which each has a secret and neither of them reveals the secret to the other OR TO THE READER.
3. Write a narrative descriptive passage in a vernacular other than your own. Listen to the way people speak in a bar, restaurant, barber shop, or some other public place where folks who speak differently (“He has an accent!”) from you, and try to capture that linguistic flavor on the page.
4. Play with sentences and paragraph structure: Find a descriptive passage you admire, a paragraph or two or three, from published material, and revise all the sentences. Write the passage using all simple sentences (no coordination, no subordination); write the passage using all complex-compound sentences; write the passage using varying sentence structure. The more ways you can think to play with sentence structure, the more you will become aware of how sentence structure helps to create pacing, alter rhythm, offer delight.
5. Focus on verbs: Find a passage that you admire (about a page of prose) and examine all of the verbs in each sentence. Are the “active,” “passive,” “linking?” If they are active, are they transitive or intransitive? Are they metaphorical (Mary floated across the floor.)? What effects do verbs have on your reading of the passage?
6. Take a passage of your own writing and revise all of the verbs in it. Do this once making all the verbs active, once making all the verbs passive. Then try it by making as many verbs as possible metaphorical (embedded metaphors).

Characters: There are two types of characters: well-drawn and stick-figures.

1. Create character sketches. This is a good exercise to perform on a regular basis in your journal. Sometimes you can just create characters as they occur to you, at other times it is good to create characters of people you see or meet. Some of the best sketches are inspired by people you don’t really know but get a brief view of, like someone sitting in a restaurant or standing by a car that has been in an accident. Ask yourself who they are, what they are about. The fact that you don’t really know the person will free you up to make some calculated guesses that ultimately have more to say about your own vision of the world than they do about the real person who inspired the description. That’s okay, you are NOT a reporter, and ultimately the story you intend to tell is YOUR story.
2. Write a character sketch strictly as narrative description, telling your reader who the character is without having the character do or say anything.
3. Revise the above to deliver the character to the reader strictly through the character’s actions.
4. Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the character’s speech to another character.
5. Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the words/actions of another character (the conversation at the water fountain about the boss).
6. Often when we call a character “flat” we mean that the author has failed in some way; however, many good stories require flat characters. Humor often relies on flat characters, but often minor characters in non-humorous pieces are also flat. These characters usually appear to help move the plot along in some way or to reveal something about the main character. A flat character is one who has only ONE characteristic. You can create whole lists of these and keep them in your journal so that you can call upon them when you need a character to fit into a scene.
7. Young writers are prone to write autobiographical pieces. Instead of writing about people like yourself, try writing about someone who is drastically different in some way from you. Writing about someone who is a good deal older or younger than you will often free up your imagination. It helps to make sure you are delivering enough information to your reader so that the reader can clearly see the character and understand the character’s motives.
8. Write a scene of about five hundred words in which a character does something while alone in a setting that is extremely significant to that character. Have the character doing something (dishes, laundry, filing taxes, playing a computer game, building a bird house) and make sure that YOU are aware that the character has a problem or issue to work out, but do NOT tell your reader what that is.

Rename that Book Contest

Well, I finally think I need to change the name of Dropcloth Angels. I’ve decided to make this a contest with prizes and everything. All you need to do is submit your entry as a response to this post and I’ll put the ten I like best into a Poll to be voted upon by my millions of adoring fans. In the event my millions of fans can’t make it out to vote, I’ll choose the winner from the top three – for which there will be prizes.

1st place winner will get a shout out as the genius who retitled my book, will get the opportunity to be a character in an upcoming novel, and a signed very limited (I’ll be having 5 proofs printed) edition of the renamed Dropcloth Angels mailed out to them.

2nd & 3rd will win the honour of knowing they are less loserly than those not chosen by a panel of your peers, and a signed copy of the renamed Dropcloth Angels, complete with a dirty poem on the inside cover.

There will only be five books printed in all. The other two already have homes; one will be heading across the pond to a friend in England, while the other will make a cross-country journey here in Canada.

For those who’ve read but need a refresher (and those who think they can rename it without having read it) I’ll place the summary below.

Good luck

DcA (dropcloth angels)

Synopsis

Part I: Unstoppable Force Meets an Edible Object

An emptiness echoes within Zane Ellis that he can’t seem to fill no matter how much blood, no matter how many he kills; his actual total is even lost to him, though their voices often find him late at night. But that’s only when they can out-scream the demon living within his head. He searches for a shining moment, a holy of holies: his dropcloth masterpiece. Disenchanted by his lack of creative progress Stateside, and feeling stifled by Gideon, his benefactor and purveyor of internet snuff, he spreads his wings and heads for the Great White North: to Canada—to kiss and kill; to snuff and tell. His first victim after arriving is a girl he comes to know as ‘boring-tasting Annie’, but there will be another.

Though he doesn’t know it, the demon’s true name is Syphilis, and is winning the battle for his mind.

Zane isn’t the only American who’s come to Toronto towing an imagined monster. Zoe Beaupre, a sharp-tongued young whore—together with a rude stuffed monkey named Purple—has come home from St. Louis to relax her well-pounded pussy and catch up with her reclusive older sister, Jeanne.

Perhaps it’s destiny that the Z’s should meet—consider it Karma, Fate, whatever the hell you want—but meet they do. Just not right away.

Zane, after scoping out the local scene, finds, and immediately begins to woo, an ivory skinned beauty named Jeanne. She is the last speaker of the day at a cancer survivors meeting, and steals his heart with her looks and sorrowful, well-woven tale. What Zane feels toward this girl is an alien thing; he’s never equated food with sex, so is both vexed and confused by the stirring in his loins during their conversation after the meeting.

He’d told Gideon he came to Canada to shoot one of their snuff movies, but what he doesn’t tell the old man is that he also came to capture, hopefully, an angel—the angel—which he’d freeze for all time: within him, upon canvas, and on page one of every newspaper in the country: not just another blood painting by the man the media so gleefully call Cannibalangelo, but the painting; his own Mona Lisa, sans head.

Of course, Jeanne finds him irresistible. How could she not? Others always found Zane as charming and handsome as he himself did. Why, sometimes he would stare for hours at his own reflection, marvelling in wonder at what his parents had wrought.

Jeanne doesn’t mention marvelling while regaling Zoe with the details surrounding her meeting of a nice young widower named David she’d met at the meeting, but Zoe can tell her sister is smitten. She is also beginning to suspect Jeanne is a cat-lady waiting to happen, and decides to help make this date with Mr. Beautiful happen.

Zoe also met a man while Jeanne was busy with her new guy, but doesn’t mention Brown Sugar, the young man she’d pleasured orally in exchange for heroin—or the fact he is only fourteen, which is a secret she plans on taking to her grave.

The night before Jeanne’s date with David, Zoe and her sister argue over Zoe’s absence from college in St. Louis. There are a great many things Zoe never told her sister. If Jeanne found out she was a heroin addicted hooker, how would it affect their relationship? All it would do is reinforce their mother’s low opinion of her. After the argument, Zoe storms out of the apartment, vowing to be gone by morning. She decides to have a few drinks at a shit-hole bar around the corner.

This is where the two Z’s meet for the first time, though each gives a false name for their own reasons; Zane calls himself Baudelaire, and Zoe introduces herself as Candace, her nom de whore.

Zoe sees the man named Baudelaire for the predator he is. She is very adept at reading people. To turn him away, she insults him enough that he should have left her alone, but his smile only widens. Scared shitless—though petulant, as always—she leaves the bar and heads for the apartment.

Zane, on the other hand, finds her both beautiful and as sharp as scalpel; a true kindred soul. Right about here is where he realizes what he felt with Jeanne might not be a bad thing, but is stronger for this girl. His feelings are so strong, in fact, that he allows her to walk out of his life forever; any follow-up meeting would end badly for her.

After a little soul-searching, Zoe decides to not be so selfish, and will stay in Toronto long enough to see how Jeanne’s date goes with her new geek. She even drives her to the man’s rural chalet for dinner before going out; Purple Monkey spends the trip out to the chalet riding the hood like a surf board, while Zoe suffers flu-like symptoms of withdrawal. Too bad she doesn’t get to meet David upon arriving at his house. She leaves quickly in order to get a fix. Her last words to her sister as she drives away are, “Don’t come home without your underwear, whore,” and then she is gone from her life forever. On the way back into Toronto, she becomes lost and doesn’t arrive at the apartment until much later. Getting stoned in a strange land has its drawbacks.

For Zane, his dinner date with Jeanne goes smashingly well, and the subsequent show they put on for Gideon breaks all previous web site records. He’d been correct in thinking she’d be a star, an angel even, but, much to his disappointment, not the one for whom he’d been searching. Before cleaning the chalet and leaving for home in Chicago, he returns Jeanne’s phone and clothes to her apartment, then searches for any evidence of him, and erases the message he left on her home phone.

As Zoe packs up the last of her things, she hears what she thinks is Jeanne returning home, but, as she frighteningly discovers, it is the man she’d met at the bar named Baudelaire, the creepy guy. She hides while he tosses the apartment, and then telephones the police after he leaves.

When the police arrive, they discover blood-splattered clothes, Jeanne’s cell phone—smashed—and a stash of heroin that falls from a duffel bag belonging to one unlucky whore. Not only is Zoe arrested for possession, but four days later is also now a ‘person of interest’ in the disappearance of one Jeanne Beaupre. Her thoughts (when she isn’t thinking about her missing sister and getting high), are as follows: “I’m fucked.” The purple monkey wholeheartedly agrees.

Upon discovering the girl he’d met at the bar is actually Jeanne’s sister, Zane does two things: first, he leaves his dropcloth painting, along with Jeanne’s remains, in a public place, so as to remove suspicion from the girl he knew as Candace; the second thing he does is come to grips with the new emotions stirring within his breast. He has no name for them, but thinks the feelings might be love. As he lingers at the scene of the angel painting, a small army of police cars and gawking revellers swarm the area. He gloats too long and is forced to kill a photographer who snaps his picture.

After her release from custody (even the possession charges are dropped in light of the extenuating circumstances; i.e., Jeanne’s death), a grief-stricken Zoe is met by her mother, the frost queen of Sarnia Ontario, and returns with her for Jeanne’s token funeral. During the service, the monkey is his usual caring self. Not.

The little prick even makes jokes about burying just a head.

Part II: Lucky Numbers, Car Sex, and Psychos

With nothing left to keep her in Canada, Zoe makes her way back to St. Louis, and tosses her pussy back in play. Cherry, her pimp, is happy to have her back.

Zoe believes the worst of her ordeal is over, that nothing could possibly top the shit storm she’d weathered. She is wrong: Simply Bob-wrong. The third customer of her very first night back to work has a very important message from a concerned Doctor: she is to keep silent about Toronto or bad things will happen. He punctuates this message by taking at gunpoint what she offers for money. He rapes her and leaves her, beaten and emotionally broken, in a dark and dingy parking lot. She can’t see it, but she is spared a similar fate to her sister by the man she later comes to know as Gideon—who actually wants her dead, but settles for ‘roughed up’ after Zane threatens to kill the old man if she’s harmed.

Puppy love is a powerful aphrodisiac.

Spared or not, Bob’s near murderous violation sends Zoe over the edge she’s been teetering on since Jeanne’s death, and she overdoses on the very drugs she uses to insulate herself from pain. As she is shaken awake, an accidental shove sends her roommate through a dressing mirror, nearly killing her.

Upon awaking, Zoe is strapped to a bed and is told she will be held for psychiatric evaluation. Her roommate’s boyfriend, a cop with whom she’s never seen eye to eye, informs hospital staff she is suicidal.

Zoe’s not happy, but Purple Monkey thinks it’s quite funny—at first anyway. This is no mere detox; Zoe is packed up and shipped to The Paradise Valley Mental Facility. Once there, she is to spend 21 days under observation and, if all goes well, will then be free to leave.

Gideon, after discovering her location, does everything he can to make sure Zoe never leaves the facility. Well, not alive anyway. As luck has it, there’s an orderly named Bud, who is a big fan of Gideon’s web site, and agrees to watch her. Watch her he does. So much so that he, like most men Zoe meets, wants her for his very own. His nightly visits begin to wear on Zoe, as she’s afraid to fall asleep.

If it weren’t for the friends she’s made within the facility, she’d likely go as bonkers as the doctors already believe her to be. Friends like Meat, Danny and Frye; all of whom become very protective of her over a very short period of time. None of them are around when, during a fight with a crazy goth bitch in the common room, Bud slaps her around and she stabs him through the hands with a pencil, but they are there for her when it counts.

During Zoe’s stay in the mental facility, Zane suffers an episode and murders a group (or so the doctor believes; without an actual head count there is no real way of knowing) of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d come by his house to spread the good word. Gideon and his number one dog, Otto, discover Zane sitting at his kitchen table, nearly catatonic and covered in blood. Upon one entire wall of his living room, Zane has painted a portrait of the one girl Gideon wanted least to see: Zoe Beaupre. In his opinion, Zane can no longer be trusted to make the decisions needed to keep them and their business safe. Further, he believes the whore’s time has come to die and that Zane will understand after he’s had time to think about it.

Up until the fight with the goth girl, Zoe believes the night orderly, Bud Hawkins, to be creepy, but not dangerous-creepy. When he lets slip the fact he was told to watch her and the truth of her life-threatening situation, Zoe realizes she is never intended to leave the facility alive; and that something evil is coming for her. In an effort to gain some sort of leverage, and knowing that Bud finds her attractive, Zoe does her best to keep him romantically interested in hopes that he won’t hurt her anymore. She also discovers around the same time that the goth bitch, Mary, knows a little something about the man who killed Jeanne. More than that, she also knows how to get out of the facility undetected. A guarded truce is formed, and Mary, with the promised aid of her boyfriend Spider, will help her—along with Frye, Danny and Meat—escape before escape is no longer an option.

So began The Retribution Club. That’s because they had to call themselves something. Every group had a name. None of them know at this time, but that name, seemingly plucked from the air by Danny, will later become a prophecy.

The boys (who Zoe had taken to calling ‘her knights’), are speaking of Zoe’s escape in the common room one evening, and are overheard by Bud as he sits just around the corner. Bud learns Mary’s secret about how she is able to come and go from the facility, and that it is actually his own key she plans to steal. Bud relays this information on to his benefactor, Gideon, and plans are made to silence the girl for good.

Gideon calls a man named Spike, a former patient and contract killer, to sneak into the hospital and kill Zoe. Spike agrees, and informs Gideon he’d be bringing along his sons to help.

On the night Zoe plans on leaving (but still has no key to the elevator), Bud corners her in her room and slashes her wrist. Then he calls for a nurse, claiming Zoe is trying to kill herself. Zoe passes out as Gert, the night nurse, along with Bud, take her to the infirmary for the night.

Just as all hope seems lost, and Zoe would be strapped down to a bed when the killers came for her, Mary sneaks into the infirmary with Bud’s key. She loosens Zoe’s straps and promises to come back when the night nurse goes for her regularly scheduled nap. Things are looking up. While Zoe awaits the goth girl’s return, she leaves her bed to search the infirmary’s cabinets for a weapon or two … just in case.

Much to Bud’s dismay (because this is when he’d told Gideon to send the men for Zoe), Gert decides against taking her nap, and also warns him she plans to report what the girl said in regard to his actions this evening. This isn’t the first time Gert pisses him off; there are many memories he has of her fucking him over just to make him look bad. Maybe it’s the pills he’s been shucking down his throat since Zoe stabbed him with the pencil, maybe it’s just because he’s finally cracked, but he thinks it’s a good idea to kill that old cunt. So he beats her into pizza paste with a bowling pin. With ten minutes to spare before the men are supposed to arrive, Bud makes up his mind to send Zoe off with a good fucking, and heads for the infirmary.

As luck would have it, the weapons Zoe lifted from a cabinet would save her life; two syringes filled with a paralyzing agent. When Bud comes for her, she stabs him with the needles and leaves him drooling and blinking on the floor. She’s met at the doorway of the infirmary by Frye who, along with Danny, Meat and Mary, plan on getting her safely on the elevator.

When the group reach the elevator (an elevator which only travels to two floors—P2 and psychiatric floor), they see the car is moving, and hide across the hall in a small room to wait for whoever is in the elevator to pass them by. In Zoe’s mind, there was no ‘whoever’ about it; it was the killers.

After Spike orders his younger son, Lou, to stay at the car, he and his oldest, Adam, head up in the elevator with the key provided by Gideon’s contact, Bud. When the two men have passed by the mess Bud made of the night nurse, and head toward the infirmary, Zoe and the entire group (after deciding they should all leave) take the elevator down.

Spike and Adam discover Bud, frozen and half naked, on the floor of the infirmary. Just as Spike is asking where the girl is, he hears the elevator ‘ding’, and sends Adam running down the hall. Spike stays with Bud, who is going to die anyway, but will be brought with them to a cottage they rented so Spike can take his frustrations out on the orderly for causing him stress.

On parking level 2, Lou (Spike’s younger son) watches as a girl, who looks strikingly similar to the girl his dad’s supposed to be upstairs killing, runs past the car and out the nearest door. He tries to call his brother’s cell phone, but can’t get through to him. He then he tries to use the elevator, but, without any key, can’t make it move. Pissed off with his inept father and brother, Lou places a call to his hero, the man he believes called for this assassination in the first place: Zane Ellis. He soon learns, after speaking to Zane, that anyone who touches the girl dies, slowly and painfully. Lou decides it might be safer for him to get away from his father, so he takes off before he and Adam come down.

Just like Mary said: her boyfriend, Spider, is waiting for them outside the parking garage doors. The group pile into his ancient, canary yellow Beetle and make good their escape. As they do, Spider’s idea of get-away music blares from shoddy speakers. The current track is Rainbow Connection, as sung by Kermit the Frog, and they travel at an ear-flattening 20mph.

Part III: Big Balls, Vengeance, & One Fiery Hoop

After Lou’s phone call, a very pissed-off Zane Ellis pays a visit to Gideon. He brings along with him the head of Gideon’s Secretary and a camera. He takes incriminating pictures of the doctor, tells him to leave Zoe alone or else, then leaves. Gideon has no choice but to go along with Zane’s wishes.

Spider, whose name was actually Seth (which Zoe believes matches his geeky appearance wonderfully), takes them to a hotel just over the Missouri/Illinois border, in East St. Louis. From there, after much argument against the plan from Zoe, they decide to find Zoe’s dropcloth killer and make him pay for what he did. They start with the one person who might know where to find him: an ex boyfriend of Mary’s named Clive had once taken her to a party where, on screens throughout the house, a snuff movie played for cheering crowds.

During Zoe and Frye’s abduction of Mary’s ex from a bar called Mud Vein, Meat is killed and Frye is wounded by two friends of Clive Purdy. The group escape and pull into an abandoned train yard to bandage Frye’s bullet wound, and then question their hog-tied fledgling cannibal, Clive. At first, the young man tells them nothing. After Mary stuffs a gun down his pants and begins a quick countdown from five, he talks. He tells them all he knows, which isn’t much more than the name of a man who would know Cannibalangelo. He tells them to find an old retired killer clown named Harry Funshine, or another who lives with him named Chin Choi, in southern Michigan.

Zoe and company leave Clive tied and bloody, as hundreds of interested rats close in on him from the darkness of the surrounding derelict trains. The best the group can do for Frye and Meat is leave them on a park bench and call 911. They wait until the ambulance arrives, and then leave for Michigan.

The group finds the man Clive spoke of: Harry Funshine. He’s an old Chinese man with a love for little dogs and the circus. He tells Zoe he made snuff movies long ago with Gideon, but that they were fakes. He knows where to find Gideon, Cannibalangelo’s controller, and offers to come along. Harry tells them that Gideon would know exactly where to find Zane Ellis, but is a very dangerous man too. The four remaining members, along with Harry and his three dogs, head to Chicago.

The doctor isn’t home when they drive by his house later that day, so the group takes a motel room to get some sleep before returning. After waking from a horrible dream, Zoe takes Seth’s car (and Harry’s three dogs that Seth refused to allow into the room) for a drive, to clear her head. She eventually finds herself in front of the doctor’s house. As she is preparing to head back to the motel, Gideon leaves his house and drives away in his car. Zoe follows.

The doctor drives slowly past an alley, and then takes off around a corner. Zoe is still watching him and almost runs over a man walking across the street. A man she recognizes immediately: it was the creepy Baudelaire guy from Toronto; the man she’d last seen in her sister’s apartment: Zane Ellis.

Long after he enters a building with a cardboard sign outside, reading ‘A.A. Meeting-8pm’, Zoe prepares to drive back to get the group, then return, but a police officer pulls up and says ‘Hi’.

Thinking quickly, she tells him she is heading into the A.A. meeting, and then goes inside. Once there, she watches the killer as he speaks in front of an assembled crowd of thirty-or-so people, and makes a complete ass out of himself in the process. Her rage grows as she watches him speak to a skinny man across the room. After the meeting, Zoe leaves to wait for him, so she can follow him home. She sees there is something very wrong with him, like his mind and body are shutting down on him. Emboldened by his lessened state, she steps out of her car in front of his house. When she opens the door, Harry’s youngest dog races from the car and runs through the open front door of the man’s house.

Zoe goes after the dog, finds Zane holding the dog up by its neck, and hits him with a large vase, crumpling the side of the cannibal’s head. As she turns, she’s shot with a tranquilizer dart by Gideon, who’d set up the whole thing from his cell phone in his car, and couldn’t be more disappointed with the poor quality of their ‘fight scene’. Zoe falls across the body of the cannibal and slips into unconsciousness just as Gideon shoots Poco, the dog she’d followed in.

Gideon telephone’s Otto for a cleanup, and then helps Otto dump Zoe into Otto’s van (for him to kill, and to get it on tape), and Zane into Gideon’s car so he could be taken to a doctor.

Something Zoe didn’t know earlier was that Harry had been sleeping with his dogs in the back of the Bug the entire time she’d been out driving. When Harry awakes, he sees Otto load one body into his van, and one into Gideon’s car. He also sees the big German throw a small dog into the back of the van. Enraged and scared for the life of his young dog, Harry decides to be the hero he never was and follows Otto.

The doctor calls ahead to a suspended plastic surgeon, a man who’s done work for him in the past, to ready him for a new patient. He arrives at the doctor’s house to find the man stoned, and his girlfriend naked. He leaves Zane in their care and hurries off.

Otto takes Zoe to an old abandoned school with a tall wooden fence surrounding the perimeter of the yard. He taunts her as he secures her arms to an ancient swing set while listening to Bach on his iPod. He sets a video camera up on the hood of the van, pulls a knife, and approaches. Zoe prays, and thinks she sees heaven, but the chariot racing toward her is kind of ugly. It’s canary yellow.

Gideon returns to Zane’s house to wait for the men who Otto was to send over to search for the pictures Zane took of Gideon with the head of his secretary, but the men don’t come. He finally decides to not bother looking for the pictures, and burns the house down. As he gets into his car, his cell phone rings. He picks up and speaks to someone he thought would never call him, but who has something very interesting to discuss with him about the girl who’s been causing so much trouble for him.

Around the same time Gideon is dropping Zane off at the doctor’s house, Harry is busy planning an assault on a schoolyard to save his dog (and the girl if all goes well). He has a plan in his mind when he busts through the wooden wall surrounding the playground behind the wheel of Seth’s 77 Bug, but a faulty brake pedal sends him racing at Otto and Zoe while music blares from the broken radio. He strikes Otto, cuts him in half, and knocks the poles out from under Zoe, throwing her ten feet away, where she comes to a rolling stop—scuffed and bruised, but alive. The car is completely smashed, so, after collecting Zoe and his dog, Harry drives Otto’s van back to the motel. Together, they relate their tale to the rest of the group. Mary asks Zoe if she’s sure the guy they came for, Zane Ellis, is dead. Zoe isn’t sure of this—she was unconscious when she was taken—so they all pile into the van while Harry, after offering, walks to the office and checks them out of the motel.

Upon nearing the killer’s house, it stands in smoking ruins, and several small fires still burn in the immediate area. Whatever closure Zoe is hoping for has gone up in flames. After much debate, they head to the doctor’s home, intending to break in and find proof, as well as remove Harry’s fake tapes from Gideon’s home before Zoe goes to the police.

Danny finds the back door of the house open and the group—minus Seth, who’d run back to the van after a scare outside the house, and Harry, who says he’ll go get Seth—enter the house and begin packing up evidence. While Zoe and Mary are busy ransacking the office, Danny, the firebug, leaves them and explores the house. Just as the girls are readying to leave, Harry enters the house, followed by Gideon, who is carrying a shot gun. Harry had double-crossed Zoe. He cries as he holds a gun on her and Mary. Gideon tells them of Harry’s earlier phone call, and how he ‘copped’ a plea. Gideon orders Harry to shoot Zoe, but he hesitates.

Outside, Seth awakes under the van, after someone—Harry!—hit him with a rock. He rolls to his feet to seek vengeance, but falls in the gutter. Eventually, he finds his feet.

As Zoe contemplates her own mortality, she watches as Seth stumbles into the room, falls, compliments Gideon on his lovely decor, then walks over and hits Harry with a rock concealed up his sleeve. After hitting Harry, he falls unconscious to the floor.

As Gideon is giving his pre-murder evil dude speech, Danny, who’d been busy while he was away, dumps a jelly/gasoline mixture over the doctor, and sets him aflame. The shot gun in the doctor’s hands goes off, Danny disappears, and Zoe dives for Harry’s discarded gun. She finds it just in time to turn and see Gideon doff his coat and extinguish the flames on his boots. He is just raising the shot gun as Zoe aims Harry’s gun, closes her eyes, and fires in his general direction. His shot rips plaster from the wall just above her head, exposing a false compartment filled with cash. Her shot takes off his trigger finger. When she opens her eyes, his gun lies beside him and he is writhing on the floor, screaming as he cradles his right hand.

During the entirety of the final few chapters, Zoe tries to emulate what her favourite cops might do in her situation. As she gazes down upon the incapacitated snuff mogul, and then at the money scattered about the floor and stuffed in the walls, she thinks of another thing she’s seen cops do on television. They take the money.

With only a short time until daylight, Zoe instructs her friends to take what money they can carry and leave. She would find them after things blew over.

Within a matter of days, the world knows of a girl who, after escaping during an altercation between her captors (a man named Chin Choi, and his partner, a Doctor Barthomew Gideon), singlehandedly took down the largest known snuff ring in The United States. She is a hero and will remain one for another fourteen minutes.

Lou Schrickt, after searching for weeks, finally finds his hero. Zane is recuperating after an operation. Zane feels great, and wishes to leave the wonderful doctor and his nurse something to show his gratitude. With the leftover paint from the doctor’s bathroom, Zane paints his dropcloth masterpiece (complete with heads), and he and Lou drive off for parts unknown.

Following Doctor Gideon’s trial, Zoe spends a few weeks doing talk shows, and then is able to slip away without notice.

She meets up with Mary, Seth, and Frye at an old barn in the country, where they divide the money taken from Gideon’s house, and swap stories. After a silence falls on the group, they go their separate ways.

Gideon’s trial is both swift and decisive. He finds himself in prison not long after his wounds heal. He is ushered to his cell, and, upon meeting his new cell mate, realizes they’d met before. The man’s name is Petey, and he’d been a patient of the doctors. Petey kills his victims with hand puppets made in the victim’s image. To Gideon’s surprise, his new cell mate had been anticipating his arrival, and has a gift for him.

Gideon’s puppet looks quite a bit like him—a fact he realizes as he lies dying.

Gideon died on a Thursday. It was meatloaf day.

Meek & Deeply Confused

For a very long while now I’ve been sitting on my first novel. Waiting. For what, I don’t know – maybe for some agent to magically appear, claiming my writing came to them in a dream or as a vision as they rode the subway home one day. And that’s how it would have to happen, because I haven’t sent it out.

Well, that’s not exactly true either. It was and is with an agent in England, but as the weeks pass without response, my belief grows that my novel has been forgotten or tossed into the trash. Dropcloth Angels has also made its way to the desk of an Avon (HarperCollins) Acquisitions Editor. She liked it but knew HC would pass on it because it doesn’t follow the familiar cookie cutter formula so popular today. She was nice enough to point me in the direction of three or four of the larger Indie Publishers who take chances on novels that don’t follow the norm (let’s use Clockwork Orange for an example).The only problem with that is none of them will look at unsolicited manuscripts. I’m not certain that it would be cool to use this editors name to open any doors with them or not, so I haven’t bothered to submit to any of them.

Aside from also sending this out to Angry Robot for their ‘Open Submission Month’, I’ve not sent out any queries whatsoever. There are many reasons I haven’t submitted more, but three reasons top the list:

a) the industry has tightened its belt lately and only seem to want non-fic books about abused housewives or tell-alls about movie stars.

b) I’m so scared to send my ‘ideal’ agent a shitty query letter, and know (or at least believe) I will only get one chance to knock them out of their panties so want to get it right the first time.

c) I’m a pussy – plain & simple – and don’t want to know that I’ve wasted my time writing a book nobody would buy to prop up a wobbly table.

I’m asked frequently if I’ve been sending out queries. My go-to response is ‘no, but I think I’ll start sending some out next week’. And I mean it every time I say it, but something always comes up and queries for DcA find their way to the back of the queue. There’s always next week, right?

I should really do a follow-up with that agent who’s had my novel for four months. The thing about not following up is this though: I look at it like a lottery ticket. Before the draw I can be as full of hope as anyone. Tomorrow I could be jetting off to destinations unknown with my newly acquired fortune, or zipping around in my cherry-red Corvette. Then, the morning after the draw I see I didn’t win and my little girl doesn’t get that pony I promised if I won. Oh well, there’s always the next draw. Without hearing a “NO” from the agent means I’m still in the game and don’t need to buy another ticket just yet.

Maybe I should change the title of this post to “Lazy”, but don’t have the energy to do so.

On Writing Fiction (And a Few Vague References Regarding Improving)

This is a large topic, so I’ll be breaking it down into smaller posts because I bore quickly, and likely wouldn’t finish it if I did it all at once.

Myth #1:

“Fiction writers learn to write by writing.”

While this is fundamentally true, it’s incomplete and should be part of a larger statement which would include the following: listening to  everyone and everything around you, taking note of vocal nuances, speech patterns (and how they might change during an argument, or when the individual is excited), and the singularity of sounds and what those sounds sound like.

Sound like a load of shit? What exactly does a load of shit sound like? Say a fully loaded bag (let’s say burlap) is thrown from the back of a pick-up truck by a man/woman standing in the bed. What do you hear when it strikes something like a sidewalk?

I don’t know either — but if you actually do know, you may have a story to tell.

How about a sack full of mud? Same scenario. Sure you know what it sounds like. You’ve heard it before.

Also, a writer must read, read, read (which I say in every post). You must read as more than a reader; try doing it as a reader/student of the current book on your nightstand. I like to pick apart every aspect of a writer’s story while reading. Well, maybe ‘pick apart’ isn’t the proper wording. I gage my response to an author’s use of the ‘elements’ and try to guess why they did what they did, and also why it worked or didn’t work for me. This is common sense really, and a writer should do this subconsciously. If you don’t do this, you should.

It all boils down to experience, and how well you can relate your own to others.

Explore the experience of experiencing. That’s it. Write lots, read lots, and live life like it was a dare.

Next on the list is licking the doorknobs at the doctor’s office…

Tomorrow I’ll be discussing the ‘Every Author Needs to Write a Million Words’ load of crap. Yeah, I said crap.

Writing for screen

This is way different  than writing a novel. Scene set-up and how you split them seems to be only slightly less important than dialogue.

Began my foray into this medium with a short work I wrote last year, ‘Merry Fucking Christmas’. Did I already mention that it’s nothing like writing a novel?

To be continued. I hope.

The Myth That is Writer’s Block

I hate to sound like a dick — and I’m really not — but writer’s block is an excuse for many other things. Writers are writers and they write.

Or they are a doctor, a garbage man, a housewife, a secretary who writes stories. There’s a varying gap between a writer and one who writes, depending on their level of dedication, experience and, most important of all, leisure time. I call it leisure time, but that just means ‘time to do what you love doing’. For a writer, writing is a job; something they do on a regular basis, whether they want to or not, or the electric bill doesn’t get paid. It’s as simple as that.

I don’t consider myself a writer. Sure, I’ve been paid for short fiction and enjoyed exposure through blogs and bloggers who’ve showcased my writing, but until I’ve made enough in one lump to pay a bill, I’m a wannabe — but a wannabe who eventually will be able to pay a bill doing what I love to do.

Keep your shirt on; I’m getting to the writer’s block thingy. Which really is just a name for a triple threat I like to call ‘being a pussy’. “Writer’s block” goes a little something like this:

a) you’re not feeling inspired; you lack the ambition to finish what you’ve started and will try selling yourself any dumb ass excuse you can to justify just giving up. b) either subconsciously or consciously, you know you need feedback, to discuss the particular section you’re working on, but can’t seem to find anyone around you to either commiserates or care about your ‘hobby’ . c) You’re scared; scared of failing, of not being as good as you think, of what your dear saint of a mother will think — or so fucking afraid that you might actually finish it and not know what the hell to do next. I feel your pain, I really do, but it’s not something tangible or solid; a wall that stops you like a runner nearing the finish line.

For the fearful child in you:

You are the prophet of every single nuance of your soul. Everything you’ve ever done or dreamed of doing is right there in your head, waiting to be translated into the realization of one or more of those dreams. Let it out. Pop the top off those bottled up fancies and dump them all over the page. Stop worrying about how others may or may not understand, like or even care about what you have to say.

For the uninspired part of you:

This may sound silly, but I find inspiration in everything I see, feel, that hurts me, helps me, or leaves me indifferent. At times, 95% of the writing I do doesn’t take place anywhere near my computer. I’ll make what I call a ‘head movie’ of what I’d like to have happen for, like, ten chapters, then I let it stew for a while, play it back, play it back again and again, and then I hit the computer. This process has sometimes taken more than a few days. I’m not saying you should shun the computer and not write down anything you feel just has to written down RIGHT NOW. This is only for when you are unsure of the story’s direction. Again with the silly: During times of indecision, I will lay in my hammock in the backyard, watching the sky, the squirrels, listen to the odd sound a tree branch makes as it draws like a bow across a violin against the backboard of my son’s basketball net. Or I’ll watch people from afar and give them a life and past that I create in my head. I initially didn’t think of this as any sort of exercise for the ‘writer’ in me. I just like to daydream. It could be that this is good exercise for the mind, or it could just be a good way to clear your mind of what’s really bothering you. Sometimes, issues within your writing can choke creativity, but if you dwell on it, a constipated mind is right around the corner.

Think no one cares (i.e., family and friends)? Well, they don’t — not really — but they sure as hell will when the advance comes for your first novel. Don’t hate them. They just can’t seem to equate you, the same person who can squirt milk out their nose on demand or pisses all over the toilet seat (even when it’s up), as an intellectual-type writer — which you really, really are. Don’t hate them for feeling this way. Also, don’t badger them to help you read a scene, a chapter (unless they want to), because their opinion is tainted by the aforementioned random body squirts. Instead, talk to (not AT) other writers. They can help, even if you don’t really have an issue you can label as an ‘issue’. In a sort of symbiotic way, writers are the best cure for each other. An idea you had but can’t seem to give legs to may have a simple solution that another will give to you gratis. Flip side of the coin: you help another writer with a problem they have and gain a little confidence from the effort which may snowball into a breakthrough in your own writing.

Okay, so are we clear? There is no such thing as writer’s block. Period.

p.s. If none of this shit works, go see a shrink; you have bigger problems than a case of stunted inspiration.

The Most Excellent Christopher Moore

Last week, I attended my first book signing. I’d always hoped my own would be the first, but barring that, this man was at the top of the list of who I’d see. So I did. Before meeting him in Waterloo at his book signing, I’d already formed an opinion of him: He was a people person, an author who kept his fingers on the on the pulse of his own stardom through interaction with his fans. I heard from a few people at the signing that they’d written to him and he’d actually written back–more than once.

After seeing him I’m happy to report that he is every bit the gentleman he is said to be. He’s also a very personable public speaker. I have no idea what it takes to smile for more than three-hundred photos in a row, but he did–and it was the same grin you’d see on the back jacket of any one of his twelve fantastic novels (I even liked the first one, which is more than I can say for most authors).

More later.

Dropcloth Angels vs. Cannibalangelo

So here’s the thing: Every time I turn around I see another novel with either an angel on the cover or in the title somewhere. Is this the end of the line for a title that’s been with me since I first changed it from ‘The Saviour’?

Last night I was chatting with a friend and mentioned my dilema to her. We jokingly started firing off ‘new’ title names (can’t recall them right now, but some were as lame as one-legged dog), however, one caused me to sit up and say, ‘hey, I kinda like that one.’ Luckily, it was one of my own suggestions, so I don’t need to kill Courtney to secure my rights to the title. Now, if you’ve never read any of ‘Dropcloth Angels’, you likely couldn’t give a rat’s butt either way, so I’ll leave this question out there for any Zaniacs or Zoephobes: Do you think my dark and oft times nasty tale of a whore on the run from a froot loop loving cannibal with a kindergarten crush could flourish under a new banner?

I asked the three wise men for their opinions, and they rode the vote to a stand-still. Skully says he doesn’t like change, because it’s all ‘changey and stuff’; Mortimer says yes, just so long as he gets to name the sequel; and the imp in my keyboard can’t decide whether he hates both names, or just me.

Any opinions on the matter will be weighed seriously.

Okay, semi-seriously. But I won’t laugh. Much.