In celebration of the site’s 500,000th hit, Moonrat at Editorial Ass is running a contest giving away a partial manuscript crit. In celebration of my newly-developed ability to take shots on unlikely but useful career opportunities like this, I am posting about it to become eligible.
You shouldn’t, though, because that would decrease my chances of winning. Even though it could be some of the most useful feedback you’re likely to get prior to your Amazon reviews. So seriously, don’t do it, other writers. Unless you post under my name, too. Thanks in advance.
As usual, here it is!
Watching this movie, you could almost mentally recreate what the makers of The Blair Witch Project thought as they watched it: “Dude, this movie kind of sucks, but some of the ideas and techniques are great. Like, what if we took what works and expanded that to be the whole movie? Think that’d go anywhere?”
I ain’t criticizing them for this, either. The Last Broadcast has a lot of flaws. It’s got some very innovative facets to it, too, but the Blair Witch creators separated the good from the bad and made one of the greatest horror movies ever as a result. It’s kind of like sampling, but when the Beastie Boys do it.
Available here. This isn’t the order the stories will appear in the book, but several of those names are going to be familiar to regular M-Brane readers. I’m pretty excited to get this thing in my hands (current release date August ’10): the experience of reading a batch of different people all writing in the same world with no idea what the other authors are up to is going to be strange and enthralling.
Done at 100,500 words, which is what, 8.5K more? By “done” I of course mean “…with the first draft,” which means that, once I’ve given the manuscript a couple weeks to cool off, I get to do all kinds of revising and rewriting. I’m not complaining. That process is just as fun and awful as writing the first draft, but in a completely different way. I think it’s very necessary for novels, too. With a short story, you can often hold the whole concept in your head at once, translate it to the page, and find that, barring a bit of line-editing, you’ve more or less recreated that vision.
At 5000 words, give or take 2.5K, a short story is 5% as long as this book. There are going to be things I didn’t account for and need expansion, and things that felt promising as I wrote them but ended up going nowhere and need extraction. Taking care of both these things makes a book much, much stronger.
Think I’m done with progress reports for now, though, mostly because I’ve discovered they’re boring as shit. Bye!
11K words; 93K total. No disruptions put me off pace, it was just harder. I had consistent output every day I sat down, but instead of finishing an all-day session with 4200 or 3500, I’d end up at 2400; instead of 2.5K on my short days, I was lucky to see 2K. I’ll probably see my total drop even more next week.
Why? Because I’m currently about a third of the way through the final chapter, bitches. I won’t be popping the champagne (or, more accurately, cracking the Smirnoff) just then, though. Well actually I will, tonight and tomorrow, but that will be for general-purpose drinking, not celebratory inebriation.
Point is, after the final chapter wraps up, I’ve got to go back and thread a reworked short story as interstitial material between chapters. Long-time me-fans–hi, Mom–will recognize it as “All Man’s Children,” my first short story I ever sold. Gonna be a little trickier than cutting and pasting, though. As my first real attempt at some structural experimentation within a novel, I’m looking forward to the challenge and hopefully learning a new trick.
Gave The Crazies a B-, but in some ways that’s overrating it. Still, even as my brain lost interest, I was caught up in a gut-level way I can’t deny.
Incidentally, got some good–nay, great–news of the most useful variety: the kind I can’t share in public just yet. Not that there’s anything “public” about this wasteland. Updates when I’m allowed.
- Fantasy (5)
- Science Fiction (16)
- Breakers (11)
- Rebel Stars (3)
- The Cycle of Arawn (4)
- The Cycle of Galand (1)