Current Plans

I'm going to try and do quick, cartoony illustrations for blog posts for a while, just to try and get the hang of this kind of work. Once I feel comfortable with drawing cartoons, well. I'm not gonna worry about that now. Don't want to get ahead of myself...

So I seem to have the worst of my depression whipped for the moment. I've been eating and sleeping more, drinking less, and I've been getting some work done.

The new story is something different for me, which will surprise no-one who's familiar with my work. It's relatively short at the moment, sticks to a single close third-person POV throughout, and is quiet horror, of the sort where nine-tenths of the nastiness lies below the surface.

I want to write more short fiction. Hey, selling a story can do that to a person. So my current plan is to run this story through all of my writer's groups, then send it out and write a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat, so I get a new story out on the market every month or so.

And I'm ready to launch back into the novel. I need to start doing the Holly Lisle revision workshop -- the lessons piled up while I was taking my midwinter dip in the Slough of Despond.

I've signed up for Painter -- the graphics application -- and Narrative Screenwriting II this semester. I've got the same major problem with my script that I do with my novel -- good parts that don't add up to a compelling story -- and I'm hoping that by working on them concurrently I'll be able to develop my storytelling skills more effectively. And if they wind up in conflict? I'll drop the scriptwriting course. But I doubt it will come to that.

Right now I'm being hideously tempted by another writer's workshop, the Taos Toolbox. I cannot afford it. I mean, I can't. But it's run by Walter John Williams. Dude is a plot god. I was admiring his plots a looooooong time before I started writing seriously. If you don't believe me, go read Voice of the Whirlwind. So the idea of having him help me learn the mechanics of storytelling is...

Dang. I dunno. Maybe I should apply and see if something weird happens that might let me attend. These kinds of things have happened before.

I dunno.

From The Valley of Lost Projects: Kanatanka

Kanatanka lay dying.

The echoes of the wardrums had long since died, and the stink of blood and shit on the battlefield had been overtaken by the scent of rotting flesh. Buzzards and condors, knife-tooth possums bigger than a man and long-legged forest caiman fought for carrion with the scattered survivors of the northern invasion.

Now they have come to his deathbed, friends and allies, old loves, all those whose lives had been changed for better or worse by the man who stood at the front of the fight against the monsters of the north. They have come to hear and record his tale, the saga of the outlander, the fugitive king, rebel, man-at-arms...

KANATANKA

From the Valley of Lost Projects -- Greetings From Grid City or Cyberpunk: The Future of my Youth

You know how old fashioned cyberpunk is? This was done using Zipatone. And Grid City, the comic script it was based on, was written on a typewriter.

Well, I promised a non-mopey update. I didn't get any work done on my novel this morning -- I used up my juice on three short fiction pieces for the next issue of Milvia Street. But here's a blast from the past, the first time I tried doing a comic book story. I wrote a hundred and thirty pages of script and some concept drawings and that was as far as it got. I gave up because I thought I sucked; now I look at this stuff and think, hey. Back in eighty-seven this would have been a hell of a comic book.

These two are a couple of good-natured drug manufacturers. When they combine cocaine with the amino acid precursors to the neurotransmitters whose release is stimulated by coke they have a hit on their hands. Too bad it winds up making people allergic to their own neurochemicals... When I heard the story about people getting those kinds of reactions to aerosol pig brains I got a nostalgiac glow. Oh, and the benefit of this rig is that they can each choose their favorite details for the lovemaking session without bothering the other person.

When I first read a review of Neuromancer in Heavy Metal I avoided reading it for a year just so I could let the idea of cyberpunk twist in my punk-rocking SF geek brain. When given a copy as a gift, I fell in love with it and tried to push it on my brother. "Fuck that," he said. "I've got this copy of Omni with a story called Johnny Mnemonic. It's the best fucking science fiction ever!" Took us a while to put two and two together. William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley! I salute you!

Any Big Black fans out there? This here's Dead Billy. He's a former soldier who had a Tin Man number done on him. Is he is or is he ain't a person? Who knows -- just don't get on his wrong side.

The Grid City script is long gone but I did write a short script for a screenwriting class that draws on the background. Ol' Dead Billy and his main squeeze Helter Kitty play prominant roles. The teacher said, "Give me something as weird as you can imagine." Well, I wasn't going to do that -- but here's a compromise.

Take a look at comment number one for the animation script Chad and Debbie's Vacation Wonderland!