writing

Wolf and I

Blog, micropost, novella: the weight, writing

I was tagged on Facebook to list five things about my work in progress. I am on vacation from my novella and working instead on rewriting a short story. So here goes with facts about the short story:

1. The protagonist is a feral child (though, he’s not really a child), literally raised by wolves.
2. I have mentally cast Oscar Isaac in the role of the secondary protagonist, who develops a relationship with the protagonist. Isaac would be perfect for the role, you can’t convince me otherwise.
3. I think of “Wolves” by Selena Gomez as the current theme song for the project.
4. The secondary protagonist plays folk music on a guitar as a hobby. He loves Cat Stevens especially.
5. My protagonist likes to play with tin cans. They are shiny.

Mood

Blog, meta, novella: the weight, writing

The project I’ve spent the last six months on, The Weight of the Impossible, deals with a fifteen year old protagonist, Zach, who is a junior level competitive figure skater. As all teens do, he has a very particular lexicon. I found a graphic (on Twitter, I believe) which lists Generation Z terminology and jokingly posted it to my Facebook, saying: “Lo, the language of my protagonist. Though he says ‘fuck’ a lot more.” I decided to go through that graphic and write the Zach version. For the lolz, as Millennials might say.

zach lingo

 

alone with the stars in the sky

Blog, real life, writing

While I have been neglectful of updating my site or submitting my fiction to magazines, it’s been a long damn year:

  • I broke my ankle in three places last June, in an attempt to learn how to ice skate. I was still recovering well into December of last year.
  • I totaled my car in a moment of carelessness. (That’s what you get for becoming too wrapped up in an audio book, kids.)
  • I fell into a deep depression last December, and it lasted nearly six months. During this time, I wrote very little.
  • I broke my wrist in the spring.
  • Relationship woes in the summer, which I will not detail except to say there were woes.

So it’s been one hell of a year. I am feeling better, stronger, and more positive in my outlook. But the result of all of the above meant I didn’t submit to short story markets, and I didn’t do much in terms of writing except for the second half of the year. Hence the radio silence over here.

I will write more about what I’ve been working on. But later. I have to go make dinner. 🙂

Hello, I love you

Blog, excerpt, writing

Lately, I’ve become dissatisfied with sex scenes in fiction. More specifically, the types featured in romance novels and fanfiction. I have to say there is nothing wrong with the sex scenes in these stories. They have a purpose and fulfill that particular purpose. I have just found the sex scenes in some of these stories to be so graphic and over the top they turned me off. One scene in particular was so graphic that it was gross to me.

I write a lot of sex scenes myself. One of my novellas is very explicit because it details a man’s particular sexual journey. I write sex scenes because it is very much a part of the characters and the story. But along the way, I’ve found myself being overly graphic. I think it’s easy to fall into that trap. I’m going to work on improving my approach to sex scenes and be more impressionistic, rather than overly realist and graphic and writing in every last detail.

To that end, I rewrote a sex scene in my current novella to be a little less graphic. In the process, I found myself writing more about the characters, which, I think, lends a nice human touch which further keeps this from being gross or overly graphic.

I have a long way to go to be where I want to be with this particular aspect of my writing, but it’s a start.

I’ve decided to share the drafts of both scenes so you can compare and contrast the original and the rewritten scene. Below the cut, you can find both of those.

Some context: this story is about a May-December romance. Ren is nineteen and Paul is forty-two. In this segment, Ren has told Paul he loves him. Paul is very ambivalent about this. He doesn’t think Ren is old enough/mature enough to really understand what that means.

Continue reading →

I am in the House of Mercy

Blog, excerpt, short story, writing

I’ve been writing shorter fiction this summer, while I’m on a break from my main manuscript. This excerpt is from one of those pieces of shorter fiction, titled Queer as Love. The story follows a married couple as one of them transitions from female to male. This part comes after the narrator, who is the cisgender spouse, has begun to seriously contemplate divorce. This is a rough draft, so it’s  not finished, but the idea is there.

But these fantasies dispersed, like ash. And then I thought of you. As you were, as you had been. I saw you in all your beauty. I saw your strength, and my pride in that. I remembered our first time, in that little hotel room, when you abandoned your towel and clambered right in my lap, straddling me, sinking down onto me while our breathing roared like an avalanche. I thought of our wedding at the courthouse, and how you said “fuck” and made the clerk blush. I remembered our first fight, bitter and spiteful and wounding because we didn’t know how to fight, and how you came running for me and threw your arms around me, and through tears, kissed me and said you loved me over and over. I remembered when Ash was born and there were three of us in the room. There was a new life between us and we were so in awe we were silent. I saw how mean you could be, how cutting and cruel with your words. You were good at that. I saw your childishness, the adult tantrums of pouting and sulking when you didn’t get what you wanted. They way you could and would emotionally manipulate me. How you hated to compromise. The way you didn’t put your shoes away but just let them lay all around where I could trip on them.

You told me once, when you were trying to explain a painting to me, that sometimes what was beautiful was also ugly, sometimes gross or scary.

I saw you in all your beauty.

Short Story Publication: The Blind Tattooist

announcements, Blog, publication, short story, writing

Today my short story, “The Blind Tattooist”, came out in issue three of |tap|. This story is important to me for a few reasons. It is that it is the first publication I’ve had in the two years since I began submitting short stories professionally, since I decided I would only submit to paying markets. And it is that this is the first time I’ve been paid for my writing.

Incidentally, this story came out of Chuck Wendig’s Flashfiction Challenge about a year ago. Wendig gives a list of titles, provided by commentors to his blog. The idea is to choose one of the titles and then write a story of about 1,000 words to go with it. I wasn’t expecting the story to go where it went, but here we are.

The story follows a young trans woman, Lucky, and her journey of recovery after surviving a horrific attack.

You can read “The Blind Tattooist” here. 

A Heart that Burns

Blog, novella: bloom, writing

I finished the second draft of my novella, Bloom. It’s just under 57k. I may have to do some tinkering with the third draft and consider designating it as a novel.

I do feel accomplished, but I also feel relieved. I’ve been chasing this ending for what feels like forever, and I am ready to be done with this draft.

On the other hand . . . I have never completed a second draft of any long piece of fiction. So this is a big victory for me.

holmes yeah

I’m going to put it away for at least a month and go work on short stories. But when the time comes — look out third draft.