Oh, brother

I think I know what I'm going to work on in this writing workshop. And since I can't bring all of you with me, I figured I'd give a brief synopsis.

Two brothers (fraternal twins) decide to go on a road trip in California to get out of their respective ruts. As with many brothers, they're very much alike but very different at the same time.

How far into their journey will they get before they want to kill each other?

Group therapy

Well, for the first time in ages, I'm part of a writing group. I'm pretty jazzed about it because we all write different types of stuff, so it will be interesting to see different voices and points of view.

I will always have a love for creative writing classes, though it would take a while for there to be a good reason for it.

When I was in my first creative writing class in the first semester of junior college, I was not exactly inspired by some of the feedback.

I wrote a story about, of all things, a guy going to his 20th high school reunion. Keep in mind that I had only graduated high school a few months prior; heck, I was still 17.

While much of the feedback was positive, the one that sticks out is someone who was in the class to write Literature, and anything that didn't have a deeper meaning was a waste of her time.

Which, I should add, is perfectly fine. Different strokes for different folks, right? However, you can be more diplomatic about your disdain for humor-based pieces.

"The part at the end with the phone call was funny, but the rest was crap unbelievable."

This, by the way, was criticism from someone in her early 30s directed at a 17-year-old. I shouldn't have let it bother me, but it soured me so much that for the remainder of the class, I just used stories I'd already written.

It wasn't until the next year that I took another writing class, this time with a different instructor. While not entirely enthusiastic about my writing--the thing that stuck out to her was that it appeared to be meticulously proofread--the class was inviting enough for me to actually want to share my writing.

At the end of the semester, we could, for extra credit, compile a list of 10 markets to which we could theoretically send our work and choose one to actually submit a piece to.

I just did it for the extra credit and promptly forgot about it. But August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail. Inside was a magazine, a letter of congratulations, and a check for $10.

I fully expected to get the first of many rejection letters. Instead, I got published on my first submission. Score!

So I rested on my laurels until a creative writing class at CSU Stanislaus. The instructor and I didn't agree on very much, but I met a cute brunette in that class, so in the long run, it was time well-spent. I think so, anyway. My wife may disagree.

I was getting prolific again at that point, and it seemed like I was churning out almost as much stuff as I was in high school.

But one thing pissed me off, and as typically happens with people like me, I focused all my energies on something that didn't warrant the attention.

I had turned in the first draft of a story in which there's a mention of how one of the characters loves the breadsticks at a certain restaurant. I wrote that shortly after gorging myself on breadsticks at Olive Garden.

The corrected version of my draft came back from my teacher, and he had crossed out breadsticks and written "garlic bread?" I meant what I wrote, and left it as such in the final draft.

Sure enough, he "corrected" me again.

So in the next story, I included a page-long conversation between two characters about the difference between garlic bread and breadsticks.

In retrospect, I think I may have crossed the line a teensy bit with one character asking the other in exasperation, "How the hell can you have lived on this planet for this long without knowing what a friggin' breadstick is?"

The only comment from the instructor was "This is not amusing."

On writing.

I've been thinking about writing a lot lately. That is to say I've been thinking a lot about writing. Aside from the daily posts here, I haven't been doing much writing at all, which kind of bums me out.

Sometimes I like to dig up something I wrote a while back and see how it looks, which, since I'm a little tired today, is what the bulk of this post will be.

It's just the first little bit of a story I started writing for NaNoWriMo back in 2006. I never finished it, so I never came up with a title.

Solomon Cauldar looked at his target and sighed.

Another bank job, he thought, looking skyward at the moon, which, he noticed, was waxing. I live for the day I don't have to waste my time with this crap.

The first couple of times, he used a couple of guys he found to help him, but as time went on, they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. Besides, he tried to keep in shape; he could manage most of the heavy lifting he needed to do.

He checked his watch: 11:37 p.m. Amazingly, this place didn't have much in the way of security, relying instead on surveillance cameras.

Morons.

He cracked the knuckles of his long, thin fingers and headed inside. The cameras wouldn't see him, and no one would know that he had been there until the morning.

He headed down the hall, staying in the shadows. Solomon wore black, as he usually did, right down to his black Chuck Taylors. He could stand right behind someone and they'd never even see him there.

Finally, he arrived at the vault. He pulled a piece of Wrigley's Doublemint out of his pocket and started chewing. Then he went to work.

How many times? he wondered. Solomon tried to keep his mind busy to fight off the pangs of guilt that plagued him during lulls in his heists. He liked to tell himself that the crimes he committed were relatively victimless, but he knew there were people out there who needed his treasure as much as he did.

He was just a little more proactive in terms of getting what he needed, that's all.
Back at his car, a green 1971 Plymouth Duster with deeply tinted windows, he loaded his haul into the trunk. He always knew exactly how much to get; no sense letting greed trip him up. That's one of the reasons he'd never been caught.

His take secured, he closed the trunk gently and slid into the driver's seat. Solomon took one last look at his target in the rear-view mirror and released the parking brake, letting the car coast down the hill a bit before starting the engine.

As the engine turned over, the radio crackled to life. Neil Diamond's "Thank the Lord for the Night Time" was playing. Solomon smiled.

"Amen," he said.

The Franklin County Blood Bank, the only two-story building in the small town of Baileyville, grew smaller in Solomon's mirror until it, like him, was out of sight.

There's a lot more, but I'm just curious if this beginning is enough to make people want to continue reading.

A writing quandry

I actually prefer writing fiction to nonfiction, not that you'd ever know it by my writing output. Aside from a brief productive period during my junior year in high school in which I managed 125 pages (not coincidentally, in the mostly pre-Internet, pre-insanely addictive guitar-based video games era), I don't get very far in my fiction writing.

Part of it is guilt, I suppose; feeling guilty that I'm taking time from my family by being hunched over the computer. Another part is the feeling that I'm wasting my time--I have nothing "important" to say.

This usually manifests itself in wondering "how the hell would I market this to someone?" The stuff I find myself writing isn't all that easy to explain succinctly. I guess you could say it's funny. I mean, I try for it to be, anyway.

But I don't see many books marketed as comedies; do you? And the humor section is generally essays and other nonfiction.

I started a story for National Novel Writing Month last year, and much like every other story I've started, I haven't finished it yet. At least with this one, I'm still interested in seeing where the story ends up.

But I find myself balancing the notion of justifying spending time and effort on something that will likely only be seen by me and a few friends with the simple fact that when it comes down to it, I have to write. I can't go long without it, lest I get headaches.

Writing: My brain's way of taking a dump.

This is not a thinly veiled plea for compliments, though I admit I have no shame and will take them. It's mostly me just wondering out loud if the stuff I want to write has an audience that makes it worth writing.

Here are a few stories I've worked on in the past few years, boiled down:

Fraternal twins celebrate the end of their 20s by going on a road trip.

Dracula's son and the Frankenstein Monster team up with other monsters to halt a zombie invasion.

A coming-of-age story about a smartass high school student.

I stop once I get to the point that I ask myself why I'm writing it. I mean, those are all interesting to me, but I'm not sure that I'm the average book buyer.

My ultimate goal is to sell a book, but first, I have to finish one, right?

When I was in junior college, the teacher offered a chance for extra credit if we a) made a list of 10 potential markets for our writing and b) submitted a piece to one of those markets.

I'd never submitted anything before, and if I didn't want the extra credit, I probably wouldn't have bothered, because damn near every book on writing tells you not to be discouraged because no one gets accepted on their first submission.

When August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail with a check for $10 and a copy of the magazine my article appeared in, I was ecstatic. Yeah, it was only 10 bucks in a tiny magazine, but I got published on my first try.

A normal person would be inspired by such an event and start churning out reams of stuff, submitting it to every market that seemed to fit.

But since I'd met my goal of being published by the time I turned 21 (I actually beat it by a little over a year), the pressure was off. I set a new goal to publish a book by the time I turned 25.

This turned into 29, 30, and is now resting perilously at 35, which gives me a shade less than two years to get off my ass.

If I were smart, I'd write a story about some wiseass who keeps procrastinating when it comes to a life goal he set when he was in elementary school.

I'll write that when I get around to it. I've still got until November 2009.

Happy birthday to The Man

Just wanted to give a birthday shoutout to Stan Lee. I've always been more of a DC Comics guy than Marvel, but Stan the Man has been an influence on me nonetheless.

In fact, I'd have to say that he's one of two influences on my writing voice. The other is Judy Blume. You probably won't detect either one reading this blog, but they're there, I assure you.

Happy birthday, Stan.

The Write Stuff, 2006

It's almost time for National Novel Writing Month again. That means it's almost time for me to try to write something slightly longer than my average bad movie review.

The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Last year, I got all the way up to a measly 6,428.

So if nothing else, I'd like to at least beat that total. The trick so far is coming up with something to write about. I don't want to try anything similar to what I did last year, because those stories tend to trip me up a little when it comes to things like progress.

I have a few ideas, but none are really spinning the old cheese wheel, if you know what I mean.

To some extent, I believe the old saw, "Write what you know." Now obviously, none of us have lived on another planet, but we can use our life experiences and imagination to extrapolate what it might be like.

The problem comes when you are slightly deficient in the life experience department, which happens if you are an exceptionally boring person who managed to avoid doing much of anything growing up.

I'm told.