Nano Update

 

Yup and there’s two of them for a reason.  This is the last stop on today’s gloat-fest.  In November 2012, I wrote upwards of 10 k and wrote two novels… which both are in serious need of editting.

I’m taking a break from both of these novels to focus on something involving Faeries (arguably what Twlight could have been) and Christmas baking.  With luck, I’ll get a holiday job, and be able to move back to Ireland by February (with extreme luck it will be at Starbucks which I have always wanted).  Until then… it’s time to bake!

Yeah, I bake too.  A casserole that tastes like Jesus and Christmas cookies you will crave all year round.

Recipes forthcoming.

Behind the Scenes: The Writer Tutor

Idea

This one is actually painfully obvious to me, but you don’t know me so…

I’ve worked as a writing tutor/editor for about nine years now (Christ!  I don’t wanna be that old!) and I started this glorious occupation in college.

In my first writing center, we had a very fun, very close knit community of tutors, at least two of which I still talk to today and we all hung out until all hours of the day in “the lab.”  The lab was a room with floor to ceiling windows, a couch that we all regularly fell asleep and drooled on, and a back corner that we called “L.J.’s office” because it’s where I sat, where I hung my print outs, where my tutees knew to wait for me, and where I could be found writing any time I wasn’t in class.  The saddest thing about graduating was seeing that my “office” had been moved out of the corner to allow for a new table. Also, they took down the disembodied pirate head hanging from the ceiling. Losers, right?

I feel I should mention that this is not a true story.  I don’t know any Josh and I had the evil librarian look mastered by the time I went to college.

Revision

There wasn’t really much in the way of revision… It’s just a sexy scene.

Today

Stop hounding me!

Read “The Writing Tutor” here

Nano update

   So remember how I’m crazy from a previous Nanowrimo post:

     “There were two options at the beginning of the month: 1) say I’ll take it easy and just write like 35 k or 40 k work on a novel… do my best and don’t commit or 2) go shit crazy and do two consecutive rounds of 50 k.  One for Hometown, Ireland and one for Hometown, Pa.  Guess which one I picked?”

Well, insanity is paying off because Virtue Decayed for Hometown, Ireland is almost finished.  Suck it, Cindy!  I have completely ignored the primary plot in the piece and just wrote what I think was supposed to be a subplot and back story… I don’t know.  It’s about a woman in a corset and that’s sexy.

What’s a Whatsit?

There are many great questions: In storytelling, there is the “What happens next?” In friendship, there is “Where do you want to eat?”  And for the rest of life there is, “What the Fuck is that about?”   Go on, preform that line in your favorite actor’s voice; it just gets better.  Nathan Lane in a freak out moment is mostly the way I say it; though when I don’t understand the lyrics to a Rufus Wainwright song usually some variation of that question fits (way to reference two gay men before paragraph one is done, L.J.).

My favorite question though is probably: “Jumping Whatsits on the Empress’s bed?”

When I was a kid and before I understood how to lie, I would blame everything I did on “the Jumping *Inarticulate-word-that-no-one-knows-not-even-adult-me* in the Empress’s bed.” i probably said it in a mind-blowingly cute baby-voice.  The adults reaction was always a confused, “what the fuck is that about?” (not always made suitable for child-me). I don’t remember ever being pressed for details about the Empress, her bed, or the inarticulate-word-that-no-one-knows-not-even-adult-me, because, remember, I was in trouble at the time.  I was getting asked about why my sister’s hair was three inches shorter and the scissors were in my snoopy dog’s lap. Or where all the pots and pans had gone.

The usual follow-up to the unanswered question was “Don’t be so bold, Little L.J.” (bold being a negative word in this use; I didn’t realize that until I was an adult).  Of course, I never actually cut my sister’s hair or used the pots and pans to make an alien space fort.  It was the inarticulate-word-that-no-one-knows-not-even-adult-me. These creatures, given the lack of precaution my parents took to stop them, have probably multiplied and are wreaking havoc on the children everywhere as we speak.  more importantly, as a result of my adults’ short sighted-ness, adult L.J. also must ask “Whatsits?  Jumping Whatsits? What did I mean?” And the world may never know what amazing creatures were jumping on that mysterious empress’s bed…

After I developed my language skills and learned to blame everything on my younger cousin, my sister’s stupidity, or indulge in the occasional flat-out denial, I had a notebook which I titled “Jumping Whatsits on the Empress’s bed.”  This became the place I wrote down all my half-baked ideas.  Oddly enough it was always more used than the good notebook where my story was being written; I organize shit, folks.  I think mostly because I had a problem with regulating my font (read I’d spend hours drawing the title and never write the first sentences; this practice stopped when another child mocked me for have twelve pages with the same words written on the top.  Now I have trouble with titles.  God Damn you, children of Hometown, Pa and your soul-scarring bullying!  Then again… I’m pretty sure I stabbed the kid with a fork so…No, I’m not ready to apologize). A little context: at the time, I was writing on a word processor that got my father’s sister through college, and the Lion King had just come out.  I wrote my first and last 16 page novel to that soundtrack on that word processor.

When Dad got us our first computer (literally when the rest of the world was also getting their first computers… I think, Hometown is sometimes slow).  One of my first files was a little text file called “Jumping Whatsits” and yeah, I dumped all my ideas and observation there.  I still have the file and I still fan through it regularly.  A lot of the ideas I have there will end up here, because when I need random inspiration I go there.

Personally, I’m just waiting to figure out where the inarticulate-word-that-no-one-knows-not-even-adult-me live so that I can join them in their relentless creative experiments.  Until then… guess I’ll write more porn.

This is what the whatsits look like in my head.

Behind the Scenes: “Before the Rain”

Idea

In the summer of 2006, while in college and working overnight shifts in a food market and giving ghost tours in Ocean City, I happened to see a Rembrandt exhibit in Philadelphia.  One of the things that most stayed with me was that the great Rembrandt, master painter, portraitist, and otherwise upstanding gents, had sketched a  series of of dirty etchings.  Like the one above “Monk in a Cornfield”.  It was painted (sketched?  I’m not an artist, wiki it) in 1646 and is considered Baroque, which is funny considering the act it’s depicting.

Being the dirty twisted bastard I am, it took me a while to realize it wasn’t a dude Padre was fucking.  Rembrandt drew all his ladies in these etching with stocky muscular legs and she’s wearing a dress… or she’s a he and another monk, I guess.  I don’t know they told me it was Hetro.

And that didn’t stop me.

On the bus home, I types up Ciaran’s story (he was Cyril at the time) and it was actually originally a very campy, comedic kind of story. Maybe about three pages long, it showed the deed and then a diva-style hissy fit about the nature of God and homosexuality.

Revision

Then a professor gave me a book called Before Stonewall, which discussed the history of being gay before the civil right movement in America.  All the articles dealt with America’s early history (that I remember anyway…  I had shit to do that summer, hoagies to make, stories to tell, hotties to… look at).  I do know it made me think about this story and I re-wrote it with the diva hissy fit toned down and made part of Cyril’s thoughts, making the only dialogue in the piece his outcry of “Oh God.”  It was much more serious and probably my first literary erotica as it dealt with more than just cock and balls… though meditations on God is quite hard for me to separate from cock and balls.  He’s called the Big Guy for a reason.

So there is sat on my computer for… six years, shit I’m getting old.

I returned to it again recently while appearing as Friar Laurence in Manly Squeeze’s Romeo and Juliet.  Manly Squeeze had a brilliant interpretation of the play, not the tragedy of the kids, but as the tragedy of unbridled passion.  Romeo who kills two people in the play and threatens a shit ton of others (it’s in the script, check it) was portrayed as insane with grief at the end, like full-on crazy Joker-ish in the tomb with Paris.  Juliet was tearing-her-hair, snotty-nosed tears, screaming suicidal.  It was not a sanitized or pretty version of teenage love and the families were the  figures of denouement (why is that word spelled like that!  Ug, the French) and passion had to be the motivation for each character.

For Laurence, I did a lot of research into Franciscan monks (considered the wisest men in Shakespeare’s time so R + J are really fighting fate and God himself when Laurence can’t help them.   A fucking plague gets in the way!  Great example that even hetros can have the Big Guy forbidding their love).  Most of Friar Laurence’s lines are sermons and mini-monologues ( had forty minutes of lines on my mp3 and that was a quick read through to get the words and stanchion) so clearly God and his will was Laurence’s passion, but then I played with the idea that Laurence was gay for Romeo (because our Romeo was a really hot Japanese kid who I would like to… look at some more because I dearly love my Manly Squeeze.).

It made me think of “Before the Rain” and I took out the story, read it, considered it and eventually rewrote what you see today.  Anyways… “Before the Rain” was not porny enough for any magazines (though it did get me a few editors who wanted less high-brow stuff and eventually picked up some of my college fantasies).  The story was also too explicit for literary magazines, so there is sat on my computer for my enjoyment.  Then an editor who loves to publish what she tells me to write and reject my original stories suggested I indie-pub “Before the Rain” and other good-but-not-what-we’re-looking-for material.  So I did.

Today

I don’t know if there’s a future in the story.  I feel like I would be cheating to take Ciaran’s struggle with God and lust outside of the time period he’s in.  But I’m not much for historical romance and I can’t think of a satisfying ending in the fifteenth century.  So this story will probably remain as a short erotic scene.

By the way, that sexy cover image was all me… and Rembrandt (it’s called Titus as Monk and it was done in 1660).  But I added the text and I… am not as impressive as I want to be…

Read “Before the Rain” here:

 

NanoWrimo!

So I’ve been doing Nanowrimo since 2005 and I’ve only lost three years.

I have high hopes for 2012, since this is my first nano where I’ve been a full time writer, my partner is supportive (though in his defense Current Manly Squeeze has been supportive for the past 3 years we’ve been together), and I don’t have too much on my plate to distract me.

Well… I do have that move back to the States in the middle of the month… hum.  What to do about that?

There were two options at the beginning of the month: 1) say I’ll take it easy and just write like 35 k or 40 k work on a novel… do my best and don’t commit or 2) go shit crazy and do two consecutive rounds of 50 k.  One for Hometown, Ireland and one for Hometown, Pa.

Guess which one I picked?

I’ll be writing Virtue Decayed for Galway and at the rate I’m going, Nano says I’ll have it finished by the 10th… I’m shooting for the 15th, but it’s nice to have a robot’s support.  You can find Virtue Decayed at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ljlongo.  Smashwords is doing this fun thing where they are supporting Nanowrimo by show-casing the works in progress.  I don’t know how I feel about it, but I’ll be abusing their trust somehow I’m sure.

50 k part two is going to be more of a challenge, since I’ll be back to dealing with Hometown, Pa.  I also have some excitement to deal with this the family I have not seen in 3 months… Current Manly Squeeze did the proposal thing.  We have no idea what comes next in our lives, so planning the ceremony is going to be a bitch, but I’m sure Ma and Sis will had plans.  So not wearing a dress for this shit.

I’ll be writing Steak and Eggs for Breakfast (aka. How High the Moon).  That’s a revision of the Little Red Ridinghood story.  More on that after the 16th.