Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 13

The Love of Mr. Stamper

I can’t write this; it’s coming out all wrong;

I am an otter; I do not write song.

Still – I met her in the by-ways of her

Moon; as the crowds rushed by in their night-song.

We shared a drink; a ship, a night, a day;

We watched the planet rise, dawning light-song.

Space otters don’t write poetry; this stinks;

She would laugh and say this is a trite song.

Still, I stamped this out, for her. At least I

Tried. Someday, for her, I’ll make a right song.

 

I bet you never read a space otter ghazal before. You probably won’t again. This form is awfully tricky, and I’m not great with love poetry. Neither is Mr. Stamper.

 

NaNoWriMo, Day 17

Word count: 21,091.

My unexpected breakout character continues to get more interesting. I just made her invincible. And I don’t mean Monty Python “Tis but a flesh wound” invincible, nor Boris the Human Popsicle from Goldeneye invincible, but honest-to-God nigh-invulnerability. I figured it would do interesting things to her character arc. So far she’s run a guy through with his own lance. It was in the heat of battle, but still. The Dark Side is calling, and they have cookies.

NaNoWriMo, Day 16

Word count: 20, 043.

On a completely unrelated subject, one of my favorite television programs is the old murder mystery series, Columbo. But, to borrow the phrasing of the main character, there’s one little thing that bothers me.

Let me describe the scenario. Person A has murdered Person B. Person C figures out that A did it. Does C alert the authorities? No. This is what happens.

C: “I know you killed B, probably to avoid paying B a lot of money, or because B was a threat to you. . I promise not to reveal this to anyone if you pay me a lot of money. While you consider my offer, I will now go to a secluded place where I will be absolutely alone. Also, I point out that I have not told anyone else of my suspicions.

A: *murders C*.

This happens several times during the course of the series. I don’t understand it. If I figured out that someone I knew had murdered someone else, I think the best thing to do would be to call the police. Even if, for instance, I didn’t want to do that, the LAST thing I would do would be to indicate to the murderer that I knew what he had done, that no one else knew I knew, and that I would be in a convenient spot for the murderer to kill me. This is just common sense, people.

 

NaNoWriMo: Halfway There

Living on a prayer, as the song goes. My word count is 18,798. I am, therefore, about 5800 words behind, give or take. My plan at this point is to muddle on through until Thanksgiving weekend, and then use those days to power on and finish the book. I expect I should do it; I wrote 14,000 words in two days last year. C’est la vie.

Where we are now, plot-wise, is that Darlene Dove, ex-Sugar Plum Fairy, is about to be caught up in a battle between the lightly armed forces of Pip of the Prairie Kerflufflies, and the significantly better armed and more numerous Legion of Harrigan. This should be fun.

NaNoWriMo, Day 14

Word count: 17,591. I have introduced a tentatively minor character named Harrigan. I don’t know if he’ll last a while, as he’s probably going to be the minion whom Darlene knocks out to get to the Big Bad in her current situation, but even so, at least he’s there. And I get to reference the classic song, “Harrigan, that’s me!” Anywho.

I also restarted an audiobook listen of Moby Dick, the original Great American Novel. I think it does better as an audiobook, honestly. I read it once in my teens and found it terrifically boring. But a good audiobook reader (Frank Muller, in this case) can make even a dry chapter about the classifications of various whales interesting. And, of course, Melville had a certain flair for commentary. For instance:

The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,–what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Lights

I was going to post about my NaNo word count, but then I saw the news about Paris. The situation is still unfolding as I write this, but it looks beyond terrible.  I think perhaps the most heartbreaking thing I read was a dispatch from a Parisian bookshop, which ended with the words, “The lights of Notre Dame have been turned off, which never happens at this time of night.”

This struck me, hard. Perhaps it’s because one of my favorite films is the deeply moving Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the Cathedral plays a significant role. Perhaps it’s because of the resemblance to the iconic words of Edward Grey on August 3rd, 1914, on the eve of World War One: ““The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”  I don’t know. But it struck me. This is a dark day for Paris, and the world.

But where there is darkness, there is always, still, light.

NaNoWriMo, Day Twelve

I didn’t get very far today.

My character Darlene Dove, last seen plummeting to the earth like a WKRP in Cincinnati turkey, survived. On the down side, she landed on a yak and killed it. On the other hand, the yak was the yak equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the East, and the locals now revere Darlene as a god.

That scene was yesterday. Today I got two paragraphs in before I reached the introductions. New deity Darlene has met the leader of the local population. So now I have to name the guy. And I am stuck on a name. C’est la vie.

A Different Place Than This

The old man sat on the rubble by the side of the road, and whistled. No one whistled anymore. Whistling meant noise, and noise, in these days, meant attracting unwanted attention. The roads, where roads existed, were not safe.

He didn’t much care. If anything, the danger in the world only made him long for the way things had been. He was the only one lately who could recall the face of the Empress. Even with that, he still couldn’t remember her name. He puzzled over it as the sun plodded wearily across the sky.

He had been in a camp the year before. There, the hold of the memories of Empire had long since loosened in the minds of the people. They had vague recollections of angry soldiers in armor, of explosions, of ration lines. He remembered more than that. He had seen the Parades. He could just barely recall the imperial anthem. The old man whistled a few notes of it now. It sounded much more impressive backed by a full brass band then it did as a thin wavering breath of air, but he was still pleased he could do it.

“Nice tune,” said a voice from behind him. The old man turned. He didn’t move quickly; a real bandit would’ve shot him without warning rather than comment on his whistling.

“You don’t happen to know what it is?” he said hopefully.

“Nope,” said the stranger. “Can’t say I do.”

“Ah. Too bad.”

“You need a lift somewhere? I have a boat on the river, a mile north of here.”

The old man considered. Winter was coming, and he would need shelter. “Where are you going, then?”

“Back from a trade. My camp is further north.”

“:How big?” the old man inquired.

The stranger gave a non-committal shrug. “Twenty families. Maybe thirty. I’ve been gone a month, so it could’ve changed.”

“Good enough. I’ll go then, if you’ll have me.”

“Sure,” the stranger said.

“By the way, you wouldn’t happen to remember the name of the Empress, would you?” The old man wasn’t really expecting an answer, when even he couldn’t call it to mind.

“No. Sorry. I can tell you my name, though. Merrick.”

“Ah,” said the old man. “You know, I think her name started with an M too…”

“Did it?” Merrick said. “I wouldn’t know.”

The two trudged away on the dirt road, towards the distant river.

This story is part of the Megverse series, and loops back to the first story with Merrick. Thanks for reading!

NaNoWriMo, Day Ten

Word count: 14,932.

This seems to be a book of cliffhangers. So far I have one person getting into a scrap with Susan, ruler of Character Hell, another person falling to her death from the sky like the sperm whale in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and yet a third person about to be overrun by the zombie hordes of the Third Circle of Character Hell. It’s dramatic. Thrilling, even.

I don’t really have any other writing anecdotes or anything important to say. I could weigh in on some of the great issues of the day, I suppose. After all, I’ve recently been reading a book on church history; I’ve gone from the Councils of Nicaea to Chalcedon to the East-West Schism in 1054 so far, and I’d be interested to weigh in on what profound theological debate we in America are having:

Oh.

We’re all discussing the color of a coffee cup.

Not transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation. Not premillenialism vs. amillenialism. Not the Donatists or Pelagians.

Coffee cups.

Oy.

NaNoWriMo: Day Nine

Word count: 13,058.

I have now entered a bit of a slowdown. I only wrote half of what I should’ve written today. This happens, sometimes. I hear it’s a tradition around Week Two of NaNoWriMo. I did, however, introduce yet another new character: Count Evelyn Ferdinand Roderigo of Zara. He is a vampire. I already threw in a zombie back in chapter one: I figured I might as well throw in a vampire. All I have to do is throw in a wizard with a lightning scar, an archer named after a flower who’s trying to survive a dystopia and the Antichrist, and I’ll have covered all the pop culture bases, from young adult to Christian fiction to paranormal. Hooray!

In the meantime, I thought I might reflect for a moment on how I got here. I didn’t always use to write comedic fantasy, or whatever one calls this genre of space otters, wacky treasure-hunting angels, and superheroes like the Wombat and Gaseous Girl. Originally I wrote very serious stuff. My first NaNo novel was a rewriting of the story of Samson and Delilah as a superhero story, with tanks and heat-rays and all. Before that, I had written a novel involving battles and sieges and even a duel or two. Like Lord of the Rings, but with less wizardry. Then, one day in college, back in 2009 or so, I had the idea to create a superheroine who derived her powers from a radioactive cheesestick. She was called Gaseous Girl. She was very meta. I wrote a series of stories about her on a blogging platform called Xanga; I don’t know if Xanga is still around, but I think it died. Either that or it went behind a paywall, which amounts to the same thing.

I couldn’t stop writing, though. Then, around 2010, I discovered WordPress. January 11th, 2011 I wrote a story about a princess named Caitlin who was good with swords.  I enjoyed her character so much I brought her back. Then in a later story she died, tragically. I cried. But then I began to wonder: what really happens to a made-up character when they die? Is there a Character Heaven? Is there a Character Hell?

Things were never the same after that. Caitlin went meta and changed her name to Catrina, Gaseous Girl made a triumphant return to WordPress, and I never looked back. I really do enjoy writing comedy. When someone comments that they had a literal spit-take after reading a line from a story, or that they actually laughed aloud, it makes my whole day. The world has enough serious writing, I think. We need more fun. And so, that leads me to this year’s NaNo, which is sort of serious (the premise is one character trying to liberate another character from hell), but funny too (the liberating character is named Jason Waterfalls).  So, there you go. :)