written word – Page 6

That thing where the thing looks like another thing but isn’t.

I’ve been watching Riverdale (a fact which has prompted a little self-analysis of what exactly I like in a movie or TV show, but that is neither here nor there), and a recent episode did something that I’m sure there should be a term for.

(Spoilers follow. Oh yes.)

Riverdale, for those of you who don’t watch it, is a pulpy neo-noir crime soap teen drama thriller with a faintly retro feel. It’s clearly fond of classic movies (every episode is named after one, usually crime or thriller but sometimes horror). It’s not quite real in a couple of subtle ways. All the main characters are juniors, but they’re also seventeen years old, for example.

One of the patterns (not hard rules) is that leaving Riverdale doesn’t quite work. In the show, three people have done so. One is Jason Blossom: he died. One is “Mrs Grundy”; she made it to Greendale, but was murdered. One was Joaquin, who left by going on a bus to San Junipero – that’s the eponymous town from an episode of Black Mirror which is actually a fictional world where people’s consciousnesses are uploaded after death. (Before the show began, there was also Archie’s mother, and Hermione Lodge – in the context of the show, they both start outside Riverdale and come back to it.) Archie’s mother gets to leave again, but overall, the pattern you see again and again is that people don’t leave Riverdale, and if they do they die.

So. The episode I’m thinking of was called “Tales from the Darkside” and told three short related stories.

In the first, Jughead owes someone a favour, so he needs to deliver a crate to Greendale. He doesn’t have a car, so he asks Archie to drive his, and while they’re en route a tire blows out. A truck driver comes by; he says he’s going to Greendale, he’s got room for one of them and the crate if they pay him, and Jughead agrees to give him all his money ($18) in exchange for the ride.

The first thing the driver says, once they’re moving, is that for a minute he thought Jughead’s friend was Jason Blossom. The driver (played by Tony Todd) then starts telling Jughead about the Riverdale Reaper, a mass murderer from fifty years ago. They stop for gas, and Jughead discovers that the guy has a dead deer in the back of his truck.

Meanwhile, Archie calls a repair service, gets his tire replaced, and drives on. He reaches the point where the sign on the road says

<- RIVERDALE
GREENDALE ->

and stops for a second. A deer crosses the path, strolls straight across the road, and disappears into the woods behind the sign.

And, alright, practically speaking, it’s not that anyone actually can’t leave. Archie catches up with Jughead and they make the delivery.

But in terms of subtext…

Jughead gets a ride from someone.
This person, in a show that loves and references movies, and which is specifically referencing horror movies with this episode, is played by the actor who played the urban legend/killer/living story from Candyman, and who was Death in the Final Destination series.
The first person the driver indicates he knew is a boy whose defining characteristic throughout the show has been that he’s dead. It drives the entire first season.
The first name the driver brings up (and he never brings up his own) is that of the Reaper.
This man demands all of Jughead’s money in exchange for ferrying him across the border.
We see a living deer as the creature that walks along the border between Riverdale and elsewhere.
We see that this man has a slaughtered deer in his truck; literally, the thing that marks the border, destroyed and made powerless.

This is absolutely the story of Jughead being stuck delivering a questionable substance to repay a favour. You know he’s not going to come to a Tales from the Crypt terrible ending. He’s got to stick around. We know this.

But it is also the story of someone being taken across a border by a stranger who is all but wearing a T-shirt saying “Ask me about my role as the Grim Reaper, Guardian of the Threshold and Ominous Bringer of the End.” And we know that as well, and we can enjoy the beats of that story even as we are sure they will never happen. And the beats of that story both exist and shape our expectations of what will actually happen.

There’s a word for this, isn’t there? Telling one story, but telling it in the shape of another?

Counting ink, 2017

I had one story come out this year; “Thou Unnecessary Letter”, which was started in one of Cat Rambo’s classes and published in the Alliteration Ink anthology No Shit, There I Was…. One of the slush jackalopes for the anthology referred to it as “magical alphabet noir”, and I can’t think of a better summary.

I submitted stories 51 times in 2017, and got 46 rejections (43 were from 2017 submissions, and 3 were from submissions made in 2016). I also withdrew two stories (one from a 2017 submission, and one from a 2016 one).

At the end of the year, I had seven stories out. Last year I only managed 36 submissions, and this year I was aiming for 50; next year I’m going to try for 70.

Here’s hoping 2018 is a little gentler all around.

Remember, remember, making it through November

This is fairly belated, in part because as soon as I won NaNoWriMo, I collapsed under a gentle heap of unanswered emails and overdue to-do items.

That said, I did win NaNoWriMo. Hit 50,084 words on November 26th, and wrote another 483 on the 30th for a grand total of 50,567 words.

I’m both saddened by how much other things seemed to pile up, and encouraged by how relatively easy it was. (Also, no joke: the light of my life helped with that a lot.) It wasn’t very easy, but it wasn’t like pulling out my own teeth, the way I’d been worried it would be. It was at least interesting to me.

(This isn’t to say that I think that everything I wrote was good, and I would like to thank Story Hospital for reminding me that it didn’t have to be, and Captain Awkward for the incredibly useful coping technique of responding to an internal editor saying “this sucks, no-one will care” with “you’re right, no-one will care, guess I’m writing it anyway.”)

If I just didn’t need to sleep, or work, I could get so much more done. Failing that, I’m looking at what’s possible in terms of carving an extra couple of hours out of each day.

Truckling along.

The title of this post was actually a typo, but I’ve decided I like it. Nice combination of “trucking” and “trickling”, which is what writing has started to feel like.

I’m just over 36,000 words (36,120! 13,880 left!), and I’m getting pretty tired. I’ve also learned that I need breaks; I can write every day for a solid week, but after that, there is going to be a day when my brain rebels, shuts down, and insists on just eating someone else’s words for a while.

(This might be different if I wasn’t also working full-time. I do get that. However, I do not have “November” amounts of vacation time, so that is a moot point. Relatedly, I am also very behind on all my reading and watching television.)

I’ve hit the point where I’m actually not sure what I have left to write, so I’m probably going to take the day and plot out what I already have (including some text from before November, because this novel has been hanging around for a long time), what order everything should be in, and what I need to still get down.

Ten days left, I should be able to manage 1,388 words a day. Wish me luck.

Grey and rainy.

The weather’s gotten properly icy, now; it’s below freezing at night, and winter coats are required. I can still get away without wearing winter boots, though.

I missed Sunday for NaNoWriMo, but I wrote yesterday and today, and I’m still ahead; slightly more than 25% done on the wordcount, although with what I had drafted up already I may hit the end of what I need to have written before I get to 50,000 words. We’ll see.

The usual small flood of magazines came in, and I’m working at getting my owned-and-to-read pile back down to a closer-to-reasonable level. It’s a process. I’m cherry-picking short works and ones that came out in 2017 (Hugos next year, and all).

I bought a sweater quantity of yarn, in a sort of raisin colour, and cast on a pattern tonight. I’m hoping to have a sweater done this month or early December.

Is that all it takes.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year (although honestly I’m thinking of cutting down my word goal–40,000 instead of 50,000, maybe), and today I had a day off. I got left in a coffee shop, handwrote for a couple of hours, came home and typed before a nap, wrote a little after dinner, and then managed to get into a 1h1k sprint.

I wrote 4,412 words today. That is not my personal best, I’m sure, but it’s probably my second-best ever.

(Clearly all I need to do is win the lottery, become utterly self-sufficient, quit my job, and be free to spend hours a day writing while still having time to, you know, walk and maintain social relationships and cook dinner and the like. Simple! Not easy, just simple.)

Back to work tomorrow. The weather has decided that it definitely wants to be November–chilly, rainy, and grey. No snow yet, though.

October

The latter half of the month has been a bit much, but rather than focussing on that I’m going to note the positive.

First, it’s October, which is always a good month. A surprising number of the neighbours put up their decorations on the 2nd, and when I walk to the bus stop for work I’ve been walking past tombstones and skeletons and grasping decomposing hands and one disturbingly large and green plastic Slimer and cobwebs and–

Look, even the more restrained houses have hay bales. It’s a very enthusiastic neighbourhood this year.

I finally got a chance to sit down and rewatch Trick ‘r Treat, and that was comfortably reassuring as always. I usually try to watch something seasonal in October, and that was the first chance I had. (Speaking of which, a YouTube channel called CineFix did a list of the top 5 horror movies of all time once you eliminate all the famous ones, and it seems pretty solid–there are a couple in there I haven’t seen, and I think I should catch them.)

I also got a few sketches done for Inktober. Nowhere near close to one a day, but it was good to sit down when I could and scribble something out in twenty-odd minutes.

And finally, I got a couple more stories into a state fit to send out, so I’ve started collecting even more rejections; I’m pretty sure I’m on track to make fifty submissions this year.

Moving again.

I had a bad few months, for writing. I didn’t realize it until I looked back at some conversations I was having, and matched them up with my record of when I was writing and when I stopped writing nearly so much.

I got into a discussion where– ugh, short summary, someone insisted very loudly that the only thing about your writing (as opposed to circumstances like connections or time) that mattered for acceptance and publication was how skilled you were. If you were a skilled writer, all you needed was the right checklist of manageable circumstances, and you’d get published.

(I honestly don’t buy this; at the very least, the most beautifully written work isn’t going to get accepted by a publisher who does not publish That Kind Of Thing.)

I was trying to articulate that–the difference between skill and appeal–when they announced the discussion was over. And I spent some time… dwelling on it.

It was not great. I wrote a little bit over the next few months–the Clarion West Write-a-thon was hugely helpful for that–but my word count honestly tanked relative to what it had been before. I know part of it was the trip to WorldCon. I know part of it was a work crunch. But I looked back and realized that I’d written for nineteen days straight before that discussion, including through a family member’s wedding, and I wrote for one day out of the entire week after it.

(They seemed so certain that my rejections were all due to my lack of skill. I had all the other circumstances they listed, after all, so it had to be that my writing was bad. Right?)

I don’t deal with that person anymore–our entire interaction was based around discussions of writing, and I figured out that discussing writing with them was a bad idea for me–but it took a while to get moving again. I think I’ve managed, finally. My word count is picking up again, the streaks are getting longer, I’ve been completing work instead of drafting disjointed scenes and never going back.

But good grief, I wish I’d been spared that unilateral diagnosis in the first place.