The Mayor

It’s been a damn long time but I churned out another flash fiction story for Kenney Mencher’s contest.  This one was a submission for the “Oration” contest, which I titled “The Mayor.”

The foundation of the story started in an interesting place.  I was looking into the Occupy movement and ran across an article in the SF Chronicle about the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.  I’d also been following the SF mayoral election fraud reported in The Epoch Times.  I ended up combining these two as a little homage to On The Waterfront, which I saw so many years ago.

Two years gone

The second year of the 5-year plan has come and gone. It was a bad year for personal reasons, but an okay year for writing. Got a few stories done, but no progress on drawing. For the next year I will need to focus on my detective story, and perhaps another one I’ve been thinking of for a long time (no details of yet).

Flash Fiction to the Rescue

Kenney Mencher is running a series of Flash Fiction contests. I submitted stories for the Bob Frapples and Owen D. Bank pictures. I also posted them on Deviant Art as “Rundown” and “The Luck”.

“Rundown” took a lot of time to get the details right. Had to search for baseball cards, trains, and even if some cities existed back in the ’30s. They did, and I was able to weave it all together.

“The Luck” is a loose sequel to “Rundown.” This one had more details in it, but I had read “The Big Con” by David Maurer previously, which greatly aided in the speed with which I could write. Limehouse Chappie was a real person, and the location of the speakeasy also existed.

VeeDubbin’

Finally, nailed one to the door. Or rather, parked it in the driveway.

Finished a short story a little over a week ago and posted it to my DevArt account. It’s the story of a high school student and his first car. Silly as it seems, sometimes a car can change someone in ways they didn’t expect. There will be more stories to follow this one later, continuing this theme.

Many thanks to the gents at the writer’s group for their input!

One more for the road…

Finished a short story this past week. Not the big one I need to get done, but it’s something. I’ll be showing it to the writers’ group on Monday, if we’re meeting. If not, up it goes.

Hopefully this will be the first of a series of small inter-connected stories that I can get to piece by piece. Each will not rely on the last one in terms of plot, at least not in any important way. Hopefully that will make it easier to return to it and write something.

The story will touch a subject close to my heart and wallet: my first car.

Impetus

Through a nice gent I met I’ve joined a writers’ group that meets at least once a month in the local area. Went for the second time last Monday and had a nice time. I showed them the first 8 pages of my mystery story this time around and got some nice feedback.

This is going to be good. This is giving me real motivation to move forward with my stories and support for improvement.

It’s going to be a good year writing, I do believe.

Weekend Update

It’s a month past the New Years, so I’m due for an update on the year past. Yeah, this should be quick. My drawing is still lagging, haven’t gotten much writing done. About the only good thing I can say is I’ve knocked some reading down. Read some very interesting books, educated myself a little, and gotten some ideas for the future.

The coming year is still the same game plan. Write more, draw more, and maybe–if things go well–I can start trying to draw a scene from one of the stories. I can dream, can’t I?

Sampling an Intro

I’m not exactly sure of the term for it, but I have seen it described in a script as a “roll-up.” Or even not at all. The terms I can find for it are “scroll” and “crawl.”

What I think of most is that text in the beginning of a movie that sets you right up. In the beginning of Blade Runner, the roll-up tells you just what kind of world you are entering. In The Maltese Falcon, you are given a very brief history of a falcon and see how the protagonist Sam Spade becomes entangled with it.

In literature I find very often quotations are inserted before the body text begins, but I’m looking for a different sort of impact, that Blade Runner sort of impact. I could of course just write a few sentences and call it the Prolog. But how about a timeline?

For the story I’m trying to finish before a friend leaves, I’m considering putting a timeline that drops you off this Earth and onto another one entirely. Consider the following:

1969: Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on the moon.

Ho hum, right? But how about this:

1969: Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on the moon.

1970: Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on Mars.

Bingo! We ain’t in Kansas anymore! (And I hope to god no one else has used this)

Those two lines came from the timeline I’m working on. I don’t want to make it too long, but there’s a lot I want to hit the reader with. Should be fun.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing

In 2001 the writer Elmore Leonard formulated 10 rules of his writing (plus a bonus one) which he shared in the New York Times. In the article he elaborates on the 10, listed below:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said”…
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

The bonus rule, which he says sums up his 10, is: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

The bonus rule creeps up on me a lot. If I leave my writing for a bit and come back I often end up changing everything again. I’ve been doing that with the latest story, though I think cutting out some of the elements is making it easier to follow.

The above rules are great to chew on, but as usual, rules were made to be broken. Dashiell Hammett broke a lot of, if not all of, the “Twenty rules for writing detective stories” postulated by S.S. Van Dine.

Down in a Hole

Where the hell have I been. Work, practice, repeat, mostly. Also, a dead computer, a new computer that became a dead computer, and now back to new computer. Not much to show for all the time off. Still working on my drawing, mostly disembodied heads and disembowled bodies (i.e. no legs–can’t seem to draw those right). Did get some reading done, a few more ideas stirring about as a result. We’ll see where it goes.

Coming up to a year already. Damn. Better get a move on.