#penmonkey

My Writing Life: Penmonkey Evaluations

Over at terribleminds (http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/03/03/time-again-for-your-penmonkey-evaluations/) Chuck Wendig is doing an informal survey of writer’s writerly habits. I’m posting my responses here because, why not? — it is my writing blog, after all.

a) What’s your greatest strength / skill in terms of writing/storytelling?

I’ve noticed that I’m getting pretty good at showing instead…

it switches between that and this

Chuck Wendig posts these challenges every week on his website Terribleminds.com, and I've been doing them lately. Here's the latest one, about a monster, and I just went over an old story I did and really tried to polished it up. Read it or don't.The Doppelganger

Terry was angry. Really, really angry. Angrier than he had ever been before. And scared. His heart was beating so hard, he thought it was going to break his ribs. The air was cold on his bare skin. He should have put on a robe, he thought. Maybe his shoes. The grass of his front lawn was cold as fuck, and an October night in New England wasn't the kind of weather you could parade around in naked. His gun was cold too, probably from keeping it in a lockbox in the basement. His breath curled in the air in front of him. The chilly air didn't matter. He felt cold all the time. Lights snapped him out of his thoughts. Big, bright lights. Spotlights. Other lights too. Blue and red, flashing and swirling. Blinding him. He told the lights what he thought of them. "Fuck off, you fucking lights! You're trying to blind me! Blind me from the real world! I can't close my eyes anymore..." he sobbed. Not after what he knew. Not after what he had seen.

Every night he saw them. The cold people. Pale and skeleton thin, with featureless faces. But eyes that saw everything. Bright, hungry eyes that saw every lie and every secret. They danced slowly around their statues, bony backs and jutting hipbones swaying to guttural, wordless hymns. Hymns in an ancient and heathen tongue. A language that made the cave man in Terry scream and quake, the primordial instinct that this was what a predator sounded like. They hunted men in the dawn of the world, took their skins, and went in among their families to live in a grotesque mockery of life. They bided their time, drove friends and neighbors mad, and then devoured them. Then they moved on.

He could feel them lurking all around him. Tall and bone white, stalking with freakish grace through black forests, as thin as the branches they moved among. Their faces were strangely human, and at the same time horribly alien. Blank faces that looked like no one and at the same time looking like everyone he had ever met. His sweat felt ice cold. Or his skin was red hot. He couldn't tell. They spoke to shadows. Their laughter was cracking ice on a black pond. They delighted in cruelty. And although nothing even close to a smile ever appeared on their lips, you could see it in their glinting eyes. They were smiling.

He could remember the creatures capturing men out hunting. Reaching into their eyes to tug the skin free from the skull. A man begging as his skin was pulled from his body like someone would peel an orange, and make a game of keeping the rind whole as they worked methodically over the body. He could see his wife and children greeting him as he came home. But it wasn't him. They could tell in the still moments between conversation. Before they slept, he would stare at the children for a heartbeat too long. His wife would find mirrors broken. His friends would suddenly be nervous in his company. And then, the creature would become bored. His friends despised him. His children feared him. His wife recoiled at his gentlest touch. Then nothing. The people in the town would come out to his house, and find his children half-eaten. His wive gibbering and drooling in a corner. And his skin, folded neatly and placed on a chair or hung from a coathook.

"Please, honey. Please. Please. Honey." a familiar voice sobbed. He looked down at his wife's rosy-cheeked face. Streaked with mascara. She was sobbing and choking on her own words. Begging for him to let her go. "Please." It was for her own good. The cold people would come for her some day, would eat her slowly. Keep her alive. He had to make it quick. No suffering for his lovely wife.

Terry saw an alien funeral. Swaying and dancing, chanting and whispering, as a pale body turned to dust. Then, with bony, clawed hands, they pawed the dust into a jar of red clay. They ripped open a jackal and pressed the jar into it's warm insides. And then they faded back into the night. That jar, like an itch in the back of his mind. He hated it. He hated it when he, Mike and Glenn had found it in the ground of the construction site. Why hadn't he smashed it with the bulldozer? Why hadn't he re-buried it? “We're rich!” he remembered Glenn saying as he tugged the clay jar free from the ribcage. “We're fucking rich, man!” But Terry couldn't stop staring at the small, canine skeleton. It's jaws had been open in a pitiful, silent scream.

a lovely little list, here's the bullet version, click through to see the rest:

You are Legion

You better put the "fun" in "fundamentals"

Skill over talent

Nobody cares about your creative writing degree

speaking of luck

this is a slow process

Nobody "gets in" the same way

Writing feels like - but isn't - magic

Storytelling is serious business

Your writing had whatever value you give it

You are your own worst enemy

Your voice is your own

cultivate Calluses

Stones are polished by agitation

act like an asshole, you'll get treated like an asshole

writing is never about just writing

this is an industry of people

the worst think your work can be is boring

no, wait, the worst think your work can be is unclear

writing is about word, storytelling is about life

everything can be fixed in post

quit quitting

no such thing as bad writing advice

though, nobody really knows shit about shit

Hope will save you