Scribbles

A few random thoughts on a rainy November afternoon...

Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

Cool subtitle, eh? That’s because I wasn’t going to write this, but I just read a SUBSTACK by Matt Zumudio, who said that he’d just put out 100 posts. I thought, wow, that’s pretty good. And then he said that he puts them out once a week. Again, I thought, hey, I put posts out at least twice a week. And then I had to look at my posts and realized that I put one of my posts out twice. That’s my JACK OF DIAMONDS, REDUX. First, I put up the edits I plan to make, and then I put up the edits I have made. It takes a big chunk of my time, because I’m also putting up my Sunday story with the intent of getting it out to you by midnight, so you can read it when you wake up in the morning. Those would be my short stories. THE AFRICAN SONGBOOK; THE BASHFUL COURTESAN, (and in the words of “the King”, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.) So I counted them.

I’ve put out 76 posts!

Now Matt, he wants to go PAID. Me? I don’t want to do that until I have way more subscribers. I want to start an email campaign and put myself out there in the New Year. I want to put out a minimum of 10,000-15,000 emails a month, for a year. And my reason for doing this? Because according to stats, emails are still the BEST way of getting subscribers. And I like that idea. There is someone on here, (and I’ve said this before) who has 20,000 subscribers. Then, and only then, did he ask if anyone wanted to go PAID. I plan to do the same thing. But my PAID page will be for my novels. JACK OF DIAMONDS is a novel. It’s an incomplete novel. It’s what I was working on when I had that incident at work. I was unable to write after that, and it took until just last month before I was able to write again. I knew that I couldn’t continuously put up old stories. I was going to run out eventually. But by starting this page and walking away from VOCAL.MEDIA, I knew I had the opportunity to actually make a living doing this. You can’t really call this work, can you? Not when it’s a passion. (My wife certainly doesn’t think it’s work.) All I do is sit at my computer all day, she says. And that might be true. When I wasn’t writing. But I didn’t tell her that.

But now…? Now, it’s different. Now I’m working on a story, a long short story because those are what I like to write. I’ve also risen to the challenge of NaNoWriMo, which is a challenge to yourself. There’s no prize at the end. There’s no bonus. It’s simply to see if you can do it. Write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Thirty days. That’s 1666 words a day. They’ve got a website where you can track things down and contact other writers for encouragement, or to ask questions about this and that. I tried to get on it, screwed up my password, contacted the powers that be and told them my problem. They fixed it. Problem was, I signed out, and now I can’t get back in. So I have a piece of paper on mu cluttered desk and I write down where I started at: Today was 6879 words, and then where I finish at: I’m at 8925. That’s 2046 words. But I don’t want to stop. I don’t think 50,000 words is long enough. THE BASHFUL COURTESAN is 56,000 and some change. I call that a novella. I want to write at least 2500-3000 words a day. If I average that out to say, 2750 a day, that gives me 82,500 words. That’s seems a little more reasonable.

So what am I doing here? Long story…(Oh yeah, the only kind I write.) When I first thought about entering this challenge, I had an idea for a story. It was going to take place in the silent era of movies, the so-called Golden Age. So I thought, well, I’d better do some research. It fell sort flat. Then I had to go to the Union Hall to see to some paper work, and there was a book there about Sikhs, and the union, and I came across a story about the Komagata Maru. An interesting piece of local history. That was two days before the November challenge. I wasn’t going to make it. I thought, well, maybe I can find an old story and make something out of it. I did. It was something where I didn’t have to do a lot of research. It was something where I didn’t need to have a plot fully fleshed out, or characters. I could just wing it, and write by the seat of my pants. I had 3000 words, and I was already 2 days behind. So I thought, okay, finish this and make it into the novel it’s supposed to be. THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL (FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.) I don’t know if I’m going to keep the last part of the title. It’s a fantasy, as if the title didn’t give that away. And as for the plot, well, I’ve got five lines written on the bottom of the page. These are points I want to include in the story. When I write one out, I delete it, and move onto the next one. Then I add one to the bottom. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I want strong characters. Flawed characters. The hero’s wife has left him for an accountant three months before the story starts. His father has dementia. He also has an old steamer trunk that no one is supposed to open until after he dies. He says, in one of his brief moments of lucidity, that he wants to open it now, before he forgets everything. Our hero agrees, drives out to his brother’s place to get the key, makes arrangements to have the third bother present, and waits for the next weekend to open the trunk. During that time, the brother and his family are murdered, the other brother disappears, and when he goes to id the bodies, finds out that instead of his sister-in-law, it’s his ex-wife! Like Wow. And where did that come from? I don’t know, I just wanted to throw it in there and see what happened.

That’s why I don’t want to stop at 1666 words.