The Song Fight Bulletin Board

yeah, i'm fizzled too.
oh well. i hope to still finish this thing some day.

y problem was that i actually liked what i was writing, so i couldn't bring myself to succumb to oblivion and just GO.

-craig

I never actually started, which is my bad (beats himself with flail) however I found this which might put some of your hard written prose to good use:
--------
The deadline for the Fictionette competition is nearing! You have two
weeks to get your entries to us. Details are as follows:

The First Short Story Competition for Fictionette must end:
" . . . but as I looked out at what stood before me I knew that nothing
had changed."
Deadline: 30th November 2004 Entry Fee: £5
Prize: £500 worth of books from http://www.anotherbookshop.com or £300 in cash!
Judges:
Literary Agent Sam Copeland
Published author Isabel Losada
enter at: http://www.fictionette.com
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32004 words, most of which are not worth the time it took to write them. that's a good last sentence, though, kamakura.

oh, yeah. i keep meaning to start this. i've got a title and a story outlined in my head, but nothing actually written yet.

if i can write 3,846 words a day for the rest of the month i can still make it.

Well, I signed up for this years brewha-ha. Even though I've been procrastinating somewhere in the vicinity of the 5500 word point. I can be such a spaz muffin sometimes, though, as in--"Ooooh, shiny!" (I've been giggling over-- and selectively "borrowing" that new favorite phrase-- ever since JE put that up as an away message.) Then again, I've spewed out 15,000 words in a weekend, so, no worries if I really feel like finishing. It's actually much easier to be wordy than to edit.

Note to TVIYH-- Sometimes when I can't think of anything to write I start by writing about all the stuff I'm "supposed to be writing about", a description of all these "interesting people" dancing around inside my head, inches from the page, waiting to get a life. Or just "There I sat, as I had so many nights before, staring blankly into the vast desolate emptiness that filled my screen..." or "50, 000 words? I don't even have five. What was I thinking? ..." Then write what you WERE thinking, and go from there... you can delete your start sentences (or give in to gratuitous padding techniques) Bwhahaha:::VEG:::

Just type something, anything, to break up the monotonous silence of the "big, white empty". You can ponder over what you're actually "saying" sometime in December. The words trot out like so many lemmings after that first one.

thanks for the advice, but i've been putting off starting it simply because i've got too many other commitments and too much else happening elsewhere in my life right now. actually i've got the whole first page written mentally, but i've decided to opt out from the novel-writing thing. it's just too much stress worrying about when i'm going to find time to fit that in with everything else, and something had to go. so it ended up being the thing that wasn't going to benefit anybody else. sorry nanowrimo, it's been real.

Finished my book yesterday. 50,047 words.

Now I can get back to writing music. Hooray!

8)
way to go, jim! that's rather impressive. as i've said in this thread, i wanted to participate (though i doubt i'd've made it all the way) but general life issues got in the way of being able to do it.

do you have it posted somewhere for people to read?

No, not yet. It's, well, pretty bad. But with revision, which I hope to do after the new year, it might crawl up the chart and become passable. I'll let you know.

well that's cool. also i forgot to mention, THIS is especially cool:

jimtyrrell wrote:Now I can get back to writing music.

damn! i wish i would of known about this earlier... say a month ago.
Defiantly looking forward to it, next year.. or maybe just pick out a month and do it.
i don't have a problem coming up with 50,000+ words, but i just think that running spellchecker through 50k+ words would be a BITCH!

<B> FOR THOSE WHO WOULD SOON BE FINISHING.</b>
I would love to read some of the stuff, there’s no way am reading 50k+ words from all of you, but if you post here like say your favorite page, or paragraphs of the whole thing, and a link to novel at the end, of the post, that’ll be a good way of skimming through some of the writings, and if there’s something that catches my attention, I’ll probably keep on reading.

jimtyrrell wrote:Finished my book yesterday. 50,047 words.

I am seriously impressed. Congratulations, and I hope you see fit to allow us a chance of reading it at some point.

jimtyrrell wrote:Now I can get back to writing music. Hooray!

Yay!

I'm curious to see what you guys came up with. Post it.

post a link, not the 50,000 words to the sf boards, i think jb would say
congratulations, jim!
-bill

i'm not going to post a link to my novel until it has been seriously edited, but i'll post an excerpt. it's 786 words long, which i imagine isn't too long to post. it's also totally hilarious.

His time for cachinnation is cut tragically short when another group of ghoulish and barbate dwarves surrounds him and, chattering in their bizarre and ominous native baragouin, charges towards him, axes raised for battle. Just as the loathly creatures converge on him, Crash does a completely unprecedented and amazing triple back flip and executes the gang of villains with machinelike precision and dispassion, firing infolaser round after infolaser round into their tiny mythological bodies and watching them combust into pink flames with the vague scent of excrement. They drop a total of 126 gold, another damaged acinaciform weapon, a set of chain mail pants, and a cursed pendant. When he finally lands, he appraises his handiwork with the pride of a primipara for her nestling and, after retrieving the gold and nothing else, continues walking. He does not make it far before he hears a rustling in the flora. Without monition a bipedal humanoid rat saltates forrader, covered in matted dapple-gray pelage, lengthy gamboge fangs bared, pink nose vellicating and dripping ebony mucous, skreighing and squealing and gibbering, and knocks Crash to the ground. The rat-man is on top of him, slashing at Crash’s physiognomy with his dreadful claws, long revoltingly pink caudal appendage slapping against his legs over and over and over again, and Crash is immobilized and unable to reach for his voidpistol. As the rat-man clapperclaws and rakes at him, Crash journeys to a demesne of interior ataraxis and repose within his nous. He calls this realm The Infinite Savage Hills of the Unnamed. Suddenly everything becomes calm. The rat-man’s incessant and savage battery signifies naught. Crash’s eyes open, and, eerie lazuline flame shooting from his rima oris as if he were a firedrake, he screams “Devilish Inferno Blaster!” The whole of Epoz VII didders with violent microseisms as a psychopathic explosion rips through the rat-man’s form, demolishing him from within. The hirstute flesh of his arms flies off cleanly as if it were a sleeve for the vile mechanical endoskeleton beneath. His black and unhallowed eyes burst and splatter a translucent pink substance onto Crash’s face. Much of it lands in his oral cavity. It tastes vaguely of geoduck chowder. The rat-man’s jagged teeth launch out one by one and crucify a dwarven ghoul who made the mistake of investigating the battle against the gnarled trunk of a long-dead tree. The gaping cavities left in the rat-man’s blackened gums spurt an endless amount of a thin milky-white fluid that coats Crash and smells like urine. The rat-man’s bizarre hermaphroditic genitalia compress and dispread in a manner that scorns natural laws and then vaporize completely in a sonic boom that pops Crash’s ears, which ring anyway with the piteous and perpetual wail of the rat-man, who, with what is left of his digestive tract, manages to defecate a fluid lime-tinted substance that runs down the aerugo-damaged length of his robotic endoskeletal legs and pools at the scorched ground beneath him. His tail shatters in multiple meaty chunks that bounce about like ping-pong balls in an embrangled physics experiment, reflecting off one tree and then another, sometimes colliding in mid-air, until finally the defleshed and deceased rat-man’s mechanical inner workings explode in a psychedelic shower of sparks that taste like cinnamon and smell like ordure and sound like a reversed tape loop of an orchestra tuning up. The comparative silence that follows is somehow more commoving than the obscene wailings of violence and degradation that came before it. The only sounds are Crash’s labored respirations and the mournful soughing of the crucified dwarf ghoul, who has for some reason grown a brobdingnagian and disgusting erection with its sphacelating and fetid genitals. Crash slowly rises, grasping a small tree for support, and draws his voidpistol. Still leaning against the tree, he fires a single infolaser round into the dwarven ghoul’s putrid penis and it turns to shit like sand turns to glass. The pitiful microbeast wails in unbelievable agony. Crash is totally unconcerned. This is war, he recognizes. A war that only a machine can win. He releases his grasp on the tree and removes his backpack. Inside, his viaticum: a pharmocoepiac farrago of anodyne and antipyretic, tranquilizer and nepenthe. He takes out a huge syringe that is normally used to immunize the space horses of Oabj-Fuudiu Tertius and fills it with Intanlal 1-5. Opening his mouth, he shoves the needle into the gums under his lower teeth and injects himself with the powerful coagulant. Instantly, a feeling of miserable euphoria chews him up and swallows him, totally consuming him. His eyes turn black like those of a pigeon. He micturates and stains his designer jeans with maroon urine. Back to normalcy. The war continues.

Dear god. This excerpt leaves us with many unanswered questions, not the least of which is: do you make geoduck chowder with a tomato base or a cream base?

jute gyte wrote:...embrangled...

Sweet.

My book also needs serious editing before it will be safe for human consumption. here's a short bit from it.

***

“Does Aaron have a dog, do you know?” said Murphy.
“Haven’t seen one over there. There’s a dog door on the house, but that’s from the last people who lived there. That dog, don’t get me going. Peaches. What a piece of shit mutt that thing was. Always jumping out at you when you’re driving by. Can’t believe it didn’t get run over.”
“Uh huh.”
“Seriously, I’d had half a mind to put a bullet into that little son of a bitch more than once.” The man leaned on his rake. “This one time, right, I’m putting Shotsy out. I gotta put her in the garage at night or she pisses all over everything. So I’m takin’ her out there, and I open the garage door there. Now that thing used to be automatic, but it’s been busted for, oh Christ, damn near since I moved in. You don’t know anybody who fixes them things, do ya?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Nobody seems to. I should learn how, I guess. I could make a killing.” He laughed. “Anyway, I gotta lean down and grab the door handle down to the bottom there, and my back is damn well shot. I used to work construction.”
“Uh huh.”
“So I get down there and I’m liftin’ up the door, and that little bastard Peaches come runnin’ out of there like a raped ape, yippin’ and shit. And I mean to tell you I damn near fell right on my ass. ‘Course, Shotsy gets loose and takes right off after the little fucker. And I can’t barely move ‘cause my god damn back is out, right?”
“Uh huh.”
“So I yell ‘Mother! Get your ass out here!’ And she come runnin’.”
“You’re married?”
“What? No. Mother’s my bloodhound. She come waddlin’ out and, well, she knows when I’m hurt. One time I was out back putting up a floodlight and I fell off that goddamn ladder over there.” He pointed to the garage. “Well I didn’t need to say nothing. I was howlin’ like a bastard, of course, but Mother, she come out and brought me a beer. Swear to God, she had gotten the refrigerator door open, and that ain’t no Sears piece of shit fridge with the plastic door neither, that’s one of the old ones from up to Montgomery Ward. That bitch is heavy, I want to tell you. But she muscled that thing open and got a bottle of Miller in her mouth and trotted that right out to me proud as anything. Best beer I ever had in my life, Mister. Anyway, I had a slipped disc, that put me in the hospital for a while, then I got out.”
“Uh huh.”
“What was I talkin’ about?” The man put his hat back on.
“The neighbor’s dog.”
“Oh shit yeah. Shotsy done took off after that thing, and now Shotsy’s a big ol’ girl. She got her ass stuck in that little doggie door they got over there, and can’t get herself out. Now I’m laying in the driveway, and Shotsy’s screaming bloody murder over in the neighbor’s yard, and Mother don’t know what all to do, so she’s just runnin’ in circles over there.” He pointed to the front yard.
“Uh huh.” Murphy started to slowly walk back to the road, still nodding and smiling.
“Well before too long that Aaron boy comes out and says ‘What’s all the god damn racket?’ And I says to him ‘Your goddamn dog broke my hip, that’s what’. He don’t like that much, and he goes back in the house. Now before too long I hear a yipe from the back of the house, and here comes Shotsy tearin’ ass across the road. Now I don’t know what all that boy did to unwedge that dog but I can tell you Shotsy never went back over there.”
“Uh huh.”
“But you want to know the weird thing? There ain’t no way Peaches coulda gotten into the garage. I can’t figure it out for the life of me. There ain’t no windows, and I keep it shut up most of the time. Except my brother-in-law had been up from Pittsburgh and he was parkin’ his truck in there on account of he don’t want it broke into. I told him this ain’t that kind of neighborhood, but with kids like that livin’ next door, maybe it weren’t such a bad idea.”
“Uh huh. Okay, thanks.”
The man got back to raking. “Yep. Have a good one.”
Murphy got in the car and drove away as fast as he could.

Jim, that's pretty good man. It reads like a Canadian novel, maybe something by W.O. Mitchell....

Jute Gyte writes loooooong paragraphs. And um... There it is. A Clockwork orange meets Tron on acid?

Jim Tyrrell... I want to read the rest sooner rather than later.

kudos to you both.

Kamakura wrote:Jute Gyte writes loooooong paragraphs. And um... There it is. A Clockwork orange meets Tron on acid?
kudos to you both.

the original idea was super mario world meets h.p. lovecraft on acid, but whatever works. and thanks.

Damn. I came within just over 1000 words of finishing my "NaNo Spew". Something like 48,869. Yes well, guessing I can always try again next year. Would have actually finished-- if I hadn't dumped the three rambling overlong chapters I started out with-- Silly me, but I didn't like how it was shaping up.

I sat there typing, watching the words take the form of a really dark, morbid exploration into perversity. The initial inspiration came from reading up on that fellow in Germany who derived sexual satisfaction from cannibalizing someone. Defining it in court as a sort of "Communion", as he baked, broiled or fried then feasted on the tangible remnants of the willing sacrifice he had videotaped slaughtering.

Then, on further reading, finding out that there was a forum where people were offering themselves as victims. Some of the respondents were into the "fantasy" of death and the ultimate "joining", but there were the occasional few who lusted after the reality of walking the last mile.

I combined those images with an expository article on the way people were "isolating" themselves in a virtual world. Occasionally taking it to brick and mortar, but generally engaging in online excursions which would never be considered acceptable if a face could be attached to them.

My MC was somewhere left of center, rationalizing his own desires and escalating need for more and more "over the top" stimulation, by comparing them to the "extremes" of others.

Approximately 7000 words in, I scrapped the idea and started with something a "teensy" step closer to sanity. The research required to "touch" that sort of reality turned out to be a bit much for me. (Although I must admit it was rather *fun* <winks> reading up on the normal aspects such as the web site devoted to detailed instructions of male masturbation techniques.)

I probably should have left the first 7000 words in the file, but it felt like 'cheating' not to chop them out when I began a completely different story.

The second idea "dipped its toes" the the darker, swirling toxic waters, but didn't jump in for a midnight skinnydip.

But even at nearly 50,000 words the book itself is far from completion. Likely by approximately 50,000 "useful" words. Still congratulations to everyone who finished. Even though I didn't get verified. It was fun while it lasted.