May, 2010:

I have been thinking a bit about the vignette at the bottom of the last blog entry. If you missed it, a quick re-cap so you don’t have to go back and read it: I was playing princess with a small child and she told me that “waiting for your prince is boring, you have to go do something instead of just sitting around and waiting.”

I have been done sitting around and waiting for awhile now. Getting effed over royally by an ex kind of does that to a gal. He pretended to be the perfect guy and that really was the fairy tale in my case, because when he couldn’t handle the strain of his own lies anymore, he disappeared into a new fantasy world. Time has passed and I am every bit as grateful as everyone said I would be now. I am so pleased that those fairy tale days are over, and I am back on my original path to spinsterhood and 11 cats. 2 down, 9 to collect! Because you know what, that’s real life, and I’d much rather have that.

I am done waiting in general, I think. For some fairy tale to happen, for someone to help me out whenever I get in a scrape. I just kind of have to triage my problems and knock them out, one by one.

The only one holding me back from whatever the future may hold is myself. And those days are done, too. So I finally am beginning to feel like whenever someone asks, “What do you do?” I can reply, “I’m a writer.” And when they ask me what I write, I feel like I can be proud to send them to Scurvytown.

It’s like part one is to stop waiting around. Well, then what? Do something, whatever it is you want to do, find a way to do it. For me, it’s always been writing.

Hopefully very soon, I can stop being the girl in a terribly awful job who writes silly stories, and be the girl who has a semi-decent job which affords her the luxury of writing silly stories, without needing to grind her fingers into the stress knot on the back her neck until she can finally relax at night enough to put some words on the page. In the meantime, writing through the pain makes for better writing, right?

Yes, I am about to get this blog started on a super boring note by talking about the weather.

It’s effing hot outside, and in the house as well. My roommate is out of town and as it’s her house, I don’t know how or want to turn on the air conditioning.

Sitting in the dark with the fan going seems pretty okay, though, and I think I will survive. After all, the kitties made it all alone for the last 48 hours, so I can, too!

I spent a couple of days in Cleveland, and it was a pretty good time, thanks to some great company. Friends are the best, and if they’re not, who needs ‘em, right? (heehee! me, as I need all the friends I can get, to be honest)

The self-imposed deadline for Scurvytown was today, so I figured worst case scenario, I’d be working on it until dusk to get it completed. Instead, what happened was that my carpool cohort woke me up just after 6am, and I finished it then. Yay!

The thing that should be noted about this episode is that it was definitely an exercise in purposefully awful writing. The storytelling is completely widdershins, some typos I kept and then corrected in the next few words just to be silly about it, and the pacing is awful and to make that even worse, I pretend the pacing is there because Captain Tullis took that long to catch up to another group of characters. I am utterly proud of how bad this was, and the awfulness, once I realized it was there, I decided, ohhhhh, it’s going to be even worse, just you wait! Deliberately writing a story badly does so amuse me, and I hope it works in this case, but it is definitely okay if it doesn’t because the Moonshine festival is coming up, and I am really excited to begin telling that story, even though I should be a good girl and do some more character build-up first, frak it, I’m launching into the fun stuff, because this is my story and I can do whatever I want.

I refuse to re-read that paragraph, because I don’t need further proof of what a brat I am.

So, about that heat, do not even get me started on the humidity!

And now, to finish editing a couple of things on Episode 3 and get that crapola posted! But first, a small story from this weekend!

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I have to put something else in writing from the weekend, simply because it was an amazing sentiment. A 4.5 year old girl gave me some very important princess lessons. She said that waiting for your prince is boring, so you should do lots of other things instead of just waiting around for him to show up. What a delightfully insightful child, right? She told me this while we were playing a princess game, so I told her mother, much to her delight, that a very important lesson had definitely been heard by her daughter. It was a really lovely moment.

What, you might be asking yourself if you bothered to pay attention to my incessant blatherings at all, is the big deal about Scurvytown?

Basically, when the idea came to me, I was immediately pissed off about having a new writing project to shuffle into the ever-expanding list of projects. At the same time, I was overjoyed, because to be honest, this is the exact project I have been waiting for ever since I started this website two years ago.

This site was always intended to be like the original fictionarium, which was amazingly fun to write, if not a terrific pain in the ass to coordinate. Getting other people to write chapters of a story, while fun, is not exactly the most practical thing because life happens and deadlines come and go, and still, no story is written. The only way around that, is to find reliable writers (insert guffaws) or to write it entirely oneself.

It took me two years to come up with the story, and in the end all I needed was a word: Scurvytown, and a character, Captain Tullis, who was the star of my oldest short story in my current writing journal. Thanks go out to my dentist’s office for making me wait so long in their waiting room the day I wrote it.

Every time I open my writing journal, there’s this little story about the captain called “All Tomorrow’s Pirates” about his arrival on an island, the joys and sorrows of smoking his last cigar, and the memory of his intervention, which was basically the last straw for him, and the day he decided to leave the civilized world and start his own colony. I am pretty sure I will post the story here at some point, most likely in flashback form in an episode of Scurvytown.

So about the episodes, I wanted to keep them short and sweet, and to sort of have the pacing and flow of a 20 minute sitcom. So I figured that around 1100-1500 words would suffice. Considering that each day during NaNoWriMo, the target word count is 1700, it should be no problem writing roughly that amount each week.

So, finally, I have some focus, and I have my weekly fiction installment. And it’s a small enough weekly writing task that if any other ideas for my other projects leap into my mind, it shouldn’t interfere with writing a measly 1500 words.

So while I’m all excited about this, I’ve hit a bit of an annoyance that happens so often when trying to share your art with friends and family. No one is reading it. This sucks because I’d like some feedback, any feedback. Should the stories be shorter, should I tone down the dialogue, should I be more descriptive about the island and the town, and heck, of things in general?

The problem with being more descriptive is it takes words to do that, and I have been really trying to keep the word count on the low side, and keep the action moving. All I really have, to be honest, is a setting, a main character, and as I write each story, more characters pop into their places. I don’t expect them to happen, they’re not planned at all, they just show up, and I am already equipped with their names and personalities without so much as over-thinking it. I have always been a big fan of character driven pieces, so I am really enjoying this eclectic group of people, and introducing only a few here and there as they occur almost like a stream on consciousness.

Anyway, this blog entry has already gone on long enough, and I need to get to writing on episode 3 of Scurvytown. Here is a teaser trailer from that episode:

“This isn’t a tour, it’s torture!” screamed the doe-eyed blonde girl as a potato flew past her head.

Happy reading! (or happy telling me you’re looking forward to reading it and then not actually reading it and leaving me hanging, wondering if I am wasting my time, but at least having fun doing so)