I hadn't intended to be reading Mieville's collection Looking for Jake as inspiration reading while scrawling out my NanoWriMo entry, but it's kind of turned out that way. I'm really impressed with how he takes an unusual fear or psychosis and makes it reality in his fiction. Probably my favorite story thus far is "Different Skies". The man character is an elderly gent living in London. Teens are getting a bit wilder and the old timer is a bit afraid of them. He has a new window installed in his apartment; by day it's normal but at night one of the panes of glass looks not outside his own home but onto a dark, dirty alleyway. A gang of shadowy kids lurk there in the mysterious alleyway, taunting him with messages in chalk on the walls and tossing rocks at his window. Very odd, very distinctive and very creepy.
My own writing is going ok. As of now, I'm a little shy of 15k words. So I'm actually ahead of schedule for my own goal of 20k words. I'm pretty much ignoring everyone pushing so hard to 50k. Someone in the forum said it best when they said, "NanoWriMo isn't about competing with other writers. It's about competing with yourself and whatever goals you set." Approaching it that way, I feel pretty good about what I'm doing and what I'm writing. It's a big stinking mess at this point, but after everything's laid out I feel pretty sure I can straighten it up a bit after about a thousand edits.
Excelsior.
2 comments:
A whole continent?
You saw my post in the forums, then :)
Yes...actually a whole planet now. It's the fantasy world, though, not the real world. Basically a big giant field of nothing is growing, slowly making everything in this other world vanish. Or at least so it appears.
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