scottStories

Or so goes the first line of HorrorCon, my very first online serial novella. I probably would have started with something else if I had intended at all to do one of these (they exist, right?). But I was only planning on doing an exploratory narrative to help find my characters, so this all came as a surprise, really. As I kept typing, I started having fun, so I kept going and going and going. I’ve never written anything of any real length that wasn’t a screenplay, so an eighty-nine page story with actual punctuation and stuff was kind of a major deal for me. I’m fully aware that it could suck, and that’s cool. It’s my first one, like I said, and I can’t get sued for writing it unless there’s someone reading this right now whose name is Eliza Lowell (played today by the precocious Anna Paquin, the second youngest actress to win an Academy Award) and she actually does work the Dealers’ Room at various horror conventions and is a bit of a pill head. If that’s the case, please email me right away and I promise to cease and desist. And seek some help, sweetheart. Cause if what you got coming is the same as my character, you may not want to go that route so consider these words to the wise.

I should also give a shout out to good buddy Trent Reznor (I can’t stop creating spontaneous fiction!) for his recent instrumental record Ghosts I-IV. Were it not for those thirty-six tracks, I may not have finished. In fact, if you do end up reading HorrorCon, I encourage you to download the album ($5.00, a bargain) and hit play at the first sentence – which you now know cause I put it up there, see? When you run out of songs you can just start over, or you might want to try a little Nox Arcana, specifically tracks from Transylvania, Necronomicon, Cantar De Procella, and Dark Age of Reason. It’s beautifully spooky stuff and it fits the story like a custom made coffin. Oh, yes.

Anyway, I’m going to give the story another polish this weekend, check my facts cause it’s loaded with bullshit that sounded good at the time, and research some online publishing companies. I think it would be cool to have it printed as a real book with pages and a cover and maybe even a short bio on the writer that would be a blank page – as would the page with all the blurbs about how great it is. Hey, I know: if any of you read it and want a comment in the book, post it and I’ll put it in. It’ll be rad. I’ll put your real names and everything and you can be a published critic! See, dudes and dudettes, I’m looking out for y’all. This tide rises all boats, is what I’m sayin’. So stay tuned.

That’s it for now. The next blog entry you hear will be the first installment of HorrorCon, also called Lost in Transfusion by no one in particular, but I think it would be a cool pitch. I’m not sure how many pages I’ll post at once, or how frequently, but I’m thinking perhaps ten pages a week. It’s a pretty easy read, I think, but a lot of it takes place in the heads of the characters so that might get tedious. If ten is too much or too little, do let me know, children. I think of you all as my children, you know? That doesn’t mean you can ask for keys to the car or anything, but I think it means I can come into your rooms at night tanked to the bejesus on Irish whiskey and play The Pogues on the guitar really loudly. Or something.

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you in a couple of days.

Say whuh? That don’ make no kinda sense!

I refer to a particular passage in my novella, HorrorCon, where my main character, Eliza (played in this blog entry by the extremely talented Emily Perkins), recounts the horrifying attack that left her with many holes in her life – more than she’s willing to live with. Writing it brought up some dormant awfulness within that I couldn’t really itemize in any concrete way, even though it still feels very real. I suppose I write, like most writers, by plucking from the ether of our collective experiences. I’ve never to my knowledge penned anything autobiographical, but bits and pieces of me end up in there that I recognize. The bulk of my narratives come from my response to the issues and themes that are probably floating about my personal universe and leaking into the cracks of my everyday life. I’ve never been really good at pushing things away and traipsing blithely along while “stuff” happened to other folks. Whether it’s because I’m overly curious or I feel the need to work these things out, laying out Eliza’s horrific episode helped me deal with…something. It was as if I hadn’t created her in my imagination, but that I was watching a real life unfold and reporting it so that it wouldn’t be forgotten. Perhaps that was it; I was both holding her hand and creating her horror. It’s a weird business, this writing nonsense. The thing I didn’t realize was how impossible it would be to stop once I got started.

So that’s my excuse as to why I’m not finished the story yet: I can’t stop! No, that’s not really it. Simply put, the story is telling me where to go and what it needs. I’ve set things in motion, and now I can’t bully proceedings for fear of having my characters fix me for good. You can’t cut them off if they’ve got something else to say any more than you can put them up a tree if they don’t want to be there. They make demands of me, and I must accept my station as their loyal servant – even if I do get to bring the pain. But trust me, whatever I do to them will have definite repercussions. I’m no more alone in this than Eliza. In a way we’re sharing this, and as I put her in the darkest of peril, she makes me feel it, too. I’m sorry, Eliza. And I’m not.

I finished my five today (I’m averaging a page an hour) and realized I’m coming to the end of ACT II, part one, which means it’s not working out how I originally planned. When I started, I thought it would be nice and clean and easy to grasp if I made the acts all correlate to the three different days of the convention: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I would make each day hold equal weight in page count, and the power of three would make it a taut and balanced story.

BUZZZZ. Wrong answer.

Had I bothered to look a little more closely, I would have realized that I’m actually dealing with Friday night, Saturday day and night, and Sunday day. So just by looking at that you can tell that I’ve got a fat second act as I’ve got to cover more time. And that’s fine, but damn I look a little silly to myself. There was a moment when I thought I was done, and Sunday was about two pages long. I still have that version, and it works, but not if I’m going to adapt it into an American film. So I tucked it away and kept going, cause I want people to actually see this some day.

By my calculations, based on what I know today, I’m halfway done at 72 pages. But something tells me that’s going to change. Surely, Eliza will let me know, as I continue to put her through hell and record it for posterity. In a way, I’m like the doctor/author in the story. I’ve been awakened to a responsibility that may or may not mean the end of me, but I’m inextricably drawn to seeing it out as there are things I need to learn. Cool. I can’t wait to see if I make it.

Madness. Fantastic madness.