This one is, as you might guess, sort of taken from life. Or online life, anyway.
Morning e-mail
He: Honestly, I don’t know about this word you used. Frankly, it makes no sense at all. Sorry.
I: What do you mean? It’s slangy, but pop culture is a perfectly cromulent form of expression.
He: Jesus. Not Simpsons quotes too. Buffy and Homicide were ubiquitous enough, God knows, but the Simpsons has been on for fourteen years. If you’re gonna start doing that, I’m gonna want more coffee.
I: I can’t help it if you’re a killjoy. Or if I retain more than you do.:)
He: Yes. I’m very envious of your scary “Rain Man” quoting talent. If I tried to keep all that stuff, my brain would be like dried spaghetti. I don’t know where you put it all.
I: Maybe it fills up the space where my organizational skills should be.
He: That could very well be. But that’s no excuse to be hiding out in e-mail instead of writing, slacker.
For all you writers in search of an agent, or for those wrestling with the rejection letter issue, my own agent, Jennifer Jackson, just posted up some wonderful, wonderful advice in her livejournal, and gave me permission to link it here:
[link]
Marked for intent perusal at a later date. DAmn, the whole agent issue makes my stomach hurt.
Finish the book first, Constance, then worry about that.
wrod.
I'm not even done with my "shitty first draft" yet.(Thank you, Anne Lamott)
I went for the easy words. Blame the carbs.
Drabble:
The yawn felt like it nearly split her face in two. Today, the afterlunch lethargy threatened to put her face down into the test bench with all its flashing beacons and winking LEDs. The fault lay directly on the spaghetti and garlic bread she’d purchased from the deli. She knew better. Avoid the tryptophan and the carbs; get a salad intead and she could stay alert throughout the afternoon. She could get some coffee to help countereffect the sleepiness, but it actually takes caffeine an hour to have a physical effect on the human body. Still, it would help, eventually.
Can I hijack away from drabbling for a moment, SVP? I need to float something.
Jenn feels I ought to do the synopsis and first 100 pages of Burden of Memory (the "what feeds on vampires" novel, now to be referred to as BoM).
So, I want to write the synopsis. The setting is Africa, a thinly-veiled version of William Holden's Hollywood community hotel in Kenya. The backers and Hollywood elite sit down to a sumptious feast on the set of a troubled movie production, as the movie's people try to get them to dole out more money to complete the film. They're fed the local animals, cooked in gourmet style.
Among the dishes is one made with monkey meat. And the monkeys are carrying a very odd little virus, that jumps species between primates, and has no effect on the people who just ate the monkey, but rather sets up in the sex line cells, and transmits to the next generation. And I want the reader the watch them eat this sumptious dinner, and also to watch the virus enter their systems and settle in and begin to mutate. It's these peoples' grandchildren who manifest the illness, which is a form of PNH: Paroxysmal nocturnal haemglobinuria. I quote my expert source on this:
This is a weird disease, cause by a mutation in the delightfully named Pig-A gene, which makes the red cells fragile. This disease can come on in early adolescence and looks like a progressive anaemia. One interesting problem is that you have to be very careful with giving transfusions to these people as they can spontaneously destroy (haemolyse) all the blood and get very sick. They also get a severe blood clots A symptom of the disease (hence the name) is they can get blood in their urine at night from time to time. A similar group of disease is Fanconi's anaemia caused by a variety of different mutations in, which again have not all been worked out so you could have some latitude there in inventing the mutation. This has been associated with radiation. These children often have other strange symptoms - abnormal kidneys, strange skeletal problems (especially of their forearms and thumbs), and odd skin pigmentation.
I'm thinking of doing it with a sort of "Hot Zone" take on the writing style.
Comments? I'm off to bank, would love some input.
Deb, interesting idea.
Susan, I forgot to congratulate you on your travel piece. Yay for getting jobs.
Karl, I'll read you tomorrow first thing.
I just got a total(writing) love letter from my college creative writing teacher...I sent him the latest clip. God, did I need that today!
Oh, Erika, yay for love letters!
Deb, your synopsis sounds delightfully creepy.
