Trans/plant/portation

This is an excerpt of the novel I’ll be drafting this November as part of NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. Just a teaser. I may post excerpts on this blog from time to time as I make my way through.

One itchy elbow, right foot falling into a pins-and-needles sensation, and the slight stress from wondering if the glob of putty above my left eye was going to run down my forehead: this was the sum of my bodily annoyances. I tried to see the clock on the wall ahead of me, but with my glasses off I needed to squint to read the hands. Hopefully I was near the end of this test.

I heard a metal click but knew not to move in response to it.

“How are you doing, hon,” asked Cindy, the lab technician. That must mean it was okay to move my jaw to answer her.

“I’m okay. Itchy, and I think my right foot’s asleep.”

“Go ahead and scratch if it’s not your head, and shake your foot a little.”

I hadn’t moved more than two millimeters and the seismograph thing set up next to me went wild, scratching out thick, dark lines on the paper. Well, I presumed that’s what it was doing. I didn’t need to look at it to know what my brainwaves looked like. I scratched my elbow through my shirt, but that wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t dig under my sleeve without upsetting the wires. I pounded my foot on the floor, trying to get it startled enough to wake up. Without thinking, I reached up to stop the glop on my head from getting in my eyes. I knew better than to touch anything other than the tip of my nose, but once I’d started moving itches popped up everywhere, and I forgot myself. Read More…

Everyone loves a good character. The converse is also true. Weak, two-dimensional characters kill a story because what hooks most of us is our interest in the personalities depicted by the writer. After all, we’re writing, usually, about conflict between people, and most stories end by showing how someone changed from the start of the tale. Thus readers are looking for people who feel real, with whom we can identify or about whom we can feel superior, especially in the case of comedy. Read More…

It’s not as short as Hemingway’s shortest story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) but seeing as I don’t compare myself to him, it doesn’t matter. It is, however, my shortest story, barely scratching 450 words.

She feels the pressure at her knees, because this roof is on more of a slant than the hill behind her house, and she’s only used to running down dirt and grass. Something about this hard tile surface hurts.

Looking toward the sunset she’s excited by how far her vision extends. She’s only ever seen the curve of the earth when she visits the coast with her parents, and somehow, it never seemed as powerful a view as this does now. She wishes, for a snatch of time, that she could just extend this sunset into tomorrow. Read More…

I’m a regular reader of the various “How I found my agent” stories that pop up all over the Web at a slow simmering rate. Part of it is because I enjoy a good pick me up tale in the midst of all the mass-murder, spree-killing, pandemic-virus, certain-doom narratives that flood the information superhighway every day. But I’ll come to Jesus and add that I’m also looking for patterns, as anecdotal as the occasional agent article is. Is there something successful authors are doing that I should adopt as a practice? Is there any kind of aspect to their attitudes, their community base, their writing environment that I can leverage? Read More…

I put all of my Friday Flash stories and a bonus short story in one collection, titled Spinning Around a Sun: Stories by Everett Maroon, and slapped it up on Amazon for their Kindle reader, at the bargain basement price of $2.99. Hey, as an author, I’ll take what I can get in terms of income, so hopefully $3 isn’t too much to ask for months of my work. Anyway, feel free to purchase one!

This is an excerpt from Bumbling into Body Hair that I may strike out entirely as I get my word count down to more publisher-attractive levels. But I thought I would share it here out of the goodness of my heart, and because it was a troubling moment within the LGBT community. One of the places I had the hardest time transitioning was among my queer peers, which shouldn’t have been the case.

Jeffrey and I were late to bowling. By the time we got to the alley, there were only five minutes of practice left. This was also annoying because in each of the previous weeks in this new league we’d joined, they ran behind schedule on the practice and start of play. Not so this week.

No sooner had I sat down to put on my shoes than the president of the league was sitting next to me. Buddy was a round, older, very smiley man who was every bit as laid back as the last president of the other league was over-engaged. I liked Buddy.

Buddy looked serious. “Everett, can I talk to you about something?” Read More…

Last week, Jane Friedman, an alum of Writer’s Digest and an advocate for writers working to get published, posted an article over at WD in which she steered very new writers away from hiring professional Web designers when those writers are just starting out on the Web. I can appreciate advice like figuring out what one wants from a Web presence before dropping money on some pricey design that may turn out to be a poor fit for one’s needs. But to me, this just means that writers should spend some time assessing those needs before they do anything else, even before they select a theme on WordPress, for example. Read More…

A good friend asked me this morning where I find my ideas, and the first image that popped into my head was an Easter egg hunt. On the heels of this sweet memory appeared a roundhouse punch, something delivered in a grimy tavern. And so I had my answer. Sometimes I find my ideas, and sometimes they find me. Read More…

A joke I’ve told over the years is that I have a 1950s education because I went to Catholic school in the 70s and they were twenty years behind. But it remains true that I learned penmanship using the Palmer method and I was forced to diagram my sentences as a means of mastering grammar and syntax. I’m sure I would have learned the difference between a complex and a compound sentence without diagramming, but hey, I had the additional instruction in seeing how words make patterns, and looking back, I appreciate the sisters’ determination even if it meant a lot of embarrassment in front of a chalkboard.

Before everyone rolls their eyes and runs off lest I carry on about sentence diagramming, know that it isn’t the focus of this post. Yippee! Actually, I want to talk about flow diagrams for novel writing. Read More…

I haven’t spent quality time in a writing workshop in years, and I was disappointed to find that the LGBT writing group in Seattle doesn’t really have a workshop per se. After college and graduate school studying American literature I don’t really have any more pep for talking about books, especially if I have to pay $100 a month to do it.

I went online to find some critique groups and I came up with three: two for speculative fiction and one for long format work. After underestimating Emerald City traffic congestion, I turned around and came back home from my first foray, now much better educated about where exactly Bellingham is, and which is the best on ramp to I-5 from my house. I will always marvel at how places so close together can take so long to reach in something as technologically advanced as a car. Read More…