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Writing and Publishing Fiction
Nearly serious fiction related diversions for the casual or more active writer.
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Obligatory Statistically Invalid Online Poll
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Some time ago, I signed up for July Novel Writing Month, which of course, is a writing contest identical to National Novel Writing Month, held in November. What are all of these novel writing months? The goal of these contests is to write a 50,000 word novel. The prize is having written a 50,000 word novel.
My specialty has been short stories, so this contest should be particularly challenging. I will be on a sabbatical of sorts as I focus my time and energy on this challenge. Don't worry, I will continue to post to Unpublished Guy, documenting my journey in the spirit of Captain Robert Scott's race to the South Pole and Sir John Franklin's 1854 Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.
Also, expect to see several guest bloggers posting in their areas of writing and publishing expertise.
 William Blake, Poet & Engraver, have begun production of my new clothing line of Illuminated Smocks called Tyger, Tyger Washing Bright. With this line consists of Illuminated Smocks: I have joined others practiced in the graphic arts in creating a clothing line to realize my vision of Heaven and Hell reconciled. Unlike the idiot Swedenborg, who has not Illuminated Smocks, my undergarments are formed by a Dragon Man & Unam'd forms in a Printing House of Hell. Hold eternity in the small of your back with William Blake Illuminated Smocks & recall; Eternity is in love with the productions of time. Aside from singing with the white cotton of the Lamb, they are appropriately priced. Exuberance is Beauty and worth an additional guinea or two.
Often I find writing to be a thoroughly unenjoyable task. It's no wonder I haven't published anything when I can't finish writing anything. Even when I employ the Mashed Potato Method of fiction writing, I get stuck where I just start thinking too much. Right about step three when the writing starts getting more detail-oriented. Then the mental debates begin—about word choice, sentence order and structure, sorting through underlying meanings and symbolism that begin to surface and whether I should develop them. Completing the short story starts feeling like I am working on an assembly line gutting chickens with arthritic hands that are seizing up into in some malformed claws. Except in the case of writing it is my brain that gets knotted up.
Chicken Processing Assembly Line as Metaphor for Writing Cerebral Fiction
source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-405105/Chicken-factory-workers-better-battery-hens.html
Given current events following the election in Iran, I thought it would be appropriate to create a fiction reading list for Iranian writers. Unfortunately, my knowledge of writers, classic or contemporary, outside of the Western canon is shockingly deficient. I have a handful of African and Asian writers: a Mishima novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and a few others. I have Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz on my bookshelf, but that would be Arabic, not Persian.
Given that, I did a search on Iranian fiction on Amazon.
What might some of John Gardner's Art of Fiction exercises looked like if he had a pathological obsession for Zen koans and parlour games?
The Land of the Lost was one of many cheesy and cheap Saturday morning programs that I watched when I was a kid. Like several other similar Seventies programs by creators Sid and Marty Kroft, the show featured live actors negotiating sets that delivered all the Styrofoam boulders, costumes with visible seams, and puppets you could expect from a low budget children's program. In the program, the Marshall family (Dad, son, and daughter) fall through a time-space portal while white water rafting and end up in a land of dinosaurs puppets, latex lizard men, and spray-painted pigs. As a child, I enjoyed Land of the Lost, as well as Sigmund the Seamonster, the Lost Space Saucer, The Bugaloos, HR Puffinstuff, and the Far Out Space Nuts (nice that Gilligan was able to find work, again).
I heard a snippet of an interview with Robert Goorlick on NPR while driving in the car. I heard a portion where Goorlick began to lament how contemporary literary fiction is too cerebral and then started to wax poetic about the physicality of his novel, Reliable Wife. You can listen to the audio by clicking here
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