Weekend Writing Warriors 7/07/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

I’m now referring to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. Set-up: Sandy has brought Neal back to the mansion the band shares. The rest of the band is not home. Sandy falls asleep and Neal roams through the rooms. He finds a room full of musical instruments. He wanders around the room, reflecting on the last several hours.

This section has been significantly condensed to fit the 8 sentence limit.

Neal dropped onto the piano bench. What if I just done somethin’ stupid, what if I can’t make it here? Me, work for a bunch of filthy rich Anglo musicians? I shouldn’a let ’im talk me into it . . . nothin’ to go back to, blood on my hands.

Thoughts went around and around, bouncing off each other until he pressed his hands against his eyes. Getting to his feet, he saw that a small lamp on top of the piano shone onto a bunch of papers; the top sheet was covered in handwriting and something that might have been a title, “New Day”, with Sandy’s name under that.

Neal read it all the way through and came back to the first lines.

Maybe Sandy didn't just say that stuff to get out of the barrio . . . tomorrow Neal would find out.

I cut the lyrics from the excerpt but for those interested, here they are:

Sun comes up over a brand new world

Got to take my dreams, fulfill that promise

Full of hope, the sky unfurled

It makes me want to still be honest

Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D

Weekend Writing Warriors 6/30/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

I’m now referring to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. Sandy and Neal enter the mansion through a rear door, which leads them into a kitchen easily twice as big as any Neal has ever seen. 

Sandy got a glass from a cupboard, poured water from the sink, and drank it down. “Do you want some?”

“Got anything else?”

“Yeah. Come on.”

Sandy’s sneakers didn’t make any sound on the thick rug in the hall. They passed a living room on the right and on the left, a huge hall opened to the ceiling two floors up. In the middle of the hall, a pair of stairways curved upward to a balcony, with a gigantic sparkly crystal light hanging over the stairs . . . on a couple of the walls, fancy-framed paintings with little lights on above them showed Asian people in flowing robes . . . another wall had long strips of paper covered in Japanese or Chinese writing . . . two fountains set into the wall on both sides of the wide front door gurgled softly.

Neal’s mouth fell open. Where the fuck am I!

Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D

Weekend Writing Warriors 6/23/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

I’m now referring to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. After last week’s excerpt, there’s a discussion about Sandy’s offer to set Neal up in training as a roadie with the rock band Sandy is part of. They also discuss living arrangements for Neal and one more very important detail that Neal’s not happy about but agrees to. The pair arrive at the enormous mansion Sandy and his band live in; Sandy explains that before the band hit it big, they couldn’t afford to live separately and the band’s sound grew out of the guys spending so much time together, so they kept the living arrangement. Sandy pulls his car into the huge garage, puts his arms on top of the steering wheel and drops his head onto them. He speaks first: 

“Thank you God, I promise to donate more to charities.”

Neal grimaced. “Shit, you believe that? God?”

Sandy turned his head to look Neal straight in the eyes and said, “Yeah I do, because there’s no other explanation for a lot of things. I thought Hispanics were strong believers.”

“Some Latinos are. Lupe’s always goin’ on about God an’ some of the cholos go to the church with their families. I only see el Diablo.”

“I guess I should have expected that. . . come on inside.”

Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D

Weekend Writing Warriors 6/16/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

This excerpt picks up from the last one. I’m now referring to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. He’s caught off guard by Sandy’s implication that he wants to do more than just give Neal money and let him take off wherever he wants to go. Neal speaks first:

      “You fuckin’ with me? ‘Cause I don’t need nobody.”

      “Maybe. Look, it bothers me that if I send you off on your way, I’ll never know what happens to you. Renee expected me to do something to help her but I pretty much told her to fend for herself and she’s dead now. I just can’t do that again. I can set you up for training as one of our roadies.”

      Neal’s eyes grew round as the moon.

Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the 8 sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D

Want to support a fellow writer?

You know I feel pretty stupid for not thinking of this earlier, but here is Art Edwards' Kickstarter page for publishing his third rock novel, Badge.

For those who don't know, Art was co-founder of The Refreshments and played bass. He went on to do the theme music for the TV show King of The Hill, write his first rock novel Stuck Outside of Phoenix which was made into a feature film, and wrote his second novel Ghost Notes which won the 2009 PODBRAM Award for best work of contemporary fiction. Later, he was one of the instructors for the short-lived Basement Writing Workshop, which is where I "met" him. He gave me great advice for my novel Street Glass, advice I'm still working on more than two years later.

Art proved to be a superior teacher -- tons of patience, open-minded, always ready with a positive comment yet didn't pump me up when something I wrote was bad, just to make a paying customer happy.

The guy has had pieces published (or they're upcoming) in The Writer, Writers' Journal and Pear Noir! (#8 (2012): 64-67), and online at The Los Angeles Review, Word Riot, The Collagist, elimae, PANK, JMWW, Bartleby Snopes, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown and writersdojo.org.  Read more about him, his writing, and his music at his blog. And please, do the right thing and contribute to Art's Kickstarter! I did. We no longer live in closed, small communities, cut off from each other. Writing and publishing are now so much more interactive than they ever were. If you were trying to self-publish, wouldn't you want to know that other writers supported you enough to help make that dream a reality?

And honestly, a guy who's willing to post a photo of himself online wearing an owl shirt deserves support :D

And thanks.

Looking for WeWriWa?

I'm not participating this week, sorry. I've had a very tiring week which included staying at work for an extra hour Friday evening then falling asleep on the sofa quite by accident. There's no way my brain will be at a functional level Sunday morning! I'll visit people Sunday evening and maybe Monday evening too. I hope to be back at WeWriWa next week though I warn you, I need to get my laptop's keyboard replaced and that could take up to a week. Long story short, I've knocked off 3 keys along with the little bits underneath that attach the keys to the board, and I really need that delete key!

So if you've stopped by my blog, I thank you very much for your loyalty and ask that you check back.

Lastly, something to cheer all of us up, because Western New York has not seen much of  the scene below in the last month or so:
(I am not a duck or a fish! I want sunshine!)

Image by Dan at freedigitalphotos.net

Weekend Writing Warriors 6/2/13

Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.

While some of the plot is subject to change (draft two is a pretty early draft, after all) the basic elements will stay, as will the character "voices." So these excerpts will still give you a good idea of how the plot plays out and what the characters are like. The year is 1986, in Los Angeles, California.

All the previous excerpts are collected here.

Part I’m skipping: Sandy’s intensely relieved to be driving his red Ferrari up the Harbor Freeway again instead of lying in some street in a rotten part of town. Still, he can’t help but think about the Terrible Thing that happened to Razor (who has said his real name is Neal) that night, what the future might be like for somebody who spent half his life in a street gang, and he thinks about certain people from his own past. Sandy says he thinks Neal has potential and adds,

“You can think on your feet and you’re not afraid to take risks, but it’s expecting too much to just let you go out on your own without anything to fall back on. You don’t have friends or family to back you up if times get tough. What do you think about learning skills you could take to any job, instead of a narrow skill like fixing cars?”

“I don’t get it, I almos’ slit your throat.”

Sandy grimaced at the memory. “Yeah, I know, but you didn’t. A few years ago, somebody told me I turned her away when she needed help. I can’t change the past but I can do something about the future.”

Tag along at Weekend Writing Warriors as we blog hop all over the world, reading fabulous snippets from works in progress, works just published and some just about to be. It's interesting to read comments and see who had the same impression as you and who read the snippet a different way. Personally, I not only love the kind things people say about my own story, but the 8 sentence limit forces me to think about what needs to be said and what doesn't. That's very valuable for a writer!

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Comments gratefully accepted :-D