I’ll admit, I’ve been mailing it in a bit. I’ve been still doing one thing a day, and I’m roughly fifteen thousand words ahead of where I wanted to be to this point (building up slowly), so I don’t feel horrible about it, and overall, I’m ahead of the game.
But yeah.
This might be the least I’ve written in a day… ever.
Target: 700 words
Written: 24 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Just A Geek, Wil Wheaton
Comics: Saga 33-36
Music: One, The BeatlesThan to be in a v… wait. No.
There’s nothing finer than a cup of coffee, a mix of David Bowie/Rise Against/Nine Inch Nails in your ears, as you finalize the edits on the fourth draft of your novella.
Thirteen scenes I hope to combine to six.
I know you can’t sell a novella. I’m hoping to package it as The Mungk & Other Bullshit, which I realize will be a tough sell on bookstore shelves, but it’s also an eyecatcher. It was suggested to me to call the book The Little House In The Country, but that sounds fucking boring and generic.
The Mungk is a weird name. And people love swearing.
You see the word Mungk and ask, what the fuck is that (although you might be one of those people who don’t swear like longshoremen, so you might say, “what a strange looking word, perhaps I should inquire as to its meaning” and then drink some tea with your pinky out and adjust your monocle, you fucking weirdo), and then pick it up.
Pick it up and maybe buy it. And then maybe that money goes through the various systems of skimming off the top from the store, the distributor, the publisher, agents, managers and probably some grifting professional organization that claims to advocate for authors, but actually keeps them poor and begging, like the RIAA and MPAA do to movies and music, and then finally, that pittance will arrive in my bank account, where it’s probably already been paid out in an advance and I’ll actually get nothing extra for it at all.
But if enough of you do it…
Well, shit.
Break out the fucking tea.
Target: 700 words
Written: 302 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Comics: Saga 21-24
Music: On Your Own, The Verve (sometimes, it's all so appropriate)The poor girl, she’s so nervous.
The first crack of thunder in the far distance and she’s losing her shit and I have to go sit downstairs on the couch with her until she settles enough to get one of her calming treats in her, and then, maybe, we can go back to bed, where she’ll shiver like a leaf in my arms until the drugs kick in and the lightning stops flashing and the thunder fades and she falls gently asleep, allowing me to do the same.
How’s that for a run-on?
What can I say?
I’m tired of not sleeping, but I love the little girl.
Target: 700 words
Written: 702 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith
Comics: Saga 13-16
Music: On A Train, MudmenFourth time’s the charm, is that it?
I suspect I have five or six iterations to go.
It might be eleventh time’s the charm.
Or twentieth.
Or nine hundred and seventh.
I suspect I am a poor scribe. I am in progress.
Aren’t we all?
Target: 700 words
Written: 200 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way
Comics: Danger Girl: Revolver 2-4, Danger Girl/Army Of Darkness 5
Music: Oh No, OK GO (so underrated, these guys)I know it probably looks like I’ve completely checked out on writing, but I’m just in a lull.
My overall total of written words and time spent on The Mungk still exceeds its target by about twenty thousand words, so if I take a few days to regroup before the draft, I have the leeway. It’s one of the reasons why I keep a daily target and a total target.
That way, if there’s days where things go off the rails and the demands on my life leave me with barely time to take a piss, let alone crank out a few hundred words, I have the room.
And this past week?
I’m near to bursting from holding it.
This can’t be healthy.
Target: 700 words
Written: 54 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Hans Christian Anderson's Fairy Tales
Comics: Danger Girl 0-3
Music: Odds & Sods, The WhoI ain’t got it.
Beck’s better at it than I. So is Flava Flav, Eminem, Ernest Hemingway, Erica Jong and Jules Verne.
I ain’t got it.
My niece raps better than I do. The other one sings better.
Everyone connects better with one another.
I am a non-valence electron, there but not involved, outside the chemical process, lurking in the outer ring.
I ain’t got it.
Target: 600 words
Written: 140 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Awaken The Giant Within, Tony Robbins
Comics: Aphrodite IX: Hidden Files, Aphrodite IX v2 8-10
Music: Vivid, Living Colour
That’s what I think when I hear super rich people are having children, especially when they’re known to have been shitty little people themselves.
That poor fucking child.
And here I am, writing the length of a tweet for the thing I love.
Poor fucking child.
Target: 600 words
Written: 140 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Yellow Birds, Karen Green
Comics: Aphrodite IX v2 4-7
Music: Viva Wisconsin, Violent Femmes (I don't know what it is about these guys, but I connect so completely with literally everything they've ever done, except Vancouver, which sucks)There are certain authors and creations that I’m in absolute awe of.
The ability of the Jasons to capture the feel of the South so completely in Southern Bastards. Chip Zdarsky and Matt Fraction’s incredible wit and compassion for their character’s rich internal lives in Sex Criminals. Chuck Palahniuk’s ability to create complexity out of simplicity, to blend “clever art” with something more raw.
The sheer fucking depth and expanse, both internally and in the world-building of Monstress.
Marjorie Liu has created something truly incredible, a world so full and dense that it’s hard to believe it belongs to a comic book. I’m not sure that Game of Thrones is this massive, and the written word allows for much greater detail, in general. Sana Takeda’s extremely detailed art gives that same sense so beautifully, that one almost might believe it’s building the mythos and the world on its own.
I love stuff that requires multiple readings in order to catch all the details, things where that second, third, fourth reading continues to add to the understanding, to improve the experience, to heighten the depth of one’s immersion into the material.
I’m so on board with this series, I kind of don’t ever want it to end (though it inevitably will need to, as all things do, save Batman).
Target: 600 words
Written: 68 words, novella: The Mungk
Reading: Gate Of Ivrel, C.J. Cherryh
Comics: Monstress 51
Music: Victrola, Veruca SaltHey, chipper self.
I don’t know if it was waking up to find out the Leafs actually won in OT and live to play another day, or finishing the second draft of The Mungk, but I feel marginally better today.
The deck is shuffled, time to re-deal.
My body is still “depressed”, but I’m going to fight the cognitive dissonance of a body and mind telling me I should snuff it and focus on focus.
Get things done. Try new things. Use the mind. Let things go. It’s good for the soul.
Move, maybe a little. Enjoy my cats and dogs.
Are you buying this? I’m certainly trying to.
Target: 600 words
Written: 538 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Gate Of Ivrel, C.J. Cherryh
Comics: Monstress 47-50
Music: Vessel, BjorkIt’s the science of impact, not influence, but impact, IMPACT, something smashing into you so hard, like a monster asteroid that slams you off course, out of your steady elliptical orbit, to plummet out into space, away from your neighbours, away from the source of your light and heat, away from where you’re supposed to be, out into the endless void, where it is dark and frozen and immensely lonely and the only hope is that somehow, there’s something close enough, large enough, with enough gravity to suck you in and put you back on your axis, but the void is so big, and so empty, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be close enough to centre in your new rotation, that you’ll be in that sweet spot where life can bloom, but instead you’re cold, cold, cold, shivering without relent, or on fire, burning, bleeding, blisters bursting in poison gas…
This is the nature of trauma, and it pays to remember: there’s a hell of a lot more void than stars.
Target: 600 words
Written: 269 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: People Of The Deer, Farley Mowat
Comics: Monstress 17-20
Music: The Very Best Of The Smiths, The Smiths