I can’t decide which I like better, the Radiohead version of “Single Ladies”

or the Cleverys’ version

One of my favourite writers, Peter Watts, has been afflicted by flesh-eating disease. Sounds like’s going to be all right, but wow.

Hit the 175-page mark today. Researched prosthetic limbs — which led into an accidental detour into prosthetic tentacles. Yeah, we’re a freak species. Also making an appearance in the book:

– subprime ghost neighbourhoods

– Ronald Reagan

– a shootout with pepper spray.

I also took  the time to shoot a background video for my story “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.”

Plus, you know: Valentine’s Day.

All right, back to the bodies.

So it took me one night to write an 8,700-word short story. Then it took me two days to cut 2,000 words from it to make it a publishable length. Now it’s taken me two days to cut 200 words to bring it in at 6,500 words (a number that has meaning only to me).

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s going to take me to come up with a title.

About 44,000 words in now. And many more bodies since the last update. Maybe I should call this book The Apocalypse Corpses.

I’m thinking about doing short video intros for each of my stories and books. Here’s one I recorded yesterday for my latest story, “we continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” which was recently published by This magazine.

we continue to pray from peterdarbyshire on Vimeo.

UPDATE: The article was viewed a couple of thousand times in the two days since it’s been up, so I guess there’s some interest in the subject.

Book Madam has just posted an article about self-publishing on Kindle and the future of the publishing industry. Please is one of the featured books. It’s getting a lot of hits, so go check it out.

Back when The Warhol Gang first came out, I gave away copies of a new story, “We continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” to people who reviewed the book favourably. It was my way of saying thank you for taking the time to engage with the book. Now This magazine has been kind enough to publish the story, after a bit of sharp editing by Stuart Ross. And it has fresh art! Check it out here.

With a short story!

I’ve written a couple of supernatural western stories — it’s a genre fetish of mine — and I’ve been itching to write another one. It must be some sort of infection. Anyway, the idea came to me yesterday morning — it’s High Plains Drifter meets… well, I’m not going to tell you quite yet.

I couldn’t put off writing it. I knew I’d be able to jump back into The Apocalypse Corpse with no problem, but I worried if I left this new idea too long I’d forget about it, or work it out too much in my mind and get bored with it. So I figured I’d put the novel aside for a few days and write the story. But I managed to write the whole thing in one feverish sitting, accompanied with much maniacal cackling — that was my son playing downstairs. I write in silence. Seven thousand words later, I had a decent first draft at midnight.

I’ll let it sit for a while, because I always let stories settle for a bit before I return to them. In the meantime, I went back into The Apocalypse Corpse today and got in another seven pages. I don’t think the novel even knows I cheated on it.

Now what the hell am I going to do with a supernatural western…?

I hit the 130-page mark in The Apocalypse Corpse today, and I’ve only been seriously working on it since Jan. 1. Pretty happy about that.

One of the things that’s allowed me to make such progress is by skipping certain parts of the book and leaving them for later. It’s a trick I picked up when writing The Warhol Gang. In that book, when I ran into some plot roadblocks, I just detoured around those scenes and wrote what I knew came next. Often doing that allowed me to see what I needed to fill in those scenes I couldn’t figure out.

I’ve been doing the same thing with The Apocalypse Corpse when it comes to flashbacks. My narrator has amnesia of sorts — it’s complicated — and is trying to piece together parts of his life through flashbacks. I wasn’t happy with the flashbacks I’d been coming up with, so I stopped writing them and just concentrated on the present-day plot. Then last night when I driving through the Downtown Eastside — just commuting, I swear — it suddenly came to me what the flashbacks meant. It was like one of those card-shuffling machines — everything just snapped into place instantly. And it was all because of one of the other characters I’ve been developing. He’s grown in a way I wasn’t expecting when I sketched the plot outline, and I saw a way that he related to the flashbacks and changed everything.

So now I have the flashback sequences ready to be inserted, although I’ll probably wait to do that until I take a natural pause in writing the present-day stuff. They’re perfect, and fit into the action more smoothly now, but I couldn’t have written that into the outline. It only came to me from writing 130 pages worth of story.

So I guess the lesson is develop an outline that’s clear enough to let you jump to any part of it if you run into problems. And the rest of the book will fill itself in as you go. Like magic!

All right, now I’m off to edit some pages in one of my other new books.