Get Back

Well, September up and disappeared like a fart in the wind. Number of blog entries written: zero. Not good, I know, but I am getting back on track with my fiction. I've finished going through the first 100 pages of Dreamwielder, made all my editing marks, and I will begin—this week, I swear—making changes and picking up where I left off over three months ago. One of the writing groups I'm in, The Inklings II, met last weekend and we workshopped a few chapters from the novel. Apart from some minor complaints, all the feedback was positive, particularly in regard to the omniscient narrative, which is my biggest concern at this point. So my goal to finish the first draft by the new year is still intact and I'm pretty stoked about getting back to writing.

To get warmed up and back into fiction mode, I wrote a new short story last week. It's tentatively titled “Choose Your Own Romance,” and I sort of ripped the premise off from a student of mine who wrote a choose your own adventure story for a 2nd person POV assignment in my Flash Fiction class. My story is drastically different, but still, I wouldn't have thought of it without reading my student's story, so thanks, Zach! I workshopped the story tonight with my other writing group, The Soggy Biscuits, and the feedback was good, so after making a few cosmetic changes I'll be sending it off to magazines to see if I can't find a home for it.

In other writing news, two of my flash fiction pieces came out online since my last post. “And the Winner is...” came out in Zygote in My Coffee a month or so back, and “The Missionary,” a sci-fi flash fiction piece, came out just last week in the online edition of Golden Visions. You can find links to both stories in the sidebar to the right under “Publications.”

On the screen writing front, my friend and collaborator Pete Vander Pluym has decided to shelve production of Dark Days, which Eric Tryon and I had written the screenplay for. After budgeting out the project, it proved to be too expensive to shoot for a short film, and Pete is now moving forward with developing a feature length movie. It's a little disappointing, of course, to have the project shelved, but it was a good writing experience and one thing I've learned is that old projects have a way of coming back to life later down the line, so we might yet see some incarnation of Dark Days in the future.

Along those lines, Pete and I have been collaborating on a new song, “Ground Water,” that was intended for the movie soundtrack. We will be recording the song shortly, and we have half-joked around that we'll write the music for a rock opera based around the Dark Days story. Who knows? Weirder things have happened.

In other music related news, I've been helping singer/songwriter Mandy Burke with recording some new demo tracks. My role has been that of producer (I use that term loosely, mind you) and laying down some bass lines. It's cool to be helping out on someone else's project, and I hope to maybe work on some collaborative song writing projects with Mandy in the future, as her style is quite different from mine and it might result in some cool cross genre tunes.

I think that's about it. I haven't been reading anything new, haven't been to any conferences, or experienced any eye-opening events to write about, so I guess I'll call it good and get back to writing Dreamwielder. Until next time, here's to us all getting back to it, and being productive.

-Garrett Calcaterra