My story "The Consultant and the Kraken" is now up at Quantum Barbarian. Click on the phrase Jeff writes great prose to see it.

This story was written quickly on impulse and I liked it so much that I sent it right in without running it through the workshop gauntlet. While that is generally a no-no of interstellar proportions, the (excellent) editor of Quantum Barbarian enjoyed it enough to accept it. Please feel free to send love mail to Tyrone Brooks, a.k.a. editor@quantumbarbarian.com.

As a side note, Tyrone's wife Jo also writes great speculative fiction, much more character-driven than my situational or idea-driven stories.

Butt has been kicked. I am a NaNoWriMo winner.

According to my word processor I hit 51,408 words this evening. I'm not sure what the official word count is, but I have been informed that I am among the winners of the contest. 50k in one month. That's epic.

Favorite quote from today's work:

I took a sip of beer. One of the advantages of working for a crook with his office in a bar is that his office is in a bar.
My phone rang.
"Jake, my name's Keen. You want me to find out anything I can on these three guys, right?"
The voice was smoother than baby diarrhea and I told him so.


What? You want to actually know about the novel? Well the beginning has been written, and the ending has been written, and lots of the stuff that goes in between has been written as well. However, the novel needs a lot more writing (not to mention some very serious editing). The work will continue, but not tonight. Tonight, I celebrate.

44 600 words. I am a machine.

Thanks to a couple of days of late nights and early mornings, I have added 13,000 words over three and a half days. I now have hope of achieving the mystical 50 000 word goal by midnight Sunday (actually midnight Sunday in San Francisco, so if REALLY desperate I actually have until 9 AM Monday morning).

Favorite quote from this morning's output:

"I took the first available flight and zombied my way to Addis Ababa by routing through Milan. Quite frankly I don't remember it--I spent the time on the plane and in the terminal either drinking or sleeping because I had a lot of catching up to do. Besides, airports all look pretty much identical from the inside anyway. All that changes is the contents of the bottles of alcohol in the duty free shops."

Hmmmm. My attempts to change the format of the blog are not working. Try, try again.

Ahhh, where was I. Right. At 28,020 words. Sadly, a week later, I am only at 31,800. This means that, in order to hit 50,000, I need to crank out on the order of 3,000 words per day.

This is possible, but deeply unlikely.

Check out the contest at National Novel Writing Month

As I left off in the last post, the novel does promise to be brilliant. Disjointed, non-sensical, clumsy, and immature, but brilliant. I hit 28,020 words today. My favorite quote from today's output is:

"So look, I'm an honest tax-paying citizen now. Actually I've always been tax-paying. The honest bit is new."

Andi and Kineke are working out some ideas for my web site, and doing a phenomenal job. The test page is here:

www.jeffspock.com

I have decided to write a novel this month. What the heck, with all those ideas buzzing around in my head, why not just sit down and do it?

So I sat down and I'm doing it. Truth be told, in order to give additional incentive to my efforts I have signed up as part of National Novel Writing Month--details can be found at www.NaNoWriMo.org.

Which novel, you ask? Ah, the one about the technophobic private eye round about the year 2015. Brilliant, I promise.