words, words, words...

here's a list of the things that i'm working on:

this is hardcore - fully formed, this high concept thriller is about love and death and werewolves. it's about the male fear of losing control and power as told through three chapters: romance, horror and psycho. i am two-thirds done the first draft. the cover is completed, thanks to jen's awesome willingness to model for me (thanks babe!) i will probably debut it here and on conquerednationpress.com in the next month or two, as soon as i'm done the first draft. really, it will take several months to rework the draft into something that is even remotely worth publishing.

live acoustic (open fire) - my experimental piece, so far about a girl named sloan. it is experimental because i've never had a female lead character (most of my writing tends to be male dominated. go figure. however, this could be a disaster, coming from a guy who only understands guys and writes about guys. just look at what happened to nick hornby and how to be good. just kidding. only slightly.) also, i tend to meticulously plan my books before writing. usually i am unable to write the actual book unless i have a beginning and end already thought up and written. this one i'm leaving open ended. it could end up as a short story, it could be a novella, it could be a full-fledged novel. who knows? i have no idea as to what the book will be about. so far, all i do know is that it's about sloan and it will have a happy ending. another first for me. personally, i think happy endings are overrated, but sometimes you just need one, and the right one at the right time can be just the thing. so far, here's all i have on the book:

To be free. It’s as much a state of love and trust as anything ever was. If you want me, she told him, you’re going to have to follow through. This is unlike anything that has ever been. Uniqueness, she told him, emboldens the spirit, and it is embodied by what we share. I, she told him, want you every day. It’s not enough to put me in your liner notes. I am not a thank you. All dressed up, she told him, just like you want me, but you don’t give a damn. Is it possible, she told him, that this is so obvious? She told him all of these things through tears and stinging slaps and ended up in the place she deep down inside was afraid that she’d be: the backseat of a taxi cab.

Falling down on her knees, caught between everything she’s wanted and everything she’s never been able to have, she doesn’t deal well. Down on her knees, wrestled there and pinned by the weight of it all...


revolutionaries wanted - i really liked this title. i want to write a political opus, and i figured this would be a great title. all i've got is the image of a guy with a big-ass beard wearing a white t-shirt and boxer shorts with slippers. it's funny: i find myself wanting to stretch further and further from where i began. desert sessions... an anti-corporate love story was my generational piece on us twenty-something twixters, those left behind in the dust of generation x; this is hardcore is my genre thriller piece; revolutionaries wanted will be my political opus, which brings me to the final piece on my very full plate...

i still love the bomb - originally thought up as a novella regarding a rip off of homer's odyssey, it has now turned into what will be my modern epic. i haven't decided yet if i want to make it a sci-fi piece. the problem i have with sci-fi is that writing techno-babble really sucks for me, and in order for it to be good sci-fi, it still has to have good science in it (at least that's the sci-fi that i like). at any rate, i know i have to live more in order to write this, so this will be on the back burner until i am fifty or sixty. here's a bit of what i have written down for this. it's about some guy trying to get laid at a wake:

I’ve never known a girl like her before. In the all-too-short span that I’ve known her, she’s always been someone else’s girl. She was Mark’s girl, Drew’s girl, Sebastian’s girl, Matthew’s girl, and for a brief two week period she was Suzie’s girl, before ending up as Keith’s girl. I suppose she was my girl for two hours Friday night, but Friday night seems so fucking long ago. I sidle up to her and press myself against her, cornering her. She’s not wearing a bra. She looks at me with those steel eyes of hers. She just stands there as she lets my hands slide up her hips, pulling her dress up. “What do you think you’re doing?” she suddenly hisses. She squirms away from me. She’s being vicious again. She’s like this most of the time. Everything is done on her timetable. “Go fuck yourself,” she mouths at me silently as she disappears around a corner. It's a shame, really. There's cancer, Aids, crime, war; with all the things in the world that need fixing, none of it seem to matter because all i want to do is get laid.

finally, i have something called, life, the existential hell. i don't know if this will be a book or what. i just like the line. maybe it'll be the name of a chapter in one of my books or something.

my fellow conquered nation peers are also hard at work on some projects. len has spoken about a satirical look at what the world would be like if the christian right won in the end. this is incredibly ambitious with lots of research involved, which means automatically it's something that i don't have the patience to write myself. caroline is reworking an adult fable (at least, that's what i think it is) about a girl and her rats that just ends up a little on this side of sadistic. speaking of sadistic, adam has something hidden away involving some guy that goes psycho on a girl that makes fun of him or something. adam doesn't really divulge much; it's like pulling teeth trying to get him to talk about it let alone let me read some of it.

so that's the long and short of it. er, more long than short i suppose. now, back to trying to finish this is hardcore...