No really, please don’t.\u00a0 I don’t know why I loathe the term so much, but I do.\u00a0 Let’s make a deal: You don’t say the word and I won’t start muttering sick and violent revenge fantasies about those who irk me.\u00a0 Trust me; you don’t want to hear this.\u00a0 It’s completely evil and not reflective of what a fine person I am otherwise.<\/p>\n
Also, “staycation” (shudder) doesn’t really apply.\u00a0 It is true that I will neither be going into work nor getting on an airplane.\u00a0 However, I won’t be on vacation at all.\u00a0 I am fortunate enough to work at one of those companies that pay me while they close the office for a week during the holidays, which makes them 1\/52 totally awesome.<\/p>\n
Last year, I spent most of the week in Granada, Nicaragua.\u00a0 It was wonderful for a number of reasons.\u00a0 First, I got the hell out of the country.\u00a0 It was the first time doing that in almost nine years.\u00a0Second, I was able to blow the dust off my Spanish and put it to use.\u00a0 There were some English speakers there, but not many.\u00a0 Mostly though, Granada is a cool town and I had a great time there.\u00a0The people are very nice (and admirably patient about my broken Spanish) and I felt happy to support their tourist industry.\u00a0 Sorry about the Contras<\/em>, guys.\u00a0 No hard feelings, right?<\/p>\n This year, the tentative destination was Victoria, BC.\u00a0 After the tropical heat of Nicaragua and then Roat\u00e1n in July, cold and miserable seemed like a good change of pace.\u00a0 Victoria is supposed to be beautiful with its old-timey parliament building, gardens, and waterfront.\u00a0 It is also the birthplace of the Dayglo Abortions, a punk-rock band utterly devoid of Canadian politeness.\u00a0 How could I not want to go?<\/p>\n Well, I just didn’t feel like it.\u00a0 I had dawdled over deciding where to go for long enough that the cheap seats had already been bought.\u00a0 I ultimately decided that I’d get out there in the spring, maybe make a four-day weekend out of it.<\/p>\n So what shall I be doing other than growing cobwebs between my ass and chair?\u00a0 The answer is Dead Sexy<\/em>, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2011.\u00a0 OK, maybe calling it “novel” is a stretch.\u00a0 It’s a rough draft of approximately 51K words.\u00a0 It glorifies cynicism and it gratuitously violent.\u00a0 Those are its good qualities.<\/p>\n I’ve made some preliminary stabs at revisions earlier this year, mostly cleaning up the stuff I wrote when I was feeling dead tired, but determined to make my word-count quota and didn’t care how idiotic it sounded coming out.<\/p>\n What made me unmotivated to dive in any further was that I had a main character who was still a mystery to me.\u00a0 I understood him on some level and I tried to make sure he didn’t do or say anything completely out of character, but there was always something missing.<\/p>\n Weirdly enough, it was during this year’s NaNoWriMo that it finally dawned on me.\u00a0 Milo’s motivations in Dead Sexy<\/em> became clear because of how different he is from Andy in Andrew’s World<\/em>(the 2012 project).\u00a0 Without giving anything away, let’s just say that he’s not a bad guy but far from a pillar of virtue.\u00a0 I know, I know, it’s silly to insist on character-driven narrative when you’re writing zombie horror.\u00a0 And yet, that does matter to me because Milo is now worth writing about.<\/p>\n So that’s what I’ll be doing.\u00a0 I don’t know how much I can get done in a week, but I think I’ll have Dead Sexy<\/em> in a lot better shape at the end of it.\u00a0 Wish me luck, and pretty please, don’t call it a staycation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No really, please don’t.\u00a0 I don’t know why I loathe the term so much, but I do.\u00a0 Let’s make a deal: You don’t say the word and I won’t start muttering sick and violent revenge fantasies about those who irk me.\u00a0 Trust me; you don’t want to hear this.\u00a0 It’s completely evil and not reflective … Continue reading Don’t Call It a “Staycation”<\/span>