I Caught a Glimpse of Titania and BimBam

Happy New Years! To welcome 2024, we’ll be combining forces for our writing prompt again this week. To make things seasonally appropriate, we pulled the prompt phrases from Dave Barry’s 2023 Year in Review. Just like last time, Jen goes first. We’ll alternate until Kent uses the final phrase, and the results will be beautiful to behold.

  • styling his hair with a defective Roomba
  • — we’ll call them Bill and Jane —
  • the situation is hopeless
  • with a heavy heart and an upset stomach
  • bored with balloons
  • narcissistic gasbags
  • like a cheap lawn chair at a sumo wrestler picnic
  • threat unlike any we have ever faced before
  • a sea urchin in his underdrawers
  • looks like he got kicked out of the James Bond Villain Academy for being too evil

Tune in next time part 865 & 866      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I caught a glimpse of Titania and BimBam through the gap between the front and back of the horse costume. In his passion, BimBam was so disheveled he looked like he’d taken to styling his hair with a defective Roomba. Of Titania I really could only see her feet — we’ll call them Bill and Jane — but that was enough to show me that she too was intensely committed to the moment.

I kept inching backwards, but Small Dennis resisted, making me think the situation is hopeless. What I’d seen of the clowns made me think I might be sick. It was with a heavy heart and an upset stomach that I ceased my attempted retreat lest the costume fall apart.

The grease-painted duo abruptly started making a noise that sounded like what happens when someone becomes bored with balloons just floating there on their strings, and starts rubbing them together. Or, in this case, when narcissistic gasbags rub against each other.

My back was getting tired from supporting Big Dennis. If I stood here much longer, I would probably collapse like a cheap lawn chair at a sumo wrestler picnic. But before that calamity could occur, Small Dennis and I became aware of a threat unlike any we have ever faced before. It was horrifying. BimBam started a striptease, but not the sultry striptease of a man with lust in his heart. This was the frenetic, flailing striptease of a clown with a sea urchin in his underdrawers. BimBam soon wore nothing but the scowl of a clown who looks like he got kicked out of the James Bond Villain Academy for being too evil.

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Look Back in Awe

As we’re sure you’ve noticed, 2023 is nearing the finish line. That means it’s time for us here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC to review what we accomplished throughout the year.

Our main goal for the year was to complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and that gets a big ol’ checkmark. The first draft was in the can by late summer, and we managed to squeeze in a couple of read-throughs and a sort of mini-edit to address the issues we uncovered. It might not meet the technical definition of a second draft, but whatever you call it, we’re happy with where it stands right now.

Our second goal was for Kent to retire, and again we accomplished it! (Well, Kent did. Jen cheered from the sidelines.)

Our third goal was to travel, and holy shit did we do that. We got to within 800 miles of the North Pole!

We forecast that we might edit one of the Music Novels if we wanted a substantial break from writing about ghosts between As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novels #1 and #2. That was not necessary. The timing worked out nicely to put #1 to bed shortly before heading out on our Epic Arctic Exploration, and that adventure provided more than enough of a break.

It took longer than we liked for us to get our brains out of vacation-mode, and acclimate to all Kent’s new free time. We’d optimistically anticipated working 4-5 hours a day and having the productivity of the gods. It didn’t quite work out like that, but toward the end of the year we did settle into a pretty good daily schedule that we hope to expand on in the coming year. There will be some challenges to that, which we’ll talk about next week in our preview of the coming year.

Happy new year!

 

ETA: we finished the year with 7287 words in Book 2

BimBam Tickles

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Boxing Day!

This year we’re continuing our tradition of marking the major December holiday with a tag-team writing prompt, using snippets drawn from a seasonally appropriate source. This year’s festive trove comes from the Wikipedia page about Krampus, everyone’s favorite child-eating Christmas monster. As per usual with these unusual events, Jen will start us off. Once she’s incorporated the first ingredient, she’ll turn over control of the keyboard to Kent, and so on until all ten(!) elements have been wrapped up.

  • gifts such as oranges
  • He is hairy
  • His long, pointed tongue
  • thrashes the chains for dramatic effect
  • wearing animal furs
  • It is customary to offer schnapps
  • (mostly with broken bones)
  • pursuing buxom women
  • one winter occasion
  • sometimes accompanied with bells

Tune in next time part 863 & 864      Click Here for Earlier Installments

BimBam Tickles, the Iron Clown of Svenborgia, was still in a philosophical mood. I heard him ask Titania, “Do you find it more amusing or cruel that we are stealing bananas for all the young clownlings at the compound, when gifts such as oranges are much easier for their small hands to juggle?”

“Things worth doing are never easy,” the Crystal Clown replied. I could hear the weariness in her voice. “I can’t believe it’s taking you this long to get him ready. He is hairy, but you must have learned how to deal with that long ago.”

“I’m having a spot of trouble with the smile. His long, pointed tongue is hanging out and keeps getting in the way.”

Oh crap, I thought. That would reveal to Titania that it wasn’t me!

“Oh,” she said. “Hmm. I do recall there being something weird about his tongue, now that you mention it…” She trailed off wistfully. “It’s not quite as exhilarating as when I have a man helpless and he thrashes the chains for dramatic effect, but it’s a nice kind of weird I can assure you.”

There followed more sounds of greasepaint being slathered on skin. “This guy is really, really hairy. It’s like he’s wearing animal furs under all these clothes!”

“Oh, that I remember clearly.”

Titania sounded a little disgusted, but I focused on the amazing luck I’d had in subduing someone who could actually pass for me. At least until BimBam’s intrusive clownification ministrations woke him up. It is customary to offer schnapps to people found lurking in one’s basement, at least in Svenborgia. I had no idea what beverage would be paired with such a discovery made in one’s horse costume.

BimBam stifled a giggle and said, “I’m nearly done, and if I do say so myself, he looks exactly like the sort of unconscious clown who would be part of your entourage.”

Titania did not appreciate his tone. She swore at him in the language of clowns (which I understand just enough of), and threatened him terrifyingly with many sorts of bodily harm (mostly with broken bones).

She calmed down enough to sum it all up. “He looks demented, yes, and one could picture him pursuing buxom women. But apart from that he falls well short of my standards!”

“I recall,” BimBam said in a clown’s squeaky approximation of a sultry voice, “one winter occasion when your standards were, perhaps, not so high. I recall it quite fondly.”

They cooed and grunted more sweet nothings, leading to a moment when I was terrified that BimBam would join Titania in the saddle. Fortunately, she dismounted instead. I wasn’t able to see what ensued, but I could hear plenty of clownishly sexy noises (sometimes accompanied with bells). I began a slow retreat, trying to coax Small Dennis along with me.

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Never Meta Blog I Didn’t Like

Writing a blog post about what you’ve previously posted on your blog about writing is a fairly meta activity, and it’s one that we engage in every year. Behold: 2023 as seen through Rune Skelley’s blog.

2023 got off to a running start. We were already thick in the writing of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. In January we were finishing up a batch of stubs (and ironing out a problem or two so that no one would forget it was a ghost story), and it dawned on us that the end was nigh. The end of the novel, that is. The year was just getting started.

Trucking along in February we passed 100,000 words in As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. And since things were going pretty smoothly with the writing, which doesn’t always give us much to blog about, we talked about our recent travels.

In March we continued our exhaustive travelog. It was a big trip, so there was a lot to talk about. Checking in with the writing, the end still felt really close, and Kent admitted that Jen is often right about stuff.

April brought  a new addition to our writer’s toolbox — the Shoehorn. It joins the Monkey Wrench and the Goose Wrench, and is used when you have to go back to a previously written section and wedge some new information in (while making it look like it had always been there). And we had a lesson in not planning too far ahead.

In May we finished the first draft! Mostly! There were some holes we knew we wanted to fill, and some small changes we knew we wanted to make, and… Putting all that quibbling aside, we reached the end of the manuscript, and it felt damn good.

Filling in those holes happened in June, along with a read through. With the story fresh in our minds, we plotted our next steps. Jen worked on the prose outline for Book 2. It had been about half-done when she picked it up, and she saw it through to the end.

While Kent dayjobbed through July, Jen wrote the prose outlines for Books 3 and 4. And we complained a whole lot about how disorganized our notes were. After spending an entire year brainstorming the entire spectral quadlrilogy, we should have taken a week or two to organize all of our notes. We did not, and we paid the price for it in July. But now everything is all straightened out and organized and we’ll have no excuses going forward.*

*we will definitely have excuses

We wanted to have a break between writing Books 1 and 2, so we spent August doing other tasks around the writing cave. It wasn’t necessarily exciting to blog about, though, so instead we shared photos of the intergalactic vacation we’d taken in the spring. We also started rereading the Divided Man series, just for funsies.

Anything important happen in September? Oh not much. We just talked about Kent’s retirement! And our new baby whiteboard! and how we used him to set up the Book 2 rainbow, and a little bit of travel again

Okay, so maybe it was a lot of travel. It was a big year for us, with some Covid-delayed trips finally happening, and celebrating Kent’s retirement. In October we shared pictures from Iceland and Greenland, and we talked about how a long vacation makes a perhaps too-convenient excuse not to write. We got back on track by immersing ourselves in the Book 2 rainbow with the help of both whiteboards.

After so much travel and upheaval, we had trouble finding our new work session rhythm. So in November we shared our Halloween decorations. What? We’re writing a ghost story, so it’s research! And on the topic of writing, we were finally ready to dive in. Almost. Jen started writing stubs for the new book while Kent optimized the blog.

Which brings us to December aka Now. Kent updated the story world map, we finished all the other preliminary stuff, we finally figured out a new schedule that seems to work, and we actually started writing Book 2!

And now the end of 2023 truly is nigh. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy spending a lot of time with. Years, even.

Countries visited: Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Batuu, Norway, Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland. Some of that was actually in 2022, but we didn’t talk about it until 2023.

“Hurry It Up”

  • by Kent“Is this *really* what I want to be famous for on the internet?”
  • returned my salute
  • a language that literally no one
  • Does he? Who knows
  • aspiring avant garde DJ

Tune in next time part 862      Click Here for Earlier Installments

“Hurry it up,” Titania growled. “That trove of bananas will be no good after tomorrow.”

“It has to look convincing,” BimBam grumbled in reply. Then, “Huh. That’s odd.”

Please don’t be the ears. Please please don’t be the ears. Please please please don’t be the ears!

“Here, use this,” Titania declared, yanking the tail off the horse costume. “Cover his head with a bushy wig, and no one will notice if the face is a little amateurish.”

“Hey! I am in fact a professional,” BimBam protested. “I got my start with a video channel where I dissected fan theories about Lost while I transformed myself from one kind of clown to another. But one day I had to ask myself that question.”

For several seconds there was no sound other than that of greasepaint being slathered on Big Dennis’s face. The hole where the horse’s tail used to be let in a welcome draft of fresh air.

“What question?” Titania asked wearily.

“Is this really what I want to be famous for on the internet?”

“You’ll be famous for making a disgusting crater underneath this airship if you delay me further!” the Crystal Clown roared. “I thought you Svenborgians were sticklers for protocol, yet you still haven’t returned my salute!”

“Bah. Protocol means nothing. Knock-knock jokes have protocol. I’m a rebel, striking terror in a language that literally no one can comprehend: the language of clowns! I sometimes wonder if you are truly a clown yourself.”

“Leave the philosophy to the university clowns, BimBam. Perhaps the unconscious man you’re tending to feels his inner clown awakening now, as his true face comes into being. Does he? Who knows. And who cares! We need those bananas.”

From what I recalled about Big Dennis, I thought it more probable that his new getup would trigger his inner aspiring avant garde DJ to wake up. I just hoped that he wouldn’t literally wake up anytime soon.

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Such Close Proximity

  • by jenEmbroider otters on all
  • sucking gleefully our respective oranges
  • slowly and most wickedly
  • (please ignore the ears)
  • who am I to dispute the research of the National Confectioners Association?

Tune in next time part 861      Click Here for Earlier Installments

Such close proximity to Small Dennis’s sweaty naked butt made my eyes water. Back at the Academy, he’d joined my twin brother Jason in founding an experimental boy band. They’d been inexplicably popular, and soon one would hear Embroider Otters on all the school’s pirate radio stations. There was a choreographed dance for their biggest hit “We Be Sucking Gleefully Our Respective Orangesicles” in which they moved their limbs slowly and most wickedly, and I shuddered to imagine what it would be like if Small Dennis did that very dance here, right now, inside our shared horse costume.

I tried to bring my thoughts back to the idea of exploiting the clowns’ fear of lumberjacks to gain the upper hand, escape my predicament, and foil their nefarious banana-thieving plans.

Titania chuckled evilly and said, “The easiest way to get him off the airship is to paint him like a clown.”

“I’ll get right on it,” BimBam said.

I relaxed a little. If BimBam was the one to apply clown makeup to Big Dennis, that would delay the discovery that he was not me. That is, as long as he didn’t try to apply any makeup to Big Dennis’s ears (please ignore the ears). My ears are quite distinctively small (please please ignore the ears) and the difference would surely give away my ruse (please please please ignore the ears). Tessa once told me about a study she’d seen that claimed most people’s ears are larger than Peanut Butter Cups. That sounds unlikely to me, but who am I to dispute the research of the National Confectioners Association? (In any case, please please please ignore Big Dennis’s ears!)

I held my breath and listened to the squealchy sounds of an evil clown applying greasepaint to an unconscious man’s face. Would BimBam ignore the ears?

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The Atmosphere Inside the Horse Costume

  • by Kentusing our peripheral vision
  • little aliens in my earwax
  • rampant lumber-jack-o-phobia
  • green motorcycle goggles covered his eyes
  • given to mild theatrics

Tune in next time part 860      Click Here for Earlier Installments

The atmosphere inside the horse costume was becoming tense and swampy, as both Small Dennis and myself stood in the presence of clowns both Crystal and Iron and absorbed the diabolical vibrations of their laughter. I knew Small Dennis was about to crack, but owing to the constraints of the costume we could only communicate by using our peripheral vision. I gave up trying to calm him and concentrated on my own dilemmas. Time was running out before the ruse with Big Dennis would be discovered, and it was hard to concentrate when every utterance from BimBam or Titania seemed to awaken little aliens in my earwax.

Suddenly, BimBam declared, “But that’s where they do all the logging!” And I dared a small smile, because I realized that the airship’s course would create an opportunity to use the rampant lumber-jack-o-phobia among clowns to my advantage. I even risked a peek through the seam between the front and back halves of the horse, and there beyond Titania’s shapely shin I beheld the notorious BimBam Tickles, the Iron Clown of Svenborgia. His flaking greasepaint had all the ochre hues of a corroded shipping container, and his hair stood in a venomous pink mohawk. Black fangs protruded from his leering lips and green motorcycle goggles covered his eyes.

The urgency of Small Dennis’s plight fully registered then. He’d been subjected to this visage all along, through the horse suit’s eyeholes. Based on the fact that he worked pantsless, I had to assume that he was given to mild theatrics even under normal conditions.

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The Iron Clown’s Laughter

  • by jenmy teeth start tingling
  • Whenever I eat grapes near her
  • skyrocketing banana demand
  • Blink once if
  • wrote “I love you” in his own blood

Tune in next time part 859      Click Here for Earlier Installments

The Iron Clown’s laughter reverberated through me and made my teeth start tingling. I clamped my jaw tightly shut to make it stop, but it did little good. The tingle intensified. (Whenever I eat grapes near her, my wife gets incredibly horny, something she also describes as an intensifying tingle. I can only assume the two sensations are not actually very similar.)

Titania said, “Once we empty this airship’s larders, our faction’s skyrocketing banana demands will be met at last. Blink once if you’re as excited as I am.”

Whether BimBam blinked or wrote “I love you” in his own blood, I could not tell because my head was still swaddled in the horse costume, but Titania seemed pleased.

“Without their favorite yellow snack, all the children aboard will be quite upset,” BimBam said with smug glee.

“All of them but mine,” Titania agreed. “I’ll bring mine along to our banana-filled paradise, their father as well.” I felt her pat Big Dennis’s butt. “I have further plans for him.”

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Getting Things Off the Ground

We’re pleased to report that productivity in the Writing Cave has seen an uptick lately.

As Kent’s retirement date drew near, we envisioned our novels flying to completion. All that writing time during the day! Plus an added bonus of getting to have evenings and weekends again!

The one part of the above that we achieved right away was the evenings and weekends. But, novels’ wings don’t flap on their own. Regular readers already know that we’ve struggled to stick to a schedule, and that we had some ideas as to why that is. Well, now things appear to be on track, and we don’t really have much of a theory about why. Perhaps there’s a natural ebb and flow to our motivational energies. Perhaps we just needed this long to adapt to the new normal. Maybe we got brain frostbite in the Arctic and now we’re finally thawing out.

Whatever the reason, we like how it feels to be accomplishing stuff as a team.

A writing partner is the wind under your wings.