At long last, Kent is officially retired from dayjobbery!
This means Rune Skelley can pivot to a daylight schedule and Jen and Kent can both finally find out what having weekends and evenings is like.
A writing partner is someone who’s been waiting for this for a long time.
It’s our chain story’s octocentennial! In keeping with tradition, Jen and Kent will write this entry together. Also traditional is our use of a unique source for our prompt phrases. This time we pulled them from the Wikipedia entry for Runic Magic, in honor of our pen name. Jen goes first, writing until she incorporates the first prompt phrase. Then it’s Kent’s turn. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Tune in next time part 799 & 800 Click Here for Earlier Installments
“I’ve never even met Uranus Pamplemousse,” I said. “He has no influence over me, evil or otherwise.”
“That’s not what Rosenkrantz said,” Tallboy said, nodding at the dude on the other sofa, who, due to his ongoing polarization, looked like he’d been shaken and thrown down like dice. “He knows all about your ‘secret’ clubhouse, and he saw the note on the whiteboard. You know, the one including nine symbols, as in nine planets! He saw how you and Uranus were connected.”
Was Jason somehow in league with Uranus Pamplemousse? Or had this guy’s ancestors neglected to “cut off a branch from a nut-bearing tree” as my Uncle Jinx used to say. Maybe his family was afflicted by hereditary stupidity. The same curse was said to have hung over my father’s line, until it was replaced by a different curse when he met Mother. It would certainly take a monumental amount of stupidity to align oneself with Uranus, but if any of my brothers would do it, it was Jason. He always had his own original method for making things worse. Like the time he performed at a mansion and threw up in the pool after drinking far too much of the ale served by the host’s wife (aka, the bride).
Rosenkrantz tried to say something, but the polarization made whatever it was into a series of apparently meaningless utterances. We all waited quietly while he tried again, and then again, but still none of it made any sense. On his next attempt, Rosenkrantz varied the pitch of his voice. This act of singing seemed to allow his meaning to come through.
The gist of it was, “Help!”
“Can’t you stop that crazy contraption now?” Talldude said. “I told you the message.”
I shrugged. Tessa pouted a little, but turned the polarization down to the lowest level. Rosenkrantz slowly took on his usual shape, all except for his fingertips. Once one has been severely polarized, it is marked on one’s fingernails forever.
“Now what?” Rosenkrantz warbled. Another side-effect of polarization is that one’s voice has a certain sound to it. Tessa and I were both trying not to laugh, and even his tall friend was smirking at him.
bonus points for using them in order
magic in the mouthTune in next time part 527 Click Here for Earlier Installments
It had been so very long since I saw her. I was awestruck anew by her beauty.
“Tessa,” I breathed, and her name was like magic in the mouth.
She said my name like she was uttering an exclamation of surprise, and yanked me into the bungalow by my lapels.
“I should have known you’d show up,” she said, cupping my face in her hands and staring into my eyes. “Wherever there is karaoke, there you are, ready to sing like an alien who used to be a rodeo champion on his home planet.” She went on to say 53 more hilarious things about my passion for the art of the empty orchestra, but I was too stunned to make note of them all. Tessa — my darling Tessa, love of my life — was wearing a wedding dress. It was for her reception that the PSLM² were rehearsing, her reception at which Jason was going to rap. Henry the faux-cowboy was here to win her back. But who was she marrying on this fateful day?
bonus points for using them in order
couldn’t see what was in the crotchTune in next time part 463 Click Here for Earlier Installments
I twitched my eyelid at Doctor Nanna to signal that I’d heard her message. Her lips relaxed into a slight smile. I wasn’t fluent in Academy staff slang, but I thought I knew what her unicorn comment meant. Unfortunately I couldn’t see what was in the crotch of her leotard to confirm, because it was hidden behind her surgical apron. I kept an eye on her as she flitted around the nursery, tending to Isolde and the infants.
“Every great warlord in Contraria’s history has slept under a picture of a bear,” Isolde said, gazing at the cartoony creatures adorning the walls. “This will do nicely.”
A 3-star yodeler arrived with flutes of champagne for Isolde and myself. “To the children.” I raised my glass.
“To the children,” Isolde agreed. She downed the champagne in one long pull and gave a dainty, giggling burp. “How many are there?” she asked. “I lost count. I felt like a baby piñata!”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Perhaps you should count them.” Behind Isolde, Doctor Nanna bent over a cradle and I finally had confirmation of her message.
I left Isolde with a second glass of champagne, and joined Doctor Nanna in the corner where we spoke in low voices. “I saw your big girl panties,” I said.
“I’d heard you were a clever boy, good with codes.” She handed me a swaddled infant. “This fortress is built on a mountain honeycombed with caves. That’s where those yeti took Jim. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous this situation is.”
bonus points for using them in order
Defying all logic, our chain story is still going strong three years later. Any pretense of a coherent backstory is long-forgotten. We find it difficult to even adhere to a single genre. No matter! The whole point of these exercises is to keep the creative juices flowing, and to keep the fingers nimble. That’s especially useful for us in times like these, when we’re at the point in our novels’ lifecycles when we’re not actively writing any novels.
Kent sometimes thinks that he’d like to wrap the chain story up and get back to a freer time when the writing prompts didn’t even need to pretend to continue an ongoing story, but so far we haven’t figured out how to give something like this an ending. Or at least a satisfying ending.
And so we soldier on, into ever more ridiculous storylines.
As you may have gathered from previous Friday Collaboration posts, Jen and Kent are learning Russian. To celebrate today’s big chain story milestone, we’ve pulled some phrases from an old Russian/English phrasebook that’s been sitting around the Writing Cave for years. We picked it up at a used book sale forever ago, and it is beyond amazing. It’s a dinky little pocket-size thing from 1951, and such a bizarre snapshot of its time. Out of all the things you could possibly want to say while staying in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, these are, apparently, among the most important. We think they’ll make for a stilted and hilarious 300th entry in Tune In Next Time. In other words, they’ll blend right in.
As these things usually go, Jen will start off the writing – after she includes the first trigger phrase she’ll hand the keyboard over to Kent. He’ll write until he works the next phrase in, and we’ll go back and forth to the end. Just like how we write our novels!
Tune in next time parts 299 & 300 Click Here for Earlier Installments
John looked at a ball of silky fabric he’d pulled from the duffle bag. With a scowl, he said, “These pajamas are badly ironed.”
Was that a hint for me? Years ago we’d known a certain woman who, despite her lack of a tiara, we both deemed trustworthy. Her favored slumbering attire was a belly-dancing costume not much bigger than the rumpled little square in John’s hand. I hope she still dances. She dances very well.
John tossed the pajamas over his shoulder and dug deeper into the duffle. As he kept up his distraction, I worked on decoding his sniff message. I thought I had it. His snuffling was a clue that he was using the Haberdasher’s Code. I would know I was right if the next thing he said was a complaint about his hankies.
With great despair he said, “Three handkerchiefs are missing.”
Try not to lay it on too thick, I thought. The message was starting to take shape in my mind, but I needed to verify what order he’d sniffed the toes on my left foot, without tipping off Tessa or Jason. So I said, as if to no one in particular, “I should like to go wolf hunting.”
“I love wolf hunting!” Jason enthused. “Do you think there are any wolves on this island?”
John muttered, “Maybe the handkerchiefs are in the pajamas.” As he ooched naked across the floor to where they lay he passed close to me and resniffed my left foot, confirming my translation.
“Those pajamas remind of Fatima, and how she danced so beautifully to the songs of her Romani brethren.” I sighed as if lost in memory. “Have you any records with Gypsy singing?” That wasn’t code for anything. I just wanted John to know I’d understood him and he didn’t need to make another pass past my tootsies.
Nevertheless, he lavished further attention on them. The tableau was indistinguishable from a performance art piece wherein a nude man plays a feet-shaped harmonica with his nostrils.
By now I knew his message had something to do with rocks, and I knew where these rocks were located. These rocks are dangerous. There are snipers behind these rocks. There are landmines in front of them. And something important perched on top.
I flexed my toes against John’s nose, telling him, “Slower, please!”
“For Pete’s sake, do you think you’re going to figure out what’s wrong with him by the way his feet smell?” Tessa demanded. “Is your nose some kind of medical instrument? Like a stink MRI? Will you take an X-ray? A stink X-ray?”
I was very disappointed in Tessa. Not that I wanted her to know the message John was passing to me, but I at least expected her to realize that we were passing a message. I thought of her as I’d seen her the evening before graduation, nude but for her Academy sash with its plethora of merit badges, and I wondered Damn girl! What did you get those decorations for?
John wriggled his naked way back to the duffle bag. He reached inside it and said, “It must be in here somewhere.” Tessa and Jason asked him what he was looking for, but he only grunted at them.
While he kept them preoccupied, I did my best to determine what it was that was so well protected in that lethal, rocky place. Perhaps knowing where to go was enough, really. Everything else would become clear in the moment. But if John devoted so much effort to imparting this detail, I owed it to him to do my best to work it out.
He finally withdrew his hand from the bag, holding aloft a colorful full-face mask made of satin. Splaying his fingers to unfurl it for better presentation, he told us all, “This wrestler is very strong.”
we get bonus points!
Hallelujah, it’s raining completed manuscripts. We beat our deadline for getting both Science Sequels done by the end of May! With a day to spare, and only a tiny bit of fudging. Kent even had time to mow the lawn. (Hey, we all celebrate in our own ways.)
Seriously, though. There was celebrating, for real. Instead of champagne, we had milkshakes spiked with vodka. Far more appropriate, as our beta readers know. The rest of you will need to wait a bit to find out why.
We’re both very happy with how these first drafts have come together. Jen is even able to admit that the word counts are acceptable. Now it’s time to let them rest for a while and apply ourselves to a different project. It’s vital to get ourselves prepped to see things clearly when we return to do revisions, and working on an unrelated story is something we’ve found to be unbeatable for flushing the residue out of the ol’ mental RAM circuits.
Having a writing partner sometimes turns “we did it!” into date-night. Which is sorta nice.
Last night we wrote the final scenes for Grandson of Science Novel! Yay! Go team!
Clearly Jen’s original vision of finishing by the end of 2017 was wildly optimistic. Some might even say delusional. No matter. It’s done now.
Or rather, the main composition is done. There are still a few comments we need to address in both this one and its predecessor, Son of Science Novel. And a few little holes in both to fill in with details. But! We reached the end!
We’ll take the weekend to celebrate, then dive back in next week and knock those last items off of our To Do list in short order. And it will feel so fucking good! We’ll get to put this story world down for a little while and turn our attention to other things. And when we come back we’ll be refreshed and ready edit and perfect it.
Now, where’s that champagne?
One year ago today we released our first novel, Miss Brandymoon’s Device. It’s been an exciting and momentous year for us. We’ve finally gotten our hard work out in front of an audience. The financial rewards are, so far, very modest. It’s the other, less tangible rewards that we’re basking in. We’ve racked up some reviews, we’ve added newsletter subscribers, we’ve enjoyed conversations with our readers. It’s been a really busy year, but an incredibly satisfying one.
Just a couple of weeks ago we released our third novel, Elsewhere’s Twin, in ebook format, and we’re thrilled to announce that it’s finally available in paperback, too. Since we’d been through the process twice before, we thought we were old pros. We thought that ordering a proof copy was a mere formality. So when the proof arrived and there was an issue with the cover it threw off our schedule. After a bunch of fiddling and phone calls and reformatting we finally have the cover looking how we want it. Which means it’s ready for you to enjoy!
Elsewhere’s Twin is the final book (so far) in our Divided Man series. Since we’re self-publishing, we do all the steps ourselves. Editing and polishing Divided Man has pulled us away from writing the new Science Novels more than we anticipated, and more than we like. We’re planning to slow our pace a little bit for the next set of releases so that we have ample time to make everything the best that we possibly can.
But right now we’re just basking a little bit in the glow of our accomplishment. Go Team Skelley!
We are so close to done with the first draft of Son of Science Novel we can taste it!
Jen wrote the final scene yesterday, but we’re not actually done. Kent has one more scene on his plate that will fall before the last scene. Um. Obviously.
Here’s the thing. This draft is going to come it at around 95,000 words. That’s a lot of words, right? That’s a very satisfying, lengthy novel. We should be happy! The problem is that Science Novel, the book that this is a sequel to, is currently 121,000 words. That’s quite a discrepancy!
While Science Novel has had some edits, there is certainly still some flab there to be carved away. It will get smaller. But so will Son of SN when we edit it. The discrepancy will remain. Jen has this hangup about all the chapters in a book being roughly the same size, and all the books in a series, too. The key word here is “roughly.” No matter how much Kent teases, she doesn’t actually want all the chapters to be exactly the same length. But they should be able to measured with the same yardstick.
Since Jen is the keeper of the outline, and the creator of the stubs, she has seen this word count disaster coming for a while now and she’s been running around like Chicken Little. Now that the end is in sight, Kent has finally begun to believe her. We’ve given a lot of thought to the ‘problem,’ trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Every novel we’ve written previously has come out well above 100,000. Hell, the one before this (Son of Music Novel) came it at 182,900 (which we are not going to round to 183,000 goddammit). Our current draft feels like the runt of the litter.
The problem is not lack of plot. We have enough plot to choke a horse. Before we started writing, we were concerned that we might have another monster on our hands. It would be nice to think we’ve just improved our craft so much that we have transcended the need for editing, but the sky in our world is blue, just like yours.
We have identified a few places where we need to expand things, and we think we’ve discovered a hole that needs to be filled. It’s not 25,000 words worth of stuff, but it might get us up to the magic 100K.
Our current plan is to have Kent write that one last scene that is not the last scene, and then read the manuscript through, looking for what’s missing. It shouldn’t take long, since it’s so damn short.
It’s been just over a year since we started our chain story, creatively titled Tune In Next Time. To celebrate part 100, we’re going to write this one together! We’ll also use a longer list of prompt phrases, just to make it fun.
Jen will start things off and she’ll hand the keyboard over to Kent as soon as she incorporates the first prompt phrase. He’ll hand it back after he includes a prompt snippet. And so on.
This is not actually how we write our novels, at least not so far. But if it works well today, who knows?
Tune in next time part 100 Click Here for Earlier Installments
“How long do I need to keep this up?” I panted to Fleur, wiping my sore and sweaty hands on my embroidered trousers. John was even worse off than I was, confined as he was inside the furry and constrictive rabbit costume.
My wife waved vaguely at a large, colorful piñata hanging from one of the pillars. “You will stop when my father punches a screwdriver into the paper effigy of the hare. If candy spills out, it means that we succeeded and I am pregnant.”
As the pyroclastic yams accumulated in pots of water around the battleground, I wondered about my wife. We’d spent very little time together, going our separate ways immediately after the honeymoon when I agreed that she could “take other lovers,” mildly amused at her insistence that I make air quotes when I said it.
She never made air quotes when she said it about me, but she generally didn’t seem jealous. Would things change if she was indeed now pregnant? Would I be expected to stay in Contraria and play a part in the child’s life?
As I ran around the perimeter of the courtyard with a flaming tuber, I looked at Fleur, trying to imagine her with a baby. She stood beside her father who held a large screwdriver, Fleur was clutching his free hand which I saw now was wrapped up like a mummy’s in a bright blue ribbon.
The ribbon’s color seemed significant, but try as I might I couldn’t recall whether Contrarian custom associated blue with boys or girls. Did my warlord-in-law foster the stereotypical hopes for male issue, or was he hoping for the next generation to emulate his formidable daughter? John began another frenzied lap with his next yam, bunny mask askew and fluffy tail darkened by soot and dirt. How would all these exertions matter, if the piñata determined the outcome? Then I saw the second hare-shaped paper sculpture, discreetly poised for substitution. I poured on a burst of speed, realizing my victory relied on Fleur having not managed to untie the convoluted ribbon from her father’s hand.
Needing to gain an advantage over my cunicular foe, I let loose the shriek of the Himalayan Snowcock. John has had a deep-rooted terror of that bird ever since his childhood misadventures in the Tibetan monastery. John dropped his flaming yam and clapped his smoldering paws over his ears (the human ones, not those of his fanciful costume). Fleur looked at me agape as I snatched up John’s root vegetable from the dust and dunked both it and my own into the ceremonial pot, quenching them in a hiss of steam.
I smiled and said, “Something you may not know about me is that I can imitate any kind of a bird or beast.” And then, just to be a dick, I did the Snowcock cry again and watched John flounder on the ground. It took him several minutes to fully recuperate, time I used to extend my lead.
The blue ribbon now trailed almost to the ground between my wife and her father, the two of them smiling smugly at one another. If they were pleased, that was a good sign for me. I hoped.
I lapped John again, feeling regretful for exploiting his weakness when he was already encumbered. “Gotta be miserable in that suit,” I muttered as I passed.
“Eh, it’s not so bad,” he panted. “Has a nice lining, silky, kind of a lingerie feeling.” I sped up so I couldn’t hear the rest of his explanation.
Fleur’s father waved his now benuded hand in the air and shot a look at the scorekeeper, the rotund man who wore a flowing silken caftan, the man who held my future in his hands, the man who was keeping tally of our yams on his ipad (who’s also probably looking at porn). The rotund man nodded slightly.
By now the water in all the pots was boiling from the residual heat of the incendiary root vegetables piling up in them. I watched the rotund man, barely paying any attention to where I was running. I stared at him, willing him to end this before all the blisters on my hands burst open. You’re my favorite person right now, I thought, because when you wave the red flag I can stop doing this.
But there was no red flag. Instead, my father-in-law strode across the temple courtyard and stabbed his enormous screwdriver straight into the heart of the rabbit piñata. He awkwardly worked his middle fingers into the resulting hole, enlarging it.
“Who made this damn thing?” he bellowed. “I just don’t have enough middle fingers to make the hole big enough!”
Fleur scampered over to him and plunged her own impudent digits into the paper maché rodent, and suddenly the ground was covered with brightly colored gummy babies, the only Contrarian export.
A blare of trumpets rang out from all around the walls, in honor of the good news. Fleur scooped up handfuls of the sticky candy and skipped over to where I had slumped in the dirt. I spotted John hopping away. My father-in-law raised his arms in triumph. I smiled up at Fleur.
I began to speak, but she leaned down and put one of the dusty gummy babies in my mouth. She pressed her pinky against my lips, and pressed her thumb against her lips, and made puckery little noises at me. I was too tired to ask what it meant, and too grateful that the ordeal was over to even care.
bonus points for using them in order!