I saw that Chuck Wending posted a Flash Fiction Challenge this past Friday, and since tonight I was just goofing off online before spending all of Sunday studying for a test, I said, “Sure, why not?” So, challenge accepted!

Flash Fiction Challenge: Random Photo Story -  Write a 1000-words-max flash fiction piece based around three random photographs.

Here are my three photographs:

• Paraty
• Untitled
• Hungry Like The Wolf

My story is called Parati, and clocks in at 986 words. I wrote it cold; I looked at the pics for like three minutes and started writing, letting the story emerge as I went. It was a fun exercise, especially after two weeks of being in “nursing school” mode. I warn you, it gets a little graphic toward the end, but just a little. Feedback is appreciated. Enjoy.

Parati

 

Parati swam slowly towards the pier, enjoying the undulating waves lapping against her skin in the early morning hour. She felt sated, content, at peace. That she had no idea how she had made it into the water was, strangely, not something that was bothering her at the moment, though it certainly should have. The blackouts had become more frequent over the last year, since leaving her namesake city in Brazil to live in Miami, much to the chagrin of her family. They were all usually the same: periods of amnesia following moments of high stress. From her best calculations, they usually lasted a few hours, a night at most, though there had been that one right when she first moved that lasted a couple of days and ended with her standing in the middle of the Everglades, miles away from her home near Downtown Miami, overlooking Biscayne Bay.

It was in Biscayne Bay that she found herself right now, swimming towards the pier. She wouldn’t be able to tell how long this last blackout had been until she made it home, but unlike all the other times, she didn’t care at all today. She also didn’t care that she was naked and had no idea how she’d make it the fifteen or so blocks north to her apartment. It’s as if there was a part of her mind that should have been panicking, but instead had been assaulted by a brigade of endorphins and overpowered into submission, rendering worry irrelevant.

She finally made it to the pier. She climbed the ladder out of the water and walked down the wooden path to the ramshackle little harbor made from abandoned sidewalk in this forgotten part of Downtown Miami. A homeless guy cuddling under a large ratty blanket eyed her as she walked by but turned back to whatever dreams he had been having. Parati simply walked on, the water dripping down her naked skin onto the cracked cement. She realized something stung on her abdomen and looked down to see a gash, maybe six inches long, going from right under her left breast to right above her belly button. It was raw but not bleeding. She could not remember how she’d gotten it. Yet she did not feel unease. She simply walked on.

The sun started to show above the Miami Beach skyline on the opposite side of the bay, bathing her with orange light as she made her way up backstreets unknown to most people driving up Biscayne Boulevard just a few blocks west. Eventually she reached her building, a forgotten piece of 1940s construction that by all standards should have been demolished years ago. There were four apartments, all rented out to immigrants for fairly reasonable rates, considering the entire structure would hardly survive any hurricane to hit the city. Parati loved her apartment; it was hers, and hers alone.

She walked through the creaky gate, oblivious to Mr. Gonzalez, the eighty-two year old Cuban ex-trucker that rented apartment 1 and sat outside his door, dawn to dusk, every day, smoking cigars smuggled in from his native Havana. Parati walked up the stairs to her apartment, number 3, right above Mr. Gonzalez’s, also oblivious to the three dead cats right by the foot of the stairs. Had she stopped to look, she would have seen that all three cats had had their tiny hearts ripped out through small holes in their chests, and that there was a trail of dried blood leading up the stairs as well.

Parati opened the door, not being the least surprised to find it unlocked, and walked to her couch. She sat down, contemplating the small living room, which was now kind of messy, with things strewn all over the place, as if there had been some commotion here. The last memory she had of this room was of a morning as she left for work. Was that yesterday, the day before? She wasn’t sure and strangely, unlike other times when she’d come out of a blackout, desperate for information, this time she did not care.

She saw her clothes lying all about the room. She assumed those were the ones she had been wearing before the blackout. She also saw a pair of old, dirty, torn jeans, and a pair of tattered shoes. A dark streak led from the living room into the one bedroom. She stood up and walked to the door of the bedroom, opened it. Lying on the bed was the undressed body of a man she did not know, his chest cracked open, ribs sticking out like fingers pleading to heaven. The man’s face was slumped, his eyes semi-closed, mouth slightly agape. There was blood all over the bed and floor, and Parati could see the streak that led from the living room as it ended at the foot of the bed. She walked to the body, peeked inside the chest cavity, saw that the heart was missing. Without knowing why, she dipped her index finger into the chest and licked the blood off it. It wasn’t warm anymore, but it still tasted good. Though she felt sated, she also felt a desire for more. She sat on the bed, reached in and tore out a lung. It wasn’t a heart, but it was still good. She bit into the soft tissue and ate.

It all came back to her: the urge, the cats, the desire, the hunt, the man, the struggle, the gash, the strike, the heart, the walk, the water. It was the man that had made the difference. She’d never eaten a man’s heart before. Now she had, and that had brought her peace at last. Somehow she knew the blackouts would cease now. From now on she’d hunt consciously, at peace with who she was, what she was. She bit once more into the lung and smiled.

During my mom’s stay at the hospital throughout 2009, she had to have a lot of blood transfused to her. The tumors she had were especially hungry for hematocrits and as her levels would drop suddenly, pints of blood had to be had at the ready so keep her stabilized. All in all, over the 5 or so months she spent in and out of the hospital, she ended up using 12 pints of blood.

You know those commercials where they say to please donate blood, that you might be saving a life? Guess what, they’re 100% true. Thanks to those 12 pints of blood my mom was able to live just a little longer. She had no way to pay that cosmic debt back, but I had.

Since late 2009, I embarked on a small quest to donate those 12 pints of blood back (and just to put it more in perspective, that’s 1.5 gallons of blood). Last night I made it. Last night I donated my 12th pint of blood of the last two-ish years, and finally managed to pay back what was owed.

I feel awesome. I know for a fact that this blood I have donated will go to help someone else live a little longer, be with their loved ones a little longer. I know Mom is high-fiving me right now.

I don’t intend to stop. I intend to continue donating every 2 months, because someone will always need blood. I exhort you to donate blood regularly as well.

For Mom, for myself, for those who will need it and will have it thanks to my and your donations.

On Dec 13, 43 days after I started the mad-dash that is NaNoWriMo, and 71,587 words later, I finished the first draft of my very first novel, now titled The Myth of Romantic Comedies.

Woohoo to me!

I am still in shock over the experience. I was “in the zone” that last day; I wrote 4539 words on Dec 13 alone! I was writing as fast as I could and then, suddenly, the ending line I had had in mind since the second week of November was written. I was done. I teared up a little.

I never thought I could write a novel. I always said I wanted to do so, but never thought I could. And now I’ve done it. And I cannot wait to write the next one, even with the crazy schedule I know awaits me next year with Nursing school. Because writing is something I have to do. I stopped doing it for years and I was miserable. And now, whatever else happens in my life, I have writing back in it and I won’t let it go.

But let me tell you, it was exhausting. Partly because 50,000 words of it were written during the month of November for NaNoWriMo (which means a daily goal of 2000 words, which I kept to religiously); partly because I have now set my writing time at 5 AM-ish, which means I get up really early, forsaking sleep; but also, and perhaps most importantly, because in my head I have just lived the lives of these characters as much as they did.

I wrote in First Person point of view, and that took a toll on me. Much like I do when I roleplay, I got into character, and I smiled when he was happy, scowled when he was angry, and hurt when he was hurting. Plus I did so as well for all the other characters who did not have a direct voice to the reader except through the narrator, because I knew what was going on with them (for the most part—characters don’t always tell you everything) and felt that as well. It’s almost a method acting form of writing.

As I look at the file, page through its electronic pages, I am in awe of all those words that came from me, all putting together one story. I can’t wait to share it with people.

So this week I have taken it off, letting Me (Daniel) come back to the forefront and recover from that emotional rollercoaster. I’ve also been working on getting my wife’s first novel ready for publication. But I so look forward to going back to do the rewrites.

So yeah, I just wrote a novel. May it be only the first.

Today is my dad’s 59th birthday. Or, it would’ve been, anyway. My dad died in 1993, 18 years ago last November 19. I was 19 at the time, he was 40, just a month shy of turning 41.

I don’t talk a lot about my father, especially not as much as I do about my mother. It’s not that I loved him any less, it’s that he’s been dead longer and I’ve had many years to bring that pain down to a semi-comfortable numbness. There’s also the simple issue that I didn’t know my father well.

My parents divorced when I was 2. My father had a problem with drugs and my mother wasn’t gonna have that. My father went through rehab, completed it, relapsed, and rehabbed again. During this process, my entire early childhood, I only got to see my dad on a few occasions. I really didn’t grow up with him, though everyone did their best to make sure he was somehow in my life.

The picture above was taken when I was 10. By then he was living in the States, doing (I would only learn later on) ministry with other men who’d gone through the same problems he had. By the time I hit my mid-teens, my dad was an established youth counselor working with troubled teens in Florida. I visited him over one summer and went camping with some of those kids. It was the summer I had my first cigarette and saw my first pair of real boobs, up in the North Carolina mountains.

He was a youth counselor for years, and even if I didn’t entirely grasp all that he did (he did not like to talk too much about his cases to protect his kids’ privacy), I was fucking proud of what he did. The flip-side was that I was jealous that those troubled kids got a lot more of him than I did. But he lived in Miami, and I in Puerto Rico, so we did what we could.

He died suddenly. He went in for a check-up, and two weeks later he was dead. My dad had done a lot of damage to his body over his youth, which was worsened by some serious car accidents he’d been in over the years (many a result of the stupid decisions of his youth). I used to say my dad was stuck together with spit and a prayer, and I wasn’t far from the truth. His time came up and I was left without him just as I was getting to know him as an adult.

As angry as I am at G-d[rel]Yes, I get angry at G-d at times. Faith is a struggle, not a joyride.[/ref] sometimes for my mom’s death, over the years I’ve been far more angry over my dad’s. As much as I love my paternal grandfather and uncle, they aren’t him, and there’s a lot of things I’ve left unsaid over the years because he wasn’t here. There will be more. It is what it is.

I have learned a lot more about my dad in the last 18 years. I have acquired documents relating to his life, essays he wrote for university, letters he wrote my mom over the years. I have built a better picture of him, of the real him, though it remains (and it always will remain) incomplete. I’m pretty sure I have in me a story about the process of getting to know my dad after his death; one day it’ll emerge.

All this said, today isn’t a day to remember his death. Today is a celebration of his life. Today I remember my dad as the guy in the pic above, or as the guy who took his 16-year old son around Miami early on various Saturday mornings to attend some Star Trek or comic convention while he visited from Puerto Rico. As the guy who, though he fucked up during his own youth, more than made it up by helping to steer hundreds of other young kids away from drugs and violence, a good number of them successfully, too.

That is my dad. That is Miguel Angel Perez, Micky as he was known to most; just Papi to me and my brother. Happy birthday.

I talked about this briefly already, but I’ve been thinking about it more and wanted to expand.

Plain and simple: writing demands a sacrifice of you, the writer. If you’re not willing to pay it, you won’t write.

This was made evident to me during NaNoWriMo; the format of the event forces you to make brutal choices if you want to reach 50,000 words in 30 days. And yes, I mean brutal.

This year, my sacrifices were two:

1. The smaller one: I put aside everything writing related in my life (blog posts, my Play-by-Post RPGs, sometimes even my journal) to save all those words for my novel.
2. The bigger one, my true pound of flesh: sleep.

A few years back I started getting up at 5 AM to have time to write before the start of the day. That worked for me fairly well, so with the start of NaNoWriMo, I went back to that format, except I would wake up at 4 AM to give myself an hour to do all my waking up prep before being ready to sit down to write. Every day, with few exceptions, this was my routine and I would write my 2000 words for the day between 5-7-ish AM.

It meant that by 10 PM I was beat and ready for bed (though in reality my bedtime is more like 11-12 Midnight), but it was worth it for the burst of fresh creativity I experienced in the mornings.

And you know what? I’m still doing it. And I will continue to do it for the foreseeable future.^[1]

So, what about you? What’s your sacrifice? What’s your pound of flesh offered to this cruel mistress, Writing?

1. ^[1] We’ll see once I start Nursing school what sacrifice must I make to carve even a couple minutes to write down a few words. ↩

If there’s one illness in this world I take personal it’s cancer. That shit took my mother and it owes me big for that. Unfortunately, it is a devastating disease that continues to threaten thousands, and it needs to be fought against with tooth and nail.

This here to the right, that’s Kelly Cline. She has just been diagnosed with cervical cancer and she has decided to fight that shit with a positive attitude. I used to wonder how anyone could remain upbeat when confronted with a diagnose of cancer, but I saw that firsthand with my mother. She also put on a smile and said, Let’s do this.

I don’t know Kelly, but my friend Ryan Macklin does, and my friend wants to help his friend in her hour of need. To that end him and some other game designers have put together a collection of roleplaying games to help raise funds that will go towards paying Kelly’s medical bills. They are calling it the Random Kindness Encounter Bundle and it includes 8 roleplaying games and some fiction, along with a chance to unlock a ninth game if the $4000 goal is met by the end of 2011.

Do a mitzvah and get great games in return? You cannot pass that up. I’m not. I know my mom would approve.

Follow the link, help out, get games. That simple. What are you waiting for?

So, NaNoWriMo? I accomplished that shit I set out to do. I “won” at 50,469 yesterday, Nov 29, though I’ve added another  1500 words by now. I’m about 60-ish % done with my story, so I continue to write.

I loved doing this. I’d done NaNo four times before, “won” once in ’06 but with a memoir, not fiction. To have done it this year with fiction, and new fiction that was flowing like a friggin river, has been fantastic. Why? Because I am a writer, have been a writer, want to be a writer, but I wasn’t writing, and that’s bullshit. For reasons I cannot even remember I stopped doing it and it left a hole in me that I plugged with words this month. And I will keep on going. Because writing is something I HAVE to do, for myself if for no one else.

So yeah, the fuck-you-don’t-think-just-write-50K-words-in-November boot camp march was what I needed to clear the cobwebs and get the engine running again. I woke up pretty much every day at 4-ish AM so I could write from 5-7 AM, before the world woke up. I’m not a morning person at all, but that worked for me so awesomely, I continue to do it even though I “won.”

Writing is a cruel mistress and she demands a sacrifice. Without a sacrifice, nothing is going to happen. Ante up your pound of flesh, cause that’s what it takes. At minimum.

I know a lot of people hate on NaNoWriMo, but I love it. Even the years I didn’t participate in it I glanced at it like a boy peeping through the glory hole in the girl’s bathroom. This time next year, G-d willing, I will be finishing my Nursing clinicals and studying for finals, so who knows if I’ll be able to do NaNo then. But it doesn’t matter, because I intend to write every day, and turn NaNoWriMo into NaNoWriYe(ar).

Go read Chuck Wendig‘s post, “The NaNoWriMo Epilogue: Miles To Go Before You Sleep.” This post started as a reply to Chuck’s post, and what Chuck says there is gospel truth.

If you “won” this year, HIGHFIVE for those 50K!
If you didn’t, HIGHFIVE for those [whatever]K!
Now, here’s the knife: where are you gonna cut that pound of flesh from? The words are waiting.

After skipping it for a few years, I am doing NaNoWriMo this year and I am loving it. I started right on Nov 1 with a scene that I had had in my mind for over ten years. I stripped it of the details that had accumulated over time and left it as the simple concept, then let the characters show me how it happened now. They very much did and they have continued to tell me their story day by day.

As of this post I am right on target with 14,201 words written. I have a daily goal of 2000 words so I can account for Shabbat and have a day off each week and after week 1, so far so good. I get up every day at 4 AM to give myself time to wake up and get some coffee made and by 5 AM I am typing, usually until 7 or so when it’s time to wake my wife up and do all the usual morning chores. It’s a bit exhausting, especially days when I work 9 hours until closing at 9 PM, but I am loving the early morning quiet writing time. The words flow so much better on a clear, rested mind.

I don’t know why I stopped writing. I have found a part of myself I had missed terribly and am loving reacquainting myself with it. I have a really good idea where this novel is going, too, which has me really excited to continue.

You can take a look at my NaNoWriMo profile (if you’re doing NaNo as well, friend me up), where you will find the very first scene of the novel as an excerpt.

Ok, that’s 287 words I could’ve put into the novel. Back to work!

Included in this pack are four adventures that will take the young heroes to far off places and pit them against fearsome adversaries.

• The Curse of the Sleepy Mist – The evil wizard Geleron has released a magical mist that has put the entire town of Springwell to sleep. Can the heroes of Springwell defeat him yet again and make everything right in Springwell?
• Trixie the Unicorn’s Rescue – The fairies of the Evergreen Forest need help, as their unicorn, Trixie, has been taken prisoner by the evil goblins of the Dark Swamp. Can the heroes of Springwell find her and bring her home to her fairy friends?
• Rescue from Dinosaur Island – A group of explorers left on a boat to the mysterious Dinosaur Island but never returned. Can the heroes find them and bring them back home to Springwell?
• The Pirates of Seaweed Cove – It seems pirates have been attacking ships off the coast of Springwell’s beach, teaming up with Shark?Men from under the sea. Can the heroes stop the pirates and the Shark?Men before everyone becomes too scared to go out on boats?

The pack includes all the maps and tokens you will need for your brave adventures.

In addition, we have also released the rpgKids Game Bundle, which includes both the Core Game and the Adventure Pack I for a discounted price, making it the perfect way for newcomers to join in the rpgKids fun!

Both the rpgKids Adventure Pack and the rpgKids Game Bundle are now available at RPGNow.com.

Gather the kids, bring out the dice and get ready to be the heroes of Springwell!

I can’t believe it’s already Rosh Hashanah again! Nevertheless, here we are. A very happy shana tova (happy year) to all my Jewish friends out there. May you have a sweet and healthy new year and be inscribed in the Book of Life. Now let’s go party!