Jeff Adams Writes » The First Line

Attack of an Image Monkey: A New Story is Born

Jeff — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:29:20 +0000

“Writing should feel easy, like a monkey driving a speed boat / Close your eyes… breath… ladle into that barrel of monkeys you call a head and scoop out an image monkey / Now let that image monkey drive a speed boat, and you, you water ski behind it / Stay behind the image and write down what you see on your monkey ski trip. ready… go!” — “Monkeys and Playbills,” [title of show]

Since I finished Neutral Zone and the end of last month, I’ve been casting around for the next writing project. I know I want to write something forThe First Line this year (in fact I like a couple of this year’s sentences a lot). There’s also an idea floating around to write the prequel to Neutral Zone, an idea planted by TFL’s David.

Yesterday during the morning commute though I was attacked by an image monkey. The little critter brought with him an idea that I’ve been working over in my head ever since. This is a particularly agressive and generous monkey too. Not only did he show up unannounced flashing bits and pieces of story idea, he kept at it all day yesterday. I’ve got random bits of character personalities, a couple scenes setups, settings and more. I’m going to start getting this down on paper to see what I can actually make out of it. For now, it’s known as Untitled Dream Project (dreams play a central part of the plot… and that’s all I can say on that for now). Now the fun begins… seeing if it can become a living, breathing story.

“Mindgames” Accepted!

Jeff — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:56:58 +0000

“Mindgames” the story that narrowly missed getting into Superqueeroes got accepted this week into Project for a New Mythology, a quarterly literary journal with a stance on artistic social mindfulness. The issue with “Mindgames” gets printed later this month, so I’m very excited to have my first non-The First Line credit.

Thanks to Brian for posting the call for submissions on his website and to Quinn for accepting me into PFANM!

Superqueeroes… and Other Writing News

Jeff — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:54:19 +0000

I’ve just completed my first short story in about four years! It’s a superhero story for an anthology with the tentative title of Superqueeroes. Will found the call for submissions a couple weeks ago and I wrote most of the story last Thursday and Friday. I just put the finishing touches on it this morning. It will go into the mail over the weekend after Will gets the final read on it (and thanks to Dave for taking the first pass on editing it). Wish me luck getting it accepted.

It feels so good to write again. The last short story I did was for The First Line before Dave and I stopped writing for the magazine to just focus on the editing. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy story creation. Will found a couple other calls for submission that are due over the next couple of months and I’m going to try for some of those as well.

What is even more fun is that Will and I are both trying to place stories in some of these. It would be very cool for both of us to get in these (although we’d be happy if just one of us got in too… we’re not in this for competition after all).

Meanwhile, I’m working on a second draft of Neutral Zone, the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo. I’m reworking a lot of it because having read it over recently, it definitely had shortcomings. But the work is going pretty good in terms of fully mapping out characters and plot. I should start actually writing on the manuscript again sometime in February.

And in a completely unrelated note to the subject of this post, it snowed this morning! There isn’t much, and there isn’t expected to be, but it did leave a dusting on the ground. Yay! Here’s a picture I just took from our 11th floor window down into our building’s courtyard.