More Genre Stories

Once again, here are 35 of the most recent Genre Stories that I’ve written for Twitter. And once again I made a few corrections for spelling and clarity, but I have made sure that none of these corrections make the tweets go over the 140 character limit.

If you like these tweets, then please follow Genre Stories at Twitter/Genrestories. Thanks!

Medical: For years the doctors thought he had Tourette’s, until they found out that he was just surrounded by arseholes.

Philosophical: His motto was “Live every day like it was your last.” He spent the final 37 years of his life screaming and crying.

Fable: The Late Bird came home after an all-night bender, and ate the worm. When the Early Bird woke up it had to reevaluate its priorities.

Uplifting: The tattooed man looked into his newborn baby’s face. His heart melted. “I’d Fuckin’ KILL fer yew,” he said. “KILL!”

Drama: She married him at his ultra-orthodox church. “I declare you Man and Disfigured Rib,” said the priest. And she had second thoughts.

Culinary Historical: It was a disaster, but he had to brazen it out. “Voila!” he said to the shocked dinner guests. And the flambé was born.

Cautionary: Alone in the blizzard, he wondered what had compelled him to check whether his tongue would stick to the snowmobile.

Mob: The cops watched the rookie heading out of the station. When he was gone, the desks flipped and the place turned back into a speakeasy.

Adventures In Cliché: After base camp it was a seven-day hard climb. When they got to the summit they saw the mole and felt ashamed.

Circus Drama: She always tagged along whenever he went to unicyclist conventions. She always got in the way. His second wheel.

Business: He’d finally made it. A corner office with huge plate-glass windows. A wheelie chair. But the two didn’t go well together.

Twitter – The Musical: It seems his stream’s become a flood / of dull banality / I wonder why they follow / Twits likes him, and never me?

War: The recruit sat in a circle of candles. The others got scared. “Satanist!” said the major. “No Sir! Scared of spiders, sir!”

Zen: .

Family drama: Fishing with his sons. “This is lame!” said the youngest. So he took out the dynamite, got their respect, and lost custody.

Classical: The poison taster gagged and writhed. The cook was executed before the taster could explain that he just hated coriander.

Historical: He stared at his tools. The bolts first? The pliers? That wouldn’t work. He sighed helplessly. Torturer’s block.

Bio: In a work far ahead of his time, Mozart composed the operettas “Rollin’ in florins”, “Musket up yo ass” and “The Bitchiz of Figaro”.

Crisis Of Faith: Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, they told him. But the scuba tank kept knocking over the communion wine.

Prehistorical: As the meteor grew near, some dinosaurs rejoiced. They roared hymns, denounced the mammals, and awaited the Velocirapture.

Fable: The sparrow didn’t care that her chick was a changeling. “Fly, my pretty!” she said with pride, pushing the baby rhino from the nest.

Magic Realism: She followed the knife-thrower everywhere, always first on stage, showing off the scar where his knife had pierced her heart.

Overheared: It was New Years Eve in Zimbabwe. They raised their glasses. “Here’s to 2011. It can’t possibly be worse than 2012.”

Utopian Conspiracy: This tweet was the only way to get to you. Everyone else is in on it. CIA. FBI. They’re throwing you a surprise party.

Pop-Sci: “It’s okay to be shallow,” said the biologist. “90% of ocean life is in the shallows. It’s warm and bright.” The model just yawned.

Fable: The clumsy trap-maker always got caught in his own traps. “Here we go again,” he thought, as the ring slid onto his finger.

Conspiracy: Inside the hanger wasn’t a moon landing set. There was a stadium. Our minds reeled. The 2010 World Cup was faked.

Apocalyptic: Everything got gradually worse. People fantasised about a quick and definite end. Roland Emmerich made millions.

Horror: “Fish Fingers tonight!” said New Mommy. Jimmy looked at his plate. Scales. Knuckles. They weren’t what Jimmy expected. Not at all.

Speculative: To end racism, we found new ways to define ourselves. But a new power elite rose. Fucking Sagittarians.

Epic: He had The Call. He has a Love Interest, and an Antagonist, and the potential for Personal Growth. Unfortunately, he also had an Xbox.

Urban Legend: A string of cheese led up from the top of the pizza to the mouth of the guilty-looking waiter.

Ghost: Dripping walls. Patches of cold. Weird laughter in the night. On the plus hand, only 800 per month and close to varsity AND the pub.

Paradise Lost: He thought he’d finally found the ideal way of life in the nudist camp. Then he tried frying sausages.

Revisionism: Jesus made a famous statement about rich people and camels and eyes of needles. But he didn’t say “Heaven”. He said “Prison”.

Would you like more? The first 100 genre stories can be found here, and the next 35 can be found here.

Zombie Stand Up

Me as head of the Zombie Survivors' Committee. Photo by Liesl Jobson.

I just got back from Lily Herne’s Deadlands party, where the younger part of the Lily team, Savannah Lotz, was talking to Lauren Beukes about the process of writing a book with The Mother. It was a fun evening, with plenty of zombie costumes, and Tape Hiss And Sparkle revealed to us to the zombie subtext of Boyz II Men.

For the evening, I was asked to write and perform some Zombie stand-up comedy. Here’s the transcript of my speech:

All right everyone, settle down, settle down! Survivors Committee call to order, please.

For the record this is Day 127 of the Zombie uprising, 25th of March by the old calander, which is also… National cleavage day! So that’s, er, jolly.

Now listen. I’m calling this meeting together because our supplies are low. According to this list, all we’ve got left is:

Half a pot of mayonnaise,

a slightly wrinkled tomato,

some chewable antacid,

an Endearmint,

and about 500 kilos of rat bobotie.

Seriously, please, will someone just eat it. Just think of rats as… the cows of the sewer. You can have the Endearmint afterwards if it helps.

You may need the antacid, too.

Unfortunately, even with all the bobotie, we only have enough food for about a week. That’s not a real problem, though, because we only have enough water for two days. I wouldn’t get too upset about that, though, because I’m told that the bars on the window will only last for about another 15 minutes.

Which brings us to the next critical point, defence.

Now, I know we all thought it was a good idea to vote Frano as the head of defence. He’s strong, he’s direct, he’s a man of few words, he can rip off a man’s head off with his bare hands. And I think that maybe we should have all just thought about that incident a bit more before voting.

So maybe next time we should go ahead and do some background checks, and make absolutely sure that the next person we vote for as the head of defence is NOT already a zombie. By now we should all be clear that there is in fact a difference between a thick Pofadder accent and the groans of the undead.

Oh! On the subject of voting, you remember we all agreed that since we were rebuilding society, we should have a name for new, er, fledgeling democracy? Well, the nominations for what we’re going to call our new country are in!

Don’t run off! I know you’re keen to get on with the defending, but this is good for morale.

This is the first time I’m seeing these. It’s all very exciting. The potential names for our new country are:

“Sipho’s mum’s house’s cellar.” Yes, all right, that accurate, but at some point we are going to try to expand our country beyond these walls at some point, so…

“Stevetopia.” Very mature, Steve.

“The People’s Republic of Steve’s Bonerville.” No.

“Lick Steve’s…” No.

“Steve’s Meatflap Paradise.” Oh, that’s just obscene. Look, if you’re not going to take this seriously then we might as well have a dictatorship. Is that what you want? No? Because if you all wake up tomorrow and find this place being run by jackbooted thugs then it’s all Steve’s fault.

And look, on the subject of our new civilisation, I know we’re running short of supplies but please, could we stop using the pages from our only encyclopedia toilet paper? Please, if you find it in your hearts, could you use one of the Heat magazines? We’ve got plenty of those! Someone ripped out the page about Penicillin yesterday. Penicillin! That could have been handy! Does anyone here know how to generate electricity? No? Not since curry night, we don’t!

Just, next time you go to the bathroom ask yourself, does the future depend on us preserving MORE THAN ONE article about Katy Perry’s cellulite? Would it kill you to wipe with one of the many, many pictures of the unthreateningly well-groomed teen sensation Justin Beiber? More than one generation will thank you!

Now I know we’re all very keen to get back to defending against that zombie attack, so just one last thing. The breeding program. I know the idea was vetoed and I respect that, but I can’t help but noticing that Steve is getting a lot of action lately, so if we started to think again, just think, mind you, no pressure, about repopulating the planet of a formal basis, then, as chairman of the survival committee, I am sort of, well, you know…

if we were gorillas, then I would be the silverback. Precedence. So just, putting it out there.

All right, here come the zombies, so good luck to everyone, and if we all survive then for tonight’s music evening, Mimi will be performing “A tribute to the silver voice Susan Boyle!” So that’s… worth living for.

See you on the other side!

Quite A Friday, Really.

On Friday I received an MA with distinction for my debut novel, Commedia. I also found out that I was on the Mail and Guardian’s top 200 young South Africans list, and I got to attend the premiere of Lauren Beukes‘s Glitterboys and Ganglands. I have no idea what next Friday has in store; presumably I’ll get my own space shuttle and discover a harem-planet made of chocolate.

I want to give a huge thank you to my supervisor Mike Nicol who remained calm in the face of the whirling chaos of my first draft, and to Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes for reading the book in record time and giving me sensible advice which I absolutely should have followed. I’d also like to thank my examiners Zukiswa Wanner and Tihalo Raditlhalo, for liking it.

Here’s me graduating. I’m the one on the left with the double chin. The one on the right is my girlfriend Kerry who got her PhD in biochemistry, which is even more awesome.

Franschhoek Literary Festival

This Friday will be my first time attending the Franschhoek Literary Festival, and I’m greatly looking forward to it. Last year I was holed up in Cape Town, listening to the third-party accounts of Thoughtful Analysis, Heated Discussions, and drunken J.M. Coetzee impersonations. This year, I shall witness the identity theft in person.

If you need tickets (and you probably will), the online booking form can be found here. And while you’re booking, I’m talking on Friday from 11.30 to 12.30, on the panel “A Real Tweet” with Steve Vosloo, Michael Rice and the other Sam Wilson. So, you know… There’s that.

See you there!

Sam.

The next 35 Genre Stories

Here are the latest 35 genre stories. I made a few corrections for spelling and clarity and (in one case) plot, but I have made sure that none of these corrections make the tweets go over the 140 character limit.

Follow Genre Stories at Twitter/Genrestories

Melodrama: “Forgive me for posing as your long-lost daughter, Brad. I’ll wear this wig no more. Before I die, just once, call me: ‘Father.’”

Metafiction: “Mr President, we’re on the brink of disaster. Our world is built on 140 characters and they’re non-renewable. When they run ou

Cringe: He did a German accent whenever he was nervous. He met his new boss Mister Müller, and panicked. “Top o’ t’ mornin’ to ye!” he said.

Steampunk: “The Analytical Engines must be purged!” said the minister. Too late. The compromising mimeograph was already at clickileaks.

Drama: He was miserable. “Puzzle pieces that were forced together are harder to pull apart,” he said. But she didn’t understand him. Again.

War: “They’re filling their trenches with poets,” said the German general. “We can play that game. Send in the mimes.”

Horror: “Wear this ring,” said the shopkeeper, “and all your dreams will come true.” They did. Even the one with the teeth.

Exposé: It was his first day as a copywriter. “Jesus Saves… With CostCo!” he said. It was his last day as a copywriter.

Comedy: He did the racist bit. The audience gasped. He paused, ready to launch the punchline, when the heart attack hit. He died on stage.

Historical: The man walked into the sultan’s tent, mistaking him for a fortune teller. The sultan screamed out a fortune. It was accurate.

Campus novel: “Strip rubik’s cube?” he suggested. She solved it in 23 seconds. He ran out the dorm in a panic of love.

Tech: The app made ethics easy. Product histories, informed decisions, clear consciences. No one asked why it kept saying “Buy Coke.”

Psi-Fi: Humanity unified telepathically. Finally we were of one mind. A mind filled with sex and arguments and kittens with poor spelling.

Black Comedy: “They’ll remember me now,” he thought, finger on the trigger. “I’ll be the Kurt Cobain of actuaries.” He was wrong.

Objectivist: His industrialist father had told him that the wealthy owed nothing to anybody. So, as his trust-fund grew, Atlas chugged.

War: He wasn’t that bright. He failed his driver’s test twelve times. But driving a tank means never having to check your blind spots.

Unnerving Children’s Haiku: Waldo is easy / But can you spot the ninja? / He Is Behind You.

Arjun Basu: Two men waited on the bench. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we’re waiting for the same girl?” said one. But they were, and it wasn’t.

Allegory: He slept all day. His conversation left people drained. He avoided mirrors; they made him look unremarkable. And garlic was passé.

War: Christmas in the trenches. The two sides played football in no man’s land. Afterwards the English fans got out of hand, as usual.

Horror: Lovecraft stared at the page. During the fever he’d channeled a phantasmagorical tale of sentient beasts, and signed it “B. POTTER.”

Teen Romance: She watched him from across the cafeteria. He was so much taller, more confident, and better described than she was.

Chain Letter: RT This! A Joburg man RTed it and got 876 new followers! A man in Pofadder ignored it, but nothing worse could happen to him.

Self-referential: This tweey has exactly one hundred and thirty nine characters, two commas, one full stop and an obvious spelling mistake.

Historical: While trying to get a loan, Spartacus discovers he’s the victim of quite unbelievable identity theft.

Superhero: “Behold! This suit will let me move through solid walls!” He put it on, fell to the center of the Earth, and burned to a crisp.

Crime: He argued with the mechanic. Drove off without paying. Just as he hit 120, he noticed the tyre bolts on the passenger seat.

Child: Jimmy wanted to see the fire engines but mummy wouldn’t take him. Mohammad won’t come to the mountain, he thought, lighting a match.

TwilightZone: As he read his acceptance speech to the Nobel Academy on his discovery that dying brains hallucinate, a distant beeping ended.

SciFi: He solved the world’s energy crisis by developing cheap fusion. His statue bore his historic words “Fok Eskom. ‘N boer maak ‘n plan.”

Game: In the Sims 4, your character can, through meditation, transcend and become aware of its true nature: A bored person playing Sims 4.

Horror Metafiction: Vampire romances suck the life out of all new young adult novels. They turn every new book into a vampire romance.

Cooking: Unfold bag. Microwave on high for 3 mins. Open away from face or steam will scald eyes, making Transformers II even less enjoyable.

Post-CS Lewis: After years of adventure, he was pulled up out of his underwater kingdom. He coughed water. The bully said “Flush him again!”

Horror Movie Trailer: 140 IS THE NEW 666. This summer, Follow the warnings. Follow your instinct. Just don’t follow… DeathTweet.

Would you like more? The first 100 genre stories can be found here.

Commedia – Book Excerpt

My first novel, Commedia, is set in Roman Britain in the year 410 and follows the adventures of a group of slacker actors on a road-trip around the collapsing country.

Although I’m still in the process of final revisions, I thought I’d post the first chapter to give a taste of what the novel’s like.

LONDINIUM AUGUSTA, 410 AD

It was a burial, and Curio had the giggles. He tried to stop himself laughing by stamping down on the toes of his foot, but it didn’t help. Everything he saw made him feel like he was going to burst. The mud splattered on the nobility’s funeral robes, for instance, or the way they were glaring at the young priest, who couldn’t pronounce the ceremony’s high-Latin words. The way the women’s jewellery was jangling in the wind. But the fact that Musca was dead was enough. The more that Curio told himself how awful it would be to laugh at something so tragic, the worse it got.

They were in a field to the east of the town, on a gentle slope littered with grave markers. This was where the lowest of the low were buried. There were better graveyards to the north of Londinium, filled with cultivated flowerbeds and marble mausoleums. Not here. The graves were shallow, and the gentle rain that had been falling all day had washed away the upper layers of mud, bringing some disturbing things to the surface. A couple of goats stood nearby, watching the proceedings through hourglass pupils. One of them was chewing on something that had recently come up from the ground. Curio decided not to look too closely. Other than the goats and the burial party, the field was empty. No trees, no shrubs, no buildings. No mausoleum for Musca. The nobility were gathered there to make sure that he was buried in disgrace.

Musca’s body was wrapped up in the shroud at the foot of the grave. The sheer size of it was testament to a life lived for pleasure. In forty years of life he had eaten spectacular volumes of pork, lamb, venison, beef, chicken, turkey, quail, and, when the imperial menagerie had closed, giraffe. Musca was an old-school Roman. While the rest of Britain was prostrate before their local emperor, Constantine III, Musca was prostrate on a couch. While the rest of Britain was paying Christianity lip-service, Musca was filling his lips with grapes. In the war between virtue and vice, Musca had been a significant outpost of vice.

Still, he had been rich, which got him a proper Christian burial, including a priest with thinning hair and poor eyesight who was stumbling over the words and sweating at all the attention.

He came to the end of his scroll and looked over at the slave captain, who signalled to his men. The four slaves lifted Musca’s stretcher and carry it over the grave. As they lowered it into the hole the wet ropes slipped in their hands, and two of them lost control.

“Shit!” said the slave captain.

The stretcher flipped, and Musca’s body dropped into the muddy water at the bottom of the grave.

The splash sounded exactly like a privy. The priest flinched and lost control of his scroll. Half of it unrolled down into the hole, coming to a stop next to the body. The priest hurriedly rolled in the scroll, reciting a psalm to cover his mistake. It came back up covered in mud which smeared on the sleeve of the priest’s oversized robe. The nobles shifted from foot to foot. Curio screwed up his eyes and pinched his nose closed and prayed that the people around him thought he was crying. No such luck.

“Pull yourself together, you tit,” said a voice in his ear.

“Can’t!” squeaked Curio.

The man behind him took a swig of wine. He was ragged and crow-like, with greasy hair and a sneer. He was also Curio’s oldest friend, although neither of them were sure why. His name was Pavo.

“Typical Brit. Can’t respect a Roman at his own burial.”

One of the slaves behind them tried to shush them. Pavo ignored him.

“Look at this place,” Pavo said, almost hitting Curio in the face as he waved his arm. “A Roman shouldn’t be buried here.”

“Shouldn’t have conquered it, then,” said Curio.

Several more slaves started shushing.

“No respect,” said Pavo. “No respect.”

- – -

After the ceremony the nobility dispersed, shaking unspeakable things off their boots, and calling for their litter-bearers. Curio and Pavo watched them go.

“It’s over already?” said Pavo accusingly.

Curio wiped his eyes. “What a service,” he said. “Did you hear that prayer? Musca’s going to Heaven, apparently. Unbelievable.”

Pavo held his jug of wine upside down and shook it. He threw it aside.

“Come on,” he said.

“Can we stay for a bit?” said Curio, looking at the grave.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. To get a good look our lives.”

“Why would you want to do that?” said Pavo. “My life, all right, yes, that’s a tale worth telling. But you’re from Isca Dumnoniorum, for God’s sake. Get a grip.”

“What’s wrong with Isca Dumnoniorum?”

“Nothing. It’s a fine place to come from if you fuck your own sister.”

Pavo slouched off towards the gate, leaving Curio watching a swinging greasy ponytail.

Curio looked back at the grave. The man who gave him money and kept him out of prison was dead. Why didn’t the moment feel more significant? Maybe really big disasters were too big to understand. You could just get on with your life and not bother noticing.

“Here lies Curio,” called Pavo. “Not dead, just too lazy to leave the graveyard.”

“Coming, you lanky Roman twat,” muttered Curio.

Book Trailers

I’ve gradually slid into a sideline making book trailers for upcoming novels.

It started with the motion graphics trailer for Lauren Beukes‘s “Zoo City”, and then the creepy mood piece for S.L. Grey‘s “The Mall”. And now I’ve completed a trailer for Mike Nicol‘s latest crime novel “Black Heart”, the final part of his Revenge Trilogy.

Making a book trailer is an interesting proposition. You have to capture the mood of a novel concisely, without using the original text, and because you’re playing in the same visual area as movie trailers then there are a lot of tropes that can be used, but raised expectations too. On a tiny fraction of a movie budget, shots have to be chosen very carefully.

If done well, though, a trailer can introduce readers to a book quickly, deeply and memorably.

Thanks to Sarah Lotz, who co-directed the trailers for “Black Heart” and the “Mall”.

Black Heart:

The Mall:

Zoo City:

UPDATE: As Lauren pointed out, I didn’t put my email address out here where the spambots can see it. If you’d like to get in contact with me, I’m wombatsamwilson on gmail, or wombatsam on Twitter. Thanks!

Draft One

I finished the first draft of my first novel yesterday. I’m filled with a lot of different thoughts that are hard to structure into a single intelligible blog post. The best I can do right now is throw them down as a quick rambling list.

1) Every single person I spoke to about my novel before I started told me that I should hurtle through the first draft and not worry too much about it, and only polish it up when it was done. Now, finally, I understand why. When I was feverishly polishing my first three chapters rather than pushing forward, I knew that I was probably wasting time, and I might have to re-write them again anyway. What I didn’t realise was that, because I edited them so much at the beginning, they would be a lot harder to re-write at the end. They’re currently a densely-packed mesh of discarded plot-points, unnecessary characters and pointless exposition, all tied very neatly to the actual story. So I’ll need to spend the next month untangling them all again.

2) Setting a novel in a historical time period limits the number of metaphors and similes you can use. It wouldn’t seem right to say that someone shot out of the forum “like a rocket” because it’s anachronistic. But what’s the limit here? The Romans didn’t have minutes or seconds. Am I still allowed to say that a character “paused for a second”? The general rule I’ve used is to avoid any modern wording that calls too much attention to itself. For example, the characters speak contemporary English, but I have avoided Americanisms like “Okay” and “Cool”.

3) I wrote the book as a comedy road-novel and a heist, with parallels to contemporary South Africa and meditations on misplaced faith and the nature of comedy and theatre. I’m going to have to either cut some of these threads or reinforce them so they don’t seem so arbitrary. Next time, I’m going to take one idea and stick with it.

4) I’m glad I gave up trying to write with a funny narrative voice. Some things are better deadpan.

5) Writing a novel is a Big Thing. I can’t let myself review another novel for a while: Even if it was awful I’d still shower it with praise for existing at all.

6) I’m very grateful to the people who have bravely agreed to give me feedback. Thanks very much to Mike Nicol, Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes.

Commedia Word Cloud

I’ve just seen Mandy Watson’s brilliant project, creating word clouds of classical speculative fiction texts using Wordle. I liked it so much that I thought I’d give it a try on my own book.

I’m writing a novel called Commedia, about a small group of comedy actors in post-colonial Roman Britain. I’m still a few days away from finishing the first draft, but I have enough words to make a decent word cloud.

Click to see the full-sized version

Curio, Pavo, Trio and Alba are the names of the main characters, so no major surprises there. I didn’t expect the word cloud to look like a tree, but I quite like it this way.

Sanlam Prize Winners

On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Adeline Radloff and Alex Smith at the Book Lounge about their Sanlam Prize-Winning young adult novels, Sidekick and Agency Blue. Adeline and Alex were charming and delightful and the books are fantastic – pick them up if you get a chance. There’s a write-up of the evening here.