Blog Novella

Every now and then something happens on the blogosphere that completely cracks me up… for some reason it sticks in my head and when I’m bored at a stoplight or my mind is wandering, whatever it is will crawl back to the forefront of my thoughts and make me laugh. Something right now is going on and it is still unfolding… and I finally had to blog on it.

Christina at Feisty Repartee started a Novella. She dished out Chapters to some of her fellow bloggers, she started with Chapter 1, then it alternated amongst them one chapter at a time. When I read they were doing this, I started to chuckle to myself, wondering how this would come out. Of the bloggers she picked, I knew of 4 and their writing styles are distinctly different and their life experiences are also so.

First let me state that I have NO creative writing abilities at all. I can only write what I see or perceive... my own little warped view on things and I am in awe of those who can make stuff up. So when I read that these folks had been approached to write my first thought was, “Wow. Good for them to be so creative!” And as I perused her list, they were all bloggers whose writing I had either read and respected greatly, or bloggers of whom I had heard great things.

With that Christina put out Chapter One, which you can read HERE. She is an excellent writer. Really, I could visualize all she wrote. I’ve e-mailed Christina this part, so this is no surprise to her. She writes like I write. We write like women. What we notice and what men notice are distinctly different. You just have to read it to understand. So she writes this piece where you can truly understand what the nameless male character's senses are experiencing. All of it. And then at the end… something odd happens… does he die? Does he not? Where is he? And then… she lobs it over to Eric’s court, with this final thought from the character, “This is my Destiny…”

Well, Eric of Straight White Guy takes it and if you don’t read Eric, you are missing out. A former Marine, a Southern story teller, and Eric is ALL man. Period. From his favorite scotch to… well, he just is, and he’s funny as hell. Definitely Laugh Out Loud funny. Now keep in mind… THIS IS MY PERCEPTION! Never have Eric or Christina ever said anything to me about this. But in MY head, I can picture Eric receiving this and thinking, “Oh crap. What do I do with this now?”, because as I said, when you read Christina’s, it is definitely written by a woman. And I must admit, I was quietly laughing when I finished Christina’s chapter thinking, “heh. This is going to be fun.”

Eric, as he put it, ‘birthed’ the 2nd chapter and it is HERE. This is where I start to really laugh because now it is no longer about a man going through something more touchy feely, as we women see things, but it is now… A FRICKIN’ WAR STORY! The character now has a name, James, and he’s a doctor in a war and he’s been blown up, lost a leg, saved some lives, he’s a hero, but of course a mental and emotional wreck… and the first chapter that Christina wrote… it is now a BOOK that our hero James is reading. I read that and laughed so hard, I nearly cried.

Very well written… both chapters, as I would have expected, because as I said, both are truly talented writers.

With that, Eric lobs it into Acidman’s court. Acidman is over at GutRumbles and to say the man is full of life experiences is just selling him short. With him now having James the war hero in his hands, I had to wonder what would happen next, although for some reason I felt certain James was going to get laid, probably in Costa Rica. I got half right. He did end up on Costa Rica. But as Acidmen said, he writes about flawed people, not heroes. Read Chapter 3 HERE.

And so now… our hero James… is a drunk, in Costa Rica, and most probably a plagiarist as he received royalties from a book he never really wrote… and a second installment is due… Definitely a flawed man. And I had to laugh yet again!

Perhaps you have to know the blogs to find it so humorous, but each chapter has fit each blogger's writing personality very well. It has really been fun to read.

Jack of Random Fate is on deck with Chapter 4. We’re awaiting his chapter and there is no doubt that it will be different yet again, but he’s got his work cut out as Jack was quoted as saying that Acidman ‘handed him a grenade with the pin pulled’. But Jack too is a hugely talented writer and I’m looking forward to what he now does with “James, our war hero, missing a leg, haunted by dreams, drunkard, and potential plagiarist, whose favorite book from high school happens to be about a 40 year old man who threw it all into the wind to move to Belize, but may or may not have died of a heart attack".