Scott William Carter

Water Balloon Boys: The First Page

April 26, 2010April 25, 2010Scott William Carter

Well, tomorrow my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is officially published, meaning it’s the day that I go from being an almost published novelist to a published novelist. How am I feeling about that? Pretty darn good.

So I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that while my first book may not be the kind of book that flies off the shelves right from the get go — hey, there’s no vampires, wizards, or other strange paranormal activity going on here, just two boys who steal their Principal’s car and end up on a life-changing adventure — I really believe it’s the kind of book that if people read the first page, they’ll have a hard time putting it down. Maybe not everyone — taste is a subjective thing — but a lot of people.

Of course, my friend challenged me to post my first page online to back up my words. So here it is, the first page of my first book:

The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys
by Scott William Carter

If I’m going to tell you how I killed this kid, I can’t start on the day it happened. It won’t make any sense, and you’ll just think I was some psycho teenage boy with glue for brains. No, the whole thing really started three days earlier, on Monday, which made it bad straight off. It was also raining, which made it even worse.

In fact, it was raining so hard that my tennis shoes were soaked before I even walked two blocks from our house. Not just kind of wet, either, but really soaked in that way your socks get all squishy and your feet make those mucky sounds each time you take a step. Muck, muck, muck, all through the halls, everybody staring at you like you’ve just turned into a human squid. Back then, before all the crazy stuff happened, most kids looked at me as if I was a human squid anyway. I figured that’s what they’d put in the senior yearbook, if they remembered to put anything in there about me at all: Charlie Hill, Most Likely To Be a Human Squid For the Rest of His Life.

If it sounds bad, that’s because it was. If you want to read a nice, happy little story where everything turns out all neat and tidy in the end, you should go read some Hardy Boys or something. This isn’t that kind of story.

Not that everything that happened that Monday was bad. About halfway to the school, I realized I had probably missed the bus on purpose.

Want to read more? You can buy it right now from Amazon.com for only $11.46.

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Postcards from the Garage: Water Balloon Boys Author Copies

April 22, 2010April 21, 2010Scott William Carter

I now have in my hands the author copies of my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys. I can’t tell you what a great feeling this is. What a beautiful hardback book. As a former owner of a used bookstore, and one who’s sold a number of antiquarian books, I gotta tell you it’s a real pleasure to open this one up and see the words “First Edition” there on the copyright page. I would have been fine with my first book being a paperback original, but it gives me an extra thrill for it to be a hardcover.

And if you’ve pre-ordered it, you too can hold it your hands . . . in about five days.

ROF publishes “The Grand Mal Reaper” Online (Free Reading)

April 21, 2010April 21, 2010Scott William Carter

If you want a taste of the sort of thing I write, here’s a great example. As a promotional effort for my just-published story collection, Realms of Fantasy magazine has just posted my story, “The Grand Mal Reaper,” on their website. It should be up for about a month, and you can read it for free here. It originally appeared in the August 2006 issue.

This story actually has a very interesting history. I’d submitted it back in 2005 and the assistant editor at the time passed it up to Shawna McCarthy, the magazine’s editor. But then this assistant editor left and a new one took over — Douglas Cohen. Shawna had Doug review all the stories the previous assistant editor had recently passed up, and mine was the only one he decided to pass up to her a second time. Which she then purchased and published in the magazine in August 2006.

And of course it’s also included in my collection, The Dinosaur Diaries And Other Tales Across Space and Time.

Check it out if you have a few minutes. Here’s the opening to whet your appetite:

The Grand Mal Reaper
by Scott William Carter

She stood across from me, hands tucked into the armpits of her jean jacket, the tear in her nylon stocking looking garish in the pale yellow light. When she glanced at me through the fogging breaths and cigarette smoke, my heart did the skids.

Five of us huddled on the snow-covered sidewalk outside the restaurant, Lenny the manager, a couple of waitresses in addition to Rita, and me, a thirty-year old busboy who’d only been in Oregon a month. The conversation had turned to our plans for the holiday, and while Lenny and the other waitresses chatted animatedly about turkey dinners with annoying relatives and last-minute shopping for hard-to-find toys, Rita and I hadn’t said a word.

We’d been exchanging glances a lot the last couple of weeks, the kind of glances that often lead to buying condoms and beer from the mini-mart in the middle of the night, but I hadn’t thought about pursuing her until that moment. I was sure my own eyes had the same look, a what the hell am I doing here sort of a look. I didn’t know squat about Rita, nothing except that she was about my age and that she lived on the south side of Rexton out by the golf course, but after that glance I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to know where she grew up and what movies she liked and why she never smiled. The conversation was winding down, everybody doing the slow sidestep toward their cars, and I was thinking don’t let her go, ask her stupid, do it now, but then came the death-tugging. Like an invisible cord pulling at my chest.

[Read the rest here.]

Games Writers Play #14: Five Minute Free Write

April 20, 2010April 16, 2010Scott William Carter

If you’re like me, there’s times when you sit down at the keyboard and every idea that comes to you seems hackneyed. The well has run dry. You can’t seem to think of an original idea.

Well, therein lies the problem, this tendency that writers have that everything must be original, and that everything they write should be autographed and framed on the wall. Sometimes you have to plow through thousands of words of practice before the original idea — the one that really gets you excited — emerges.

Here’s a technique I’ve used all the time just to get the fingers moving: Set your countdown timer to five minutes and write as many words as you can in that time. Don’t stop. Don’t judge. Just keep typing until the timer goes off. Then add up the words. If you like this technique, keep a running total of how many words you’ve written at each session. *

Now, you might be thinking, well, I could just type random words, but I dare you to try it. Our minds actually want to create order out of chaos. You might be surprised at where your typing takes you. If you’re pushing yourself to write fast — remember, don’t judge, just keeping pushing, the focus is on the number of words and not on the quality — you’re out-racing the critical side of your brain, the side that censors things for being “too weird.” But when I’ve used this technique, often those “too weird” ideas are the ones I’ve been able to turn into something I had a blast writing — and usually sold too.

The worst that can happen? Even if you don’t find anything in your free write you want to use, you spent five minutes — a whopping five minutes — warming up your fingers and shaking the cobwebs out of your brain. That’s valuable all by itself.

* Note: If you use Microsoft Word, you can click on File, then Properties to get the word count of your document.

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