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An Interesting Metaphor for Writing
I was just listening to a podcast (The Skeptics Guide to the Universe) on which author Scott Sigler was discussing his upcoming novel Nocturnal. It’s a science horror novel, which means that it’s a horror novel, but not based on anything supernatural; he meticulously made sure that everything in the novel is based on real science.
During his interview, they digressed onto how upset people were with the endings of Battlestar Galactica and Lost.
Supposedly, the creators of BSG and Lost both claimed originally that they had plotted out everything before they started shooting. The Lost creators in particular claimed that everything was important, and viewers analyzed every frame of video.
Then, after the series finale, the Lost creators admitted they were making it up as they went. There was no intended end-point from the beginning. Every plot was pulled out of the air, with very little to no thought given to continuity or arc.
Sigler compared the two styles of writing to an architect and a gardener.
An architect designs a building from the foundation to the roof, noting with precision where plumbing, wiring, fixtures, structural details, etc. are going to be located in the end product. And when the building is constructed, the building is a physical representation of the architect’s design right down to the finest detail. A beautiful example of this style of writer is Connie Willis. In several interviews I’ve heard with her, she has said she leaves nothing—or precious little—to chance. The plot is outlined before she writes a word. The characters are designed to fulfill the plot’s requirements.
A gardener, on the other hand, plants a bunch of seeds. He has some idea of the impact he intends, but these are plants, and who knows whether they’ll come up as intended—or at all—or how much they’ll grow or whether they’ll be the right color? And after everything sprouts, he can either replant or prune or fertilize, and what comes out of the other end is an organic (sorry, I couldn’t resist) product that may or may not be what he originally had in mind. It may look similar, or it may be something entirely different, even if it is just as æsthetically pleasing. This is where I am. It’s also called “discovery writing.”
I will add a third one to the mix to represent what I’d like to aim for. I don’t want to be an architect; the way I write, I would get bored with the story because in my mind, if I’ve drawn the blueprint that meticulously…then why write the story? And I will readily admit that the gardener approach isn’t working for me, either. I plant so many seeds that don’t produce, but in the meanwhile, they sprout and have to be weeded out. I waste a lot of words going down blind paths that don’t lead anywhere or scenes where the characters veer off into discussions that ultimately have to be pruned.
What I would like to aim for is the landscape designer. Someone who plans based on the best information they have, with an idea to what the project should look like in the end, but who also realizes that sometimes changes have to be made along the way. The ground might be harder in the spot where you wanted to have the pansies, so instead you put your bird bath there and move the pansies over here, but now the phlox has to go over there…
And sometimes, the landscape designer ends up with something that they never intended, but is better than what they set out for at the beginning. But because they had a plan, it still has the backbones in place.
OK, maybe the analogy gets a bit forced there, toward the end. But at least it gives me a convenient way to keep it in my head.
And you know is the first writer that comes to mind when I think “Landscape Designer”? J. Michael Straczynski, creator and main writer for the wonderful TV series “Babylon 5.” He had a five-year arc for the show and each character. But when the star of the show decided to leave (amicably) after one season, he had a contingency plan. And when an actor in the second season decided her character wasn’t getting enough to do and wanted out in spite of the fact that her character was going to be a huge, critical role down the road, he had a contingency plan. And when another main character departed after the fourth season, he had a contingency plan. And each time, the show quietly dealt with the loss, working them into the plot and coming out the other end better. Or if not entirely better, at least not utterly destroyed (I’m sure I don’t have to argue that the fifth season would have been better with Ivanova instead of Lochley, but that Lochley didn’t ruin the show, either).
I’m going to stop, here, before I gush more about Babylon 5, which you should be watching right now instead of whatever trivial thing you’re doing.
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Review: Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha
Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha
My rating: 4 of 5 starsDead Mann Walking is an urban fantasy that manages to break free from the pack of most of the other urban fantasies I’ve read. Most of those others involve sexy vampires, sexy werewolves, wizards, or other…well, romantic figures. Ghosts. Fairies. Elves. That kind of thing.
Hessius Mann is a zombie. But they don’t call them that. They call them chakz, after the Spanish word for “jerky,” or “dried meat.”
Mann, who was a policeman in life, was accused of murdering his wife (for good reason), and found guilty. He was executed for the crime. And then exonerated. To give him a “second chance” of sorts, he was revived. The hell of it is, he doesn’t remember whether he actually did it or not. It’s all lost in a haze. Chakz’ memories aren’t what they were in life. Mann doesn’t like to think about it too much. What if he remembers…and it turns out he did kill her? Could he “live” with himself, knowing that?
Unlike most chakz, Mann is pretty lucky. He’s in one piece with few nicks and cuts, although the injuries he’s received since his raising are easy enough for his assistant Misty to fix with an exacto knife, needle, thread, and super glue.
He’s running a mostly unsuccessful private investigation business. Chakz are universally reviled. Not only are they outcast, they have to deal with the constant threat of harassment by Hakkers, gangs of young thugs who think it’s fun to torture and/or destroy the undead. And even though most chakz are able to hold things together pretty well, mentally…occasionally one slips and turns feral, becoming like those Romero-type zombies that mindlessly kill and eat any living humans–Livebloods–they come across. That doesn’t make chakz any more loved.
A lawyer visits Mann at his office one day to offer him a substantial sum of cash to find his client’s heir–who is a chak–and bring him home into the loving arms of his family so he can inherit the family fortune. Mann doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and takes the money–and the case. But then, several chakz are discovered in pieces. Minus their heads.
Mann soon realizes that the cases are related, and once he starts investigating it, he stirs up all kinds of trouble in the community, and uncovers a plot that will endanger his unlife several times over. But the police are no help–they all think he killed his wife, after all, and it’s just chakz who are being disposed of, not real people–and the only liveblood who’ll help is Misty, who has her own demons.
What I really liked about this novel is that not only does it have the requisite Mystery That Must Be Solved™, there’s quite a few things in there that hold a bright light up to how society tends to treat those it values least. The people it chooses not to notice. The people it wishes would just go away. A chakz’ existence is pretty bleak, and most of them didn’t ask for it. It’s not really life they’re living so much as it is mere existence. They don’t have any of the animal drives of the living–sleep, food, water, air, sex–and they aren’t welcome anywhere. What’s left to them?
The book doesn’t shy away from these questions, either. It addresses them head on. At the end of the book, the legal status of chakz comes under scrutiny and undergoes a drastic change, which should provide a very interesting backdrop for subsequent books in the series.
Make no doubt about it: In many ways, this is a bleak story. With bleak characters. Living in a bleak world. It is not light-hearted and fluffy. It is probably not going to uplift your soul or make you shed tears of happiness and joy. There are no wise-cracking heroes who always get the girl, here. In fact, even the good guys aren’t always so great. But I think that makes them more interesting to read.
And it is a very good read. The plot makes sense. The pacing is good. The characters are not just flat caricatures of movie monsters, but have some actual depth. There are some very interesting secondary characters that I look forward to seeing come back in later volumes. There are a few places where you’ll laugh, and there are a few places where you’ll squirm. And there’s at least one scene that should give you the heebie-jeebies. (Heh-heh!)
But you’ll keep turning the page because you want to know what happens next.
And isn’t that the hallmark of a good book?
I’ll definitely be looking for the subsequent volumes. -
This Always Happens
This always happens.
I fully intended to post this during NaNoWriMo, but . . . somewhere in the shuffle, I forgot about it until last week . . . and then it was Christmas. So here I am a couple of days after Christmas posting something I intended to post on November 7th.
Anyway.
I had to put my current novel on hold for NaNoWriMo because I simply couldn’t think too much about it and do 26 stories at the same time. But someone posted a link to a video on YouTube that distracted me for several hours during NaNoWriMo, and may have directly contributed to the fact that the story I wrote on November 7th (“G Is for Gravesite”) was the shortest (finished) story of the bunch.
This is the video. I created a playlist of all five parts. It’s Dan Wells‘ presentation at BYU’s Life, the Universe, and Everything writing symposium on February 13, 2010. It is his seven-point outlining scheme.
(For some reason, WordPress refuses to let me embed a playlist. I’m working on it. For now, this is the first of the five videos.)So I watched this, and was pretty much overcome with the desire to use this to figure out exactly what the plot(s) is(are) for my novel Perdition’s Flames. Not to mention the other novels in the same series. Maybe if I can figure out the seven points of the first one, I can come up with the seven points of others, as well.
It came as quite a surprise to me when I sat down to actually do this that I already knew exactly what each of the seven points was going to be for the plot of the novel. Not so much for subplots and character arcs. Those I still need to work on.
This always happens. I find yet another reason to stop writing and start over. I think perhaps what I’ll do instead is to continue writing and use this for the rewrite. There are only a few more scenes, really, and I already know what has to happen in them. I don’t have any subplots, and two of my characters have kind of disappeared, but hey. That’s what rewrites are for, right? :)
I keep searching for useful tools to help me plot and plan. Truth is, it’s all in my head, but every time I try to put it on paper (figuratively or literally), I end up frustrated. One of these days I’m going to find a useful tool, dammit! :)
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NaNoWriMo Final Update: My Machinery Is Too Big
NaNoWriMo is now officially over. I wrote 122,408 words between midnight on November 1st and midnight on November 30th.
The title of this post (and the awesome image) is in reference to a quote my housemate often uses to explain why every short story she writes turns into a novel. “I just can’t write anything short. My machinery is too big.”
I think I might have a touch of the same problem. A lot of the stories I worked on for NaNoWriMo this year got a little out of hand, length-wise, turning into novelettes, novellas, or worse. Well, ‘worse’ is probably a bit strong . . .
But my express purpose this year was to focus on short stories. And only two completed ones—”G Is for Gravesite” and “U Is for Unicorn Power Imblance”—were under 3000 words. While that may still qualify as “short” by some definitions, my inspiration for doing this were all these 250-, 300-, and 350-word flash pieces that I’ve done for the Second Life writing group, The Quillians.
When I thought about the plots of the stories I planned out before November, I could not conceive of any of them being longer than a couple of thousand words. The ideas seemed simple. Easy to write.
But another thing I have learned from NaNoWriMo this year—in addition to the things I iterated in the last two NaNoWriMo update posts—is simply this: A story is as long as a story needs to be.
That sounds simplistic, but it’s hard to let go of a length when you set out to write a story of 2000 words and you end up with something 10,000 words or more. Granted, a lot of that 10,000 words will be edited out, but still.
Basically, what it means to me is that two stories took just a few words to tell. Gravesite came in at 2204 and Unicorn at just 1826. But I told the stories I wanted to tell. Each of them has a beginning, middle, and end. They resolve. They have one or more of Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event.
Others are not even close to being finished at 6,000, 10,000 or even 12,000 words. (No, I didn’t write all of any of those on a single day.)
And both of those are OK. Really.
My next step is to edit some of these, finish the others, and to take apart the novel I’m in the midst of and . . . fix problems. The next post will explain that last comment. :)
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NaNoWriMo: Week 3 Report
Tonight marks the close of the 7th day of NaNoWriMo 2011.So, I have just completed week 3 of this craziness. I had every intention of doing a week 2 report, as well, but I just didn’t have time. You’ll see why in a moment. After day 7, I had 44,717 words, less than 6,000 words shy of “winning” NaNoWriMo. Here are my individual story word-counts as of midnight, November 22nd.
“A Is for Anchor” – 10,574 words – incomplete – Magic Realism
“B Is for Bard” – 10,092 words – incomplete – Fantasy
“C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” – 5719 words – complete – Horror“D Is for Dragon” – 6,369 words – complete – Fairy Tale + Humor
“E Is for Egg” – 4,975 words – complete – Science Fiction
“F Is for Fangs that Are Sunk in Your Leg” – 9,039 words – incomplete – Science Fiction“G Is for Gravesite” – 2,204 words – complete – Fantasy
“H Is for Haunted” – 5,309 words – incomplete – Horror
“I Is for Investigation: Unwanted” – 6,627 words – incomplete – Urban Fantasy“J Is for Jackpot” – 3,069 words – complete – Dystopian Science Fiction
“K Is for Kiss” – 3,191 words – complete – Fairy Tale
“L Is for Lucky for a Hit or a Miss” – 3,219 words – complete – Dark Fantasy“M Is for Moons” – 3,378 words – incomplete – Science Fiction + Fantasy
“N Is for Nocturnal” – 4,151 words – complete – Erotic Fantasy
“O Is for Oath of Service Eternal” – incomplete – Fantasy + Humor“P Is for Prey” – 3,630 words – complete – Science Fiction
“Q Is for Quest” – 1,557 words – incomplete – Fairy Tale + Humor
“R Is for Ritual Performed as a Test” – 4,598 words – complete – Dark Fiction“S Is for SkullCosm” – 3,872 words – incomplete – Science Fiction
“T Is for Talents” – 3,622 words – complete – Dystopian Science Fiction
“U Is for Unicorn Imbalance” – 1,826 words – complete – Dark FantasyIf you add in the 617 words of “Fangs” that I wrote and then crossed out because I had chosen the wrong part of the story to start at and the 1527 words of “Nocturnal” that were an interesting science fiction idea that I could not make work before I changed it to Erotic Fantasy, that comes out to a grand total of 101,066 words as of today.
Here’s what the intervening two weeks of writing fast and furious to get to this many words has taught me.
- Write through writer’s block. For the first seven stories (the first week), I had definite ideas (minus Anchor). When I sat down to write most of them, I knew the characters, plot, and world, and all I had to do was sit down and let the words out. It was actually fairly easy. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed writing so much as I did that first week. But then for Haunted, Investigation, Kiss, Moon, Prey, Quest, Ritual, and SkullCosm, I had only the vaguest notion of what the story was. At most I had a notion of character and a glimmer of a world. But I sat down at the keyboard and I just started typing, going with the first thing that popped into my head, inventing as I went along. As I went, I was forced to make decisions, and those decisions forced me to make others . . . and then before you know it, I had character, plot, and world. Do I love these stories? Not all of them. :) I think all of them are good ideas, and with a little work after NaNoWriMo, I may be able to pull a better story out of them, and you’ll notice that a lot of those are incomplete. But the important part is that I didn’t let not having a perfectly formed story stop me. I went with my original ideas and made them work, and I look forward to finishing the stories.
- Butt in chair. For Jackpot, Lucky, Nocturnal, Oath, Talents, and Unicorn, I had less than no idea when I sat down to write at the beginning of the day. Not even the words for all but two of those. But I let my subconscious work on it, and each time, a story sparked. It’s interesting that of these most recent 14 stories, my favorite six are Jackpot, Lucky, Nocturnal, Oath, Talents, and Unicorn.
- Trust your instincts. For Nocturnal, my first glimmer of an idea was involving Nyx, the Greek personification of the Night. I did a lot of research on her, but the story kept turning into erotic fiction, and I couldn’t figure out the POV. So I abandoned it and forced another interpretation, which I then tried to write. I got 1527 words in and said, “No. This isn’t working. This isn’t what I want to write.” So I scrapped it and started over using my original idea of Nyx, but told from the POV of a man she picks up from a bar. I’m not comfortable writing erotic fantasy, but apparently that’s what I needed to write, because that’s what came out. And other than the very last paragraph or two, I really like it.
- Two—or sometimes 17—heads are better than one. I needed help on some of my ideas and I enlisted friends to help me out. I used names suggested by my Facebook friends in Dragon. The entire idea for Fangs came from a friend on LiveJournal. Kiss got its twist from yet another friend who made a typo to me in IM while trying to help me out. For Ritual, I used many suggestions from my friends on Facebook, although never in quite the way they probably intended. :) Not only did my friends make direct contributions by coming up with angles I wasn’t seeing (I need to work on that, clearly), but merely opening up for that to happen seems to have gotten my own creative juices flowing more.
I’d like to stress one thing in relation to the first point above. “Writers Block” doesn’t mean you don’t have ideas. It means you don’t have ideas that you can work with right now. Or at least for me, that’s what it means. I had plenty of ideas for, say, the letter J, but nothing that worked for me until a tiny voice in my head said “Jackpot” and showed me the entire story from beginning to end.
That’s pretty much it for weeks 2 through 3. I typed this mostly because I need to keep all these points in mind for the upcoming week. I have nothing at all for V, only a faint glimmer of a world and situation for W(itness), zero for X(enogamy) and Y, and then the beginnings of a notion for Z(ombie).
I can’t wait to see what I come up with. :)
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NaNoWriMo: Week 1 Report
Tonight marks the close of the 7th day of NaNoWriMo 2011.When I first started making posts about it back in . . . probably August? Maybe even July? . . . I had come to the decision that I did not want yet another incomplete novel sitting on my hard drive, especially with four current ones in development. It just seemed silly. Irresponsible. Overwhelming. And probably a few other choice adjectives as well.
So I decided to do a collection of 26 short stories. I’ll spare you from me repeating the idea again. The idea was that they were supposed to be short stories. You know, 2000 to 2500 words on average. I’d do one per day, maybe not even in order, and at the end I’d have around 52,000 words. Ample to win NaNoWriMo and it would give me 26 new short stories to play with.
“A Is for Anchor” currently sits at 10,574 words, and it’s not even close to done.
“B Is for Bard” currently has 7,547 words, and is also not complete. I know where I’m going with it, at least.
“C Is for Clowns (that Creep Through Your Yard)” is at 5,700 words even, and is complete.“D Is for Dragon” boasts 6,369 words, complete.
“E Is for Egg” weighs in at 4,975 words, complete.
“F Is for Fang (that Gets Sunk in Your Leg)” halted at 6,731 and is not complete.1“G Is for Gravesite” came in at just 2,204 words, complete.
At least one of the stories came in around 2000 words.
This puts me at 44,717 words in just 7 days. If I keep writing at the same rate I’ve been writing so far this month, I will surpass the monthly goal of 50,000 words tomorrow at some point.
To say that this is unexpected would be tantamount to calling the Pacific Ocean “a bit damp.” I had no idea I could write this much in just 7 days. Hell, I had no idea I could write > 7,000 words in one day (a personal best).
In just one week of NaNoWriMo, here is what I have learned:
- At no point in my life can I ever again utter the phrase, “I just can’t find the time to write.” That, to put it bluntly, is bullshit. I’m working the same job for the same amount of hours this week as I was two weeks ago. I still have the same social obligations. I haven’t missed anything important that I normally do. The difference is that I didn’t find time to write; I made time to write. I get up a couple of hours early in the morning and I write. Instead of futzing around on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google+, and GoodReads during my “free time,” I write. During lunch when I would normally read a book after finishing my meal, I write. When I come home from work, instead of relaxing with a DVD or reading or listening to podcasts, I write. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do. The thing that is important to me—writing—is what I’m spending time on. Anything less important goes bye-bye. I reiterate that during this week, I did not miss one single social event. I attended both writers group meetings, went to a party, socialized with my housemate, socialized with people at work, spent time with my cats, listened to some podcasts (but only in the car or while working when I cannot otherwise write), kept up in a limited way on Facebook… I intend to attend three writers group meetings this week as well as working an extra hour at work for monthly maintenance on some servers I’m responsible for. But right under all of that on my priorities is writing.
- Never again will I be able to utter the phrase “I just don’t have any ideas.” That is also bullshit. The trick isn’t having ideas, it’s turning them off. The truth is, I get ideas for stories all the time. Usually I dismiss them because they aren’t something I want to write right now or don’t go with anything I’m working on. Sometimes I write them down for ‘later,’ but we all know ‘later’ is never coming. Well, I needed 26 fresh ideas for NaNoWriMo and with the exception of a few tough letters of the alphabet, the problem hasn’t been finding an idea, it’s been finding a good one among all the crappy ones. For ‘S’ as an example, I had to sift through Sulfur, Saturn, Sinister, Silo, Silver, Sylph, Sand, Scraps, Solid…for each word that occurred to me, the tiny sliver of an idea would come with it. Was Silver a story about werewolves? Did Solid involve an alien able to exist in any state of matter? Did Silo have to do with an abandoned missile silo in a post-apocalyptic world? Maybe. Some of the others were probably just as good. But when Skullcosm finally came to me, I knew that was my S-word. And even inside that world, the story itself could take any of a number of shapes, one of which I’ll pick. Perhaps at the moment of coming up with a character name on the morning of the 19th. So, yeah. I have ideas. I just discard most of them. This week has taught me that some of those stories should probably get written sooner and not later, and certainly not never.
I also know that I cannot sustain 6000+ words per day. It is too wrist-intensive for one thing, but it also promotes quantity over quality, which is just fine and dandy for NaNoWriMo; not at any other time, however. Sure, there’s something to be said for getting a story down that’s way too long and then whittling away all the parts that aren’t the story I want to tell and leaving the only the bits that are behind. And that will most certainly be done with each of these when November is in the rearview and Christmas is hurtling ever closer.
December is always about the loss of momentum for me. NaNoWriMo is over! Whew! Time to parTAAAAAY! And by ‘parTAAAAAY’ I mean goof off. But I am going to try to make an effort to at least keep the momentum going.
Sometime in December, I’ll be recording myself reading one of my stories for a podcast. I haven’t decided which one, yet, but I’m heavily leaning on “D Is for Dragon” or “G Is for Gravesite” right now. It’s a pretty low-key podcast called The Quillian Chronicles, and is produced by members of my Second Life writers group as a way to foster participation by producing our stories in audio format for free distribution to the listening public.
Have I mentioned that I loathe the sound of my recorded voice? <sigh>
- I had a false start with this one and got 617 words in before realizing I had started at the wrong spot and with the wrong POV, so I started over. I count the 617 words in my total word-count (this is NaNoWriMo and every word counts), but not in the story total given here.
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Message from Poughkeepsie
This is how it happens.
I was driving my car to work, listening to podcasts, as I do every day. Today’s podcast happened to be one I’ve been putting off listening to because it’s lengthy. Over an hour and a half, and calls itself an interview with Jim Butcher. Butcher is, currently1, my favorite living author, creator of the fantastic urban fantasy series The Dresden Files.
The “podcast” turned out to be a recording of a radio show. The interview with Butcher started over an hour in, so I was doing a lot of fast-forwarding over a lot of inane babble.
When I finally got to the interview, only one of the three hosts of the show has read any of his books, but at least that one person is asking intelligent questions that indicate he did, indeed, read the books.
One of the questions was about vampires. In Butcher’s world, there are four “courts” of vampires, roughly divided into “Stoker-esque, Dracula-type” vampires (the Black Court), blood-sucking demon-types (the Red Court), psychic vampires who consume emotion and sexual energy (the White Court), and asian vampires (the Jade Court, which has not yet made an appearance in any of his books).
Now, when I designed my urban fantasy world, I decided up front that I wanted it to have a kind of scientific feel. No ghosts, fairies, demons, angels, gods, etc. And therefore no curses, which means no vampires or werewolves. Mostly, no sexy vampires or sexy werewolves. I’ve had my fill of those.
My one-line description of my series is, “It’s an urban fantasy set in modern Atlanta where magic works, but there are no sexy vampires or sexy werewolves.” People generally say, “Oh, thank God” at that, which seems to indicate to me that other people are getting tired of the whole ‘sexy cursed creature’ trend in fantasy, as well.
So, to re-iterate, my entire premise is based on how vampires and werewolves are simply not allowed. Just so we’re clear on that.
So, I’m listening to Jim talk . . . and my subconscious mind—which is generally free to wander indiscriminately while I’m doing something boring like driving, showering, or eating—looks up at me and grins. “Mutation,” it says, and then goes back to . . . I don’t know, playing jacks with Bigfoot or whatever it is that it does in there.
I, of course, knew immediately what this meant, because we share a brain. But for those of you out there who aren’t me, allow me to elaborate.
The way my magic system works is kind of complex and convoluted and I won’t go fully into it, here (because I might decide to change something later), but basically, you need energy to do work. Each person (animal, even plants) has energy. There are basically three types of magic users to draw on this energy: psionic, magic, and necromancers. Psionics draw on their own life energy, mages draw on their own and others’ life energy (slowly, as it’s naturally given off), and necromancers draw on their own energy, others’ energy, and can absorb the sum total of energy “released at the moment of death” as well.2 There’s a whole bunch of stuff about who can and can’t use what, how they access it, how the three mutations can all exist in the same person and what that means, etc. that I will probably never put in a story, but which I have to know for consistency.
What my subconscious was telling me is that there’s a fourth type who can draw energy forcefully, not all at once, but over a longer period of time than “at the moment of death,” but much higher rate than “as it is given off normally.”3
Yep. Vampires.
My subconscious is subverting the entire premise of my series.
But it does open certain very intriguing plot lines…No! No, no, no!
Talk me down, people. Talk. Me. Down. Before my subconscious whispers something that makes werewolves possible within my system.
- And by ‘currently,’ I mean currently in the sense of being my favorite, not currently living. He’s younger than I am. He should be around a while. :)
- The astute observers among you will no doubt be wondering what the “catch” is. With that much power out there for the use, what’s to stop magic-using people from taking over? And the answer is that there are serious physical consequences to using any type of magic, and there’s an addictive quality as well.
- Which implies, of course, that some people give off more, some less, and others can hoard energy like a battery.
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References
As you may be aware (because I keep telling you), NaNoWriMo rapidly approacheth.I’ve been hanging out on the forums a little this year, hoping to participate a bit more than I did last year (which was not at all). I ran across a whole forum for asking questions. Otherwise known as “The Reference Desk.” These are questions where you’ve exhausted what you can find out yourself and are now hoping someone else participating in the forums is an expert—or is at least knowledgeable—in that area.
This is why I love writers. There’s a quote I’ve seen recently, but I could not find the source, no matter how I flogged Google, but Rick Castle on the awesome series Castle paraphrased it nicely.
There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I’m the kind that pays better.
Here’s a sampling of some of the subject lines that I find particularly amusing.
Help with a new fictional element or molecular compound
Scars – from accidents, in non-obvious places
Anyone born in the forties
Things that knock together
Why would a married couple cook two different meals simultaneously?
Decomposition of Human Bodies?
How Does One Sustain Optic Nerve Damage?
Werecat Myths
Pregnancy – Funny Moments
Poison Which Doesn’t Quite Kill You
Tourism in Egypt
Slit Veins – How Long Do You Have Until You Die?
Killing Someone to Drive Down Stock PricesMaybe it’s just me, but I find that extremely funny. And this goes on for more than 32 pages of threads, where each page displays 20 threads.
I honestly hope that I’m never suspected of committing a murder, because if the authorities were to obtain my search history from Google, it would be all over. I’ve searched many topics similar to the ones above, such as “What chemicals are used in lethal injection?” “How long does it take pentobarbital to kill an adult male?” “How long does a person live if shot in the lung?” And that old standard, “Where to dispose of a body.”
That kind of thing. This forum and those thread topics tells me that these are mah peepz, yo.
I have a feeling I will be using the forums a lot this year. :)
As it turns out, H is not for Hive, as I thought it would be. H Is for Haunting. The whole story popped into my head last night while I was dropping off to sleep, and I managed to retain a good bit of it, and am writing down ideas in my Moleskine notebook (of awesomeness) as the day goes. I was stuck on H for days. Maybe the remaining 17 letters will come faster.Hear that, Muse? I’m talkin’ to you.
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Hi. My Name Is Gary, and I’m a Papyrophile.
Moleskine
<This is where you all say, “Hi, Gary!” at the same time.><No, go on and do it.>
<I’m not going to continue until you do it.>
<I’m waaaaiiiiitiiiiiing.>
<Thank you.>
Some people collect unicorns. Some collect turtles. Some collect mementos1 from a favorite movie or TV show, or autographs.
Others collect everything, and we call these people “hoarders.”
I have always been a fan of notebooks, notepads, clipboards, different types of paper . . . as far back as I can remember. I have a whole closet in my office at home replete with this kind of thing. It is with some degree of difficulty that I’m able to stop myself from buying more even though I have enough to last me many, many years.
Of course, when I buy really cool notebooks or notepads, I don’t want to use them because . . . well, they’re really cool. Somewhere in my house I have a notebook where the covers are made of computer circuit boards sanded smooth. No one has ever seen this because it’s really cool and using it would reduce the really coolness.
You see how this could become a type of trap, I’ll bet.
The other night, I went to a special Thursday night session of my Tuesday night writers group. I thought I might need to take notes, but alas! alack! I had no notebook. At all. (Because all of my really cool notebooks are locked in a closet in my office at home.)
The book store didn’t, of course, carry simple legal pads, which is all I wanted, really.
But what they did have were Moleskine notebooks. A lot of them. I neeeeeeded something to write on. Really. So I bought a three-pack of dark red Moleskine notebooks. But this time, I was determined to actually use them even though they are really cool.
Of course, I needed to take no notes at all. So at the end of a more-than-two-hour meeting, my Moleskine was unsullied by ink or graphite.
I wanted it sullied. I wanted it sullied in the worst possible way.2 But every moment of unsullied . . . ness was one moment closer to these three really cool Moleskine notebooks finding their way into my closet.
I brought them to work with me on Friday morning, thinking surely I’d find a way to sully them. Or at least one of them. Surely.
But . . . I didn’t want to use them for work. (There. You see how this starts? A really cool notebook shouldn’t have mundane things written in it, like notes from a silly meeting or phone conference. A really cool notebook needs to have really cool things written in it.)
When I went to lunch, I took one of them with me. The intent was to use the notebook to work through some ideas for my alphabet series of short stories I talked about the other day. I was stuck at the time on the letter F.
I took along my favorite pen. (Which, incidentally, I also seldom use because it’s really cool and I might lose it or chip it or damage it in some way. See how this goes?)
Well . . . I did it. I wrote “F Is for Fangs” at the top of the first page and . . . and . . . took notes! In my really cool Moleskine notebook using my really cool ACME Writing Instrument. And then put “D Is for Dragon” on the next page. And “H Is for Hive” on the one after that. And “G Is for Gravesite” on the one after that.
Sullied! I have sullied my Moleskine notebooks! I even crossed some stuff out so it’s not perfect.
If you knew how big a step this is, you would not now be making that face and thinking about rotating one hand at your temple in the international symbol for “one ring short of a binder” or making that “cuckoo” sound. Yes, I know what you were thinking. I mean, come on . . . it was obvious.
I thought I had lost said sullied notebook, but today I found it and made some more story notes, including a snippet of dialogue for “D Is for Dragon,” which I’m going to have a lot of fun writing.
One page for each letter of the alphabet will use 26 whole pages.
Oh, and Z? It’s for Zombie, and these are the stories that keep sleep from me. “Zombie” and “from me” kind of rhyme . . .
Disclaimer: This post may not be used to establish or confirm any lack of sanity that may be hinted at by the contents thereof.
- Every time I see this word, my mind says, “The Fresh-Maker!”
- Well, that’s not true. The worst possible way would be to give them to Snooki and have her pen her next best-seller on them. Oog. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. But I digress.
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Golly! Two posts in one day? Will wonders never cease?My posts here are automatically cross-posted to my LiveJournal account. Over there, one of my long-time friends very casually gave me “F Is for Fangs. I got bit in the leg” to give my subconscious a little help on the stanza currently troubling me.
Now, I had already thought of “Fangs” and rejected it. “There are way too many stories about vampires,” I thought to myself, then told my subconscious to just ignore “vampires and fangs” and go on.
I said as much to my commenter. She then said, “Oh, I never thought of vampires. I was just thinking Dragon → Egg → (baby dragon) Fangs . . .”
Well, duh. Even though that’s not something I can use because the Egg story that I want to write has nothing to do with the Dragon story that comes before it, I never saw the progression. It was staring me right in the face, too. Either me or my subconscious should have seen this.
Then, just as I was getting over that, she added one more comment. “You know what else has fangs? Snakes. :)”
Again, duh. You know, I’ve been a snake online for so long that you would think that would have been the first thing that occurred to me. But no, “fangs” to me implied only vampires.
This comes back to something Holly Lisle recently said in one of her excellent writing newsletters. She was talking about a technique for generating story ideas that she calls “Calling Down Lightning.” It’s when your conscious (left brain) says, “I need to write a story about <topic> of about <word count> words, and I need it by <deadline>.” The subconscious (right brain) hears this, cogitates on it, and starts tossing out concepts.
The conscious then either says, “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe . . .”, and the subconscious goes back to refine the idea or provide new ones.
It’s a pretty good personification of the process creative types go through when trying to generate ideas.
In that newsletter where she introduces the process to her readers, she tells a story of how it broke down for her. She needed a “paranormal romance” idea, but told her subconscious to avoid a certain topic because she already had a couple of other stories about that. Her subconscious went into a four-day sulk, refusing to give her anything at all to work with.
Because her conscious tried to limit her subconscious. Exactly what I did when I said, “F, but not ‘fangs’ because I don’t want to write a vampire story.” So my subconscious mind may have gone off in a huff and worked on something else just to spite me.
Or I’m overanalyzing and my shipment of ideas from Poughkeepsie simply hasn’t arrived this week.
I don’t know how I got so locked into “fangs = vampires,” but it clearly has caused me to miss a couple of good ideas. Which my commenter helped me see.
Thanks, Molly. :)
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