Motivation.

Motivation. Hi folks, how you all doing this find soggy day? Me? Well, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Of course, part of that pickle is a writing problem (isn’t it always), and the other part is motivation. Not that I’m not motivated to do my work (had that problem for the last two weeks due to illness), but I want to talk about a deeper motivation. Hell, maybe even a double or triple motivation.

In this world of fast cars, and fast food, what is our primary motivation? Why do we want to try and slow our worlds down while we sit at a typewriter (computer, pen & paper, whatever) and pluck words out of thin air to try and write a story. Is it because we want to waste paper? Maybe we just want to kill time? Or our motivation could actually be that we really do want to try and write the next Great American Novel? I don’t think that any of these are real motivation though. I try to be a realist, and I realize that in this world of fast cars and fast food that everything revolves around one thing. The all mighty dollar. Why am I trying to finish Raising Kain: Diseased God? Because, in the state that it’s in (sitting on my kitchen table) it has no potential to make money, but if I get it finished and begin to market it, it gains the potential to make money. Why is this motivation so important? Because wishes and prayers don’t keep the lights on.

The realization that I’m in the real world hit early last week when Mel, her mom, and I sat down to work up a budget for our monthly bills. The verdict wasn’t very pretty, less so than the one the doctor gave me. We have mono of the pocket book, and I realized why it is I want to write (besides the fact that it’s my only marketable skill). I want to write to give my wife and I (and our cat [and any possible little pitter pattering feet]) a comfortable life. I can’t do that without writing, and I can’t do that without, first, finishing my new draft of Raising Kain and getting it out there were it has potential.

So, now that my philosophical rant is over, let’s talk shop. I’ve got a problem with two tiny innocent looking paragraphs. Reproduced here:

The rest of the morning went very much the same. Gaia taught Kain many other aerobic exercises, a lot of them had to do with running, and all of them made Kain’s chest burn and his heart pump. Gaia later told him that was the point. Aerobic exercises by their very nature were designed to strengthen the heart and lungs, any benefit that they had on the body other than just that. From the time they completed that, around ten o’clock, they did what Gaia called strength building exercises until noon.

The new exercises didn’t make Kain’s lungs and heart ache in the same way the aerobic exercises had, instead they made the muscles in his legs, arms, chest, stomach, shoulders, and any part Kain was now discovering he had. Gaia explained as they worked that these exercises were to build strength throughout his body, and to make him as strong as he could be. At noon they stopped exactly like Gaia said they would.

Now, what’s wrong with these paragraphs (besides the bad grammar, missing words, and passive voice)? It should be obvious that these paragraphs are much more telling than showing, and they are just a summary of events for four hours of Kain’s day. We have an idea of what the aerobic and strength building exercises were that Kain preformed, but we have no way of knowing exactly what those exercises were. We also don’t know how he did while performing them. In what ways did his body ache, what language did Gaia use to explain how they were done, did she demonstrate, and what did she do when Kain got it wrong? These are the questions that I need to answer in my writing today. I’ve got a lot of work to do. Later taters.

Silence

Silence. So as many of you know, without me telling you, being sick really sucks. Some people are able to work through the haze that being sick creates, most times I am too. But, for the last two weeks I have been ridiculously sick, and have been completely unable to put pin to paper or fingers to keys unless it was for the direct purpose of school work.

If you’ve looked at a calendar recently than you know that there are like five days left until the end of September (there were that many left when this post was written). Do you wanna know how many pages of the new Raising Kain: Diseased God draft I have done? 20. I’m not going to make my deadline unless God decides to take a vacation and leave me in charge. Right, it’s not going to happen.

So, now that we’re all back in the real world, instead of imagining how absolutely terrible life would be with me as God for a week, let’s talk shop. In one of the lasts posts that I did I talked about some scene changes I was making. Well I’m still making those same changes (T.T) and I have decided that a new scene was necessary.

This new scene is a back-story point for both Gaia and MV. Setting up motivation for one (MV) and explaining the existence of Gaia’s doubt moments. Come Tuesday, if the scene is up to par, I might do my first Teaser Tuesday post with it. Beyond that, I am now going to say later taters, and get to work.

Closing Remarks.

Closing Remarks. I need to apologize for all these boring topics, and once again, today, I’m going to be covering yet another boring topic. This one might at lease spark a little bit more interest than my close reading topic on Shakespeare did. At least this topic is going to be about horror. Dracula to be precise.

I’m taking a mini-course called Monstrosity, and it is a class based on two of the 19th centuries biggest horror novels. That’s right; Frankenstein and Dracula. Now, my close reading is going to relate specifically to Dracula, particularly to the action within the final page and a half, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t get to include bits and pieces of Frankenstein into the paper as well.

Like I said the passage I’m working with relates directly to the climactic engagement between our stalwart heroes and the villainous Count. We’re supposed to focus on the theme of our passage, and how the themes relate to the work as a whole. Well, one theme I noticed in my passage is that of forgiveness, and I can actually point to two occurrences within the passage where this theme takes precedence. First is where Dracula is “killed.” Mina says that she sees a look of peace on his face just before he dissolved into dust. Quoted here: “I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there” (Stoker, 380). The next instance of forgiveness occurs almost with the very last lines of the novel. This is when the scar on Mina’s forehead, created by being burned by a holy wafer, disappears. Quincy points it out with his final breath: “’It was worth for this to die! Look! look!’...’Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!” (Stoker, 381). This quote also brings up another important theme in Dracula; the purity of women in Victorian England.

At this point, I do believe that I need to come up with a thesis statement. Such as: The theme of purity and forgiveness is important in Dracula, and demonstrated best in the closing action of the novel.

As a plan of development sentence I could say something along the lines of: In this essay we will discuss how purity and forgiveness relates to the closing passage, how these themes relate to the rest of the novel, and how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein stands in comparison to these themes.

Now, it’s time to write my paper. I will talk to you taters later, and try to do a more interesting post in the near future.

Scene Changes.

Scene Changes. Okay, guys, I’m going to admit that I kinda lied to you. Today’s post is, again, not going to be a revisitation of Raising Kain’s premise. I’m pretty confident with what I have, and I don’t think that I need to go over it in accordance with Donald Maass’s guidelines. I read that portion of Writing the Breakout Novel before writing the premises. So, on that note, I’m pretty sure that things would line up fairly well. If anybody is interested I will try to write that post, but this time I make no promises.

Anyway, onto what’s semi-important.

I’ve been working on the revisions to Raising Kain: Diseased God since school started, and if I had been intelligent to keep with the schedule I’d be a lot farther into this draft than I am. Sickness and general procrastination have built into this predicament. But, I am roughly 9 ½ k into the new draft (hand written based on an estimation of 1k per page [college ruled paper]), and about 6k typed, so I’m feeling alright about this. I would like to have the second draft done by the first week of October, so I can let it rest for about a month, then punch out the final proof in November and get it back on the market by the first week of December.

I really need to turn into a workaholic on this one.

Other than that, what I wanted to discuss today was changing a scene around. Originally the scene went something like this: Kain wakes up, eats, asks why Gaia took him away from his rents. Gaia explains about destiny (changed name to The Writer), and all that funstuff.

This time around, I want to add a bit of beef to the description, and even add a little bit of a hint to the main villains motivations. There will also be a bit more information about Gaia’s past and her connections to said villain.
Well it’s time for me to get my butt to writing. Later taters.

Academic Writing-Close Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Academic Writing-Close Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is going to be an odd post for me, and as many of you can see by the title it is obviously going to have nothing at all to do with comparing the premise of Raising Kain: Diseased God to the premise guidelines set forth by Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel. (I promise that I will try to get to it soon though.) No, instead we are going to take a short journey into my mind, look at how my writing process works, see how that process translates to Academic Writing, and go over the essential basics of my paper for my current Shakespeare Mini-Course. Yes, it’s going to be another long post.

First off, my writing process. I see myself as a tiny bit of a spiritual person, and I buy, a tiny bit, into the New Age persuasion. So, I believe that meditating helps my writing process. On a typical day for writing, I will meditate (I usually take a slip of paper and write a question or a problem I want to figure out on it), then I will write a blog post to help clear my mind of distractions and put it into the writing mood (which I am doing right now). Then I will set to the actual work of the writing, and, I find that its much easier for me to access the creative centers of my mind in this fashion. I don’t know how true this is going to be in the case of Academic Writing. This is the first time I’ve tried it.

I guess I’ve covered two topics in one paragraph. Oops.

Anyway, like I said, I don’t know how well this method is going to work for Academic Writing, but let’s go ahead and give it a shot. The paper I’m working on has to be a close reading paper and since I haven’t worked out my thesis yet, I wrote the passage I’m analyzing on a sheet of paper along with some notes I wrote out earlier (me writing notes…I know it’s a terrifying concept). I used this sheet for my meditation, and with my next paragraph we’ll see just how well my paper builds itself in my head.

So, since I don’t have a thesis yet, I can at least give you the passage I’m working on before diving into the matter at hand. It is Puck’s final soliloquy from the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Puck: If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Now in my Philosophy class, our instructor told us that the first part of showing understanding is comprehension, and he suggested that paraphrasing was one of the best ways to show comprehension. So, if you would allow me, I would like to paraphrase what Puck has said here so that I might better understand it: If we actors have upset you, think this and the problem will be solved. Believe that you fell asleep upon entering the theater, and that what you saw was naught but a dream. And, like a dream it will fade upon waking. Gentlemen, do not be angry; if you allow us we will fix it. And, being the honest man that I am, if anybody is angry we would be happy to make amends before too long. If we don’t, you can call me a liar. So goodnight unto you all. Applaud if you liked it, and I shall restore amends.

Now that I have committed a cardinal sin among Shakespeare’s most devout followers (changing what Shakespeare himself wrote). I would like to say that I liked my paraphrasing paragraph, and will probably use it as my introductory paragraph. All I need to do is come up with a thesis statement and a plan of development sentence, and we could get down to work on the paper itself.

Now, in regards to the thesis statement, that is one sentence that gives the central topic for the entire paper, I would have to say that it is going to have to do with dreams. Why is that? Well, because Puck himself mentions the dream (and by extension the imagination and subconscious), and by the fact that all of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a dream-like (chaotic) reality to it. This is also a mechanic that has become popular, not only in literature, but in popular media as well. What mechanic am I talking about? The dream episode mechanic. The sort of stories or incidents where the character wakes up at the end of the story/game/episode/whatever and realizes that the situation they just went through didn’t happen (Note: This mechanic has a tendency to piss off consumers). So, what is my thesis going to be? The mechanic of the dream, used by Shakespeare through the character of Puck, is important to, not only to Puck’s final soliloquy, but also to the entirety of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because of the changes this mechanic has gone through since the time of the play. Is this a good thesis? I really don’t know.

The plan of development sentence is much easier to come up with. The concept behind it is, tell them what you’re going to tell them, and that’s a pretty simple concept to understand. What I’m going to tell them is my understanding of the close reading of puck’s final soliloquy, how that soliloquy relates to the rest of the play, and how that soliloquy relates to the mechanic of the dream. How do I put that in terms of Academic Writing? In this essay we will discuss the close reading of Act V, Scene I, lines 409-424 of A Midsummer Night’s dream, how this part relates to the rest of the play, and how this portion relates to the mechanic of the dream.

Now that I have that basic bit of information down, all I have to do is write the paper. I’ll let you know how it turns out, and I apologize for boring your brains out. Later taters.

Working on it Wednesday

Working on it Wednesday. I’m a day late and a dollar short quite literally this time. I like funny day themed names but it doesn’t really work if you post them on the next day. Maybe, I should write them the night before and name them for the next day. Or I could just run on my own schedule like usual. So, do we want to get to my subject or keep rambling? (You don’t have to throw canned goods, I know you want to get to the subject.)

So, while I was in Study of the English Language, and not paying attention to my professor, I did something related to writing. Essentially I wrote a dialogue between me and Kain (an older version, but still the same guy) and the two of us got down to discussing some interesting things about the novel. We discussed motivation, character depth, conflict, and all of it was in regards to structuring the stories premise. What is the premise of Raising Kain: Diseased God? I thought you’d ask.

A proud Atlantean Prince is chosen to be the Apprentice to the Earth Aspect Gaia. Gaia doubts her ability to train him because of failures with a previous student and the parallels between him and the Prince. The problems are compounded when the previous student, in the form of Pestilence, shows up with the intention of killing the Prince. The prince has to confront Pestilence, his hubris, and the parallels between himself and Pestilence to survive the first three years of his training.

Well, how do you like it?

Tomorrow (mainly because I don’t want to write another two page blog post) we’ll take a look at the premise in the context of Donald Maass’s Breakout Novel Guidelines. Later taters.

Too Lazy Tuesday

Too Lazy Tuesday. Howdy folks. I think Too Lazy Tuesday is a very apropos title for this post especially since it was written on Tuesday and wasn’t posted until Wednesday. And the hilarity ensues. But, let’s not dwell on the unpleasant facts for too long, and let us get down to the meat and potatoes of our post. Yay and verily. (Note: too much Shakespeare is not a good thing.)

Today I want to discuss a few topics that have been brought to my attention by other bloggers. First for Lapetus999.

In Lap’s post on Monday, Your Character Is Wrong, he brought up a few very important character development questions and then asked us to answer them.

So, what I want to try and do right now is answer those questions in regard to my novel Raising Kain: Diseased God.

-What critical event occurred in your character’s life (usually in childhood) and what decision did they make about themselves based on that event? How does it affect their world view?

The main character of Raising Kain is in fact a six-year-old boy, so my possibilities are rather limited when it comes to answering the question. Though, I still believe that the answer to it is rather simple. It is Kain’s breeding and his status in his early life that paints his narrow world view. He is the child of Celita Luna, an Aspect of Life (high level goddess), and Ouranus Skygod. And not only is he the child of these two gods (and something akin to a demigod himself), but his parents are the rulers of Atlantis. Making him the apparent crown prince. So, let’s just say that Kain’s opinion of himself (and what he believes the rest of the world should owe him)is somewhere beyond that of a spoiled brat.

-How does this negatively impact them in the present (start of the novel)? How does it hold them back?

This question is a little bit easier to answer. Based on the fact that Kain is a spoiled brat, it negatively impacts him because it is much harder to teach someone who is unwilling to see their mistakes, and unwilling to act in a proper fashion if they don’t get their way. Kain is held back by this because he doesn’t take Gaia’s lessons to heart, and has to push her to extremes to teach him anything at all.

-How does this world view impact their ability to work through the central crisis in the novel?

Because he is opposed to learning from his mistakes, and listening to Gaia in general, Kain is unable to see that he is walking down the exact same path that Pestilence walked before he became the diseased god. He is even willing to confront the malicious deity in the same way that Pestilence’s younger self first confronted Death.

-What do they learn about this critical event in their past? What new interpretation do they have? How does this affect their choices moving forward?

In a fever induced dream, Kain sees the parallels between himself and Pestilence, and starts to understand why Gaia had been so hard on him throughout their first few years together. He sees why she tries to instill humility in him before his pride can bring him crashing down in the same way it brought Pestilence low once before.

-How does this help them confront the antagonist in the end?

When Kain first met Pestilence, he sought him out to prove to Gaia that an Atlantean Prince could do anything. After that near death experience Kain allows Pestilence to seek him out for the final confrontation. And in two moments of quick thinking, instead of being blinded to them by pride, Kain is able to lay the diseased god low twice.

By the way, I would like to thank Lap for laying a great deal more work on my writing table. Not that my story won’t benefit from it. Grumble. Lol.

On to the next bit of business. A week or so ago Elana J nominated me for the Kreative Blogger award, so I am now finally getting around to accepting it. First off, thank you Elana J for nominating me for this prestigious award. Let’s go over the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it in your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate 7 Kreative Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting you know they have been nominated.

So, I thanked her, linked to her, and somewhere in here is the logo. That leaves four left.

Seven semi-interesting things about me:

1. I have a cat named Button.
2. She’s a kitten so my legs look a lot like messy raw hamburger right now.
3. It irritates me when people eat in my vehicle.
4. I eat in my vehicle anyway. Lol.
5. I hate social networking.
6. But I’m addicted to sites like blogger and facebook.
7. I don’t aspire to be a writer. I aspire to be a published writer and a better writer, but not a writer.

Confusing aren’t I:)

Nominate 7 Kreative bloggers and link to their blogs.

1. Lapetus999
2. Jenna Alexander
3. Barb
4. Elana J:P
5. Lisa & Laura
6. Purple Clover
7. Mira

Later Taters.

New Project

New Project. Okay, so, let’s talk about new projects and such. How many do you guys have going right now? Technically I‘ve got three “new” projects going on, but right now what I’m working on is the second draft for Raising Kain: Diseased God.

Raising Kain: Diseased God is the first novel that I have written all the way to the conclusion of the book. I would say that I have completed the novel, but truth be told I really haven’t completed it yet. There is a great deal of the book that still needs to be written, numerous scenes that need to be added, and a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes that need to be corrected before I say that the book is completed.

My beta, who also happens to be my creative writing teacher had suggested that I worry about the scenes and dialogue problems fixed before I worry about the grammar and misspellings and such and I agree with her.

What scenes am I working on right now? Well I’m working on a rewrite for the stories prologue. Originally for the prologue I had a scene with Kain, the main character, when he was twelve years old fighting against a monster of Greek legend called the Hecatoncheir. Instead of using this scene though I’ve decided to go with a scene that doesn’t actually involve Kain at all. This scene takes place before Kain’s birth and involves the Four Aspects of Life and destiny as destiny tells the Aspects that they are going to have to take on apprentices.

The next scene of the prologue, though it might become chapter one, goes on to deal with Odin and the burial of Kellinock. Originally this scene took place in the epilogue, but I’ve decided to move it to the front of the novel to help introduce the villain early on.

So, I’m going to get to work. Later taters.

School Assignments.

School Assignments. Today our blog post is going to be just a little bit different. I have a journalism class, news reporting one, that is a requirement for the writing focus at Concord University. On the first day our professor told us to write the first post for a blog that we would pretend to have. Well, having a blog, I asked if I could just take one of the posts I already had. She said if it were one of the earlier posts I could use it, but if you look back through my original posts you would find that my original posts weren’t very good. So, what I decided to do was to write a new post that was semi-biographical like I would expect a first post to be like. This assignment is what follows (note to self; don’t print first paragraph).

Hello, my name is Ryan M. Smith, and I am a writer. I decided to start this blog because I wanted to chronicle my journey as an aspiring writer.

Critical information about me: I am married to the most wonderful lady in the world. I attend Concord University with a triple major (English; focusing in both Literature and Writing, and History) and a minor in Recreation and Tourism. I want to be a full time writer, but until I achieve that dream I plan on working for the national park service as a park ranger.

Current Works in Progress: Currently I have a number of projects I am working on both large and small. The first novel that I completed the first draft of is called Raising Kain: Diseased God. It is a young adult fantasy novel about a young boy forced to go through an agogi-like training program to become the new Aspect of the Earth. It is the first book of a trilogy about the boy. Raising Kain is the title of the trilogy, Diseased God is the title of the book. Wesley Grey is the second book that I have finished the rough draft for. It is a paranormal romance novel about a male vampire prostitute. This story requires a great deal of additional material, what I have written right now is little more than an outline. The language also needs a great deal of work. I have three other works that have yet to reach completion of the first draft. Transient Dawn, a novel about a pair of dwarves, a lich, and a dragon fighting against an unstoppable horde of undead. Hive, a horror novel about monstrous vampires with a bee hive like mentality. Possession (The Devil in Me) is a horror novel dealing with demonic possession and unintentional incest.

Beliefs: I guess you could call this section my personal philosophy. I don’t really know of anybody else with my personal beliefs. My beliefs are essentially Christian, I believe that God exists and that Jesus came and gave his life for the sins of mankind. I also believe that Muhammed was a prophet that gave testament sent from god, and that John Smith did the same, though, John explained his in the wrong way. In the same vein I also believe that the Jews are right. I even believe that the Greeks, Egyptians, and Sumerians were right. Go ahead and throw on top of that pretty much every religion in the world. My personal philosophy is that everyone is right, it’s the act of worship that matters.

Well that’s pretty much me. I’ll talk to you taters later.

Good News

Good News. You’re all going to go on a delivery to an incredibly dangerous portion of the galaxy where you will most certainly meet a grisly end. Err… Wait… I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. But, beyond the delivery, and my not so mild insanity, let’s get on with the post.

First the good news. Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I know that I vanished for quite some time, a week or so at least, but now I’m back and nobody needs to worry anymore. In my last post I outlined a few things that I intended to do. To give you an update on this I failed at most of them. I blame Facebook (Farmville in particular) and school for these failures. I have submitted Well of Terror to Flesh and Blood Magazine, and I will let you all know something as soon as I know it (it might be a while since I sent it snail mail). I have finished typing I Want to Marry Your Daughter, but I have not proofed the copy yet, and, therefore, have not submitted it yet. This will be done tomorrow.

Next I have one major project and one minor project to discuss.

First the minor one. I have a creative writing class this semester and we have an exercise to do. We got to leave class and stalk a random person for twenty minutes, make notes about them and their characteristics and such, then we got to merge those characteristics with someone we know well, essentially making a new character. With the new character we have to write a scene, essentially a short story or piece of flash fiction, involving the characteristics noted, dialog, and conflict. Should be easy.

The major project I will be beginning tomorrow is working on the new draft of Raising Kain: Diseased God. I will give more details on that work at a later date. Later taters. Enjoy that dangerous delivery.

A Good Spit Shine.

A Good Spit Shine. Okay, today we are going to talk about something that has become very important to authors. Well, it’s important to me anyway. What is it? It’s the polish of the manuscript. I don’t mean getting a bottle of wax, and a half clean rag, and rubbing the pages until they literally shine (though it’d be nice if it was that easy). What I’m talking about are those nasty little typos like now for not, or fro instead of for. Those things that the spell checker skips over. Well, that and the places in the manuscript where you have unnecessary words that you missed in the edit, or places where the phrase just sound weird (rambling again).

I guess most people could call the polish another draft, but when I first heard polish used that way in King’s On Writing I imagined him [King] bent over the typewriter retyping single pages of his second draft to fix those little errors I was talking about. In today’s day and age we can just go into the file and correct them before printing it out. I find this method tedious however.

Yesterday, I had Melanie’s [my wife] mom [Violet] pick out those little mistakes [that I missed when checking for them] in Well of Terror, and I retyped it [creating more little errors] then I ran it through the text-to-speech all [lap pointed out] and I corrected the errors as I heard them in the app, copied and pasted it back to the word document, and bam I had a polished doc.
What did I do today? I printed a copy of I Want to Marry Your Daughter, read through it to catch those little mistakes, and I ran it through the text-to-speech app to catch the rest. Tomorrow I will type and polish it again, and then I will have two short stories ready to submit.

When are they going on submission you ask? Both of them should be on submission by the beginning of the week. I will be mailing out Well of Terror to choice numero uno tomorrow or Monday, and I will be putting I Want to Marry Your Daughter into the other market’s submission system on Monday after I get paid. You guys will be the first ones to know (after my wife of course) what their status is when I hear something back.

What am I going to do next? I don’t know. When I do, I’ll let you all know. Till then, have a good one.

Not Really Sure.

Not Really Sure. Normally I have a title that relates almost exactly to what I’m going to be talking about in my post. Today however is different. Why is it different? Because I’m not really sure what I want to talk about (Ha! I made it relate). So, let’s just let my pencil run across the page and see what comes out.

I finished the first draft of The Cleansing of Retanok. I’ve not updated it in my shorts sidebar yet because I’m not finished typing it yet. It’s definitely a novelette (what I’ve typed so far totals over 9000 words), and I think it might even be longer than what I have written on the novel based on the same characters. Of course the novel will be longer, that’s the difference between a novelette and a novel. Length. And I’m rambling.

Okay going to try and focus a little bit. Do you guys remember where I was talking about working on the second draft of Well of Terror (if not click on the label Well of Terror and you can read all about it:)? Well, my two weeks are up (past that time actually) and now I’m going to sit down and see if I’ve disconnected myself from it enough to be able to properly edit. If I’ve not it will go back up on the shelf.
Since I’ve already bored you to tears with this one I’m going to try and get to work. Talk to you kids later.

P.S. I would like to thank lapetus999 for his post http://blog.dawnsrise.com/2009/08/my-new-writing-technique.html where he points out the neat uses of Text-to-speech apps for people (like me) too lazy to read their work out to themselves.

The Hole in the Page.

The Hole in the Page. Now I’ve touched on this before, but I don’t think I’ve went far enough in depth with it. So let’s talk about it again. Not the hole in the page, but the IDEA. IT is the IDEA that is the hole in the page that we fall through while we write, and it is the IDEA that holds the story up around us like a house. If we don’t have a strong enough IDEA than the story falls down around us like a house of cards. But what is the IDEA? Why is the IDEA so important to the story? Why does the IDEA deserve to be written in all capital letters? Well, let me give you my take on it.

The IDEA is a number of things when it comes to the story. It is the foundation of the story, and what are we taught in classes is the foundation of all stories? Plot and Theme. But, I don’t believe this is implicitly true. In regards to the theme portion, I can see it being true for literary pieces. In I Want to Marry Your Daughter the over arching theme of the story is one of love, and that everything works out in the end. It is that theme (IDEA) that drives the piece onward to it’s happily ever after. In the flash fiction piece, Looks Like Rain, the theme is duty vs. emotion, and once again it’s the theme that drives the story to its conclusion. The IDEA that love is important to these characters, but that duty to the IDEA of their civilization is more important.

But, what about the other facets? When is plot the important part of the IDEA? To be honest with you, I’m not sure. I’m not a plot driven writer, and Formula writing (what I consider plot driven writing) is not one of my strong suits. Can I take the points A, B, and C and write a line in between them? Sure I can, but I’m going to take you to points X, Y, and Z before we make it to C. That’s just the way I write.

I’m going to compare my writing to that of Dean Koontz, Michael Chrichton, and Stephen King (not that I’m that good, but, hey, can’t a guy dream). I believe that all of these gentlemen are situational writers who, like me, start out with the “what if” question, and then go from there. What if you walked down to your basement and fell through a hole in reality? (Well of Terror) What if dwarven twins and a priest from Atlantis teamed up to fight the undead? (The Cleansing of Retanok & Transient Dawn) What if an Atlantean prince was being raised to take over as the Aspect of the Earth? (Raising Kain: Diseased God) And, what if a vampire started a chain reaction that could turn all of humanity into blood sucking fiends? (Wesley Grey) These are the questions that I ask myself when I sit down to write, and it is these “what if” IDEAs that give my stories legs to stand on. Time to write.

What Makes a House a Home?

What Makes a House a Home? I believe that there are as many different answers to this question as there are people in the world, but I want to give it a shot anyway. The technical definition (I guess you could call it) of a house is four walls and a roof. The technical definition of home is four walls and a roof in which people live, store their stuff, and whatnot. What do I believe most people would give for the answer to this question? The people. The people who live in the house infuse their personalities, their energies, and their stuff. Is this the definition I use? No.

I believe that a home is more of an idea. It is the idea of being at home that makes you feel safe and secure, and it is the belief in this ideal that causes a great deal of heartache and pain when it is violated. An act (arson, robbery, murder, etc.) has the ability to offend out idea of home, and with that offense come insecurities. Sometimes these offenses can be so great that it can destroy our psyches. In IT, by Stephen King, the character Stanley Uris is a rational minded character that is offended by the existence of the monster. He is offended to the point where he chooses to die clean instead of live and get dirty dealing with the monster. In The Shining, also by Stephen King, the Torrance family is torn apart by an evil possessing force (an offense to their reality) as well as alcoholism (a breakdown of personal ideas in the stories main character/villain, Jack Torrance).

Why did I bring all this up? Because I wanted to know if a house can be a home before people move into it. I think that it can, and that lies in the existence of the idea we call a dream home. My wife and I have been together for a year and we are looking from a bigger place to live in and start a family. There is a house about forty-five minutes from where we live. They just finished construction on it late last year, and now it’s for sale. Over the years the land development company took to build it, it has become our dream home (only problem being yard space). The problem is it is way out of our price range (baring some unforeseen miracle [publication, movie deal, and bestseller status]), it is far out of our possible price range. I know that even though I don’t know how much it costs. It would mean a lot to get it, but I don’t see it happening.

How does all of this relate to writing? For that we’d have to go back to the architect metaphor I’ve used elsewhere in this blog. A house is like a story because it is the idea that makes it a home. If your story doesn’t have the proper foundation (idea) it will fall apart fast. Signing off.

Injuries

Injuries. I attend a karate class on Tuesdays and Thursdays with my wife, and unfortunately I’m a bit of a klutz. Last Thursday during a class I was partnered with a fraternity brother of mine, who just started the class, and who doesn’t know the difference between a controlled drop and a throw. He threw me, and I landed on concrete instead of mat. My wife thought I might have a concussion (I didn’t thank god), and I curled up in a little ball with a killer headache and sat out the rest of class. The day after the fall I woke up with neck pain.

Neck injuries freak me out. It hurts to turn my head (I can turn it though), and it hurts to swallow, burp, and take a drag on a cigarette on a off. Aleve helps it a bit, but doesn’t get rid of it. Did I mention I’m freaked out by neck injuries?

I’ve spent the last three days, on and off, terrified that there’s something seriously wrong with my neck. Terrified that I might have an impacted vertebra and might have to have surgery to fix it. (This conjures up an image of me wearing a neck brace bent over a typewriter with my mom and wife standing behind me. One is holding an axe, the other an electric knife saying: “write me a book you cockadoodie dirty bird a-la-Annie Wilkes. The phrase “pet writer” springs to mind. Lol.) And, I’m terrified, most of all, that if I have to take time off work to heal I’ll be out of a job. I’ve had this job for just under a month and I don’t want to loose it.

So what does this have to do with my writing? Well, I find that physical pain is a good excuse to find the whole in the page. That way I can escape said pain for just a little while. So, what am I working on? The Cleansing of Retanok. (I finished the first draft of Looks Like Rain and I’m still 40 words short of 500.) The Cleansing of Retanok is a fantasy piece that I figure is going to be between 9000 and 12000 words long, which, if I’m not mistaken, put’s it firmly in the novelette category. It’s about a pair of dwarves, twins actually, and a holy man worshipping a deity named AtA. (In the world the worship of AtA has been extinct for roughly eight thousand years.) The holy man, Zave, is captured with a group of adventurers trying to reconstruct an ancient pilgrimage in hopes of reviving the worship of AtA. The captors are undead beings that have infested the location Zave and crew were on their way too. Zave is taken alive while the others are turned or just killed. One zombie, Zave’s second, wonders away from the group of the undead and stumbles across Tacklin and Stracklin Quiltip. The brother’s, Tacklin especially, feel remorse for the zombie, kill him, and lay him to rest (this portion of the story was originally When the Dead Stop Walking). Tacklin discovers that the zombie’s breastplate (originally Zave’s) is made of a remarkable and rare metal (Taralleium) with the symbol of AtA carved into it. They decide to retrace the zombie’s footsteps which take them to Retanok: Once the second holiest city in the world, now a crumbling necropolis. Zave and the twins link up, and through a miracle caused by AtA, Zave is able to “cleanse” Retanok (essentially vaporizing every undead in the city), and restoring the cathedral of AtA in the same instance. At the end, Zave explains to the twins that AtA means God in the language that is common to him, and that AtA was responsible for the creation of the world and the Aspects of Life that the residents of the world worship.

Problems with the story? Just one simple one for the time being. It’s only half written. I’ve still got 6000 words or more to write. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hole to fall into.

The Journey.

The Journey. I’ll admit right off the bat that this post was inspired by a few others. Elana J’s post The Worth of Writing, Nathan Bransford’s You Tell Me: How Do You Deal With the "Am-I-Crazies?", and Writing as an Identity. (Not good at hyper-linking, links provided at the bottom of the page.) So, in this post I want to talk about, you guess it, the journey of writing.

A while back Nathan Bransford asked if we defined ourselves as writers, and what level of obsession we had I guess you could say. At the time of the post I don’t believe I understood enough about myself to be able to answer that question, and I’m still not sure that I’m able too at all. But, I’m going to try.

I don’t feel that writing defines me; I feel that I am defined by writing. I don’t mean to say that I’m a writer, or that I’m defined as a writer because I write. I’m defined by writing because that is the journey that I’ve chosen, and it’s the pat that’s been chosen for me. I write because it takes me away from the world and into a place that is better. I write about scary things because sometimes scary things happen. Sometimes you look over the edge and into the abyss and realize what’s waiting down there for you. I write about the fantastic because the world is made of dreams. If superman can fly through our imagination and leap tall buildings in a single bound, then dwarves can sing, dragons can be gods among men, and a little boy can stand tall against the first of the four horsemen. I write about love because it is the theme and meaning of life. Love of language and words. Love of one another. Love of literature. Maybe even the love of a teenage girl for a werewolf and a sparkly vampire. Love makes the world go round.

I write because it’s a journey, each new step lights a bulb of wonder and fascination. Some of these bulbs are happy little houses (poems and shorts), some of them are towns and small cities (short stories-novellas), some of them are cities as big as New York (novels), and some of them encompass the whole world (epics). We learn with each word written about what lies ahead, and even though there are a few bumps in the road (rejection), there will be rewards too. But, we have to realize one thing about this journey were on. Publication isn’t the destination; it’s just one of the stops along the road. Keep on walking and remember that, and I don’t think the journey will be too hard. You never know what’s around the next turn.


Links:
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/05/writing-as-identity.html
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/07/you-tell-me-how-do-you-deal-with-am-i.html
http://elanajohnson.blogspot.com/2009/07/worth-of-writing.html

Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction. Before I break into today’s topic I just want to update you guys on the last piece I was working on. If you pay attention to my sidebar, List of Shorts, you’ll see that I’ve changed I Want to Marry Your Daughter’s completion status to two drafts. I finished it earlier today and it topped out at a little over three thousand words. Now onto flash fiction.

Flash fiction is an amazing thing in the world of the internet and that of speed. It’s short, easy to read, and you’re able to enjoy it all in one setting: A miracle in this age if I’ve never seen one. There are problems with flash fiction thought, at least from my point of view. I’ve “finished” a novel that experience left me with mingled feelings of accomplishment and post-partum depression. Lawrence Block called it post-novel depression in his book Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print, and I think that’s a very apt term for it. I’ve “finished” a novella, with the same mixed feelings of apathy and accomplishment. I’ve “finished” several short stories. They didn’t have the mixed feelings, just the feeling of accomplishment. And I’ve written one piece of flash fiction to date. My original feelings about it were that it was perfect, and then I started to think that it was missing something. And at 250 words long, I think that second feeling was right.

To me, flash fiction for a writer is a much harder game than shorts or novels. You have to cram everything (plot, character development, setting, climax, conflict, etc.) into roughly one thousand words. And then you have to worry about a market for it, and most markets won’t come to my problem.

The piece of flash fiction I’m working on is titled Looks Like Rain. As I’ve said its 250 words long and about four paragraphs (yes I believe this post is already bigger than it is), and is set in a very brief span of time, minutes actually, before the three hundred Spartans set out to wage the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartan character in it (he is unnamed but I think of him as Leonidas) is facing his wife as she holds out his shield. She recites the litany of the Spartan woman (with this shield or on it), and they both wage an internal battle between duty to the state and love for one another. The story ends as the warrior turns back to the three hundred. He looks up into the blue cloudless sky as a tear rolls down his cheek and says: “Looks like rain.” (This paragraph might be longer than the story is as of yet.)

So, what I need to do is fatten the story up, before I can edit and trim the fat. It doesn’t make any sense does it? I’ll let you know how it goes. Signing off.

Physical, Mental, Emotional Stress and Writing

Physical, Mental, Emotional Stress and Writing. Today we’re going to talk about stress and its uses. For me, there are two types of stress that always seem to be a major pain in the ass. They are the latter of the three in the title. Mental and emotional. I don’t know if it’s got to do with the depression or not, but I’ve found that when both of those tanks are running high if feels like there is a chain in my head holding my sanity to the rest of me, and it feels like that chain is going to break and drop my sanity far away into some twisting nether with no possibility of return.

On Wednesday of last week, I think it was anyway, it had been one year to the day of my first collision with that breaking point. I was at a literal wall when it came to work, I was cold calling at the time and the foul language was impossible to stand: Forcing myself mindlessly on to an unseen ending. This was also four days or so away from my wedding, and my emotional batteries were maxed out. My wife and I had a fight during my lunch break, at the time all we fought about was my job. I told her I couldn’t stand it anymore, told her if I couldn’t get out of that job right then the wedding was off, told her if I didn’t leave work she’d be attending a funeral.

On that day I looked into the abyss and almost stepped over the edge. Instead, I got things about halfway straightened out at work, got married, and went on my honeymoon. When we got back I went to the doctor and got my little pink helpers. I broke through a two year barrier of writer’s block, and I started walking. I learned that physical stress helps to beat internal stress; it sort of makes it bleed away into a place where it can’t harm you. Meditation is like that too, so is writing. All of these things probably saved my life.

How do all of these things relate to I Want to Marry Your Daughter?

Well, if I wasn’t alive right now I wouldn’t have been able to write it in the first place. And, I Want to Marry Your Daughter is in its very essence the story about another time in my life when I was almost at the breaking point. It’s essentially the story of me looking at Melanie’s parents and saying those exact words. Write what you know is some of the first advice given to an aspiring writer, I hope I’ve put enough of that into this piece. Signing off.

Alcohol & Writing.

Alcohol & Writing. This is a combination that I’ve found doesn’t work for me. Alcohol is a drug that dulls the senses, perception, and the mental capacity of the person who imbibes it. It does have the sometimes desirable effect of lowering barriers you wouldn’t normally cross, and some may look to it to find solace from their problems. I’ve come close to this latter definition and discovered that the morning after you still wake up with your problems and a splitting headache on top of it.

About a year ago I worked for a telecommunications company, and I absolutely hated the job. I drove home every day wanting something to take away my feelings of inadequacy and depression as I worked. In short I wanted a cold one. I didn’t give into that desire, and I know if I had I would have become an alcoholic.

Instead of turning to the bottle I went to the doctor, got myself some nice little pink pills to help with the chemical imbalance in my brain, and I buried myself in my writing. I pledged to be published in six months (didn’t work out that way, but I didn’t understand the biz as well as I do now), and I managed to channel my problems into a few short stories (most of them listed to the side), part of one novel, and the skeleton of another novel. I have since been fired from the job (and thankful for it somewhat).

How does all of this relate to today? Well, I forgot my meds and got to feeling a little down about the current situation. I’ve started to work again, but I didn’t get my one year wedding anniversary off. So, instead of spending this Sunday with my wonderful wife, I’ll be asking people how they want their steaks grilled. My wife and I celebrated today, and we bought a bottle of champagne. I drank a little too much of it, then drank a couple of Smirnoff Ices on top of it. For my body weight and low tolerance it was too much. I got drunk, then decided to type up a previous blog post in that condition. I managed not to worf of the keyboard, and bet the blog typed up, but had I been sitting down to try and come up with new material I’m sure I would have found it impossible. (I am amazed that Stephen King could think, write, and drink at the same time.)

How does all this relate to my current work on I Want to Marry Your Daughter? I don’t think that it does: Other than managing to sober up before working on it.

A final note on the piece, I have completed the edits and have started to write the second draft. I should be finished with it in a few days if anybody would be interested in taking a look. Good night.

(P.S. I hand wrote this post before going to bed last night.)

The Importance of Drafting

The Importance of Drafting. I don’t mean the computer programs where architects work on their blueprints, and I’m sure most of you know that, though. With that sentence I can see why the level of change out work goes through are called drafts. With the first draft of a story you’re essentially laying the ground work for a house. Let’s take Well of Terror and look at it in that light. The first draft was sh** and full of holes. You could see daylight through the walls even though it wasn’t meant to have any. With the second draft of the story, I essentially knocked down the weak plastic walls while leaving the supports in place (the supports were the major elements of the story [namely the monster and the twist ending]). Then around these supports I laid walls made of wood. The wood probably isn’t the best, but I will know what needs to be done to it to turn those walls into brick when it’s time to go there.

Now, on I Want to Marry Your Daughter, it seems to me that the walls started being made of sterner stuff. It seems to me I went straight to wood instead of plastic. Like I said earlier the wording is a bit of a problem (I’m crossing our –ly words every few sentences), but that wording doesn’t damage to structure in the same way as the perspective and language damaged Well of Terror: Which is good, considering the fact that I’m not going to have to do a total rewrite on I Want to Marry Your Daughter (Geese that’s a long title).

There is one problem that I missed when I talked to you guys last night. Characters: Particularly the character of Melanie’s mother. All of the characters in the piece are based on real-life counter parts. Will (MC) is based on me, and Melanie is based on my wife (my wife’s name is actually Melanie), and our family members portray the roles they do in real life (Will’s family members are unnamed, but Melanie’s family members are named after their real-life counter parts). Now, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have a problem just asking permission to use their names and likenesses in the story, but….

But, Melanie’s mother has been in a car wreck, and that is an important point to the story, because Will gets Melanie’s parents alone by offering to help Violet down the stairs. My wife believes that this portrayal will upset her mother, and I don’t want to do that. I’ve considered just changing the names of the characters, but that would be an easy façade to see through, and removing that fact about her character will take something away from the story. I don’t know yet. I’ll just have to finish my edits, write my second draft, and see how things turn out before worrying about it I guess.

If you guys have an opinion let me know.

Good News.

Good News. I’ve managed to finish the complete second draft of Well of Terror. I’ve even managed to type the whole thing up. And, wait, there’s even more good news. I wasn’t a total dumbass, so I didn’t send it off to collect another rejection letter. Though, I’m sure that this one is a much better draft than the previous one was. Only time will tell on that note, and that’s exactly what I plan to give it: Time. Two weeks to a month before I worry about it again at all. I’m sure you guys are happy to hear that.

So, what am I going to do in the mean time? I’m going to do what any good author would do while letting a piece age. I’m going to work on another. This other piece isn’t exactly a new piece though. It’s a piece that is actually far older than Well of Terror, and until yesterday I hadn’t even touched it in almost a year. Yesterday I typed the piece up (and I hope that doesn’t mess with my limited connection to it) so that I had a hard computer copy to make the necessary revisions, changes, and rewrites on. It’s much easier than working on a handwritten copy.

I guess that you folks are dying of suspense since I haven’t told you the name of it yet. Well, it’s I Want to Marry Your Daughter. This is the first short story that I wrote with the intention of submitting it to the first market I found. This particular market is Glimmer Train, a quarterly literary magazine that holds monthly competitions based on different themes. I never got around to submitting my piece to them (money became an issue and since most of its competition there are reading fees involved). I was lucky that I hadn’t submitted it because it would have come back with a big fat rejection slip attached to it. Not that the piece is as bad as the first draft of Well of Terror was, this one just has amateur written all over it, and I feel that I have developed quite a bit beyond that point now.

So, as I’ve said in a previous post, let’s get down to the meat and potatoes. There are problems with I Want to Marry Your Daughter, but before I go into those I need to tell you what it’s about. It’s a modern day tale about a boy setting out to ask his girlfriend’s parents’ permission to wed their daughter. The story is a nonlinear-narrative switching back and forth from when he told his family about his intentions to the night of the event, ending, of course, in asking the lucky ladies parents.
Many of the problems don’t actually come from the nature of the nonlinear-narrative as you would expect. I feel that I have done a very good job fusing Will (the MC)’s memories with the events happening. I used objects in the environment to bring up the flash back like sequences with what is going on. I could probably use some work on those situations though, and I will be paying a great deal of attention to it. The other problems that I see are normal problems with my early work: word choice, I noticed a proliferation of –ly words (a habit I’ve tried very hard to kill since that point), and possible use of passive voice. I’m not very good at noticing this, and it might not matter since the piece is supposed to be literary. I don’t know about that.

Anyway, it looks like I have a long road ahead of me with this piece. If you would like to give me a hand with it (or with Well of Terror), please leave your email address in the comments, and I will send the piece to you. Later taters.

Similarities 2.0.

Similarities 2.0. Okay I know I said I was going to finish my second draft of Well of Terror yesterday, but guess what. I lied. It wasn’t an intentional lie, more like I meant to finish it, but I dozed off before that could happen. So, tonight I will finish Well of Terror version 2.0. There I said it.

Now, on to the meat and potatoes. As you could tell by the title we’re going to be talking about similarities again tonight. Last night I pointed out similarities between my story and the SK novel Misery. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most average readers wouldn’t catch most of these similarities because they are rather vague, and you would probably have to get a college class and assign a comparison/contrast paper between the two before the average reader would catch them. That’s what I think anyway, and please don’t get me wrong; I’m not putting anybody down. It’s just that those similarities are vague.

Now why did I catch those similarities? I’m not sure, but I believe the answer comes in three parts. First, I’m a writer, as many of you writer types have undoubtedly noticed; we writers read things differently than other people do. As in a high level English class, we are always on the lookout for trends, patterns, similarities, themes, and what not; as such we are far more likely to find those vague similarities between our own work and other writer’s work (as well as similarities between different writers). I want to make a comparison that might seem odd now, but might help to add a little bit of clarity to what I’m trying to say. Look at the works of R.A. Salvatore and J.R.R. Tolkien. Salvatore wrote the Drizzt Do’Urden saga for Wizards of the Coast, and Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings. Both are works of fantasy that deal with items of tremendous power and the destruction of those items by fire. Are they similar? Yes. Are they vague similarities? Very. Why did I notice them? I trained myself to do it, unconsciously I believe, because I’m a writer.

Second part of the answer. Simple, I was working on my story at the same time I was reading Misery. My subconscious was much more likely to pick up on those similarities than if I had finished Well of Terror before picking up the book. As proof of this, I told you yesterday that I had watched the movie version a month or so after writing the first draft and nothing clicked.

Third, I’m still a little vague on this myself, but I think that it’s because I identified with Paul Sheldon. I know that most people would say that’s because he’s a writer and I’m a writer, but the connection goes deeper than that I believe. It’s not just the fact that he’s a writer; it’s more about the way he writes. The book talks about the hole in the page, and I feel like that’s the way I write too. It’s like when the writing really grabs you everything else just doesn’t matter. You are transported from your reality (crappy job, crappy day, crazy psychotic kidnapper, whatever bothers you) into one you create on the page. It’s escapism for some, and for others its therapy. I don’t know what it is for me, but it’s wonderful.

So, unlike normal, instead of just leaving it lie I want to ask a question for my ending tonight. Two really. What similarities have you noticed between your work, and other published works? And, how do you write? Do you drop into the hole in the page like me and Paul Sheldon? Do your characters whisper it to you as you sit at your desk like R.A. Salvatore? Or do you open a door inside your mind and walk into that world fully formed like Stephenie Meyer?

Similarities.

Similarities. It wasn’t until today that I realized something I find really odd. I know that it has been said for years that there’s no such thing as an original idea. Everything has been done before, and what we try to do when we set down with pen and paper is to try and make our work stand out from the crowd. I didn’t realize how true this was until today.

The story I’m working on, Well of Terror, is amazingly similar (in plot not situation) to the Stephen King novel Misery. The funny thing about this is the only thing I had ever seen about Misery, before writing my story was the skit they did on Robot Chicken with the Peanuts characters. I watched the movie maybe a month after writing my story and didn’t realize the similarities because the story was out of my mind at the time. Today I read the book (one of only two SK novels I’ve read in under 24 hours), and the similarities between the two were so pronounced that I almost smacked my hand against my forehead and said: “Why didn’t I see it when I watched the movie?” (I feel I should note again that I had not seen the movie or read the book before writing the story. Lol.)

If you don’t mind I would like to point out the similarities between the two pieces (so, if you’ve not read the book this is your spoiler alert). Paul Sheldon is a writer/Gerald White is a copy editor. Paul is in an accident and is transported into Annie Wilkes’s world/Gerald trips (not the same as a car crash, but an accident none the less) and falls into the world of shadows. Both are hounded by monsters (Paul by the bipolar neurotic human-monster Annie Wilkes/Gerald by the masked beastie). Both monsters’ wear masks (Annie’s figurative mask of normalcy, masked beastie in the figurative sense). Both kill their monsters, and in the end, neither of them win (Paul Sheldon will spend the rest of his life watching over his shoulder for Annie/Gerald becomes the monster).

I don’t find this to be particularly disturbing (the similarities), especially sense the basis of the two stories are different (and there’s the length to consider). King’s book is about horror in the real world/ While mine is based solely in the supernatural and unreality of dreams. I think I’m safe enough. Anyway, it’s time for me to finish up my second draft of Well of Terror. Signing off.

Well of Terror

Well of Terror. This is a short story I wrote about a month ago. I sort of put it through two drafts (one hand written, the other typed), and then I jumped the gun (as it often happens with me) and sent it to an e-zine. I got a response just a few days later on it. It was terrible. I should have known it was, but I didn’t even read it before I sent it out, and now that I sit here looking at it, I know that it is a terrible piece that needs a great deal of work to it. I didn’t even need to read past the first page to know about two-thirds of what I need to change.

Before I get too much further let me give you a run through of what the story is about. A friend and I have both had dreams about the monster this story revolves around. We both call them masked beasties, and to give you a general idea of the monster imagine a man seven to eight feet tall. He is anorexic to the point of being a walking skeleton, and his fingers look more like the glove that Freddy Kruger wears than human hands. His hair is black, greasy, smeared with what could only be blood, and falls down to just past his shoulders. Covering his face is a black and white mask that looks like a yin-yang symbol. The mask has no holes period, and the monster walks on all fours instead of upright.

The story is about a man who has gone down to his basement and finds himself falling through a barrier (that looks like a well) into the world of shadows. He lands at the bottom of the well and finds the masked beastie. He runs, the beastie chases. Man finds a sword, turns to attack, cracks the mask, looks into the monster’s non-existent face, kills the beast, and finds himself back in his basement with no proof of the encounter other than the sword and part of the cracked mask. The story ends with the man beginning to turn into a similar monster because he saw its face.

I see four problems with the story as is: Motivation, Character Development, Perspective, and Language. Motivation is a problem because: Why was the man going down to the basement to start with? No answer to that question in the story. Character Development is a problem because we have no idea who this man is. Does he have a name? What does he do? Neither question is answered. Perspective is a problem because it was written in the first person. This is a problem for me because I have a tendency to ramble in the first person, making the story much harder to read. Language is a problem because the story sounds like it’s trying to be literary, and I don’t have a literary style. The story doesn’t sound like me in other words.

Solutions to these problems are very simple. Motivation: Blown fuse, the fuse box is in the basement. Character Development: Gerald White, he’s a copyeditor for a local newspaper. Perspective: Third person. Language: My own, no sense trying to be someone else when writing. Now that I’ve got all this figured out it should be very easy to write the second draft of the story, and maybe this one will be much more publishable than the last.