The Life of an Aspiring Writer.

Fight Scenes

2010-12-30T14:01:00.000-05:00

Fight Scenes. I said I wasn’t sure if I had anything more to say about fight scenes, but now I believe that I might just have a few things to say. But, anyway, let’s get on with the show.

First up: Cinematic Fight Scenes: Cinematic fight scenes are probably my favorite type of fight scene. In this type of fight scene just about every move is described in complete detail. Reading one of these is almost like watching the fight take place on a big movie screen, which is why I called it a Cinematic Fight Scene.

Pros: The pros to this type of fight scene are pretty simple. This type is pretty much the ultimate form of showing the reader what is going on.

Cons: The cons are also pretty simple. If a fight scene goes on too long, or you have more than one of them in the course of a novel they can become a little tedious and boring for the reader to … well, read.

Second: This is a type of fight scene I call Short and Sweet. Usually this is a type of fight scene where you only describe a few of the moves in the fight, kill/knock-out the MC’s (or whoever’s) opponent in those couple of moves, and go on with the story.

Pros: The pro to this fight scene is the brevity of the fight while still showing more of what happens in the fight then the next time.

Cons: Again this is something you should use in moderation, just like everything else. Too many of these little fights can become predictable, and tedious.

Third: The third type of fight scene, as I see it, is the worst type. I don’t even feel like coming up with a name for it because of how lame I feel the fight scene is. What the whole thing amounts to is: Sara stabbed the goblin. And, that sentence right there is the whole fight scene. It’s not exciting, not even remotely entertaining, and leaves all parties wanting more. I honestly dislike it so much, that I can’t even think of any pros to the situation at all. And, the con is simple…very very simple… its boring.

So, yeah, there you go, my full fledged post on fight scenes.

Tell Me: What type of fight scene do you like to use?

Worth Reading—A Christmas Carol

2010-12-29T12:22:00.000-05:00

Worth Reading—A Christmas Carol

So, I was talking about doing a series on fight scenes, going into depth about the different types of fight scenes. Right now, I don’t think I have anything more to say about that, so we might have to wait until I find something more to say about them.

Anyway, I did have something I wanted to talk about. It’s a little story by Charles Dickenson called A Christmas Carol.

I have been in love with this story, in all its different televised or movie forms, but until now I’ve never had the chance to read the book.

I have the book now, and I’m like five pages into it, and it’s great.

I certainly must say that everybody should own a copy of A Christmas Carol.

Tell me: What’s your favorite Christmas story?

What I got for Christmas.

2010-12-28T11:09:00.000-05:00

What I got for Christmas. Original title isn’t it. Lol.

Anyway, I hadn’t planned on talking about what I got for Christmas, although I did get a really badass pen set and a self cleaning litter box.

What I did want to talk about was the different mediums available to writers, and the way in which I employ them.

I seem to be getting some strange looks…but, I can guarantee that I’m not entirely crazy, because I guarantee that you have also thought about the different mediums available to writers.

Those mediums are: pen and paper, typewriter, word processor/computer, and tape recorder.

And, I’m still getting crazy looks. But, before you write me off as insane I want you to think about it. What mediums have you used in the past? Me? I’ve used all of them. At this point in time, pen and paper is my preferred medium. I find that my mind works best at building a story while I’ve got a pencil in hand.

I have also used the “tape recorder” option in the past. You see, I didn’t always write. Instead I would pace around and around telling myself a story as it built in my head. That was the way I wrote as a child, but unfortunately I didn’t actually use a tape recorder to record my stories. (I might be much further along in my writing career if I had thought of that.)

The other two mediums are the ones I began playing with most recently. Using a computer is a good way to cut out the middle-man (transcription), while the typewriter has an extremely classical sort of feel to it (I love listening to a typewriter work).

But, the problems with these mediums is the way my mind works. I can use both the typewriter and the computer to come up with fresh copy. But, often enough, my mind doesn’t like to work with those mediums, and I wind up churning out barely usable copy.

Anyway, I think I’ll stop bitching now, and let you all enjoy your day.

Tell me: what mediums do you like to use for your stories?

Good News!

2010-12-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Good news, ladies and gents. I finished a new project I've been working on. And, as a result, I've decided to take a day off of writing.

Anyway, that includes a day away from the blog. But, I shall start up again tomorrow, with another post on Fight Scene's.

So, tell me: When you finish a project, what do you like to do to "distance" yourself from the work?

Merry Christmas.

2010-12-25T07:00:00.001-05:00

To all you fun and wonderful people out there in the world, I would just like to say: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, and just have a Happy Holiday season.

PS: Be sure to indulge in a little Gluttony as well.

PPS: A post on Gluttony will probably be one of my first posts after the Holiday's are over. Lol.

Fight Scenes

2010-12-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

Fight Scenes. Today I want to talk about something that relates directly to writing, instead of something related to writing in a twenty-one degrees to Kevin Bacon sort of fashion.

Any way, yeah, I want to talk about fight scenes.

It would be my guess that fight scenes are one of the hardest things to manage when it comes to writing a novel, short story, or really any sort of writing at all.

Why are they tricky?

Well, there can actually be any number of reasons why fight scenes can be tricky. Often enough, for me anyway, fight scenes can become something of a story of their own, and like stories you have to manage the tension of the action you want to portray, how you go about the detail of the fight in the midst of, as well as dialogue, imagery, onomatopoeia (if you use that sort of thing) and just the language in general when you sit down to put the thing on paper. And, of course, you have to go back over the fight scene itself and look at the bitter picture surrounding it.

How does the fight scene relate to the story? How does the action involved in the story build up the overall action of the work? And, does the tension of the story take too much of a hit after the fight scene is over? Does it build said tension up? Or, does the fight scene after the flow of tension entirely, meaning…does the fight scene bring the whole story to a climax.

These are the sort of questions I ask myself when I write a fight scene. And, I would think that, they’re important universal questions that any writer should ask themselves going into a fight scene.

This post turned out to be longer than I though it would be. Lol. Anyway, I think I’ll continue this discussion on over into next weeks set. Maybe even break the fight scenes up into neat little categories. So, yeah, I’ll do that. Talk to you kids later.

Tell me: what questions do you ask yourself before writing a fight scene.

PS: and yeah, I realize that one paragraph towards the top of the post is like one giant run on sentence. Lol.

Motivation

2010-12-23T14:32:00.000-05:00

Motivation. Motivation is the utter bane of my existence.

Really it is.

I swear to god.

Why?

I don’t really know why, though, it just seems to me that I never want to get work done.

I mean I do have things I want to do, I come up with a whole list of things I want to get done almost as soon as I get up. But, more and more I continue to find something else to do, something easier to do instead of the things on the list.
It’s like, okay I need to pick up the living room…but, wait my computer is right in front of me. Why don’t I play a few games of Mah Jong before I get started? And guess what, that’s right, an hour later I’m still playing Mah Jong, and have done absolutely nothing towards getting the living room picked up.

And, when it comes to writing I seem to be even less motivated. Once again, its because there are easier things to do then sit down, pluck words out of the air, and set them down on paper.

And, the really funny thing is, I should be more motivated to get my writing done. Because, well, because of the possiblility of generating some form on income (out of a job right now, so yes income is a big concern of mine).

Anyway, I guess I’m going to try and show some motivation and get some work done.

Tell me: what helps you when it comes to motivation for both house hold chores and for writing?

My computer.

2010-12-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

My computer. So, I have come to the conclusion that my computer hates me. It hates me more than anything else in this world. And, I believe I might have figured out why.

Do you know why my computer hates me?

Do you want to know why my computer hates me?

Well, the answer to the second question is probably not. But, I’m going to tell you anyway.

My computer hates me because it’s a piece of technology, and all technology hates me.

Vending machines eat my money.

Credit cards decline.

My X-box won’t read the disk of a game I bought weeks ago.

My laptops hinges are broken so the screen won’t stand up on its own, and the cord is freyed to the point where the laptop won’t charge until I jiggle the plug for like twenty minutes.

And, to top it all off, my truck is trying its best to die on me. It got into a car wreck, has problems shifting gear, the radiator ran dry, and the engine tried to blow up on me.

Anyway, now that I’ve bitched, I feel a little bit better about the world. Thank you for reading…

And, tell me, in what ways does technology hate you?

Revision

2010-12-21T07:00:00.002-05:00

Revision. Revision is an important element, not only in writing, but in life as well.

Revision in writing means to look at the story, determine which parts are good, which parts are bad, and then to decide how to deal with the negative parts. This often means re-writing the negative parts, and maybe even throwing those parts out of the equation all together.

And, I know what you’re asking?

How can you reverse life? How can you go back through your life and cut out all the bad parts?

Well, the process for both of them is pretty much the same, except for the singular fact that you can’t change your past. And, these bad experiences that you’ve had. But, you can move forward.

When applying revision to life, you do have to look back at the bad parts, no matter how terrible those parts might be, and then take the lessons you learned from the experience and applying them to your everyday life.

I can even give and example of where I’ve tried to apply revision to my own life.

I used to lie, and I mean lie really bad. I would lie to my wife about going to class, whether I was doing my work or not, and most definitely about tests that we had to take in class. I would lie because I didn’t want to create conflict with my wife, but as it turned out, lying made the whole situation worse than what it could have been. Those lies created an enormous rift in our relationship, and very nearly destroyed it.

But, I learned from the experience. I learned how to watch for cases where a lie would fall from my lips, and I’m doing everything I can, mentally, to keep from lying to my wife. I don’t want to lose her, so I am cutting the lying from my character, and dropping it to the floor. And, I’m going to step on it a few dozen times.

So, that’s my story. How do you apply revision to your writing and your life?

Follow Me

2010-12-20T17:20:00.001-05:00

Follow me on:

Twitter

Facebook:

and
Myspace:

Envy.

2010-12-20T07:00:00.002-05:00

Envy. So, envy is my new favorite of the seven deadly sins. And, well, it’s not because I think envy is a cool sin. No, if I had a favorite sin based on which ones I think are interesting my favorite would have to be lust ;) But, that’s not the case.

Envy is my favorite because I am envious.

I’m envious of other people. Not because they have more success than I do. Not because they have more money than I do. And, not because they’re better at their jobs than I am at mine.

Are those things a factor? Yes, I would have to say they are. I want to be rich. I want to be important. And, I want to be a great writer. But, more than anything, I want to be normal, I want to have a daily routine, I want to be able to sleep in bed with my wife…at night!

These are things that I want that other people have. These are the things that make me envious.

Tell me:
What makes you envious?

Work.

2010-09-15T09:14:00.000-04:00

Work. So, sorry I didn’t post yesterday. I was kind of out of it with the insomnia, illness, and all that fun crap. Anyway, so , today’s topic for writing is work, and when I talk about work I don’t exactly mean the minimum wage job I work on the weekends to try and help my wife pay the bills. No, what I consider my work is what my mother considers recreational writing. Writing is my passion and my joy (besides the obvious given when it comes to my wife), writing is what I want to do with my life. I already consider writing my career, even though I don’t get paid of it. Is this behavior a little obsessive? Probably. But, you know what, writers deal in dreams and obsessions, you could say it’s their bread and butter, so maybe, just maybe, I’m a little bit ahead of the curve already.

Anyway, something that some people might consider small, but I consider to be a relatively big deal is production when it comes to writing. Production is sort of the keystone for every market on the face of the globe (at least those markets that have gone through the Industrial Revolution). And, as I see it writing is no different. (A higher level of production would also mean a larger amount of my writing out of my computer and onto the desks of agents and editors. And, when it comes to odds it would be a higher chance to get my work noticed.) So, you see, I would really like it if I was producing 4-6000 words a day. This would cut the time it takes to get a first draft written down to a little less than a month, for a novel roughly seventy-thousand words long. But, as it is I rarely produce more than a thousand words a day, and this saddens me. So far I’ve tried just about everything I can think of to increase production, and so far nothings worked. Not even massive amounts of caffeine, which just makes me really jittery.

Anyway, since I’ve managed to make myself sad I’m going to do something happy. On, maybe I’ll write for a bit. Later kids.

Lists.

2010-09-13T07:00:00.001-04:00

Lists. So yesterday, I had the idea to write down a few lists, and while I was at work and couldn’t do it at the time I still like the idea. I am going to go through with it today, probably sometime later in the day. But anyway, what the idea was, was to sit down and write down a few lists. My mind decided that I should write down three lists, maybe four, each of them thirty words, or lines, long. What I plan on doing with the lists is also kind of simple. Sort of a word association thing. I intend to write a list of blog topics/possible writing practice topics. A list of images or common house hold items to use to try and write a poem everyday. And a list of short story ideas.

In my reading on improving writing I’ve seen a couple of examples where list writing is often helpful and writing every day helps to improve the work you’re doing. I’ve also seen somewhere were its suggested to write a poem everyday. While I’m not much of a poet I think that learning and improving my craft in poetry will help when it comes to improve the prose, so yeah. Besides, it’d be neat to have a book or two of poetry out in the future.

At the moment I can’t think of anything else to say, so I shall talk to you laters.

new post

2010-09-12T02:01:00.000-04:00

So, I've not written a blog post in a long time, and I'm not really sure if I can give a reason as to why I have or have not. If you want to ask me you can, but the answer I would give you probably wouldn't be satisfactory. I'm sure I could probably come up with some excuse such as saying, well I've been playing wow, or I've had marital issues or something like that. But, in the end it would feel to me like I'm doing nothing more than giving you excuses, and I don't want to do that. I will however give you at least one reason as to why, though it still might qualify as an excuse. over the last couple of months I've felt like I've had nothing at all worth saying. Before I fell out of the practice of writing a blog, which I wasn't very practiced at anyway, I had noticed that the different bloggers around the lot usually have something that they at least feel is worth saying. I don't think that I did. I tried to believe I did, but I didn't. you can tell me that that's not true, and now I would be able to say whole heartily that you're right. I do have something to say. Sort of. It might not be important to you all, but it's going to be important to me. Everything I say, everything I ever write, be it the next Great American Novel or a shopping list, should be full of something that is important to me. That's how you connect with yourself and improve your writing. Make everything important to you whether its going to be important to someone else or not. And, there you have it ladies and gentleman. Just a little jewel of writing information. Write what's important to you, not to someone else. Later kids.

P.S. Upon rereading this, I'm not sure it makes any sense, but what the hell. It's important to me after all. Lol.

About Zombies.

2010-05-05T07:27:00.001-04:00

So…I’m kind of bored. This isn’t really a new state of being for me just so you know. Instead of trying to find some electronic form of entertainment, something quick and flashy to drain away whatever small amount of intelligence I have left, I’ve decided to entertain myself by writing. Go figure. You think I might be a writer or something along those lines. And, I’m sure you’re just dying to know what I’m going to write about. Well, right now I feel a little bit like writing about zombies, the great flesh eating somnambulists. Where to start…

Zombies eat flesh. It’s a proven fact. If you run into a zombie in a dark alley somewhere it is my suggestion to run as fast as you can in the other direction. Zombies will try to eat you, and if they get close enough to you they will take a bite out of you. And, as I’m sure its common knowledge, the best way to kill a zombie is a head shot. Don’t aim for the lungs, as they don’t need to breath. Don’t aim for the heart, because hitting them in the heart is going to do absolutely nothing for you. Their hearts don’t beat after all. But, is that all there is to zombies? I don’t think so.

One of my college professors called zombies ‘the ultimate film noir character,’ and zombie films ‘the ultimate film noir films.’ Why? Because zombies are representations of humanity stripped of everything we think of that makes us human. The zombies only desire is to eat your flesh, and then to eat your friend’s flesh, and then to eat your mother’s flesh, and then to eat your dad’s flesh, and so on and so fourth until the zombies have literally eaten every ounce of human flesh on the planet. But why? Why do zombies want to do that? No one knows. It’s not a need for sustenance. Zombies don’t have a functional digestive tract. Perhaps it’s an existential need to destroy everything about the life they once had. To try and break through the bonds of society to get back to a simpler life and returning to nature, which zombies do quite literally in six years or so, or maybe it’s a drive to spread the disease. A subconscious drive within them to spread disease far and wide until it overruns the planet.

Then again, human’s posses that same need. So, maybe humans are the disease, and zombies are the cure.

My newest Query :)

2010-05-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Agent,

I am seeking representation for my 70,000 word YA URBAN FANTASY novel Little Nightmares.

You’d think it would be safe to explore a haunted house when your two best friends are horror stories themselves. Seline Crier finds out differently.

All her life Seline Crier has been ostracized from her family and society because of one little ability. She’s a telekinetic. And when she meets Dmitri, a forty year old vampire trapped in the body of a twelve year old, and Omega, a fledgling werewolf on the eave of his first transformation, she thinks she might be able to pull her family back together again. She just has to brave the horrors of the Wickham House first.

Inside the Wickham House Seline’s life complicates even further as she’s almost scared to death by the House’s two friendly haunts, almost torn apart by Omega, and drawn into a plot to kill Dmitri that will change her life forever. Seline uses her powers to stop the monster threatening her friends, and earns its wrath when she proves unable to kill it. Now Seline must rush to her home before the monster can arrive ahead of her, and take away any chance she ever has of fixing her family and earning their love.

Little Nightmares will appeal to the fans of both paranormal and horror genres. I am a student of history at Concord University and have one prior publication with Concord University’s publication Reflexes.
I would be happy to forward the complete manuscript to you upon your request, and I thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Ryan M. Smith

As you can see, this is the query for Little Nightmares, my latest project. I'm getting ready to start work on the revision and just wanted to see if I could nail down the query before jumping in head first. Thanks for your help:)

News

2010-04-19T13:39:00.005-04:00

So... I've vanished again. I'm sorry. I don't think I'm very good at this blogging thing lol. Anyway, today is a really weird day for me. I finished Little Nightmares last night. Now I think it would be normal for a person to be really happy and excited after they completed something novel length. Not me. I feel empty. And bored. Like there's nothing there. A gaping hole inside of my mind. The TV shows over. The credits have rolled. All that, and now its time to get back to real life. I don't like it. Lol. So... what do I do now?

How do you feel when you come to the end of a project?

Worth Reading-Under the Dome

2010-03-22T13:42:00.000-04:00

Worth Reading. Hiya tots and taters, what are you all up to? Me? I’m still working on my Little Nightmares project, but since I’m not one of those people who can write every second of the day (and there are times when I really wish I was lol) I read and play a few games every now and then. What did I read for your viewing pleasure today? Well, the honest answer is really only one book since the last time I did a worth reading, but there’s a reason for that. Today’s book:

Stephen King’s Under the Dome. Under the Dome is the third of King’s epic novels and runs just over a thousand pages long (this being why it took me so long to read the novel), and I have to say that every time I sit down with one of this man’s works I keep seeing why it is that I want to be a writer. Under the Dome follows the story of a little town, shaped like a shoe, in Maine called Chester’s Mill. And why is it that this little town I different from any other? Because this town has been placed under an invisible barrier, the dome as the inhabitants of King’s world come to call it, and what goes on under the dome stays under the dome. (Sorry I really couldn’t help myself there.) The only really “supernatural” element of the novel is the dome itself, and the way that the dome is lifted at the end of the story. The rest of the novel, however, is one of political intrigue and maneuvering on the part of James “Big Jim” Rennie his corruption and the downfall of his short regime. The hero of the story, Dale “Barbie” Barbara is not what I would consider a traditional hero. He is a military man and man on the inside representing to an extent the government of the US, and to an extent how that government fails to cope with the problem posed in the novel. How does the US institute martial law in a region completely cut off from the rest of the world? It can’t. How can Barbie deal with the iron fist taking over the small town when practically everyone in the city supports Big Jim? To answer that question I’m really going to have to suggest you read Under the Dome.

Recommendation: This book is worth reading, but I would suggest picking it up at your local library if you don’t want to pay the twenty to thirty dollars for it. Lol.

PS. I will really admit that I feel kind of bad about having just this one book for today. I am also upset about not being able to talk about what I want to (and what bothered me about the book) without giving away too many spoilers about the book. If you want to discuss it in depth and don’t mind the spoilers please email me at smithr10 (at) concord (dot) edu Later taters.

Lazy Day, Friday.

2010-03-19T13:39:00.004-04:00

Lazy Day, Friday. Howdy tots and taters. I apologize for how long it took me to get my blog post up, I had to write a paper for my history class. And, I really do have to say that it was a killer paper:) I am pleased with it. But you guys probably don’t want to hear about my academic writing. Its not nearly as fun as what I got waiting for ya, lol.

So, before I copy and paste any of my creative writing into this post, lemme give you a quick set up. Seline, Dmitri, and Omega are exploring a haunted house. Dmitri is a vampire, Seline has psychic potential, and something is wrong with Omega. If you can guess what it is then awesome:) Anyway, here you go:

Material removed by author. Sorry.

And, just one more note to make, I’ll leave this post up until my post on Monday comes out, because perfect paranoia is perfect awareness and all that lol. Also please keep in mind that this is first draft material and has yet to go through any polish.

WIP it Wednesday

2010-03-17T08:23:00.005-04:00

WIP it Wednesday. So…first let me try to welcome all my tots and taters back into the wild world of my own insanity…and try to apologize for my latest disappearance. I’m not entirely sure why it is that I vanish when I do, but I think it has something to do whit the way my brain works. Lol. Its broken.

I’m kidding to some extent, because it might not really be broken, but what it does really really enjoy doing is going in enormous circles. Especially when I’m writing. The reason I disappeared is because I have been playing World of Warcraft again. And, don’t get me wrong it’s a wonderful game, but when I’m playing it its all I can do to get anything else done. Writing and blogging drop complete from mind when I play, and I guess the only reason I don’t believe I have a sever problem (addiction or something like that) about playing it is because I only play it for like a week and a half to two weeks and it seems to me that this is a necessary time my brain uses to rest up after the month and a half I put into my writing. The one thing I really dislike about it is the way it tears me away from blogger completely, so if (more likely when) it happens again, I will try to be better about blogging, or at least warning you all of my impending disappearance.

So…I feel bad doing this cause I don’t think I deserve it at this point, but…I will now accept the Honest Scrap award from Anne Gallagher at the Piedmont Writer. So, first let me say thank you to Anne, and I hope you think it’s still okay for me to accept this. If, in the last month, you believe that I’ve moved from the pile of “Honest Scrap” to the pile of worthless scrap I completely understand lol:-)

Ten things that make me happy in no particular order:

1) Receiving awards of which I am probably not worthy.

2) Sleeping from 9pm to 4am, it helps a lot with writing believe it or not.

3) Food, coffee, and friends at the local Omelet Spot.

4) Sundrop…I remain convinced that this is the soda God drinks when he wants one.

5) Outlining

6) Writing

7) Reading

8) H&R Block so that I don’t have to do my taxes myself .

9) Thinking of myself as a great writer to be… LOL

10) When characters really take on a life of their own…makes my life so much easier.

And, now to pass it on to 5 other bloggers that I believe deserve it:

1)Can I just give to Anne Gallagher again? She needs I double dose of it I do believe.

2)How about Iapetus999 at The WriteRunner namely for his wonderful abilities at helpful series. He’s also the person I’m blaming for my new love of outlining.

3)I do also believe that Kiersten White at Kiersten Writes deserves an award…maybe it will help with the brain problems she’s had recently:-)

4)Donna Hole for being awesome.

5)And, Natalie Whipple at Between Fact and Fiction for awesome ninja skill:-)

And, now if there was supposed to be some point to today’s madness I forgot what it was…should probably have mentioned something about my WIP seeing as it is WIP it Wednesday…maybe something along the lines of my new WIP just passed the halfway point :-) Another forty or so handwritten pages and the story should be done :-) Friday, if the gods of blogging deem it alright, I’ll see about posting a scene or two for your viewing pleasure. So…until then…please stick around…and I shall talk to you taters later.

Worth Reading-2

2010-02-22T07:52:00.004-05:00

Worth Reading-2. Good morning tots and taters. Hope the coffees working. So, how are you all this foine morning? Me? I’m not too bad, other than getting up at the butt crack of dawn. I’m also feeling a little lazy so instead of trying to come up with a really cool post about writing, I think I’ll try my hand at reviews once again. This time instead of doing three books by one author, we’re going to do three books by the same number of authors.

First up, another Lawrence Block tale. This book, is Eight Million Ways to Die, and is an urban noir mystery. The run and styling of the book is a lot heavier than that of Bernie Rhodenbarr book I read for last week. This one also plays with much deeper themes than Bernie’s. The main theme of this book: Overcoming alcoholism. It takes a little while for the pacing of the book to pick up, and the story doesn’t seem to start until a couple of chapters in (at least to me it did). But once the ball got rolling this was a wonderful story to read. Recommendation: Worth Reading.

Next book is The Vision by Dean R. Koontz. The story of The Vision is about a clairvoyant who is using her psychic twinkle to track down murderers. (Premise sounds a little familiar, but it’s an older book.) The book is dialogue heavy, which makes it a fast read, but the dialogue kind of overloads the story. I think it would have been better without just a tad bit more detail. I also managed to figure out the whodunit halfway through the story so the end of the book wasn’t as good as it could have been. Recommendation: Meh, pick it up at the library if you’re a Koontz fan otherwise don’t worry about it.

The third book is a run into an entirely new genre. The Vampire Affair by Livia Reasoner. This is a paranormal romance published by the Silhouette Nocturne line, and it the first recently published book I’ve reviewed. Woot! This was an absolutely fantastic read. I enjoyed watching the romance develop between the two mains, and the treatment of the paranormal factor wasn’t too bad either. Lol. The vampires she used were along the classical lines of the vampire (similar to Dracula). The only thing I really didn’t like was that those bitten by the vamps turned after one bite.
But, I’m weird like that. Anywho, recommendation: Worth Reading.

I think that just about wraps things up for this morning. On Wednesday I shall be accepting an award from the wonderful Anne Gallagher over at the Piedmont Writer. And with that said, I shall talk to you taters laters.

Lazy Day-Casting Couch.

2010-02-19T05:36:00.002-05:00

Lazy Day-Casting Couch. Hey taters, what you all into? Me? Well, I’ve decided to have a little bit of fun with today’s post. But, before we get to it I’ve got a couple of questions for you first. Have you ever thought of your book becoming a movie? (Don’t lie you know you have.) And, since you have thought of that, have you ever given any thought to who you would want to cast as the different roles for your characters? Well, guess what, I have. Here’s my list of choice actors for Raising Kain: Diseased God.

Apophis Kain younger: I’m not too good with child actors, so I really have no idea who would be a good choice for Kain’s early years.

Terra Gaia: Zoe Saldana. I’ve not seen her work in Avatar, but from seeing her in Star Trek I do believe that she would make a very believable Lady Gaia.

Apophis Kain elder: Brandon Routh. Superman is kind of the way I see the elder version of Kain, so I think it would be quite fitting to have someone who once wore the red and blue cape to play a character inspired by him. And, the idea of Kain kind of fits in with the Superman type cast. Lol.

Apolla Sola: Chris Pine. For this role you need someone who knows their all that and several bags of chips. After filling The Shat’s shoes as James Kirk, I definitely think Chris would be up for the job.

Celita Luna: Lady Gaga. Celita is a hypersexual character, and chaos personified. The only person I think could do a believable Celita is somebody who already acts like her. Thus Lady Gaga. Plus, the contrast between Gaia and Celita would be even greater with these two at the helm.

AtA: Morgan Freeman. He played God before in Bruce Almighty, so I would have no problem whatsoever with him reprising that role in Raising Kain.

Pestilence: Andy Serkis or Crispin Glover. Both of them have played broken tortured characters to an unbelievable level. Maybe they should have to fight to the death over the role. (Insert evil smile here.)

Beyond this list though, I don’t really have any idea who I would want for the other parts. So, unlike normal, I’m going to leave you with another question. Who would you want to play your characters in a movie.

WIP it Wednesday

2010-02-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

WIP it Wednesday. Hey potatoes, so last week I told you that my last project, RAISING KAIN: DISEASED GOD, is now at the query stage of its life, and I’ve since moved onto a new project. I told you then that I’d get around to telling you about the new project, and it seems like doing that might be a good idea while I wait for the coffee to finish percolating.

My new project is roughly titled LITTLE NIGHTMARES. It’s a YA paranormal/horror novel about three younger versions of some horror classics as they explore a classic horror location, the haunted house. The three horror story figures are as follows: Seline Crier is a Carrie type figure. She is telekinetic, and has no idea of that fact, though she knows that her parents are afraid of her for something, she just can’t remember what it is. (The first time she fell down and scrapped her hands she pitched her mother against the back wall of the Crier family home, not as dramatic as the stones from Carrie, but I thought using the stones would be pushing it lol.)

Dmitri Candle is a Dracula type figure. I find that he’s different from a number of the other YA vampires because he is based as close as I could possibly make him (while still having him be a relatively heroic figure) off of the classic Dracula image. Another thing that I believe help sets him apart is the fact that he enjoys being a vampire. He likes the power, the nocturnal lifestyle, and he enjoys thinking of people as if they were dishes at a buffet instead of human beings. He thinks differently about Seline, but does so only for his own indiscernible reasons.

Omega Shamtith is a Wolfman/Lon Chaney Jr. figure. Unlike the original Wolfman Omega is a natural born lycanthrope, and at this point in his life has no idea that he’s able to get really furry at will. I mean the little boy hasn’t even hit puberty yet. But if you can’t guess, I will tell you that he goes through his first werewolf transformation during the course of the novel, but not right were this event occurs. As a character though, and without looking at just the werewolf thing, Omega is an amazingly intelligent boy. He skipped two grades, and is 9 years old in the seventh grade instead of 12. He can read four books at a time, one of them usually being a college level textbook, and when he has homework he can usually get all of it done in roughly ten minutes.

Interesting things that I think I’m doing with the novel:

This one is more over the course of the series than the novel, if it becomes a series, is I’m looking at the werewolf transformation in stages. Since Omega is a natural born werewolf, and puberty is all about changes, his transformation is going to be broken up into a number of different stages. The key form in this novel, which is to say the first stage, is going to be that of the Wolfman from the original film. Omega grows from his current height of 4’5” to his soon to be full height of 5’9”, grows hair and a 60% increase in muscle over his entire body. (He’s mostly baby fat right now so there’s not a lot of muscle to start building on for the sixty percent, so buff he is not during the werewolf transformation.) The transformation in subsequent novels, if there is going to be any, is going to follow some of Hollywood’s ideas when it comes to the werewolf. The second stage will be a man-wolf stage, like that seen in Cursed and Dog Soldiers, these are pretty fearsome creatures. The following transformations will be more wolf-like with the third being very similar to the monster-wolf seen in the Ginger Snaps series, and the monster wolf from An American Werewolf in London. The final transformation is one that I’ve not decided on yet, but obviously one of my options is that of the actual wolf, but that one might be a bit too predictable. So, over the course of the next few years, if LITTLE NIGHTMARES goes anywhere, we’ll see what comes to me further down the road.

I had something else I wanted to talk about, but since were running a little long on what my blog usually runs (and I’m probably boring you all to tears) I’ll go ahead an cut it short, leaving me something to talk about later on. So, I think I’ll just leave you with some of the stats from LITTLE NIGHTMARES right now:

LITTLE NIGHTMARES
Genre: YA paranormal/horror
Current WC: 20-30k
Typed WC: 13k
Number of Longhand pages: 29
Average words per page (guesstimation): 900
Estimate Number of Longhand pages: 90
Estimated WC: 80-90k
Query Written: Not yet.
Number of words put into outlining process: 20k
Outline type used: Snowflake

So, I think that’s about it for today. I will talk to you all later taters.

Worth Reading.

2010-02-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Worth Reading. Hey potatoes, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do book reviews. So, I suppose I’m going to give it a try today, and see if maybe I can sell a few good books by word of mouth. So, for the first ever installment of Worth Reading I give you the author Lawrence Block.

Block is an author that I first ran into while working on my first novel, and I would probably have to say that without him my very first novel might not have been written. Now I don’t mean to say that I know the man personally, I wish I did, but his book Writing the Novel From Plot to Print helped me immensely with those first 100 pages, and it kept me plugging right up through to the end of that first book as well. Since then I’ve reread this book maybe four times, sometimes while working on a project, other times just for pleasure. In the book he covers a number of topics on a number of problems that any first time novelist is bound to run into. I’d say that even an experienced novelist would be able to find any number of things that would be helpful in the book as well. The conversational style of the book is also a big plus in my eyes (much better than the preachy styling I’ve ran into in some other books on writing). My personal recommendation is to buy the book. But, if your not looking to buy I do suggest running down to your local library and picking it up.

Next up from Lawrence Block is The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. This is probably the first actual mystery novel I’ve ever read, and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It uses a conversational first person style to it. The writing itself is light hearted, and the pacing was fast enough for me (a very slow reader) to be able to read it in under a day. The resolution was done in a sort of Clue style, where all of the suspects and the “detective” (the Series title character: a professional burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr) were gathered together as Bernie put the clues together and solved the crime. The one thing I didn’t care much for, and this is something I found I didn’t like while reading the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris, was that most of the clues the main character found wasn’t presented until right there in the resolution. So there’s very little chance of figuring out the who-done-it for yourself before the resolution of the novel. Recommendation: Worth reading, but maybe you should get it from the library and read it before you buy it.

For the next novel I read Deadly Honeymoon. This is the only book I’ve seen by Block written in the third person. The premise in this novel is that a man’s wife is raped the night after they’re married. The couple decide to hunt down and kill the rapists. They travel to New York City, and manage to find the rapists within a week and a half. New York City has over eight million people living in it, so that parts kind of hard for me to swallow, but Block managed to have his heroic pair go about it in a fairly believable manner. The thing about this book that really gets me though is the lack of attention to detail in it. Block puts a lot of detail in it, don’t get me wrong, but what I’m getting at is attention to detail in an action sequence that relates to guns. If you mention a number of times throughout the book that your main character keeps four bullets in a five-shot revolver, don’t have him fire the gun six times without reloading the gun. Especially if you mentioned nothing about carrying extra bullets with him in the first place. Alright, I’m sorry, rant over. Recommendation: I’d say pick it up at your local library if they have it.

Well, I hope that was alright in the way of a book review. I don’t think it was really all that good, but I’ve never done one before and I don’t make a habit of reading them, so I’ll leave the decision up to you all. Later taters.

Lazy Day-Query.

2010-02-12T07:00:00.001-05:00

Lazy Day-Query. Hey potatoes, what’s up with you guys today? Me? If you can’t tell already I’ve decided that today’s going to be a lazy day. So, what am I going to do for my lazy day? I’m going to post my query for you all (and for any prospective agents that might just happen by my blog…lol). This thing has gone through a number of revisions (the first one I want to forget exists), and its current state is thanks to a lot of different people. Let’s post the query itself first then I’ll get into the thank yous.

Dear Agent,

I am seeking representation for my 48,000 word YA fantasy novel RAISING KAIN: DISEASED GOD.

The day he turns six Apophis Kain learns he is destined to become the Aspect of the Earth—he just has to survive the training.

Kain is the son of the Aspect of the Moon and a Sky God. Throw in his title—Crown Prince of Atlantis—and the fact that he can transform into a dragon, and Kain can’t escape the high expectations of his parents. He just didn’t realize, “high” meant living in the woods naked or having his Aunt Terra Gaia, the current Aspect of the Earth, as the world’s strictest tutor.

Training to be the Aspect of the Earth and fighting to overcome his headstrong pride is hard enough, but when Pestilence—the deranged diseased god, and Gaia’s former apprentice—shows up seeking revenge against Gaia through Kain, the boy must fight for his life. If Kain can’t find a way to defeat Pestilence, he’s facing the destruction of the material plane—and life as a mindless slave of the diseased god.

RAISING KAIN: DISEASED GOD will appeal to fans of all ages, specifically 10-18 year olds, and to fans of fantasy, mythology, and action/adventure stories. I am a student of history and literature at Concord University. I have published one short story with Concord University’s publication, Reflexes.

I would be happy to forward the complete manuscript at your request, and I thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Ryan Smith

Now, that its up, time for the thanks. The biggest portion of thanks must go to Elana Johnson, not only did her ebook From the Query to the Call help me tear the original query to shreds and make it a thousand times better than it was (I really am serious about this) she also used her awesome Query Ninja skills to help whip the query into its current awesome state (though she never did post it on the Query Ninja blog [if you want to see it bug her about it or I guess I could post it on here at some point]). The next round of thanks goes out to the great people at The Public Query Slushpile who made me realize that my first query was absolute slush, and who helped me just as much as Elana when it came down to the second draft of the new query.

If you really wanna look at the horror of the first Query click here.
If you want to see the complete rewritten Query click here.
If you want to see the way Elana put my rewritten Query to shame vote on it in the comments.

Well, that’s all for now. Later Taters.

Catching Up.

2010-02-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

Catching Up. Hey potatoes, what’s been happening? So…I guess the first thing I should do is apologize for my amazing vanishing act. I can’t really say what it was that made me stop blogging for the last four or five months. I guess that it was really because of laziness on my part. At the time I was working on getting my second draft of Raising Kain done, loosing my job (after working my ass off the week of Thanksgiving “happy holidays right”), fighting my way through a terrible semester at college, and all sorts of other shit. But, I still blame not blogging on laziness. So far as I can see, it really doesn’t take that long out of a day or a weekend to write one or five or three blog posts or whatever. So, I guess this is the point where I promise to try and do better? Right?

Well, I don’t think I can, because I don’t know when another case of the super lazys is going to hit me. But, what I will promise to do is try to give at least three posts a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) as long as I can keep the super lazys at bay. So, I hope we’re cool:)

But, anyway, onto other business: What I’ve done writing wise since I dropped off the face of the earth is as good a place as any to start. Let’s see, I finished my second draft of Raising Kain: Diseased in early November. I wanted to try and do something I had been playing around with for NaNoWriMo, but when I started on it I just wasn’t feeling plugging into a full blown project after finishing the second draft of my first novel. So, that first attempt petered out. The month of November wasn’t entirely unproductive for me. Instead of plugging into a full blown project I discovered the Snowflake Plotting Method (developed by Randy Ingermanson), and discovered that I really enjoy the act of outlining a novel. So, I took the NaNo idea, broke it down by the Snowflake numbers, and over the course of November and December blew it up into a twenty page outline like document.

After plotting I took some time off of writing and felt as though my soul was consumed by the World of Warcraft (if you play look me up on Duskwood under the name Bice, I’m a hordie by the way). For the first two weeks of January playing WoW is really all I did for 16 or so hours a day. After that I got a little sick of it (I still play for maybe two or three hours a week) and set down to writing. I have consistently put at least one handwritten page of copy into my new project per day since that point. I just reached twenty-one pages handwritten, and about 10k words typed so far. I’m feeling pretty good with myself right now, and by the way the new project is called Little Nightmares. I’m sure you’ll here more about it as the work continues on.

One other fun bit of news before I clock out for the day is the fact that besides finishing the second draft of Raising Kain, I’ve also completed the polish for the manuscript. I’ll be sending out queries for it this week. So, wish me luck. Later taters.

Motivation.

2009-10-06T06:40:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-28T15:54:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-09-17T08:03:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-09-13T19:57:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-09-10T22:27:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-03T23:57:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-02T18:46:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-31T22:22:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-08-31T01:32:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-25T23:53:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-08-15T16:34:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-08-12T00:53:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-08-06T22:22:00.001-04:00

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?

2009-08-04T17:50:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-03T00:31:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-07-31T08:30:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-29T16:02:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-07-24T14:41:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-24T00:02:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-07-22T21:51:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-07-21T03:20:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-07-20T20:40:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-19T00:32:00.000-04:00

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.

Some odd Sh**

2009-07-14T18:59:00.003-04:00

Writer's block sucks. Really it does (not that we don't already know that).

This week feels weird, and maybe it's because of this week that my writer's block exists in the first place. Why is that? Well for years (the last ten or fifteen at least) my family has been going down to Holden Beach NC, usually during this week, and this is the first year in all that time that I haven't been able to go. You could say that last year was like that too, but last year we had the wedding planned and the honeymoon to look forward too (and I was batsh** insane at work from stress). Then we went down to the beach (Myrtle Beach SC) and were able to drive up to Holden to chill with my mom, Terri, and Kaitlyn one day. This year we're not able to do that, and we won't be able to at all (barring some miraculous increase in funds) and even if we were able too my family wouldn't be there to enjoy it with us. That would be just as weird as it is now, probably.

So anywho, on to a different topic. Let's look at writing for a moment, and just puzzle over a few things on paper and maybe everything will click back into place. As of this moment I have four (five if you count Hive, though I haven't worked on that in almost a year) WIP. Two of these (Raising Kain: Diseased God & Wesley Grey) are in the completed rough draft stage. Both of them (Wesley Grey especially, being only 20k words long) are skeletons of the novels they want to become. Both require a great deal of beefing up as well as a nice long whipping session (trimming the fat so to speak) to turn them into publishable novels (and since they are the first of many [I hope]) they might not turn out to be publishable anyway. The other two WIP, Transient Dawn and Possession/The Devil in Me (as well as Hive) have not even reached the completed skeleton of the beasts they hide. If memory serves me correctly, Possession is farther along (word count wise) than Transient Dawn is, but just like Hive, I've not touched it in months, and I'm not even sure where I've left off now.

Well, beyond those is a mess of short stories (Well of Terror, The Cleansing of Retanok [Novelette], The Good Doctor, Soul Eater, I Want to Marry Your Daughter, Early Signs of Insanity, and a zombie piece I've not named yet) that I've been playing around with. Each of them are in varying stages of completion, and some of them are floating around around on editor's desks (I don't want to say their part of the dreaded slush pile, lol). I don't think they're ready for publication yet though (like with RK I jumped the gun), and a lot of them still need quite a bit of work. I wish I knew of a writer's group to join (I've tried critters but do to personal failings I've not been able to be a member for more than three weeks at a time), maybe I'd do better if it were in person, or maybe with a couple of on line writer friends. I don't know. Anywho, signing off for the time being.

Checking in.

2009-07-06T01:21:00.003-04:00

Hi everybody! What have all you been up to since I have been away? Me? I've got some good news (not related to writing), bad news (related to writing), and I don't know if I have any ugly news or not.

So, good news is, I am now employed. Woot! After almost five months of unemployment I have been hired at Ryan's Buffet in Princeton WV. If your in the area stop in and say hey, I'm the only person their wearing a name tag that has the same name as the company. Lol.

Bad news is, I have received two three rejection slips in the last week all regarding Raising Kain: Diseased God. Two were from agents, and one was from an ebook publisher. Its not like I was really expecting anything different. I have realized since I sent those out that I jumped the gun a whole lot, and that RK is nowhere near ready for publication. Hell if somebody wanted to publish it as is I would probably think that it was another version of PublishAmerica. Lol.

Sort of Ugly news, I've been going through a dry spot recently with writing, and its taking a little bit of time to get back on my feet with it. I know it sucks, but I'm kinda used to it ya know. Anywho, if I wind up with any more cool news I'll let you guys know. Laters.

MIA

2009-06-15T19:11:00.003-04:00

What's up guys. Not a great total here. Just wanted to say that I didn't fall off the face of the planet. My computer has been having internet troubles over the last few days, and I've not been able to get online while I'm awake, though my wife has had very little trouble with it. (Damned sexist machine! LOL.)

Anywho onto the more important world of publishing. I submitted Wesley Grey to an ebook publisher, and got a rejection slip. What I want to say is cool about this is the fact that it wasn't the usual form rejection we see. The editor told me that her problems with WG was due to the POV shifts throughout the story.

Well, that's really all the news I got to go with that. I will talk to you peeps later.

Authonomy

2009-06-04T00:45:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Iapetus999 (I'm not sure if I spelled that right;) I discovered authonomy which seems like its going to be a very helpful and informative sight when it comes to wip. As such I have placed both of my wips up. Wesley Grey is a story for those of you who are more interested in the paranormal erotica type of story (url is: http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=9398) please take a look if you feel so inclined. I've also posted Raising Kain: Diseased God, it is a young adult fantasy novel (url is: http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=9380), again, please feel free to take a look if you are so inclined. Well, have a good one guys.

Query letter for my next book.

2009-06-02T06:07:00.001-04:00

Query letter for Wesley Grey

To editor/agent at ***:

I am seeking publication for my 20,000-word novella, Wesley Grey.

Up until tonight Wesley Grey was a vampire escort, but after killing his latest client and finding the love of his life, Wesley has decided to turn in the towel. The problem with that is, his last client isn’t dead, and she’s biting up a horde of trouble for the vampires of Florence West Virginia.

Wesley Grey is a paranormal erotica story set in a fictional town in West Virginia. The villain is a Hive vampire, a type of vampire that functions under the hive mentality.

I have one previous publishing credit with Concord University’s publication, Reflexes. I would like to publish Wesley Grey under the pen-name Lawrence E. Wilcox.

Thank you for your time, and I hope that you enjoy Wesley Grey.

Sincerely,

Ryan M. Smith

HOLY CRAP

2009-06-01T17:12:00.002-04:00

I have a follower!!!! Barb you have officially made my day! Please, please, please, comment on something. As you can see I'm going crazy here. Lol.

Sorry about my insanity. Love you Barb! GRIN :D

2009-06-01T16:57:00.005-04:00

Howdy everybody. Its been a couple of days since my last post, so I just wanted to check in and give a few brief updates.

On the quest for publication: None. No new news though I think that it might be getting close to time to ask a couple of people that I sent out too if they have any interest. Other than that, nadda.

I recently tried a little bit of cooking, it was delicious, I made baby back ribs with part of the recipe that Alton Brown used in one of the Good Eats episodes. I changed the rub a little though, with:

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon creole seasoning
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon onion powder

It was delicious! Have I told you how delicious it was. Mmm. I wish that you all could come over and enjoy it with me.

Another thing that I did with the rub was try it out first on hot dogs. No, they're not something that you would normally cover in a rub, but they were delicious too. Mmm.

Anywho, back on what this blog is about, I have almost completed the first draft of my second project, and you guys should keep your eyes open for any tantalizing little bits I might post about it. Other than that fact, have a good one.

Missing in action.

2009-05-27T03:44:00.004-04:00

Howdy everybody! Sorry about being mia for the last week or so. There really hasn't been anything to report over the last little bit, but lets give a quick rundown of what has happened. I rejoined Critters. This is an online writing group to help with the writing, and I've been doing a good job out there, at least I think I have. Anywho, the other piece of news is that I'm working on something new, though it isn't actually something I am going to post here on this site. Other than that, there is nothing new. I'm gonna hop off here now. You cats have a cool time.

Rejection

2009-05-12T23:29:00.004-04:00

Howdy everybody. Yours truly here to do another pose. Sorry if I've been a little inconsistent with my posting. Just bad at doing things like that I guess. Anywho, on with today's topic.

As you can see, I received a rejection today, and I've been in a fairly crappy mood since. Not that I receive so many acceptance letters that I should feel put down by a rejection. Its just normal I guess.

Here's what I'm going to do about this rejection. I've got another market that I was thinking about submitting this story too, and I've had a recent revamp of the story that I sent out anyway. So I'm going to do a quick rewrite and send it out. After that I'm going to finish polishing up another story that I wanted to send to the pub that denied my story and see if they want the new one instead.

Well, that's publishing for you. Now I'm going to go and do some more work on my finals.

Le Sigh...

2009-05-10T00:07:00.001-04:00

I don't know what it is but it has been a long time since I have heard anything from the agents I last sent too. I don't know if I should send to them again and ask about what is going on, or just mark them off my list. I really don't know.

Ok, I think I'm going insane. Most agents say that they have a two week to three month response time, and I guess I'm just bad at being patient. That might have to do with the fact that I don't have a job, and therefore have a great deal more time to worry about what is going on with my submission, but it is also true that since I do not have a job, I also don't have any source of income, and I think that it would be really great if my book would sell, so, that instead of trying to find a new job I can get on with the writing of my next novel and the major spending of some money. LOL.

And, on another note about my insanity, I've not actually done any creative writing this last week. This is due to the fact, like I said yesterday, that it is finals week at Concord and I am studying and trying to make it out of my current classes in one piece. Should I fail, I will probably curl up into a ball, and spend a great deal of time crying.

Well, now, I think that I am going to go to bed, and try to keep my own personal insanity from getting worse. Good night all.

Hello... Hello... Hello...

2009-05-08T19:26:00.001-04:00

Lol. Personal joke I'm sorry. But, I just realized something, and it also makes some small amount of since to me. There is nobody on my blog, well, nobody other than me. I've posted some of the book that I'm trying to get published, and there isn't even anyone here to try and enjoy it. But, I also realize that this is because my blog has been active for somewhere around two weeks. My problem though, is that I am an impatient human being, and I believe that everybody should bow down to all of my wonderful demands as soon as they are posted on the interwebs. Not so. I know this, however much my irrational sensibilities want to deny that fact.

On the updates side of the game: Nothing. As usual. As always when I do hear something you guys will be the first to know.

Other than that, I have done no creative writing for the last week or so due to the fact that this is finals week at Concord. This is also the reason that I've not had any updates in a while if anybody noticed. Well, other than that fact, I think that I might do some breif publicisizing for my blog, and lay down for a nap while it rains.

One more thing. I wish that I could go see star trek. I really want to go.

Learning Blogger and nothing but crikets in my inbox.

2009-05-04T00:19:00.001-04:00

Howdy everybody. Boy its really popping out there isn't it. Lol. Sorry, for some reason I start to freak out when absolutely nobody has commented on anything I do. I'm sure its just some odd level of paranoia but it makes me think that nobody is paying any attention to me. That's probably true, and I will have to force my wife to read and comment on my blog tomorrow just to make me feel better about myself. Lol. No, really I'm kidding.

I'm not as demented as some people like to think. So, instead of talking about my insanity lets run through the short list of updates I need to make to my blog.

First up: Business update.

My school email only has Facebook updates and all that fun stuff. My business email has had nothing but crickets since the day I set it up. And, my spam email...let's not go there.

So, as you can see no updates about getting an agent or one of the two e-book publishers I've sent my work too.

Personal update.

Today was the Sigma Tau Gamma Alpha Lambda chapter Founder's day celebration. Though our actual Founder's day is May 7th we celebrated it on a weekend for convience. It was wet. All day long, and we were outside. All day long. But, I still thought it was fun, and I even got a few good idea's from some of the brothers on a neat way to search for representation. I'm not going to share though. I'm sorry. I have to keep some of my secrets to myself.

Talking Shop:

Now on the writing front, I think it is getting close to time to do a little tweaking of my novel Raising Kain: Diseased God. I think there might be some problems with the pacing. This idea comes from me looking at Nathan Bransfords's blog (one of his archives I think) where he was discussing the differences between adult fiction and young adult fiction.

My novel has a protagonist that is six years old (though the book covers until he is nine), and it is far more indepth than a six year olds chapter book, so, I'm thinking that most agents might want to rep it as a YA. But, for the book to work as a YA book the pacing in it is going to have to be much quicker. That way it holds the attention of my readers more than say a flashy television show, but I'm not sure. This writing stuff is a lot harder than I thought it was. Lol. But, this is what I want, and I'm willing to go to the ends of the earth for it. Well, I think that's it for now. peace out peeps.

Raising Kain: Diseased God

2009-05-03T00:00:00.003-04:00

Removed post. Will post revision at a later date.

Day One to Present.

2009-05-02T23:54:00.000-04:00

This is a blog that I have been keeping on myspace for the last few days. This was before I realized the major problem in a author's blog was that it is a very bad idea to post any WIP on myspace. So, to fix that problem I decided to come over here to blogger and set up my own personal little blog space. I hope you enjoy.

First Day of the Waiting Game

So, what's up everybody. I was just looking over my old blogs, and I realized that I forgot to let you all know about what had happened with my short-story "When the Dead Stop Walking." Well, MindFlights declined the publication, but you won't find any hard feelings on my part about my story getting declined. It happens to every author at some point, and the reason that they gave me that the story was declined is because it was too short. Since that point I have submitted two other short stories for publication. One, called "The Good Doctor," to Shroud Magazine (they're on my friends list and you guys should check them out), and the other one was a short called "Early Signs of Insanity" to Necrography. I've not heard back from them yet, but I'm well aware that unfortunately the game that makes up the publication is mainly all about waiting. lol.

But, now that I've covered that one point I do need to get down to what it was I wanted to talk to you all about. Today (well last night really), I finally set down to send out query letters to try and get an agent. Needless to say I have been a little bit of a nervous wreck all day long. LOL. If you are curious as to who I sent my queries out to it was The Knight Agency, Caitlin Blasdell at the Liza Dawson Associates Literary agency, and Nathan Bransford at Curtis Brown LTD. If you would want to email these folks and show your support for Raising Kain: Diseased God that would be phenomenal, but it probably wouldn't work out as well as I think it might. Lol.

So, instead of spamming the people I would like to represent my work, you could just post your support here in the comments. Thank you. And, I will try to keep you all updated on the insanity I will no doubt go through while trying to get an agent and a publisher for Raising Kain: Diseased God.

Day Two (well its sorta still the first day)

Hello again everybody.

I blogged two time in one day. Omg!
LOL.

But, other than that I have more news for my tiny and dedicated crowd of followers, all like three of you. LOL. I just finished submitting my novel to two, count them one, two, epublishers. I will be honest, having my book printed only in the electronic format is not what I want, but both companies seem to have a print option, and if it is avaliable to me I will most likely accept it.

Another thing I'm hoping for is that both companys clamor and enjoy it so much that they start a bidding war, like on eBay, for the rights to the book. The more money each company is willing to pay the happier I will be. LOL.

Anywho, I'm tired and I'm probably going to go to bed now. And just so all you sig taus out there know, I am extatic about what we accomplished this week. I wish I could have gotten my head our of my ass sooner and got out to participate much more. But, I'm going to try and fix that and all you boys better believe that I'll be at the car wash later today. LOL.

See you cool cats later.

Day 2.5

Howdy everybody, its everybody's favorite writer once again here to talk about the woes of the publishing industry. LOL. Nah, I'm just kiddin. Though, I did mangae to do something amazingly stupid last night. I told you about sending the work to two different companies, right?

Right.

Well, after that I got on google and did a search for publising companies, not an amazingly intelligent way to go about it in the first place. Well, while searching I found a company that looked really promising (not going to mention any names), and I went ahead and submitted RK to them. Went to bed, fell asleep, did all that fun stuff, and earlier today when I had a few moments I decided to do a bit of research to see if I could find out anymore information about what exactly I was thinking about getting myself into.

You guys wanna guess what I found out?

Go ahead.

That's right. They're a vanity press, and now the little voice in the back of my head that was telling me the this company was too good to be true has not stopped saying I told ya so since I found out. It's an irritating little prick is exactly what it is. Well, other than that one faulty escapde there is a sort of a consolation prize.

Right now there are two legitimate companies that I'm thinking about submitting too. I say legitimate because they are in fact a part of larger companies. Their names are TOR books and a publisher called DAW. It just so happens that DAW is also a part of the Penguin Group. I think that my chances with DAW are a little slim though. It's not because I'm afraid that my writing isn't up to par with some other published novelists its the word count that is going to hit me with them. My book is only 44560 words long, and DAW's average accepted length (as stated on their website) is in the area of 80000 words. Yup, I'm just a little over half-way there. I will still keep my fingers crossed, and pray that I can scrounge up the money and paper to send my submission out in snail mail. Neither group accepts email entries :(

Well, I smell bad so I think that I am going to jump off here and take a shower. If I manage to find anymore good news today I will let you all know. Laters.

Day 3

Wow, it really feels like it should have been a week since I started doing this blog thingy. I must admit that I'm a little amazed to see that I am actually keeping a blog, though, I'm not sure what its doing to my other writing habits. I usually try to write about a thousand words a day, and I think that since I've started keeping the blog I've not been keeping up my end of the bargain when it comes to my regular writing. Not, to mention the fact that I have a tone of school writing coming up. So, I might be quiet for a few days, or just drop in to give you any news. But, I probably won't be doing any big heavy blog.

Speeking of news, though, the waiting game is over on two counts. Both, declined. Like yesterday I don't want to include any names, and I want to say that I will be famous without them. LOL. Well, I'm going to go cry now. Not really, but it kinda feels like I should. I guess that's the hard part about this business. Later taters.

Day 4

Howdy everybody. Its your favorite neighborhood writer stopping in to let you all know what is up with me today.

Well, on that list is one funny thing. I got an email from one of the companies I sent out to. The one that I told you all about being a vanity press. They requested to see my full manuscript. I find this odd, because about twelve hours after sending in the query, when I found out they were a vanity press, I sent them an email removing my stuff from their consideration. Oh well, maybe it sounds interesting to them, I hope if they show intrest in it a legitimate company will show intrest in it as well.

On the other side of the news I have written a short story, most of which was done last night, and typed it up today. I submitted it to an e-zine called Fear and Trembling. The e-zine is done by the same publishing group that does Mindflights. The story is called "Well of Terror." Kind of cheesy I know, but I think that the story itself will stand out far better than the title does.

Another point I wanted to bring up. Due to my lack of being famous and fear of being ripped off, I have thought about opening up a website on proboards. Kind of like an online portfolio of work that I can control to a t. If I decide to open that up, I will post information about it in my blogs. Just going to let you guys know ahead of time that the site will be a locked site, and you will need to message me or leave me a note in the comments to get a guest key. The guest key will be active for a limited amount of time, not sure how long yet. This way I can keep my work under good lock and key. Its not that I don't trust you guys, its just that I don't trust the people on the internet. Anywho, have a good one.

Day 6

Hey peeps, what's up?

Well, on my end I really feel like hell. It's got nothing to do with my recent quest to get published. I am sick. Its just that simple, and it sucks. I'm sorry that I didn't get to update you all.

Anywho, the only update to give you all is another agent said no. But, don't worry about it, your favorite neighberhood writer is still at it, and is still trying to figure out what to do about a website. I shall talk to you alls later.