Writing Excuses 10.2 - Writing Exercise

This week's exercise builds on the first one.

Writing Prompt: Using last week's five story ideas (or five new ones):

• Take two of them and combine them into one story.
• Take one and change the genre underneath it.
• Take one and change the ages and genders of everybody you had in mind for it
• Take the last one and have a character make the opposite choice.

Combining the idea of a discovered artifact and the research idea, the new Shaman finds something in the belongings of an elder that leads both to the discovery of a new healing method, and to the solution to an old, old mystery about what exactly happened to the elder (a story that he wouldn’t talk about…)

Porn idea - change it to YA fiction instead of porn? Something a little less NSFW - this idea still comes across as low-hanging fruite, and I probably won’t do much more with it.

Drinking from Sprinklers - warning to children, perhaps? Kids invent a ridiculous tale of gaining superpowers from drinking sprinkler water, only to discover that the truth is even weirder…

Technomancer idea - the Technomancer finds out that the AI is actually amoral, bordering on psychopathic and evil. The “Black Hats” could either be using it for their own nefarious purposes, and she has to either destroy it, neutralize it, or enslave it for the greater good - or they could turn out to be the good guys, and she begins working for them (or at least with them, on a case by case basis).

Writing Excuses 10.1 - First Exercise

I'm following along with the Writing Excuses podcast's Season 10 Master Class series. Here's the exercise from the first episode.

This week’s writing exercise is:

Writing Prompt: Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:

• From an interview or conversation you’ve had
• From research you’ve done (reading science news, military history, etc)
• From observation (go for a walk!)
• From a piece of media (watch a movie)
• From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

1. An author decides to let off some steam in order to distract himself from an impending deadline and writes a terrible porn novella. On a whim, he releases it under a pseudonym, and it’s a surprise hit. The publisher (would this work if self-published?) demands more of him, resulting in pressure to punt his other deadlines in order to continue to produce terrible porn. Ending could go full O. Henry, with the author punting his porn deadline in order to finish the novel he was originally working on, or could go darker with some trope about art vs. Paying the bills.
2. In 1493, the author cites modern genetic research that indicates that the native lack of resistance to Western European diseases has a genetic component. What if a particularly gifted shaman discovered genetic manipulation via shamanic healing techniques, reversing Clarke’s Third Law (”Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”)? The discovery could lead to, say, genetically altered berserker warriors (my alternate history project posits early, sustained contact with the Vikings, who melt into the indigenous population as they tended to in other areas where they colonized).
3. Do not drink from the sprinklers. Who does that? Thirsty runners, homeless people, aliens misunderstanding how water distribution works on this planet? What happens as a result? Superpowers? What if it’s a communication to someone, or something, cleverly disguised as a health and safety warning regarding potable water? What would it be communicating, and to whom? And what might happen to someone who inadvertently cracked the code?
4. After watching a lot of History Detectives and Discovering Your Roots, it’s interesting to see what kinds of stories can be written about objects and their provenance, and about familial relationships. A young woman discovers an object (to be determined) among her otherwise unsentimental mother’s belongings while sorting through them after her mother’s funeral. The object’s story winds up revising a lot of the stories that she had been told about her family history, leading to a disruption of her remaining familial relationships and/or a new relationship with a distant branch of the family whose story was unknown to her.
5. A young technomancer, working on a musical side project, downloads a file that’s supposed to be a set of samples, loops, and/or full tracks for remixing. It’s not - someone has leaked a file containing something entirely different (perhaps an encoded intelligence?), and soon the Black Hats come looking for whoever downloaded the file. HIjinks ensue, including a chase scene through an Itchy-O concert, before the technomancer finally figures out how to release the “djinn” from its digital “bottle”.

The Year of Writing Dangerously

Has it really been over 2 years since I posted anything here? Sadly, it has. In that time, an awful lot has happened, but this year it seems as if things are coming together. The writing group has pretty much collapsed back in on itself, and all of us are focusing more on actually getting stuff written than on getting it critiqued - especially in my case, as my rough drafts are either getting rougher, or I'm getting better at figuring out what's wrong with them before submitting them to readers.

NaNoWriMo was a complete wash for me - after two middling days, I got sick and just never got my momentum back. I've continued to poke at one of the short stories I outlined, and it has possibilities, but I really need to do some research and rewriting before it's worth showing to anyone.

Since I tend to work better with actual deadlines, though, I went ahead and signed up for the Writing Excuses 2015 Retreat, which will take place on a Caribbean Cruise Ship (tragic, I know - one must suffer for one's art...). I'd like to have edited rough drafts of as many of my stories as possible before sailing, so that I can use what I learn on actual work that I've done. We met one of the WE crew (Mary Robinette Kowal) on the first (and second) Steampunk Cruise during my hiatus, and she's a great presenter - I've been listening to the Writing Excuses podcast for the last couple of seasons after finding out that she was one of the "cast", and we bought a copy of their anthology, which they workshopped in a series of episodes of the podcast in order to demonstrate portions of their process in writing, which was very useful in learning to analyze my own weaknesses.

Now I just need to make it through Jim Hines' "Prosekiller Chronicle", which promises to be even more enlightening for a rank beginner such as myself.

Second thing coming together in 2015 is the new format of Writing Excuses - they're conducting this season as an extended Master Class in writing, so I've elected to dust off this blog, which I plan to use as my "notebook" for their writing prompts, exercises, and so forth - if nothing else, it should get me back in the habit of blogging, which in turn should help me rediscover a writing habit, which should help get some of my stories onto pages/disc storage, and so on down the domino chain.

Let us see what happens. We all know what road is paved with good intentions.