Writing Excuses 10.4 Exercise - Ideas

This week's writing exercise:

Take one of the ideas you're excited about, and then audition five different characters for the lead role in that story. Make sure they're all different from each other.

Technomancer in the music-inspired story - who should the character be?

1. Initial idea was to write a character very much NOT like myself - an anti-Mary Sue. Female, sexuality somewhere at the other end of the Kinsey scale, loves electronic/techno/dance music, one rent payment shy of being homeless, dark-skinned (specific ethnic background TBD), young (early 20's), skinny, hyper - sleeps a couple of hours at a time, then goes for hours on a project. Employment? TBD. Magically aware - knows that something's happening, is fusing magic and tech to create a new Path.

2. Chaos magician side character from UF novel? I'm planning to kill him off in the novel, but this could be part of his backstory. Some tech elements possible with chaos magic - conspiracy theories definitely cross over, and it would flesh out the character's moral compass (or complete lack thereof) - he finds the MacGuffin, and is out to get as much for it as he can without actually getting killed in the process. Youngish - 30's? Male, white, suburban, kind of an asshole when it comes down to it - would have to spin him as an antihero, perhaps.

3. Female lead, based loosely on X? Loves music, especially country (much to her boyfriend's dismay). Does karaoke regularly, downloads MacGuffin while looking for new tracks to practice with. Completely out of her depth when things go sideways, and nearly as disoriented by the Itchy-O performance as the thugs chasing. Not aware of the magical reawakening - could be horrified by the idea, reacting from a strongly anti-magical bias (it's all Demonic...)? Not a technomancer, obviously - might need to add a character if I go this route.

4. Fish out of water - the person who downloads the file is computer-savvy enough to know it's not what they thought it was, but has no idea what it actually is. Engineer pulls a copy off of a shared directory that shouldn't have been shared? Leads down the rabbit hole - weird phone call(s), people following, foot chase on Broadway, cue Itchy-O in 3...2..1... mass hysteria. Could do this with or without the UF framework, as a straight-up mystery/thriller.

5. Or push the competency slider up - the person who downloads the files knows exactly what she's looking for. Perhaps she's actually a member of Itchy-O? Could pump my sources for road stories - the West Coast Tour would have been a perfect opportunity to do some research on an unconnected laptop, then ditch/disperse/pass along the file in California to a Silicon Valley bigwig (either technical or magickal or both)

Writing Excuses 10.3 - Lovecraftian Horror

This week’s writing exercise is:

Take a character, and from that character's point of view, describe their reaction to something horrific and awful, but do so without describing the thing itself.

When I looked around the corner, my brain refused to process the information my eyes were seeing for a couple of minutes. My friends were obviously dead, but there was no way that the indescribable sight before me could have happened between the time they called out and the time I got to the end of the hallway. I think I was in shock. The whole room seemed to pulse and dilate, and I remembered an experiment in time perception that demonstrated that people simply don’t remember all of the visual information that they take in, so when under stress, more stuff gets remembered and it seems as if time slows down because our perception of how quickly things happen gets screwed up by what seems to be additional input, when it’s actually what we’re seeing all the time - we just forget most of it because it’s not relevant.

Gods, I wish I could forget more of what I saw there.

Old fashioned words like “abbatoir” and “charnel house” might work in attempting to describe the scene, but who talks like that anymore? Perhaps if I had been in the military and seen death rained down from above in a shower of high explosives and napalm, I might have the words. Then again, seeing something like this more than once might have driven me to catatonia, and I can't be certain whether that’s not exactly what happened to me at that point. What I remember seems almost as disconnected as the bits of flesh and bone that were once my friends, now littering the room at the end of the hallway. A ring, still encircling a finger bone; a spray of droplets on one wall, outlining a shape that can’t possibly be real; one hiking boot, still smoldering and with a stain I really just don’t want to think about; more will no doubt come back to me in nightmares, should I ever fall asleep again.

Whatever had done this had not come back down the hallway. I looked around the room for another exit, my brain strangely compartmentalized. One bit focused on figuring out where the thing that had done this could have gone, while another processed snapshots of the horror that surrounded me, and yet another distracted my conscious mind from what the second bit was doing.

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I enjoyed this exercise enough that I even started writing an opening chapter - but since I might actually work on that as a short story, I'll keep it under wraps until it's ready for critique.

The TBR Pile, 2015

As with any habitual reader, there are always more books on my "to be read" list than I can ever actually get to. Several of the ones I started over on Goodreads have not yet been finished (especially the writing books with exercises in them, which I hope to start remedying shortly), and I've added several more that I actually do have a shot at finishing.

So for 2015, here's my initial pass at a prioritized reading list, to be added to at will, with preliminary notes on why I'm reading what I'm reading, if anyone actually finds that of interest.

Nalo Hopkinson, "Midnight Robber"
Dan Wells, "Partials"

(I've signed up for the 2015 Out of Excuses Writing Workshop and Retreat. I"m already familiar with the work of Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson, and I'm perusing Howard Tayler's "Schlock Mercenary" online, so this is me catching up on what the other authors have been up to.)

Catherynne Valente, "The Habitation of the Blessed" (Audible)
E.E. "Doc" Smith "Triplanetary: Lensman #1" (Audible)

(I commute about a half hour to work each way, so I get a fair bit of listening time in - Audible and podcasts FTW...)

Jim Hines "Rise of the Spider Goddess"
Jim Hines "Unbound"
Anne Bishop "Written in Red"
Anne Bishop "Murder of Crows"
Cherie Priest "Maplecroft"
John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"
Elizabeth Bear "Karen Memory"
Gail Carriger "Prudence"

And more to come...