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...

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.

Writing Group - first meeting

As it happens, several of my friends and relations are also trying their hand at writing, some with more success than others (depending on how one defines "success") - and 5 of us got together over the weekend to discuss forming a once-a-month support group. Nothing terribly formal, as none of us particularly wanted to go the "bylaws and parliamentary procedure" route, but something that will allow all of us to get something out of the group, and that something being fairly flexible.

One of the big things for several of us was accountability - if we're setting an expectation that we'll have X done for the next meeting, we agreed that we need to actually have X done - and uploaded to our private Google Group at least a week prior, so that those who prefer to mark up hard copy can print and manage pages in their own preferred method (staples, paper clips, whatever...).

I'm looking forward to this - getting myself to the point of handing over my creative work for someone else to look at is going to be a big step.