Category Archives: Writing

NaNoWriMo Wildlife

Ah, November, the weather is becoming cool and  crisp, the leaves are falling, and everyone’s using pumpkin spice to wake each other up from sugar comas. The Candyocalypse has passed and all of us are trying to figure out what to do in the time before Turkeygeddon is upon us. For many people it is a time to appreciate pumpkin spice, watch leaves fall, and take in some Football. However, the writers are going another route. Those writers among us have been stirring for a while, their mating calls echoing across the ‘net to ring in the annual season. Should you listen carefully, some of them may be heard right now:

“NaNo”

mating dance

“WriMo”

Yes, National Novel Writing Month is back and this time it’s personal. Not that it wasn’t always personal, no one is going to twist your arm. The tradition is something of a vendetta that some writers have imposed on themselves. After all, Jonathan Franzen admitted just recently on Colbert that he only aims for 6,000 works a week and yet there’s a sea of people right now declaring they’re going to average that roughly every 3 and a half days.

The number makes sense, it’s totally doable, at only 2,000 words a day you’ll find yourself done before the month is through and that’s what Stephen King tells all of us to do. The problem is, as many of you know, that number can be hard to hit consistently every single day. Still, as far as it goes, this is a good time for new people to get into the art of writing and for the old guard to have a sense of community that we sometimes need desperately. It’s okay, it’s NaNoWriMo, we can admit sometimes the only people we talk to are our pets and our growing psychosis.

Simpsons voices

But for those new people, it’s time to warn you a little about what you’re getting into. You see, there are a lot of colorful characters out there and some of them may draw some ire out of you. That’s fine, but it’s best we warn you now so you see them coming… Continue reading NaNoWriMo Wildlife

How To Scare Me

As autumn rolls in and we find the days growing shorter and the nights growing longer, we also start to imagine the things that may be moving through those nights. Since mankind first made complete words on paper, we’ve found ourselves enamored with the possibilities of this time of year. Most of the creatures we fear are nocturnal, and the nights are making them much more active. So the questions we find ourselves asking are appropriately filled with hush tones of fear and reverence. It’s no surprise this is when we start to put more effort into our stories of ghouls and ghosts.

It’s strange, really, that someone who writes so often about monsters and creatures of the night like myself hasn’t written that many horror stories. I’ve written things that were a bit grotesque, maybe even disturbing, but actual attempts at horror are few and far between. The genre’s never really gripped me like most. It’s not too unusual, most people are too creeped out by these stories to be able to read or write them. But my problem is a little different: few stories really capture the things I’m most afraid of.

Most of the things you’d find in the horror genre just doesn’t do it for me. Monsters intrigue me mostly as creatures of fantasy. I joked through most of Paranormal Activity that it was just Casper trying to make new friends. And as a child I fell asleep through a Friday the 13th Marathon. And as for books, while I appreciate the work of someone like Stephen King, I always liked his less horror oriented stories better.

So it’s strange to say, if you knew me better, you’d think it’d be easier to scare me with these things. I actually had some pretty severe phobias, almost crippling in some cases, and still have one of them to this day. Generally that would be enough for most people, but what scares me doesn’t take center stage as often. So when it comes time to give writing tips to horror authors, there’s really only one thing I can help them with:

How do you scare someone like me? Continue reading How To Scare Me

Opinion: Are Jump Scares Really Lazy?

October, that time of year when horror franchises march out their newest edition and try to convince you that you haven’t seen this movie before. This year, 2015, we have another Paranormal Activity, The Scout’s Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, and, scariest movie of the season, a Bradley Cooper movie where he’s not playing a racoon.

burn
I know, it’s not horror. But, seriously, not looking good.

I haven’t seen any of this year’s crop. The last Zombie movie I went out of my way to watch was Zombieland and I haven’t watched a Paranormal Activity since the first one. So I’m just going to guess right off the top of my head, based on what I’ve seen of the Paranormal Activity franchise, that there’s a lot of jump scares in there. For those not in the know, that’s one of these.

scary-maze-game-reaction-gif

But I’ll give them a benefit of a doubt and say they’re only 50% jump scares. That’s being pretty generous in the modern horror scene, with a great deal of horror franchises being anchored now into the old slasher model. It used to be that the only time you could expect a solid wall of jump scares was when a maniac with a mask and a machete were involved. But now they’re basically everywhere and a lot of horror critics are jumping onto the bandwagon that the genre is full of lazy hacks. But I have a different opinion.

They’re not lazy, they’re ignorant… Continue reading Opinion: Are Jump Scares Really Lazy?

Foreshadowing: Hidden In Plain Sight

As we enter the autumn and most of the northern hemisphere cools and takes on sunset shades, we start to enter a magical time. This is the twilight of the summer season when we can stop pretending to give a shit about whether or not the hedges are trimmed and the weeds are cleared. Instead we now get to watch the world take on a new shade, settle back, and let nature take its course. Before long, some of us will find ourselves watching snow fall through a window of our cozy dens. Not me though, I live in California where it’s still in the mid-90s in October.

Man-on-fire

But while I contemplate a trip to the cold depths of Siberia to escape this hell, others have far more pleasant plans to make. National Novel Writing Month is almost upon us once more in November, and it’s time for some of us to dust off some old projects or start anew with the power of community behind us. It’s a joyful time, practically the writer’s holiday season, when good will is shared among all and we each find a little bit of comfort from each other. To acknowledge this, years ago I wrote my first real writing advice posts and found that it was actually something I liked to do. In fact, since those first few posts I’ve made it a point to make writing advice a regular part of this blog.

But a friend recently pointed out to me that I only superficially touched on a vital topic when I talked about Mystery writing. I’d covered requiring enough evidence to prove your case and the timing for when you should reveal it all, but I didn’t really touch on how you would reveal it. What if you didn’t want something to feel like a clue? What if you just wanted it to be something that people would recognize after the fact? This is something that applies to all genres because there is always information you wouldn’t want to leak at the wrong place or time.

So in the interest of giving people the information they deserve, I feel like it’s a good time to cover… Continue reading Foreshadowing: Hidden In Plain Sight

Meyer Doesn’t Get It

When I relaunched this blog about 11 months ago, I came up with a very strict set of topics to be found every week so that you’d always have a feel for what to find here. Mondays are about either my personal opinions, mythology, fantasy topics, or reader requests. Fridays are either fictional things, sci-fi, or where I see the future going. And Wednesday? I reserved Wednesday for writing tips, answering a writer’s questions, or things that make me go “WTF”.

You’d think this would make Wednesday the easiest, but you’d be wrong. Sometimes I don’t have anything really insightful to tell people about the art of writing, at least nothing that jumps to mind. Sometimes I also have a hard time thinking of anything to have a WTF reaction to. And, strangely, while this is usually the hardest day for me to fill out on the calendar I make every month, it’s also the one I tend to hit the most often. Why? Because even if I feel uninspired, someone’s going to do something stupid somewhere.

And like manna from heaven, Stephenie Meyer heard my cries and celebrated the 10th anniversary of Twilight by releasing a “new” book…

life-and-death

Thank you Stephenie for this gift of “WTF” for my Wednesday. Continue reading Meyer Doesn’t Get It

Getting More “Urban” Into Urban Fantasy

In the days leading up to publishing my first book I went over several genres to try to get an idea of what exactly I should classify it as. This seems like it should have been an easier task than it was since we all know most genres through personal experience as readers. The problem, however, presented itself in the fact I was using fantasy creatures in a world without something resembling traditional magic. There are scientific explanations for almost everything in the series, including some real world medical conditions. That sounded like a little too much science for a fantasy book to me.

So a great hunt began for a proverbial shelf to put my work on. Was I a science fiction author? Had I written a fantasy novel? Did i stumble into doing sci-fantasy? Was my work urban fantasy or supernatural mystery? To my surprise the answer to all of these was, to a degree, “yes”.

What I ended up finding was that my work could easily sit next to many different genres at the same time. I hadn’t done this intentionally and really had no motivation to even consider genre for the longest time – I just wanted to write my story. The questions would have gone unanswered if not for the fact you have to answer them before you can publish. So to this day I still change my description of its genre slightly depending on who I’m talking to. Recently, however, this means I’ve described it often with urban fantasy and that led to an interesting discovery… Continue reading Getting More “Urban” Into Urban Fantasy

Character: The Danger of “Unique Voices”

Characters can be difficult to differentiate. No matter how hard you try, they’re always going to be a bit of an extension of you because you’re thinking for them. It’s not impossible, making them different people just requires changing your point of view for each of them. But sometimes, it can be a struggle to make them all feel like different people to you and your audience.

One of the most commonly passed around pieces of advice to resolve this easily is to give each of the characters a “unique voice”. The advice is a matter of making them all read as different people when they speak so that they end up feeling further differentiated from each other. This will generally let you know who is speaking and how they think without much more context, in theory.

But I’ve noticed when newer writers, and even some older ones, go about trying to make this happen they end up causing something they didn’t intend. While it’s true that many of the characters will stand out as individuals, they don’t always sound like who they were meant to be. The ways we transcribe linguistic ticks to the page are limited, what with only having three tools at our disposal to make it work. Letters, vocabulary, and punctuation can go a long way, but not nearly far enough to truly relate the human voice. Unfortunately, this means a lot of people, in trying to provide a “unique voice”, make the same mistake.

To put it bluntly: your characters sound stupid… Continue reading Character: The Danger of “Unique Voices”

So You’ve Built A Time Machine

Time travel, it’s not exactly something we’re sure can even be done, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to write about it. One of the things that gives humans an edge on the rest of the world is recognizing the passage of time. And, of course, because we hate the thought of dying, we’re constantly trying to figure out ways to turn it back. Almost every day someone out there is thinking, “maybe we could accomplish this by building an elaborate machine, finding a wormhole, or sticking plutonium in the back of a 1980s POS sports car no one wanted.”

delorean-back-to-the-future
It’s so simple, I figured it out when I gave myself a concussion, Marty!

However you go about it though, it’s a good chance you’re basing a lot of what you know on time travel you’ve seen in the movies. After all, when you look for reference materials on the subject, most agree that it’s impossible. The only place where anyone would give any credence to your batshit project is the hallowed halls of sci-fi where they think you’re bound to happen. So you’re likely to crack out the sci-fi books and movies and get to working on it. There’s just one problem for you… it’s all bullshit.

A lot of sci-fi has no clue how time travel would work, and most of the time we’re just winging it. In fact, most uses of time travel eventually devolve into some lazy writing. So let’s go ahead and check out a couple hurdles in your way before you fire up the Delorean and do your best… Continue reading So You’ve Built A Time Machine

A World Without [Blank]

As someone who writes speculative fiction, I usually find myself looking into things that would be a little out of the ordinary for most people. I like to read about different religions and mythologies, for instance, and I spend a great deal of time looking into the history of old superstitions that most wouldn’t much care for. I also happen to look through a lot of science articles and a great deal of people I follow on Twitter are involved in something to do with space. Hell, I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson before it was cool.

NeilDeGrasseTysonDealWithItNWM
Seriously, he’s doubled his twitter followers in a year. ‘Grats Neil!

But sometimes that means I run across people who are exceptionally close minded about things I love. It never ceases to amaze me how many religious people I know are closed off to learning more about other religions. Similarly, I’d think more people would want to know why superstitions they don’t believe in got to be where they are. Anyone who caught my last off the cuff post can know I have an issue with people who deny science. And anyone following the elections at the moment knows we have a neurosurgeon running for President who doesn’t believe in evolution – one of the foundations of modern medical science.

ben-carson

We all have a bit of a problem of seeing beyond our own existence and into something else. It doesn’t just impact our political and cultural views, it also impacts how we think on a fundamental level. We, as a species, have a difficult time imagining worlds without some of the things we’re most familiar with. It’s why some of us have a hard time accepting the Earth existed before we did. It’s also why some of us have a hard time accepting the Earth could exist without us. Hell, it’s why so many aliens in our sci-fi look like humans with shit growing out of their faces.

klingon

The thing is, that last one shows we kind of have these boxes in all parts of our lives. We tend to become stubborn and caught up in things even as trivial as fictional elements. Frankly, as a geek, I know we can get severely caught up in things like continuity, but it doesn’t just end there.  We often have a hard time straying from the tried and true.

I know I can’t reach people who have this sort of thing impacting the way they look at the real world. A lot of that has been ingrained into them since early in life, and it’s a painful process to let that kind of thinking go. But I do think there’s a chance that I could reach some of the people that have this mental block interfering with their fictional worlds. Because I think, for us, the most important part of “speculative” fiction is the “speculation”… Continue reading A World Without [Blank]

The Passive (Aggressive) Voice

One of the things you end up doing a lot of when you’re not feeling your absolute best is just taking in some media. Maybe there’s a book you’ve been wanting to read, a movie you’ve never seen but always wanted to, or a wiki that you’ve decided to memorize. Whatever it is, you’re probably going to get way too invested in it because you can’t really do much else. Sitting as a puddle that used to be a person under the influence of medications, I’ve watched some lackluster movies in the last few weeks. One day I may, haunted by my flashbacks, tell people about the time Bedazzled’s ending made me tear up because I was too gone to know better.

sensitive-man
It was a rough night

But one of these lackluster movies actually made me think about a real problem that real people have. A lot of readers and writers encounter a problem with a situation called the passive voice. The passive voice is when your characters are less actors in their own life and decisions and more passengers along for the ride. A lot of advice columns will tell you to avoid it like the plague and, really, there’s not a whole lot to say on that subject anymore. The best piece of advice for this is already on the internet if you’re willing to look for it: If the sentence can be finished with “by zombies”, it’s a passive sentence.

This advice was brought to you by Zombies.

But during my lazy watching of lackluster movies I came across a unique case that needed to be pointed out: The Devil Wears Prada. In The Devil Wears Prada we see a rare (but not unique) situation… a passive-aggressive voice. Continue reading The Passive (Aggressive) Voice