Discouragement in Writers

The days are getting short and cold here in New Hampshire, and that's got me thinking about moods. I've known some people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Apparently people who suffer from this become depressed if they don't see enough sunlight. The treatment seems to be to get away from me - they move far away to some place I've never been, like Arizona, and feel much better.

We writers, of course, tend to be very moody people. Not all of us have a disorder like SAD, but I think most of us have times when we get very discouraged for one reason or another. In a tough world economy, people tend to feel like art of any type is unimportant, and it's hard to take an objective look at your own work and know if it's any good or not. Add to that the fact that writing tends to be a rather solitary job, and compound it with the reality that most of us are at least a little bit reclusive, and you've got a fertile environment for discouragement.

I'm not here to dole out some kind of cure, or try to make you feel guilty if you're discouraged. I have to admit that I don't even know whether your writing is any good or not. But if you're feeling discouraged, I can tell you I've been there. And I'll probably be there again, since moods tend to go in cycles.

Right now I'm feeling energized and seeing nothing but possibilities. So since I seem to be the one standing on a rock at the moment, I'd like to offer a hand to anyone struggling in the mud. Another day it will be my turn to slog through the mud, and someone else's turn to reach out a hand to me.

Here are some thoughts that have helped me when I've been discouraged:

• All the great writers were once just ordinary people who wrote something without knowing if anyone was going to like it or not. Probably every single one of them got discouraged sometimes, and if they had quit, the world would be without so much great literature.
• Easy writing is like airplane crashes. It happens so rarely that when it does, we remember it. The vast majority of flights are uneventful and the vast majority of writing takes work. It's extremely rewarding work, but it's sometimes hard. Because of that, I have a right to feel proud of what I've written. If it were easy, it would be like turning on a water faucet. The water may be delicious, but I can't take the credit.
• Feelings and facts are two different things. They're both real, and they're both important. If I feel discouraged or lonely, or just don't feel anything at all, then that's my reality at the moment. But those feelings don't necessarily line up with any facts. If I feel discouraged, that doesn't mean my work isn't worth something. If I feel lonely, that doesn't mean I'm alone. And if I don't feel anything, that doesn't mean there isn't still a lot of great stuff in my future.
• I don't have to follow someone else's rules. One of the most wonderful things about creative writing is that each author's work is unique. That's because it's an expression of a unique individual, produced in a unique way. But when I see what works for another writer (wordcount quotas, for example), I'm tempted to feel like I'm not a 'real' writer unless I do it, too. Trying to fit into someone else's mold can be extremely discouraging. I think it's important to find what works for your own unique style and situation, and not worry about the rest.

The Slaver's Tale: Development Notes

It's always a treat when Luke Bellmason blogs about how he creates his stories. Here he is:

Having just completed a story about a miner, the next Tale in the series follows on with the miner’s sort of evil counterpart; the Slaver. For a long time I wasn’t sure what the “evil miner” would be. As I explained in the intro to the Canterbury Tales Vol. 1, I originally came up with six main character types and a ‘good’ and ‘evil’ version of each one. For example the good Trader was the Merchant, and the bad one was the Smuggler. There’s a Bounty Hunter (good) and an Assassin (bad).

Slaves were a commodity in the original Elite and the players manual describes a little about how some spacers who ejected from their doomed vessels could sometimes be blown up in their pods, or collected with a fuel scoop, when they would become slaves!

In my story, the lead character uses slaves to mine out huge asteroids because minerals just aren’t worth very much and slaves are free labour. If she had to pay everyone for their work, there wouldn’t be any profit in mining! Of course, this is a very current topic with half the world working in horrendous conditions to mine precious minerals and do menial assembly tasks so the other half can have their smart phones and cheap clothes. Of course many of these consumers are themselves slaves, wage slaves or trying to earning thier way out of accumulated debt each day. Then there’s the troubled history of my own country with the slave trade and the extensive benefits the British Empire and its contemporaries gained through effectively having thousands of unpaid workers. In fact it seems like any global superpower has got where it has through the exploitation of people.

I’m not sure how much my story is going to be able to address these issues, probably not much since it’s only a short story and I intend to focus more on the plight of the characters and their actions rather than moralising about history, but it’s in my mind nonetheless.

I’m also thinking about the robots and how the word actually comes from the Czech word for forced labour, by way of K. Capek’s story ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. Ironically, the Slaver doesn’t use the robots to do the actual mining because it turns out they’re not very good at it, at least not as good as slaves. This is largely because robots can’t be ‘motivated’ to work harder like sentient beings can. When I say ‘motivated’ I of course mean the stick rather than the carrot, but thereby hangs the central point of the Slaver’s Tale and I don’t want to give you too many spoilers before the story itself comes out.

I know roughly what kind of ending I want, but have been stuck on the details. I realised some way into the planning stage of the story that to really work out the ending I needed to know precisely how the mining operation worked. I’ve also been watching a lot of Mission: Impossible and playing GTA:V which relies heavily on really well thought out and planned heists, so my brain is sort of in a certain place with this Tale.

All this has led me to the biggest bit of development I’ve had to do for any of the Tales so far, and that is to work out exactly how the Slaver’s operation functions. I used to love this kind of thing when I ran Role Playing Games. I would spend weeks constucting huge space stations or ships (kind of a similar activity to drawing up maps for Fantasy games) on the basis that you never really knew where the players were going to go.

So without knowing how my story is going to end, I’m building everything without knowing which bits are going to make it into the story. Probably most of this stuff will never make it into the story, but it’s fun working on the background anyway. It also reminds me of a video game setting as well, which is appropriate given the general theme of the Canterbury Tales.

It’s interesting to plan stuff like this though because you never know what’s going to come out of it. I could discover a gap in a wall where one of the characters keeps a set of cutlery, because it reminds her of home, and this could become a crucial plot-point, there’s just no telling! I could even turn the whole thing into a text adventure level or something.

I can’t guarantee that the following doesn’t contain spoilers because I haven’t written the story yet, but I will forgive you if you find it all too boring to read. Anyway, if you do like knowing things like exactly how many spare rolls of toilet paper are keep in the lavatories on level 109, then this is the blog entry for you!

(note. names for alien races, planets and characters I haven’t come up with yet are usually marked with four letters ‘yyyy’, etc. If you want why not suggest your own names.)

__THE MINING OPERATION__

+OVERVIEW

The operation is a mineral mining facility spread over a large area within an asteroid field. It is one of several dozen similar facilities run by the Dosians.

Since raw mineral ore is relatively bulky to transport, it is not profitable to ship it back to the homeworld. Therefore the ore is processed on-site. Multiple minerals are processed and even a few precious gems are found among the ore.

Even in its processed state the minerals themselves are very low profit, so large quantities are required to make the operation viable. Unpaid, slave labour is used to mine the ore from the asteroids and in the processing plant. Robots are also utilised in the mines, but are not considered efficient enough to be used as miners. The robots are instead used mainly to control the slaves remotely (security) and to perform various other specialised and routine maintenance tasks.

The facility comprises a Main Hub where the central administration and accomodation is housed, along with the processing plant and loading dock, a Storage Warehouse, where containers of processed minerals are stored for collection by bulk freighters and multiple Asteroid Mines where ore is collected.
+ MAIN HUB

This large asteroid lies at the centre of the facility. It was originally mined out as part of the facilities construction and the mined ore was used to construct much of the infrastructure.

The topmost part of the Hub comprises of two separate exterior structures; the ‘Palace’ and the Shuttle Dock.

++ The Palace is the living accommodation of the Facility Director (FD) and houses all of her living quarters, food stores, life support, power plant, communications and other ancilleries. In the event of an emergency it can be jettisoned and survive for up to three months in space.

The Palace is connected to the Shuttle Dock by two subsurface tunnels, sealed at each end and in two mid-points. All supplies are moved through here each month when the re-supply shuttle arrives with the Bulk Freighter.

++ The Shuttle Bay provides storage and maintenance for three personal shuttlecraft. These are medium sized, short range interplanetary shuttles which are generally used by the FD and her staff to travel around the facility.

++ The Security Station is manned by robots and monitors all of the facility, thousands of cameras trained on all the slaves wherever they are. Should trouble arise in any location, Security sends in guards to deal with it using whatever methods seem appropriate. Though given the low value of an individual slave there is rarely much regard given to their safety. Any slave which shows even the slightest sign of stepping out of line is normally met with lethal force and riots are dealt with similarly.

++ Robot Maintenance & Control (RMC) is where all robots are repaired, maintained and programmed. All robots working out in the asteroid field and in the processor are autonomous. Their programming is set and updated at regular intervals during their routine maintenance cycle. The robots themselves are much more expensive than the slaves, but they last longer in the harsh environments of the mines and processing plant. Damaged or malfunctioning robots can be brought here from the mines and replacements sent out as necessary.

The basic unit is the Rossum-4260K, which is a multi-purpose unit ideally suited to heavy industrial environments. This unit can be then fitted with a variety of modifications to serve as guards, miners, loaders, maintenance, engineers or almost any other task. Their programming is basic and usually specialised to a particular task. Their human interaction protocols are limited unless fitted with specialist upgrades.

Robot Types;

FL-49: These are sophisticated command units with high-level AI used in the Security Station and in the Hub Admin section. They are capable of near-human level speech and can interpret instructions given to them into programming commands which are then downloaded to the lower level robots.

(All RM-4260 units are interchangeable and can be reassigned and reprogrammed at the RMC.)

RM-4260K-D: Guards
Used for processing slaves and keeping order in the mines. Fitted with stunner-prods, gas tanks and guns should things get out of hand. Interpersonal interaction units are fitted to allow limited communication with the slaves. These units also have security monitoring systems which relay back to the main Security Station on the Hub.
RM-4260K-S: Miners
Though they don’t do any real mining as such, they are configured to set up the tunnels, lay down the extraction equipment and generally assist with operations.
RM-4260-E: Engineer
These are configured for construction and more specialist mining procedures, such as the installation of lift shafts, habitable modules and other such structures. They do not work on other robots, but can recover them to be sent to the RMC on the Hub.
RM-4260-R: Loaders
Used in the various loading and unloading docks around the facility these robots operate a wide range of bulk lifters, haulers and plant machinery. Anywhere there’s ore, product or other supplies to be moved, loaders are used.
RM-4260-T: Maintenance
These are the robots which repair and maintain the other robots. Most work in the RMC on the Hub, but each asteroid has its own maintenance unit which can take care of minor faults and repairs.

[The slaves have nick-named the different types of robot based on their designation letter; R=Robbie, E=Eddie, S=Sammy, D=Davy, T=Tommy. So instead of calling them guards, a slave might say "Look out, Davy's coming." Nobody knows who the slave who came up with this was, but it seems universal that sentient beings in harsh environments will do anything they can to lighten up their dreary lives or to 'humanise' machinery.]

++ The Power Plant consists of four starship class power cores. The Processor consumes 98% of the total power output of the plant, but at any one time only two of the cores is required to be operating at full power. Normally though the load is spread over three cores working at 33% capacity each. This allows for peak requirements to be met more easily and reduces overall wear and tear on the reactors.
There is a secondary backup system in place should the main cores fail for any reason, but this system would not be able to power the Processor.

++ The Processor takes up almost the whole of the inside of the asteroid. Some of the upper sections have admin offices, control rooms and ancillery accommodations, but the operation of the processor is largely automated so only rarely does anyone need to come down here. There is a lift from the Palace into the admin section of the processor, and from there most of the interior can be accessed if necessary, but this is rarely required.

The main processor takes ore from the sleds, analyses it and subjects it to various chemical and mechanical processes. Slave labour is used throughout many of these procedures, but due to the nature of the environment slaves don’t last more than a few weeks on the job. For this reason, being assigned to the processing plant is considered a death sentence and is used as punishment for low productivity. After one week slaves will be sent back to their asteroid having learned their lesson, but most don’t recover from the experience and soon find themselves back as their failing health leads their productivity to drop even further.

++ The Loading Dock is where the containers are loaded with processed minerals ready for transport back to the homeworld. The containers are lifted out by automated tugs which take them to the storage facility.
+ THE STORAGE FACILITY

Containers of processed minerals are brought here from the Hub for storage. Once a month a bulk freighter from the Homeworld collects the full containers and leaves empty ones. The warehouse itself is carved out of a spent asteroid, the second one to be mined after the main hub asteroid. Everything here is automated, from the tugs to the unloading and storage to the loading of the freighters. There is no life support or habitable areas so any maintenance must be carried out by robots.

+ THE MINES

Each asteroid has its own designation based on its position/bearing relative to the Hub and its distance. In this way an infinate number of designations may be generated as new asteroids are added to the operation. At a certain point the distance of mines from the Hub becomes economically unviable, at which point the operation is shut down and the vital components (processor, power-plant, vehicles, robots) are removed to a new site.

A mine consists of several common features, with precise configuration being dependent on mineral content and asteroid size/shape.

++ The Docking Point is a universal access port fixed to the outside of the asteroid. It is similar to the the Shuttle Bay on the Hub, but is on three levels. All personnel are shipped through here including Slaves and Robots. Other equipment can be shipped through here also, but large machinery is moved through the Loading Bay.

++ The Airlock is a system of interconnecting passageways and chambers connecting the Docking Point to the interior of the mine, which is kept at standard pressure. Robots may use the Docking Point as an open area, but other personnel need to lock their vessels to the airlock doors inside the bay.

++ The Security Area is immediately behind the Airlock and is designed to handle Slaves in and out of the mine onto and off the Slave Transports. The section is run by Type-D robots. As slaves pass through the section they are routinely searched and scanned for any prohibited materials. They are also logged in and out with thier ‘tags’ and any slave with a malfunctioning or missing tag is sent for re-tagging.

++ The Robot Control Area is a section immediately behind the Security Area and inaccessible to any slave. Here all routine maintenance is carried out and robots are cleaned and serviced. Anything more major requires the robot to be shipped back to the Hub.

++ The Loading Bay is where the raw ore is loaded onto Ore Sleds to be shipped to the Hub. The ore is fed up through the mines along a complex series of grav-feeds and belts. When a slave loads a cart it’s mass is recorded and logged to that slave’s tag. That ore is then fed through the system to the Loading Bay.

++ Living Accomodations for the Slaves are basic in the extreme. In one small area there is a food unit which dispenses food pellets and water at pre-programmed intervals and sleeping racks. There’s little room to move around and three or four slaves might have to share one sleeping rack. There’s no communal area for socializing, but this rarely becomes a problem since outside of the four hour sleep cycle slaves are expected to be hard at work trying desperately not to be at the bottom of the week’s productivity list.
+ VEHICLES & VESSELS

All vehicles around the facility are automated and controlled by a central computer on the Hub. This avoids traffic conflicts and manages the flow of materials, slaves and robots throughout the whole operation. Shuttles may also be controlled by this system or flown directly by a pilot.

++ Ore Sled – These are large vessels designed to carry ore from the mines to the Hub. They are basically a huge cargo hold with an engine and guidance system attached. At the hub end they dump out the loose ore into the processor.

++ Container Barge -
slave transport
personal shuttle

++ Bulk Carrier – This is the ship which turns up each month to collect the loaded containers and ship them back to the homeworld. It is manned.
[aurubesh]

Diosian Alphabet

Auru
Bith
Chee
Migil
Delu
Hoh
Va
Ziu
Shih
alef – aleph
bet – beth
gimel
daleth – dalet
heh
vav
zain – zayin
cheth – het
teth – tet
yod
kaph – kaf
lamed
mem
nun
samekh
ayin
peh – pe
tzaddi – tsadi
qoph – qof
resh
shin
tau – tav

Writers and Temptation

No, this isn't about writing scenes in which our characters face temptation. That does sound like fun, though. It's about the temptations I deal with as a writer.

I'd love to hear from my fellow writers on this. What kinds of temptations do you struggle with?

Interview with Author April M Reign

Here's an interview with the prolific and popular April M Reign by M Joseph Murphy. April commented on this interview afterwards on her blog: "I’m partial to this interview because Joseph took the time to ask me personal questions that relate to ME, MY KIDS, MY WRITING and MY BOOK PROMOTIONS!" (Emphasis is hers.)

April M. Reign is the author of several fan-favorite series (e.g. Dhellia Series, Mancini Saga, Disciples of the Damned Series, etc.) I met her on Twitter. However, after following her on Facebook I became a huge fan. Not just of her writing, but of the way she interacts with her fans.

And her fans love her. I wanted to find out how she was so prolific and how she managed her brand. I was fortunate enough to be granted an interview.

1. You are very prolific. From the looks of it, you have 5 series (including HASH, book 1 in the Imprint Trilogy), several standalone books and you’re also branching out into horror. What’s your secret for getting so much work done?

My secret is consistency. Every day, I sit in front of my laptop and I write. I may only write 200 words (on a bad day) or 3000 words (on a good day) but there is never a day that goes by when I don’t write. Consistency combined with my overly active imagination gives me the foundation to create new storylines and constantly provide new books for my readers.

2. With so many projects on the go, is it difficult keeping your stories straight? Have you ever mistakenly put a character into the wrong series?

I don’t usually put a character into the wrong series but I do have a tendency to mix 3rd and 1st person narrative. I’ve written three of my series in 1st person and two in 3rd person. At times, it gets confusing. (smile)

As far as keeping my stories straight, (Laugh) I have to reread each book in a series before I can write the next one, so that I keep the voice of my characters the same. With so many series going at once, I find this is the best way to keep it all straight in the chaos that I call my…creative mind. 

3. You are a very proud mother. What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve been able to teach your sons? What’s the greatest lesson they have taught you?

Yes, I am a very proud mother of two amazing sons. Although, I’ve taught my boys many lessons in life, I’d have to say one in particular stands out above the rest… Finding and following their dreams.  Hard work, perseverance and determination are important factors in achieving their dreams and making them reality.  I’ve tried to lead them by example. 

They have taught me a thousand different things. But if I had to choose one, I’d say they’ve taught me the importance of being patient.

4. You also have very devoted fans: almost 25,000 on Twitter, over 3,000 on Facebook, and you have comments on all your blog posts. Does that put more pressure on you creatively or does it inspire you to work harder?

Both! I have supportive, amazing readers. They’ve watched me grow as an author. I can honestly say that my readers inspire me to work harder, and create different worlds where they can truly get lost. 

Of course, that also puts creative pressure on me, but I thrive in the midst of pressure.


 

5. “The Dhellia Series Fun Video” is a superb video. Very simple and yet highly polished and professional. Who did the video and what was the process like for you? What do you think makes for good video promotion?

Well, I’m not an expert on video promotion. One day, I was browsing the internet, and I saw this cool thing called a whiteboard video used as advertisement. I searched high and low for someone to create this video, but every company I researched had prices that ranged from $1500.00 to $10,000.00. That was certainly out of my price range for promotional tools. Then I found a person on a discount website that could do the video for me at a reasonable price. 

I love the video and it gives The Dhellia Series a thirty-second opportunity to shine. 

6. Lastly, if you could give fellow writers one piece of advice on how to promote their products, what would it be?

Be consistent with writing. One published story is an accomplishment, but a reader who enjoys your work will want to read more than one story. Are you giving them a selection? Sometimes individuals will wrap themselves up in promoting one story and they will forget to write the next. Your name is your brand, write the next story and your fans/readers will follow you.

Links:

April M. Reign's Website
April M. Reign's Amazon Author Page
April M. Reign's Goodread Page
April M. Reign on Smashwords
April M. Reign on Twitter
April M. Reign on Facebook

Humor and Insight, Fiction-Style

Today's post is by Luke Bellmason, a regular here and author of The Canterbury Tales, Volume I:

One of the best things about writing short fiction is that you can experiment a lot more. You can monkey around with the format, the narration, the plot, print the thing on bacon, whatever takes your fancy really.

One of the great things I learned at art college was to experiment. Especially to experiment all you could while you were at college, for it may come as no surprise that in the commercial world spending a week collecting litter and then sewing it into an encyclopedia for no discernable reason is often considered an inexcusable waste of your client's time. At college, however, such activities are rewarded with high marks. The purpose of all this is to come up with original ideas. Even if that idea doesn't work it can lead you somewhere new.

With The Canterbury Tales I have established a sort of formula, because I know I've got twelve tales to write I want to set up an easy method which I can follow each time. The trouble with formulas is you tend to get a lot of the same thing and while consistency is good, predictability and sameness is boring.

When I start a 'Tale' I already have a character and a plot; rivalry, revenge, escape, etc. The outline for the story is drawn up from the plot, then the scenes are blocked out, then it's written up, edited, rinse and repeat. So how to keep them all different?

The great thing about having rules is that once you know what they are you can break them. After my first story, the Smuggler's Tale, my second, the Merchant's Tale, was a sort of sequel, which made a whole world of difference about how I went about writing it. It meant I was constrained a lot more in terms of what I could do and especially where my starting point would be, but again that was a good constraint to have.

The third tale, the Assassin's Tale, had a very clear ending worked out and this meant I was writing up to the ending, working backwards.

The fourth story, the Knight's Tale, became a two-parter, since I plotted out the scenes and the tracks the characters would follow, but could not, however hard I tried, make the story any shorter.

For my fifth story, the Miner's Tale, I have skipped the outline phase and gone straight to 'discovery' writing it, inspired largely by the fact that the theme of the plot is 'The Discovery', but also because it cuts a month off the writing process by not having to create an outline.

For future storys I'm hoping to mess around even more. I might move act III to the beginning and put act I at the end, or have another act III (I have banned myself from ever using flashback in my stories as I think its overused, confusing and lazy plotting). I could have a story with two endings or have no middle. I could tell a story with only one scene, in real time. I could tell a story with three plotlines but in only 6,000 words.

Another idea I want to try is to have two stories intrinsically linked, with each story describing the same events, but from opposite viewpoints. this turns up in Volume 3 with the Bounty Hunter, a tale about Pursuit, and the Pirate, a tale about Sacrifice. The two colours these characters have as their theme are blue and grey and so I am already starting to think along the lines of the Blue and the Grey in the american civil war.

One of the many books I'm reading at the moment is Lateral Thinking by Edward DeBono. In it, he describes how humour and insight are parts of the same process; we find a pattern, look at its individual component parts and then rearrange them. Jokes are often broken patterns, where the ending is unexpected but fits another pattern, one which is also consistent.

The famous 'who's on first' sketch by Abbott & Costello is a good example. There are two patterns at work, one in which the players have 'awful funny names' but which phonetically sound like other words (Hoo's on first, Watt's on second), which by coincidence fit perfectly with the other pattern, which is more like regular standard responses to questions, 'Who' and 'What'.

The humour comes because we quickly understand that there's some misunderstanding between the two communicators, but we've seen how the patterns fit together. DeBono explains how insight works in the same way. Once you learn to look for patterns you can break them apart and use them like Lego. With lateral thinking we're not concerned with logic, or whether the new pattern 'works'. DeBono tells us to suspend evaluation while we are thinking laterally. We're only concerned with where the new pattern takes us. Sometimes it can take us to a place which logic would have prevented us from going.

So this, for me, is the whole point of experimentation. Often, it can seem fruitless and even silly, but you can occasionally get somewhere that nobody else has ever been, and then it's all worth it.

10 Ways to Improve Your Writing

Today's post is by Derek Haines:

As social networking is predominately text driven, it really is a good idea to make sure your writing is up to an acceptable and readable standard. There’s nothing worse than reading a tweet, Google+ or Facebook entry or blog post that is full of errors. It really gives an impression to the reader that you are a either careless, or worse, a bit of a dope. So to help you make a better impression on the few million people that may be reading you, (yes, daunting isn’t it?) here are a few tips you might want to consider.

1. Always check that your verb agree with the subject. I hates this mistake with a a passion.

2. Almost every comptupter has a speelchekker, so use it. Yoo could even use teh auto-tect correction for commun errors.

3. Typos involving small common words like that and than, it  and is and there and their are easy to make. Check before you hit the send button. Better to be safe that sorry.

4. One mistake that irks me is the incorrect use of capitalisation. I just cringe when i see this error.

4. When you use numbered bullets, make sure they are correctly sequential.

6. Check your formatting in blog posts as errors are not always obvious.

7. USE OF SHOUTING CAPITALS WILL OFFEND READERS, SO DON’T USE THEM. Except for unavoidable acronyms. LOL

8. There are some who think; oddly enough, that punctuation – commas, colons and em dashes, are a sign: or symbolic, of high intellect. In fact the opposite is true and you stand a good chance of looking like a real fool.

9. I dislike sentences that always start with I. I hate it in fact. I stop reading instantly. I would advise against it. I would.

10. Reading long passages of text on the Internet; whether it be on a computer, laptop or mobile phone is very tiring on a reader’s eyes so you should be careful not to ramble on with long sentences and un-paragraphed passages of text that are neither informative nor interesting as you will lose your reader very quickly as they will become bored and stop reading your diatribe quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, so don’t just keep typing ad infinitum about your pet subject in long and badly punctuated sentences that keep waffling on without ever coming to the point that was probably your intention to begin with but you forgot about once you got started and decided to add one extra point in your sentence that should have included a relative pronoun but you got lazy and just used a random comma and kept on typing. Phew!

11. Be sure that your title is relevant and an accurate summary of your article.

What's with All the Guest Posts?

This time last year, pretty much every post in this blog had to come from me, because I hardly knew any other writers, and the ones I did know didn't write very much. Since then, I've met a lot of great writers, mostly on Twitter. A few of them in particular keep teaching me things I find very helpful, or explaining important points much better than I could. There's also the fact that I've noticed my readers seem happiest (or at least most engaged) when I post frequently, and that can be time-consuming. So for all these reasons, I've decided to step back from being the primary writer for this blog, and become something more like an editor-in-chief.

This means you'll no longer see the words 'guest post' in the titles to the entries by other people, but I will still introduce them so you know who they are and can check out their websites, books or whatever.

Feedback is always appreciated, whether it agrees or disagrees. In fact, I believe honest discussion among people of differing viewpoints is one of the most effective tools for creativity and problem-solving.

If you're a fiction writer, or you have something to say that would benefit fiction writers, maybe you would like to write a post. Feel free to leave a comment on any post or email me at MaryJeddoreBlakney@yahoo.com.

Guest Post: The Plot

Here's another treat from Luke Bellmason. He has a couple more coming up, too.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”

- Robert Benchley

We are sometimes told that there are two kinds of writing; ‘discovery’ and ‘outline’, and that most authors tend to favour one or the other.

I know I am an outline writer because I love to plan things out, to structure my work around a solid plot and to know the reasons behind every action the characters take. Basically, I like every part of the writing process except for the writing part, which I will do anything to avoid.

I think this obsession with outline and plot comes from how I started out writing in the first place. My first stories were actually attempts to write up Role Playing Game (RPG) sessions. I was fascinated by the stories that could be created in these games, since they were not wholly the creation of one person and the characters were a lot more real for the fact that they were all being played by different people, with their own backstory. Each character reacted to the same situation in different ways and almost everything the characters did was governed by their skills and rules and the fickle fate of dice (dice have a great sense of humour). So no matter how much planning you put into a game scenario nobody could ever predict the outcome. Even running the same scenario several times would create a different story each time.

Of course, in RPGs, plot is very important and the outline aspect is quite hard to get right before the game is run. You don’t want your characters to be too restricted else they will get bored since there’s really no decisions for them to make. On the other hand, if you give them too much freedom they won’t do what you want them to and will kill the princess instead of rescuing her, make friends with the dragon instead of killing it and maybe even kidnap the wizard who sent them on the quest in the first place.

The reason a lot of RPGs are in dungeons, or on derelict spaceships or other in remote places is so there’s some structure that you can plan for. The walls of the dungeon are like the plot. Characters have a little freedom to choose which corridor to go down or how to handle a particular puzzle or trap, but they can’t get out of the dungeon. The players will always surprise you of course, and that’s a good thing, but in the end, hopefully, someone will emerge with the gold.

As an interesting side note, I like to think of outline writing as being plot driven and discovery writing as Character driven. With discovery you come up with characters first and then you let them go, taking you on their journey, making the decisions that they must make. Like in the role-playing game, different characters will want different things, will have different experiences and will go down different paths, which makes it hard for the author to impose plot onto them. The flipside of this is that with outline, the story is already set so the destiny of the characters you put into that plot is set.

There’s always this famous statement that’s thrown around that there are only 7 stories in the world, or sometimes it’s 9, or 1, or 42, or whatever. But the book I most like to consult for plots is 20 Master Plots, by Ronald B. Tobias. I can highly recommend this book as it’s been without doubt the most useful writing book I’ve ever read. This reference guide is really at the heart of my latest project The Canterbury Tales.

“20 Master Plots and how to build them” is a refernce book I use constantly when planning a story. It takes you step by step through plots such as Revenge, Rivalry, Quest, Escape, Underdog, Temptation, Discovery, etc. and gives you examples from popular culture to illustrate them. It breaks down these plots into 3 acts. To give you an example, here’s an outline of how the Rivalry plot works;

Rivalry starts out with Act I being the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Your two main characters, the antagonist and the protagonist are equals, but they might not be evenly matched in certain areas. One might have money but not be wise, the other wise but poor, or it could be something else, but as the story begins there must be equilibrium.

The rivals want the same thing, so there’s a power struggle, conflict. The antagonist initiates against the protagonist, which is the catalyst scene, which should come just after the start of the story where you’ve established the status quo. Now the protagonist is falling while the antagonist is on the rise, with these ‘power curves’ being linked. As one goes up, the other should go down by the same amount. Perhaps the rich man frames the wise man for murder and has him sent to prison so he can no longer achieve the goal, leaving the rich man to work towards it unapposed. When the protagonist is sent on his way down we move into Act II.

This is where the curves bend around and start to level out towards the middle of the story. At first things keep getting worse for the protagonist, and better for the antagonist. (It’s just personal choice, but the midpoint is where I like to put a little twist into my stories and send the plot off in a surprising new direction). At the midpoint a reversal of fortune sees the protagonist start to make a come back. As their power curves are linked, a rise for one means a fall for the other until by the end of Act II the rivals are back on equal terms again. Maybe the protagonist met someone in prison who knows the rich man, and who has information to help the protagonist beat him. The twist could be that this information will cause trouble for the protagonist too, but since he’s a wise man he might be able to figure out a way of making things bad for his rival and good for himself. So now it’s time to settle the score as we move into Act III, the final conflict.

In the final act, the protagonist beats his rival, or maybe he doesn’t if you want to really throw a surprise in there. The events of acts I and II will determine the nature of the confrontation. Maybe the wise man has been studying while he was in prison and has learned to exploit the flaws of the rich man’s elaborate security system. This makes the defeat of the antagonist all the sweeter since he brought it on himself by sending his rival somewhere he could learn from criminals. Finally, at the end of Act III, one of them is defeated and order is restored.

It might all sound very formulaic and you would expect that any story written along such a strict format would be stale and clichéd, maybe even predictible. That is where the skill of the writer comes in, the plots are simply a framework which will allow you to build a story. The author has to come up with the details and there are many ways to throw the plot in surprising new directions. Remember also that the further apart you can throw the curves at the midpoint the greater the rise to victory will be. Alternatively you might decide to play with the curves so they hardly diverge, just to see if you can maintain dramatic tension some other way, maybe by not revealing which is the protagonist. You could even kill your protagonist at the midpoint and yet still have hime somehow achieve the goal and defeat the antagonist, all that limits you is your imagination.

When I first started planning The Canterbury Tales I used “20 Master Plots” to work out which Character was going to have which plot. I didn’t know anything about the characters at this point other than their ‘title’; Merchant, Smuggler, Assassin, etc. Because I didn’t have any strong ideas about the characters or who they were, only what they did, I thought that allowing the plots to guide me would be a good way to come up with the characters.

Writing a series of short stories would also give me an opportunity to try out a lot of different plots, working my way through the book and trying out the ones that interested me. In the event it’s taken me a lot longer to write these simple short stories than I anticipated, but I wanted to become an expert at the mechanics of plotting!

So each of the twelve stories has a different plot from Tobias’ book. I’ll describe each individual plotline in separate posts, and hopefully give you an insight into the agonisingly slow weeks, months and years that some of these plots were developed over.

So watch this space and sign up to follow this blog [That's Luke's blog, of course.] for more information.

Ethics for Writers

Every once in a while, one of my Facebook friends complains about offensive 'political' posts. I figure they don't mean posts like, 'Be sure to tell your Congressman how the new farm bill will affect your family,' so I asked a few of them what they meant by 'political.'

One cousin turned out to be referring to below-the-belt personal attacks on public figures. My reaction: Go, Jennifer! I don't have much toleration for petty personal attacks, either.

But other friends objected to links or discussions about serious matters. "I go to Facebook to escape reality," some of them said. "I don't want to have it thrown in my face here." That one makes me worry.

I certainly can understand the need to take time out from a stressful life to recharge; I think we all need that. What bothers me is that with few exceptions, the people who complain the loudest don't choose to face reality outside of Facebook, either. If workers are kept in slavery, unemployed people are being jailed indefinitely without access to lawyers, or prison inmates are being tortured, many of my friends simply don't want to know about it.

I think there's a strong perception in our culture that if we don't know something, then it doesn't exist.  Judging from how much effort they devote to shutting out reality, it would seem that many Westerners have never grown up past the peek-a-boo stage. When faced with messages like, 'People are suffering; let's figure out how we can help them,' they call the messengers rude and ask them to change the subject.

So where does that leave us as writers? Should we write only about 'safe' topics and leave the slavery and torture alone? Sure, we'd be accomplices to the atrocities, but at least we wouldn't be making our readers uncomfortable. Making people uncomfortable is not nice.

Okay, let's say we choose to be part of the solution. We decide to spread the word about suffering people, and encourage brainstorming sessions on how to help. Then how do we get people to listen? How do we get past the game of peek-a-boo?

Speaking of Inspiration

Yesterday, Luke Bellmason told us about the inspiration for his Canterbury Tales, and of course it made me think about how I get inspiration.

First, I have to admit that I'm extremely lucky: I never seem to have trouble coming up with story ideas; I just have a problem containing the flood of them. A lot of them are lost, unfortunately, because I don't get them written down before so many more come that I can't recall them. Of the rest, a few rise to the category of 'Must-Write.'

The idea for An Analysis of the Cardassian Language began when I was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and kept imagining what would happen if I were there. The show is set on a space station originally built by hostile aliens, and my imagination wandered to the time when the aliens had been in charge. How would they react to my presence? Of course it was an entirely unworkable idea because I couldn't come up with any excuse for a 21st-Century human to be on a Cardassian space station in the 24 Century. But the idea kept pestering me, so I made some other stories from it, including "The Mammal Cage," figuring I'd get it out of my system. I didn't.

Finally, more than a year later, I thought of the rest of the plot elements that would make the story work. I don't remember what triggered them, but the more I thought about it, the more everything fit together.

Guest Post: Inspiration 101

Today's guest blogger is Luke Bellmason:

Inspiration 101

or

Where it all began…

Sometimes people ask writers, "where do you get your ideas from?" Joyce Grenfell always used to reply with "If I knew, I'd go there more often." If you're a writer chances are you've had inspiration hit you from one of many millions of possible directions, but I'd be willing to bet that none of you has ever had an idea for a three volume collection of short stories from quite the same unlikely source as I did.

I remember very clearly where the first idea for what became 'Canterbury Tales' came from, and back then it wasn't even an idea for a book at all.

I was sitting in the canteen at work, which is a place drivers get sent to when there's no work, or no trucks, or when a load isn't ready, or when they just don't have anything for you to do. This is when you're supposed to wait, and by wait I'm talking about two, three, four or maybe even five hours. This was back in the day before I carried an iPad everywhere, or had a portable computer of any kind. I just had a bunch of blank forms and a pen. So I decided to make a board game.

I don't know why I picked a space trading and exploration game as an idea for a board game, but I think I wanted to make it something simple. Some of my favourite board games involvled 'resource management', like Settlers of Catan, and I had played a lot of video games which used this theme, all of them in the shadow of the greatest of them all: ELITE. So I knew all about the mechanics of the game right from the start; players would fly around discovering planets, fighting pirates and police (if they became criminals), buying commodities, shipping them somewhere and then selling them. Then they would spend the money they'd made upgrading their ship.

It sounded so simple, but Elite: The Board Game, as I started to call it, was incredibly complex and involved. Every tiny detail, such as how pirates got spawned, how they moved, how they attacked the player, took months of working out. Then there was the economic structure which meant that riskier commodities such as Narcotics and Firearms could make more money for the player than Food or Textiles. Just like the video game, players could end up with a criminal rating which would then mean the authorities could come after them if they entered Corporate or Democracy systems, but Feudal and Anarchy systems had no police. Then again, criminal players had a bounty placed on them so other players could track them down and kill them for their reward. Then there were the many, many combat systems I tried to make, each more complicated than the last.

It seemed like each new layer of functionality I added to the game made everything a lot more complicated. I had some pretty cool ideas in there, but the problem was that playing the game to completion, ie a player earning enough victory points to be declared 'ELITE', didn't just take hours it took days. Most games were never completed. I started to look around for a solution that would speed things up a bit.

Then I was at a board gaming convention and met some guys from Games Workshop. They had been updating the old classic 'Talisman', which was a game I used to play when I was a teenager. I sat down at their table and spent a couple of hours playing this new version. One of the mechanics I liked was the character cards. These gave each player different skills, starting stats and strengths. I started to think about how different characters in my Elite game could start out with different ships, equipment and objectives.

Instead of everyone chasing victory points, I thought about objectives for each character. The Bounty Hunter would get points for killing pirates and hunting down players with bounties on them. The Pirate would earn points for killing players and stealing their cargo. The Miner would earn points for finding asteroid fields and mining minerals. From there it was a simple step to coming up with six character 'classes' and having a 'good' and 'evil' version of each.

Another game which served as inspiration at this point was 'Chrononauts', which had a little story card handed out to the players at the start. What if the characters in my game had a 100 words of set-up related to what they did and then a mission card which they picked up during the game which told the next part of their story? I took a new notebook and wrote down some ideas. This notebook became the basis for what would eventually, years and years later, become Canterbury Tales.

I'm not quite sure when my project crossed over from being a board game into a book, but I think I became far more interested in the characters than in the game. The board game was so huge and unplayable that I pretty much abandoned it, with occassional prompts from my gaming group to dust it off to play test again, but the 'game' of playing it became 'let's make dozens of suggestions about how to fix this' rather than the game itself. It wasn't fun to play something so broken, which I understood, but which everyone else thought could be improved.

The notebook of those twelve characters on the other hand, became a well of inspiration which really had a lot of potential, and I was more adept at fixing the problems of plot and story than I was at fixing the mechanics of an interactive game.

How to Burn Out as a Writer

The experts tell us that a writer should write every day, and my own experience would seem to confirm this.

Except,

Photo: lauragreaves.com

when I write every...single day for weeks on end, something very bad happens. My work goes dry and stiff and life gets to be a chore instead of a challenge. It's called emotional exhaustion, or burnout.

I'm not saying that 'write every day' is bad advice. In fact, I think it's good advice. I am saying it works best for me as a guideline and not a law. I write almost every day (Just try to keep me away!), but I've also learned how essential it is to take a day off once in a while to refresh my muse.

Writing Tips: Apostrophes

Question: Which of the following sentences is correct?

A) Julie would need to brush Molly's teeth as well as the dog's.

B) Julie would need to brush Molly's teeth as well as the dogs'.

 C) Julie would need to brush Molly's teeth as well as the dogs.

Photo: kingwestvets.com

Answer: All of the above. Which one to use depends on what you're trying to say.

In A), there is one dog, and Julie needs to brush his teeth.

In B), there are at least two dogs, and Julie needs to brush the teeth of both (or all) of them.

In C), there are at least two dogs, and Julie can put the toothbrush away, because it's not their teeth she needs to brush, but the dogs themselves.

The key:

1. The apostrophe (') and 's' together show possession. Together they indicate that something belongs to someone. (The apostrophe also has one other function in English, and we'll get to that.) 
2. If the apostrophe comes before the 's' then there is only one owner (or at least, only one owner mentioned). This is called a singular possessive. Some examples: Mary's dollhouse, the resident's home, the dog's teeth.
3. If the apostrophe comes after the 's' then more than one owner is being mentioned. This is called a plural possessive. Examples: the girls' dollhouse, the residents' home, the dogs' teeth.
4. Sometimes the thing that's owned has already been mentioned and it's not necessary to state it again. For example, you wouldn't say, "When you've filled the horse's water bucket, go ahead and fill the donkey's water bucket and the llama's water bucket." You'd say, "When you've filled the horse's water bucket, go ahead and fill the donkey's and the llama's." In our original examples, both A) and B) contain the understood word 'teeth.'
5. If there's no apostrophe, then there's no possessive. In C), Julie simply would need to brush Molly's teeth, and also brush the dogs. The dog's teeth are not the object here: the dogs are.

(There are two exceptions to these rules, and we'll talk about them in a little bit.)

The grocer's apostrophe:

What about sentences like these?

• This weekend only, potatoe's are only $1.00 a pound.
• Check out our new shipment of  fruit's and vegetable's.

Sorry, but they're incorrect. These are simple plurals, not possessives (more than one potato, more than one fruit, more than one vegetable, and they don't own anything) so the apostrophes shouldn't be there. This error is so common in grocery stores that it has come to be known as the grocer's apostrophe (or the grocers' apostrophe - nobody seems to know how many grocers there are).

Exceptions:

The exception to rule #1 above is for irregular plurals such as children, men and women. In these cases, the apostrophe will come before the 's' but the word will still be plural: 

• Child's: belonging to one child. Children's: belonging to more than one child.
• Man's: belonging to one man. Men's: belonging to more than one man.
• Woman's: belonging to one woman. Women's: belonging to more than one woman.

The exception to rule #5 is the word its. To prevent confusion with the contraction it's (short for it is), the possessive its (belonging to it) is spelled without the apostrophe.

Other uses for apostrophes: 

The only other official use of the apostrophe in English is to show where something was left out. Usually you'll find them in contractions (didn't, hadn't, that's, he'd, etc.), but sometimes they're used in dialogue to help show how someone speaks (he's bigger'n me, peaches 'n' cream).  

Unofficially, the apostrophe is often used to indicate a glottal stop, especially in casual transliterations of foreign words. The glottal stop sounds a lot like a hiccup, and can be found in the middle of 'uh-oh'. 

If you want to know more about that, I have some Sco'ish friends who are experts a' the glo'al sto'p.

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