Day 239: Sometimes You Just Don’t See The Lightning Coming or Manuscripts, Facebook And Cross-Country Running

 

I feel as though I have been running cross country for most of my life, at least mentally. Earlier in life it felt as though I were always running away from something, trying to put distance between myself and my disability, other people’s expectations of me or sometimes lack of expectation and a laundry list of other things. If someone drew a picture of my mental self at that point I would probably have all kinds of small cuts on my face and arms the needs of my jeans would be worn through and money shoes would probably look as if they might fall apart at any second. That’s definitely how I perceived myself anyway. At some point it changed though, instead of running away, trying to outdistance something I began to get the feeling that I was running toward something though if you asked who or what I was chasing I couldn’t give you much of an answer. At the age of 12 or 13 a man I couldn’t place as anyone I knew or had heard of at the time began showing up in my mind both while I was asleep and awake. Since I had begun writing at that time (mostly historical romances that I wouldn’t pay Harlequin to publish if they asked now) I assumed for years that he was a character I simply had not found a story for which still isn’t uncommon for me today. When I was a sophomore in high school I had to write a short story for class and since he was still in my head on a regular basis it seems natural that the lead male character would look like him. Fast forward to present day I am still working on that short story although it isn’t so short anymore. After I completed the assignment my English teacher strongly suggested that I expand it to a full length book. My graduating class has its 10 year reunion this year and I’m still tweaking the story. Christmas of 2011 I did something highly uncharacteristic for me and that I joined a dating site without someone twisting my arm to get me to do so. Much to my continued amazement somebody responded. I looked them up on Facebook only to discover the man who had been silently in my head for over 10 years staring back at me. If I had been sitting in a regular chair at the time this are probably would have knocked it over. In that exact moment I knew who I had been running toward for half my life.

Photo Credit : Possibly the coolest example of a Jacob’s Ladder I’ve seen was found at http://nova.innovation.rit.edu/csi2/main/node/Arc via Google Image search

Day 203: An Elf of Deadly Poision, Serial Part 1

Rain lashed the windows outside the high rise office building. The man sitting behind the hand crafted desk was one of the wealthiest men in the state of Washington. His classic profile had appeared several times on the of Forbes and Gentleman’s Quarterly and even though fifty five was the youngest anyone ever guessed him to be he was still the most sought after man in the state in spite of the the fact that he was never seen with same woman two weeks in a row there was no shortage of women hoping they would be the next to catch his fancy and dozens of them had tried and failed to keep it.

Jared Aconite drummed his fingers in time with the rain. The thug was late, perhaps that meant he’d finally had some success in finding where the boy had the others. He watched his reflection shimmer in the water running down the window. Water is more revealing than glass, the image reflected in the water looked very much like the man standing behind the window except that the reflection had pointed ears. It is in the nature of running water to show truth and if Jared’s middle aged office assistant had walked in and seen his reflection in the window just then she would have seen for what he truly was, an elf.

Though he passed for a human every day thanks to his innate abilities it was nothing more than a ruse. He wore the glamour as easily as some humans wore makeup. Jared saw the hireling creep through the office door behind him and slink guiltily to a chair. Jared knew even before he had turned around that that waste of breath and magic had failed, again.

“You are here, but the boy isn’t ,why is that?” The thug stared at his boots and muttered something under his breath. Jared was on the other side of the desk before the other man could blink and seized him under the chin forcing their eyes to meet, the younger elf tried to flinch away but couldn’t break the vise grip that held his chin.”When I ask a question I expect more than just a grunt which any prehistoric human is capable of, I asked where is he?” The punk whined,”I don’t know I followed him to the National Park parking lot and he was just gone.” Jared put down the letter open he had been thinking of stabbing the ill bred cretin with and smiled,”You managed to find a useful sliver of information in spite of your usual ineptitude, for that you may live another day.

The nameless thug scurried like a frightened rat from the and Jared sitting down at his desk again began picking the dirt out from under his nails with the previously discarded letter opener. Good help was hard to come by and he couldn’t risk that witless slug screwing everything up now,sighing in resignation he dialed a number from the phone on his desk.

Day 93: morning writing exercise

Image by rosefirerising via Flickr

I have heard that if you write three pages of writing in the morning (approximately 750 words)  you will find that your mind is less cluttered and it may be easier to focus because your brain is not bouncing around as many unrelated ideas. The original exercise was meant to be done in longhand, with pen and paper. Fortunately for me because my handwriting is worse than chicken scratch and if I actually wrote three pages I would give up before the second paragraph someone decided to create a digital version. 750 words.com  you can login using your Facebook account info as well as Yahoo or Google if you prefer. Just make sure that you stick with the one you initially login with because apparently the account verification is completely different for each site. Your 750 words are completely private and the various ways to connect are used only to monitor site statistics. When I first heard of the 750 word exercise I admit I scoffed at it but it is actually helpful .  There are even badges that you can earn for instance a picture of a cheetah appears when you reach the 750 mark particularly fast, the criteria for the rest of the badges remains a mystery you find out what milestone you hit when the badge appears. I would like to know what everyone else thinks of this site’s actually pretty simple.

Day 90: Story… Who are we to judge?

Image by Sidereal via Flickr

I will be the first to admit that Stephen King is a talented writer even though I do not care for several things that he’s done, mostly because I’m a chicken and they scare me. I do like The Green Mile very much though I actually wrote a post should you care to read it.That being said I lost a little bit of respect for Mr. King when I read a comment that he made about the Twilight series in which he basically espoused the opinion that Stephanie Meyer, the author, wrote fluff. I like the Twilight books, it was possibly the first series my sister and I agreed on and was also probably one of the few she finished before me, a fact which she is proud of as seen by the epitaph written on the gift tag of my copies of the second and third book which I received a few Christmases ago, “finally a series I finished before you.”

 

It greatly disturbs me that one writer can so callously dismiss the work of another. Mr. King’s comment (which can be found in its entirety over at my friend’s blog Maggie Madly Writing in her Defense of Twilight post) compared the Twilight series to Harry Potter and cast Twilight in a distinctly unfavorable light.  I believe that was unfair, the stories the respective authors tell in both book series are completely different, comparing the two is comparing apples to oranges. I don’t know what kind of problem Stephen King has with Stephanie Meyer but I think you should just get over Stephen. I am sure she put as much effort into getting those books published as you have any of yours, if you can’t respect the writing respect the elbow grease.

Day 64: sometimes I think I might implode

Image via Wikipedia

Can anger be constructive?

Prompt taken from The Daily Post at WordPress.

 

I believe that anger can be constructive for most people, I am not so sure if my anger in particular would be classified as constructive in any situation.  Most of the time if I get angry at something it grows slowly it feels as though it’s choking me.I get angry easier than some people.  It would be easy to blame my anger on the feelings of helplessness which are unfortunately a regular side effect of my disability, but I’m not sure that my disability is completely to blame for my anger issues.  Sometime my anger builds on itself and sometimes it overwhelms me and then I think I temporarily mutate into some kind of firebreathing harpy.  I think my anger more on the constructive side if I were able to do something physical with it.  I have discovered however that because my main outlet is writing my anger does absolutely nothing for it. I’ve tried to write while angry with very little success.  I even find it difficult to write a villain while angry because I can’t focus on the character.  I really command those people who can modify their anger into a form of creativity, I have learned that it is harder than it appears.

Day 53: what I wouldn’t give for snow or the trials of blogging in the summer

Image via Wikipedia

It is August in the South which just in case anybody reading this doesn’t know what I mean… it is hot.  Some days it is so hot that even a spaghetti strap top feel like too much.  I cut my hair off my shoulders and into a pixie cut and still I feel rivers running down the back of my neck most of the time.  Blogging in the summer is actually something of an endeavor for me, because I can’t type with any speed at all as a consequence of my disability I have to use the speech recognition software.  I never thought a set of headphones could qualify as a torture device but apparently they can.  I also had no clue that your ears had sweat glands and zone in them… you learn something new every day I guess.  I suppose I am merely suffering for my art but I wish I didn’t have to suffer quite some much.  How many days until October starts?

day thirty eight:more reasons why I personally keep a blog, and why it has saved my book

Image by texasgurl via Flickr

I am still surprised at how much this attention this blog has gotten  in the fairly recent past.  I started  it is nothing more than a repository for my thoughts.  It was a last ditch effort to keep writing fun for me, a place where I didn’t feel obligated or under pressure to write and with the pressure and overhanging sense of obligation gone I write.  What I never expected was for other people to write me back.  When I began I wrote out of desperation now I write in the hope of hearing even just one small voice cheering me on in the distance.  Even constructive criticism has that effect.  If a person offers constructive criticism I don’t take it negatively because the person’s comment is in effect saying to me, “I believe in you and I want to help you become someone greater than you are at this present moment.”  Some of the people reading this might be aware that I have a half written manuscript gathering dust on my hard drive.  To be honest, I haven’t touched it in months, every time I have tried I am overwhelmed with a horrible case of performance anxiety and anything I managed to write sounds stilted and two-dimensional and therefore gets scrapped almost as soon as I write it.I have discovered that the comments and even just the simple views that this blog accumulates are slowly helping to rebuild my confidence in myself as a competent writer, for that simple gift I will never be able to say thank you enough.

Fan fiction as a writing tool

define:Fanfiction – Google Search

Fan fiction (alternately referred to as fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator. …

There are hundreds, if not thousands of fan fiction sites dedicated to writing based on numerous book and television series. If you have heard of this phenomenon but have never read any of the wonderful stories it has produced you may believe that fan fiction is written solely by teenagers whose time would be better spent studying the grammar of the English language as some of the truly awful stories I first came across nearly convinced me. Happily this is not always the case. Many well educated adults, and teenagers, write fan fiction as a hobby. Why, you ask, might a writer benefit from writing fan fiction?

• The “hard” work is already done for you. Because the characters you are writing about are not originally yours you do not have to spend untold hours creating the major settings and background history for the characters , leaving you more time to focus on the actual storyline you wish to write though of course your story will divert from the original author’s in some way however, if you wish to place an orignal character into the world you are responsible for their background etc.
• There is far less pressure to complete it. If “real life” gets in the way you can stop. Your livlihood does not depend on seeing this piece through to publication . Your only deadline is the one you impose and those can modified easily.
• It can be a tool with which you can overcome writer’s block. If you get  stuck while writing an original work take a break to play around with fanfiction. Because a lot of the work has been done for you you can let your mind go almost anywhere it likes. Maybe if your lucky it will spark an idea to put into the original work.

It has been my experience that writing fan fiction can just as rewarding  as writing an original work, sans the possibility of getting paid. They are lots of people out there willing to leave reviews that will help sharpen your craft. A final word of caution though, like paid book critics not every reviewer of fan fiction leaves kind, or even constructive criticism, a review saying your work sucked without giving any reasons says more about the other person’s lack of education than it does about how well a work is written.

Words

Words are the building blocks of Story.   The words put into a character’s mouth shape the reader’s perception of him or her.   An author would employ a different vocabulary and manner of speaking when writing the character of a male military officer then they would if writing a female civillian.  They are different people dealing with different things in their lives, thus each requires a unique vocabulary all their own. Words have the power to harm or heal, uplift or depress, anger or soothe.

I find it amazing then that the meanings and intents of words can change as quickly as they do.    For example, “gay” doesn’t mean the same thing today that it did fifty years ago.

Words are insubstanial, and once spoken hang in the air for a few seconds before fading away.   If a person is lucky another person who speaks the same language is around to hear him so hopefully his words are not as easily dismissed.    But what if the only person to hear the words is from another country and doesn’t speak the same language? To that person it’s all a bunch of nonsense.

For all of its effect on people the spoken word is the most fragile thing in existence, the meanings can be warped and twisted at will.    The written word is little better off.    What makes words permanent, inescapable?   Ink and paper?    Pages can be torn, the smallest drop of water can make the most eloquent turn of phrase unreadable.   But we can depend on computers, right?   Files get corrupted and hard drives crash without backups every day.   The human brain can be trusted, surely.   Brain damage happens every day to people who had been perfectly normal before, often times a persons’ memory is affected to some extent or another.

So why write?    It has been said that time heals all.   Time is a thief, it takes our memories and fades them.    Our loved ones are changed into different people almost before we know it.   So we write vainly hoping to escape time, to fool ourselves into an illusion of immortality.   We write to ablr to say. “I may die, but that  which I’ve written shall live on,” even though it will decay as well in the end.   From dust we came and to it shall we return, and so too everything we create.   Be mindful of your actions.   You never know who carries the Gift of Story within them, and the one Story always being told is that of Humankind.   If I should be reduced to myth I for one want to be considered one of the good guys in thr end.