Friday, February 22nd, 2013  I was reading Military 1 today and came across an article about what Navy SEAL’s keep in their survival kits. These kits, which are used if a SEAL is caught behind enemy lines, are pretty impressive.
Each kit is only 4 inches by 2 inches by 1.5 inches, and comes in your choice of tan or green.
SEALs are able to use the kits as a digging tool, and a pot to cook food in (though not at the same time) – and they contain an impressive array of items: a mini, stainless-steel Multi Tool with pliers, wire cutters, file, and awl; button compass; LED Sqeeze light; fire starting kit; full-sized blanket; 2 x 3 signal mirror with aiming hole; bobby pins; safety pins; rope; first aid items and more.
They’ve got to be prepared for anything.
This got me thinking about our characters and what they might pack as “survival” items in our stories.
The lead character in my work in progress carries some specific demon-banishing items in her purse at all times, since lately, she’s been plagued by demons. Part of her kit includes holy water, holy chrism (oil) and salt which has been blessed by a priest. She uses these items to seal windows and doors, and in a pinch, they become weapons against the demons.
So, she’s always prepared, right?
Wrong. Where’s the drama in that? (She’s going to learn fairly soon that her kit no longer works.)
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Create a “survival kit” for your character. It could be as small and jam-packed as a Navy SEAL’s, or could be as mundane as the items your character habitually loads into his pockets every morning. Whatever it is: have a good reason for the items to be there. It’s got to be something your character carries with him every day. It’s too Deus ex machina if the items show up only when your character needs them.
- Think about all the ways those items can be countered. What logical things could happen to make the survival kit less than useful?
- Write the scene where your character realizes that all his or her prep has been for naught. Lead him or her through determination to get the job done, frustration after frustration of items in the kit not working, realization of failure, decision to quit and/or determination to succeed no matter what.
Good Luck!
Saturday, February 16th, 2013  You may remember that in December I wrote about how much I loved Ripley Patton’s Ghost Hand. Ripley was kind enough to answer a few questions about herself, the writing, and of course, the book.
Yay for us!
Well, if you didn’t pick up the book then, do so now: it’s free in the Kindle Store today.
Get it here:
Ghost Hand (The PSS Chronicles)
If you pick it up, give some love to Ripley! Like the book, Tweet it, add it to your Goodreads lists, and/or leave a review.
(Reviews are always the best: they’re like gold to authors!)
Friday, February 15th, 2013  Question: Where do ideas come from?
Answer: They’re all around us.
But sometimes, they’re difficult to “see.” There’s a lot of visual stimulation around us, whether we’re visiting someplace new or sitting in our own writing spaces surrounded by the familiar.
Today’s writing prompt is a challenge. I want you to spend some time focusing on the objects around you and come up with a story (or a poem, or a memoir/journal entry, etc.) about one of the objects you see. Don’t let your eyes flick past the things you’ve viewed a million times a day. Instead, choose one to focus on, and think about some possibilities:
- How did you acquire it? Was it given to you by a friend? What if someone else had given it? (An enemy? A teacher? An alien? What kind of story would that make?
- How was it manufactured? What if it were made of something else? What if it had additional properties such as motion, magnetism, solubility, invisibility?
- Who owned it before you did? Your brother? Your cousin? Henry the VIII?
- Imagine this item in another location. What significance does the new location bring to the object? (Does it give you an idea for a story?)
Now…kick it up a notch by letting your imagination run wild. Start with the focus object, and continue to ask questions of it until the object of your study is no longer what you focused on. Instead of asking the “usual” questions, take a tangent… What does the color of it remind you of? How about the shape, or the texture? Maybe the gold-rimmed dinner plate which used to belong to your grandmother makes you think of the moon. Write a poem about the moon, or a story about a colony on the moon, or a fantasy about the moon’s pull on a witch’s spells.
Maybe the blue lamp is the same color of the ocean on a rainy morning. It makes you think of a secret at a beach house, a romance on an island, or a pirate shipwreck in Boston Harbor.
You get the idea.
Write that story (poem, vignette, journal entry, etc.) without the focus piece ever being mentioned in it.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Easy: Write something (a poem, a short story, a scene, etc.) using your object of choice, coupled with some of the questions outlined above (or more of your own!) Make certain that item is the focus of the piece.
- Challenging: Start with a focus object, but transform it into a solid idea. Write something which was inspired by your focus piece.
Good luck!
Sunday, February 10th, 2013  I have a new story out in a horror anthology called Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace, & Misery.
My story is in the “Misery” section: a psychological thriller/ghost story called Lucky Clover about two high school grads who embark on a road trip before college, and get more than they bargained for.
As I said in October when I signed the contract, I’m super excited to be in an anthology with great writers such as Nancy Holder (of Buffy fame, and a five-time Bram Stoker Award™ winner), Mehitobel Wilson (nominated for a Bram Stoker Award™ and awarded Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Anthology five years in a row!) and Yvonne Navarro (also a winner of the Bram Stoker Award™).
Published by Evil Jester Press, the anthology is part of a month-long celebration of Women in Horror.
You can read more about the anthology (or the players!) at the Deep Cuts Kickstarter page (campaign now closed) or the Deep Cuts Web site. But, of course, I hope you’ll buy Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace, & Misery.
The folks over at I Like Horror Movies have posted a review, too. (Rare, that, I think: a book review on a horror movie review site.) I think I more than like “I Like Horror Morvies!”
If you live on the West Coast, there’s a book signing coming up at the end of the month:
Mysterious Galaxy Book store, Redondo Beach Location: Saturday, February 24.
I’ll be there in spirit!
Friday, February 8th, 2013 I had surgery earlier this week. I can’t drive (or walk, for that matter) until at least February 27.
Great! (I thought.) With all the commute time I’ll be saving to work, I can get more writing done.
And then my laptop broke.
I’m stuck using a crappy little mini (I actually used to be fond of) to do my writing. The keyboard is super-tiny, and it’s considered QWERTY, but the apostrophe/double-quote key is in the wrong place. I keep hitting returns when I punctuate my dialogue. (Bad, very bad for a writer.)
It’s slow going.
Like a character in one of my books, I’ve been stymied. (Although I have to admit, I do much worse things to my characters.)
The point is, this is creating some drama in my life (and the lives of the people very close to me) because it starts to spill over.
And life doesn’t stop. I’ve got commitments I need to take care of, so I have to work around the impaired walking and non-driving and crappy tech.
Just like a character.
Here’s Your Prompt
- In your next scene, make your character work for what he wants or wants to accomplish. Take away something important. Be devious about it: if you don’t want your character driving, don’t just take his license away, make them have foot surgery. 🙂 Make the stakes higher; take away something that not only your character needs, but what others depend on him for.
- If you journal, write about a time you were stopped in the pursuit of your goals by the loss of something (you missed a deadline, you failed a test, or lost something tangible) and how you worked around it to accomplished your desires. [This should not be a story of “oh, well, it was meant to be” or “I was better off not doing it!”]
Good luck!
Friday, January 25th, 2013  I’ve probably mentioned this before: the main character in my work-in-progress is a finder. You can tell her about things you’ve lost, and she can help you find them…with a little bit of help from the universe and a little ritual she performs.
And in Blood Soup, the lead character depends on her nurse — a midwife and a witch — who ‘rolls the bones’ to determine the gender of the unborn child.
Through time and across tribes, clans and peoples we’ve had scryers and seers to whom we can turn for answers. Today, people read their horoscopes, visit palm readers, and deal tarot cards.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Develop a character who has regular appointments with a seer (a palm reader, a gypsy, a tarot card reader). Why does she have regular appointments? What answers does he seek?
- Write a believable dialogue between two people where one begins with the question, “What’s your sign?”
- Write a scene where a skeptic is forced to confront his prejudices when something everything a seer has told him has come to pass.
- Write a poem with the opening line, “The fortune teller said…”
- Write about something that happened in your former life.
- Write about rolling the bones, or scattering runes.
- Write about a lucky charm that brought bad luck.
- Write about the last dream you remember having. Afterward, find an a book or internet resource on dream interpretation and write about what it means.
Good luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The image of the hand comes from the book The Woman Beautiful, page 308, by Ella Adelia Fletcher. 1901. Work is currently in the public domain since the copyright has expired.
Friday, January 18th, 2013  Happy Birthday, Peter Mark Roget!
Roget was born January 18, 1779.
He was a natural theologian and a physician, but he’s chiefly remembered for his literary contribution of creating the first thesaurus.
His apparent obsession with list-making started it all, and he worked on it for nearly 50 years in private before it was published in 1852, with the excessive title of:
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.
I love my thesaurus!
I have a copy of Roget’s International Thesaurus , 6th edition (a fabulous gift from the The Husband of Awesome™ many years ago) and it sits on a small shelf below my desk. (It’s over 1,200 pages of joy!)
I can reach it with ease any time I need to refer to it.
A thesaurus is an awesome tool when you’re looking for just the right word. And like any good tool, you get what you pay for: I haven’t found a web version that does the job anywhere as good as my hard-bound book. If you’re serious about finding the right word, get a good thesaurus.
(The problem, of course, especially for young writers — or new writers — is to choose a 50-cent word over a nickle word. By this I mean, stumbling across the first 4-syllable synonym in the thesaurus and plugging that into their writing. Don’t fall into this trap! If your character is walking across the parking lot, make him walk. Having him perambulate across the parking lot is not going to make the story any better!)
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Choose a piece of writing from your drafts that seems lackluster, or one you’ve had no luck selling somewhere. Examine the words for places you could make changes. Use a thesaurus to find more specific words to use to make your point and re-write your work.
- Do you tend to use the same words over and over in your writing?
Instead of using this prompt to jump start something, use it to hone your skills. Pick five or more words you tend to overuse – particularly ones that you tend to use modifiers around to help them along, and look them up in a good thesaurus. Make lists of alternate words (and their specific meanings) and keep them handy while you write.
- For those of you looking for a specific prompt to get your juices flowing today, try a new twist on an old stand-by for prompts. Open up a thesaurus to a random page, close your eyes, and drop your finger down on a particular word. If you’ve hit the index, turn to the specific location in the book. If you’ve tapped a particular word, you’re good.
Now, choose five of the synonyms surrounding your word and write a poem or essay and use all of them (correctly!) in context in your writing.
For those of you who are too lazy, here’s a random word and some of its synonyms:
pirate: corsair, buccaneer, privateer, sea rover, picaroon, viking
Good Luck!
Friday, January 11th, 2013 A long time ago I resolved not to make New Years resolutions.
I’m not against trying to do better. I just don’t like the system: For the last month of the year or so, people start talking about what they’re going to do next year: lose weight, read more, eat more vegetables, stop kicking the cat.
Whatever.
And for a month or so, people binge eat, swear off books, eat less vegetables and kick the cat more…because they know in a few weeks they’ll have to go cold turkey. (Never realizing, of course, that by Valentine’s Day, 75%* of all those resolutions will be long broken anyway.)
* I made up that statistic. But you get my point.
And besides, it’s all so arbitrary. If you want to stop kicking the cat, do it NOW. Why wait?
That being said…
I do like to set goals for myself: reachable, measurable goals which are wholly under my control. (If they’re out of my control, they’re not goals, they’re dreams. Don’t get me wrong: dreams are awesome. But they often rely on outside influences to obtain them.)
If I miss a goal, I’ve only got myself to blame…
…unlike really good fiction.
Goals are the building blocks of stories. The hero has a list of goals he wants to achieve. The protagonist has a list of goals he wants to achieve (often at odds with the hero’s goals). Without this conflict, the story is boring.
Often, the hero’s most basic goals, let’s say, leaving a room, are stymied by the protagonist — who locks the door, or shoots the hero, or reveals a bit of information to the hero that is so inconceivable, that the hero is frozen in place (by shock, indecision, heartbreak, anger, etc.). No matter what, the hero cannot simply get up and walk out of the room.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Make a list of 3 – 5 goals you want your hero to accomplish. (If you’re writing a short story, stick with 1 goal, 2 at the most.)
- Make a list of 3 – 5 goals for the antagonist to accomplish: goals which by their very nature are at odds with the hero. Remember: at the beginning of the story, the antagonist doesn’t know what the protagonist’s goals are, so it’s cheating if the goal is a direct contradiction of the hero’s.
For example:
Your protagonist might be a retiring Firefighter looking to purchase his neighbor’s 10-acre farm on which to live out his golden years.
The real estate agent handling the transaction finds out the land contains lucrative mineral deposits, and puts in a bid for himself instead. Prices for the farm escalate into a bidding war as the realtor decides he wants to own the property for its potential value.
(So, the protagonist’s goal is to buy some property to retire on. The antagonist’s goal is NOT to stop him from retiring with property, but to invest money in a property with possible lucrative minerals. It just so happens that in this case, the property is one and the same.)
- Choose one goal for each of them, and write the scene where the two goals conflict.
Good luck!
Friday, January 4th, 2013  The holidays are officially over and it’s back to the daily grind for most folks, myself included.
The snow’s still on the ground here (it snowed Christmas Day) and heading back to work in this Winter Wonderland (albeit a little sun-dappled with large patches of grass poking through) is a bit of a letdown. Sort of like that feeling you get when you threw a rockin’ party at your house, and you’ve just ushered the last guest out the door.
The party was great!
But now you’ve got to empty the sink full of dirty dishes, pick up all the empty bottles lying around, and scrape the remains of the crab dip and shrimp pesto into the trash — and take it out — so your house doesn’t smell like a fishing pier in the morning.
In other words, the coats are off the bed, but you’ve got a lot of work to do before you can relax.
Here’s Your Prompt
- “The Party’s Over” is a metaphor for divorce, break ups, graduation, etc. What does it mean to you? Journal about it or write a poem about the loss of “The party is over.”
- Write the “clean up” scene between roommates who just hosted an awesome get-together. Use the end of the party as an underlying metaphor for something else: they’re cleaning up, and as they do so, one roommate announces he’s moving out, or that she’s taking a job in another state, or that he’s breaking up.
- Nat King Cole and Journey both wrote hit songs about this topic. Write your own song.
To give you some ideas, here are Cole’s Lyrics:
The party’s over
The candles flicker and dim
You danced and dreamed through the night
It seemed to be right just being with him
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friend
(Read the complete lyrics here.)
Journey called their song The Party’s Over (Hopelessly in Love with You).
You never call me up
When I’m alone at night.
What can this poor boy do,
When he’s hopelessly in love with you?
So I will tell you now
This love is fallin’ down.
Just what more can I do,
When I’m hopelessly in love with you?
Oh, bye-bye, baby – The party’s over, I have gone away.
The party’s over, I have gone away.
(Read all the Journey lyrics here.)
- Turn the expression on its head: write about the party being over as a good thing. Don’t take the easy way out by having the “party” be something bad to begin with. This party had to be so good, it’s craziness that it’s over: but killing the party is going to be a good thing, just a little risky.
Good Luck!
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“Cocktail” Photo by Dan Mojado.
Friday, December 28th, 2012  Today in 1895, the first commercial movie was viewed at the Grand Cafe in Paris, France. Admission was charged.
The film was made by two professional photographers, Louis and Auguste Lumier, who were goaded into creating a movie when their father saw Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, and told them they could do better.
(Let’s hear it for a little parental guilt!)
The movie was a series of short scenes of everyday French life.
It enthralled the public, and the rest is history.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a scene as if you might be writing a movie script, rather than a novel or short story. Don’t worry about making a perfect script. Simply set the scene with a few paragraphs at the top, then write the dialogue.
- Part 2 from above: once you’ve written the movie treatment, turn around and write the scene as if for a novel or short story. Does the dialogue still work? If not, revise.
- Write a journal entry or essay on your favorite movie you’ve seen on the big screen. What about it seeing it in the theater makes it your favorite?
- In Cornhuskers, chapter, 28 Memoir of a Proud Boy, Carl Sandburg writes, “There is drama in that point: the boy and the pigs. Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs…” Write about a movie bringing you to tears. What emotion stirred the tears? Why?
Good Luck!
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