A New Year and Updates

I have taken quite a break from updating this blog, but I haven't stopped writing or playing around with story ideas. November and December is our busiest time at the call center. Now that I've had time to breathe, I've been focusing on taking my writing skills to the next level and applying for positions that will combine my writing and technical skills. Applying for a new job is a full time job in itself! There is definitely a demand for people with technical writing skills and even though I've been working on job hunting for two months now, I'm encouraged at the new direction this will take me.

I believe that writing shouldn't be a phase. It should be something that you live, breathe, and eat, even if the main focus of your energy has to be somewhere else. At first, I think I got caught up in the glamour of the idea that eventually I could sell a novel and receive a fat royalty check that would allow me to do nothing but write full time. There are a lucky few that can do that. But I have learned over the years, that if I find an hour out of my day to let my fingers fly over the keyboard and write something out, I receive the same satisfaction that those fancy published authors do. That's pretty rad.

Hugo

I went to see Hugo this Thanksgiving weekend. I liked it a lot, but it was not exactly what I expected. The trailers made it look like a fantasy film about a boy and his robot. The harshest piece of criticism I have for the film is that when the story actually started to unfold, it felt like a bait and switch. It all pays off in the end because I really enjoyed the perspective the director found in telling a little bit about the true story of french film innovator George  Méliès.

The story lands in the historical fiction genre, and even though it's more historical than fiction, it is a great steampunk fix if you're craving it.

Checking In

The writing I got in this weekend was very limited. We got our first few inches of snowfall so driveways and sidewalks needed shoveling, plus other odds and ends around the house needed taking care of. Since I've started writing every day now, I've noticed that the words are coming easier. Usually I take a sentence and mull it over for a while and then finally tap it out on to the computer. Now I can do that with paragraphs. Just like going to the gym, you have to do it every day to build up that muscle!

I need a new title for my short story. When I first gave it a working title of "The Machine That Knew Everything" I had a different idea in mind. But I find that with each paragraph, the story writes itself. This is incredibly frustrating for me because I like to plan out the smallest details and have yet to come up with an outline of where this story is going. This story will be finished by the end of Thanksgiving weekend and I will post it here.

Also, I am reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. Fantastic! I even purchased the audiobook so I could listen to it while at the gym.

A Journey of a Thousand Steps

It can be a bit overwhelming when thinking about writing a first whole novel. That is eventually my goal, but before I start with Chapter 1 there is a lot of work to be done. Character/setting development, grammar to learn, plot outlines, and liquor to stock up on. I have a lot of hard questions to tackle like "why do people want to read my stories?"

When you have as many novels and as much experience as an author like Stephen King, you can sit down and just start writing. I've heard this is called "by the seat of your pants" style. As much as I wish I could do that, I'm not any good at it. I'm a planner - to such a degree that I don't even walk in to a grocery store without a list. I stumbled across advancedfictionwriting.com where the author of that website, Randy Ingermanson has what he calls "The Snowflake" method. It's a great way to organize a novel and I've tried it a couple of times. I find the first steps very helpful to get the ball rolling.

So now that I have a whole hand full of one liners from last week, I can develop them in to full plots. That is what I'll be doing next.

Scary Stories to Read in the Dark

I was going to post my final installment of the one liners yesterday, but I got distracted by a very creepy story that kept me up for the rest of the night.

The author sets the story up like he is recalling memories from his childhood that now make sense to him as a man (I'm assuming that this story is fiction based on the style of the narrative, but I don't know that for a fact). Amidst the high range of emotions and events, the story's lesson comes in to focus: "The world is a cruel place made crueler still by man." It's well written lines like this that lead me to believe the author isn't merely recalling childhood memories, but a writer well experienced in his craft. ...Or maybe I just desperately hope that these events couldn't possibly be anything more than a work of fiction.

It doesn't matter if the events actually happened because it is true in the minds of the readers, since everyone can relate to strange or scary memories from their childhood.

With all that said, here is today's final one liner:
Something sinister from the woods follows 13 year old Jake Tanner home after an overnight camping trip.

Next week I will be picking one of these five one-liners to expand into a whole paragraph (per Randy Ingermanson's "Snowflake Method"). I highly recommend checking out his website. It has a lot of fantastic resources for writers.

Thursday One Liner

Regrettably, I can't post much this morning because a good friend of mine called me out to breakfast before work. He always has good stories about love and relationships gone bad, so I'll make today's post a quickie.

Here is the one-liner for the day, just to remain on schedule.

"A machinist composes a love song using the tools and sounds from his shop, and it is mistakenly suspected of  secret code being passed on to foreign enemies by the government."


Meh, too wordy.

Setting and Story

Is there anything Steampunkish about a paranormal investigator? Not inherently. So how do I make the setting important to the story? Those are questions I'll have to answer if I'm going to continue working down that path. Should Acacia have ghosts? Magic? Also, is it better to build a very detailed world drawn out and then start writing stories for it? All of these are questions I can't answer yet, but are keeping in mind.

Today's one liner: A gunslinging gambler from foreign lands finds himself in the middle of an anarchist's plot to blow up the capital of Acacia.