jump to navigation

[Writing] Writing Workshop: Building Characters August 29, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a comment

DeepGenre’s David Louis Edelman provides 6 basic building blocks for creating characters. It’s a fairly quick read, and will help if you’re looking to make one of those character creation spreadsheets. Or if you just want to double-check that your characters are truly 6-dimensional.


[Writing] New Length Milestone! August 28, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a comment

After adding 300+ words over the past 2 days to The Nine Mothers, it has now overtaken the length of my previous longest effort (Hear The Grass Grow) with 18,359 words.


[Writing] Creative Writing: Director Commentary

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a comment

Something occurred to me while watching Joss Whedon’s director’s commentary for Serenity. Really, this is something I should have been doing already anyway, but it basically boils down to writing a Director’s Commentary track for my book/story/thing. I know there’s scene outline spreadsheets that include multiple columns for that sort of thing (character motivations, story arc actions, etc.). So, like I said, probably something I should have already been creating, but coalescing the confines of a pre-formatted spreadsheet with that of a rambling Director’s Commentary is what makes it not only feasible in my mind, but also something that I’m apt to actually do.

That’s what it is supposed to look like (in Google Docs, at least). Mine… well, it still sort of just resides in one column, with the director-like rambling that starts with “Well, in this scene, I did this, because of this, and we were trying to convey this.”


[Writing] Word Count Wednesday 8/28 August 27, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a comment

For the week ending 8/28: 353

Not much, but as I always say, it’s 353 more words than I had last week at this time. It seems like there is only one really obvious day for writing. That’s when I get my 300+ words per week in. So, now I just need to work on creating time on a couple other days, so I can get closer to 1000 words per week. I can crank out the 350 pretty easily, but I do it, and then I kind of rest on my laurels for a couple days, and then I get back to where I want to write more, but then I don’t have the time. It’s definitely a pattern, and I’m hoping that being aware of it will help me to change it.


What is Science Fiction as a Genre?

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Uncategorized , add a comment

The following quotes are from a post that is actually about Science Fiction as an MMORPG, but it has some discussion which definitely applies to written fiction.

In my view, all the most-popular SF (Fiction or Fantasy, you choose) like Star Trek, Star Wars, SG, BG, etc. More closely resemble fantasy than SF.

In these, you’ll find all the character-centricity you need to make a compelling story. The setting (the technology) is incidental to the story rather than the focus. When you start throwing in goofy aliens with weird “powers” (or Chicago mobsters, or Nazis, or mutants, or ….) you are starting to get awfully close to reskinning fantasy in space. And honestly, thats not necessarily bad.

Here, where SF can stand for Science Fantasy (an obvious oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one), I think a more appropriate SF would be: Space Fantasy (as the other can be called “High Fantasy” - a term I’ve heard before, which I believe applies to things like A Game Of Thrones). It takes place in Space, and it’s basically a Fantasy.

Too often pure SF is more about the idea and not the character, or if about the character, it has a dependency on a technological element that is both critical to the story and too susceptible to being over taken by our headlong technological rush into the future potentially rendering the dramatic heart of the story irrelevant or to quote Wil, downright silly. Its much easier to keep our disbelief suspended when we’re talking about the Force in another galaxy than to disregard what have become now-glaring factual inaccuracies (or implausibilities) in light of scientific advance. FTL travel or the gravity problem anyone?

And that is why most laypeople (I believe) just call it SciFi no matter what narrower definition could possibly be applied. It’s not technically Science Fiction, the narrow definers argue, but it certainly is Fiction. And the term SciFi differentiates it from pretty much every other sort of fiction there is. It’s not (usually) horror, mystery, romance, fantasy, chick lit, or anything else. Sure, it can be a mix of SciFi with any other genre, but it’s still going to be distinguished as SciFi.

I accepted this concept starting with Neal Stephenson’s lecture at Gresham College in which he basically asserts that Science Fiction doesn’t really need to be narrowed down as a genre since (these days) everything that is not another genre is Science Fiction. It’s not a hard and fast fact, but more a byproduct of the way we are currently producing content. Science Fiction has become so mainstream that it, as a genre, can encompass just about everything that isn’t cordoned off by another group.


LOST, You Kind of Lost Me August 26, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : TV , 1 comment so far

Finally finished Season 4 of LOST. I think it only took about 8 months to get through the entire body of work. And honestly, I think I’m done with it.

*** Just as a warning, if anyone else on Earth hasn’t seen all of LOST, this post will probably spoil a lot of it for you ***
I’m just sayin…. cause I was extremely careful not to take in any information about the show until I’d seen it all, so I don’t want to go and ruin for anyone else.

Back to the point of the post…

Going in to the show, I really only wanted to see how (or if) they got off The Island. Now that I know, I don’t really care what happened after that point. I can imagine how people would care, but the characters whose plot lines are still a mystery just aren’t interesting enough to me to want to watch the show to learn what happened to them.

First example: Locke. Sorry, but I slowly stopped caring about him over the course of Season 3. By the end of Season 3 and throughout Season 4, Locke was nothing more than a plot driver for me. Not only that, but he was the least surprising and/or intriguing cliffhanger ever. Sure, when JJ Abrahms did cliffhangers in Alias they were always on the verge of the absurb, but at least they were surprising and hinted at something more, or something mysterious, or at least something. The end of Season 4 was just kind of like, “Oh, OK. That actually makes sense.”

Next up: Ben. I never really cared about him. I felt sorry for him, sure, but he’s the villian, and he’s engaged in a battle with another villian. And they both apparently have vast resources and/or wealth. I’m not sure I even want to know what happens there, because I don’t think I’ll be happy with the outcome no matter what it is.

Who else? Claire? Sorry, but leaving your baby to follow the ghost of Jack’s dad doesn’t exactly make me care more about you.

Juliet? My wife was really into her and her mentalness, but I just never quite connected there.

Sawyer? Yeah, OK, maybe I care what happened to Sawyer. But only because we all know that he should have ended up with Kate.

In the end, I know there’s only going to be 34 more episodes. And with all the time I’ve put into it, I suppose I’ll just end up watching the rest just to have seen the whole thing. But all the while, I’ll be wishing JJ would have just left us with the simple idea of a mysterious island and people surviving on the island. I mean, Gilligan and Co pulled off that idea for 98 episodes. LOST basically wrapped it up in only 83.


Anathem is close August 24, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Books , add a comment

So close that Amazon has videos of Neal Stephenson talking about it, and even reading from it!

Still not sure if I’m going to buy the hardcover when it comes out, because (as previously stated) I just don’t like having to carry around heavy books. And this one is already 928 pages, so it certainly doesn’t need any added tonnage.

Previous posts about Anathem:


Birthday Meme August 22, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , 3 comments

It’s not my birthday, but this meme was up over on Chris Roberson’s site, so I’m using it…

Look up your birthday in Wikipedia. Pick 4 events, 3 births, 2 deaths, and 1 holiday.

4 events
1493 - Christopher Columbus first sighted the island of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea
1913 - The USA introduces an income tax
1918 - Poland declares its independence from Russia
1957 - Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2. On board is the first animal to enter orbit: a dog named Laika

3 births
1852 - Meiji Emperor, Japanese emperor (d. 1912)
1900 - Adolf Dassler, founder of Adidas (d. 1978)
1957 - Dolph Lundgren, Swedish actor

2 deaths
1954 - Henri Matisse, French artist (b. 1869)
1998 - Bob Kane, comic artist and Batman co-creator (b. 1915)

1 holiday
Japan - Culture Day (originally celebrated as Emperor’s Birthday until the Meiji Emperor’s death in 1912)


Clone Wars equals Awful August 21, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a comment

I saw Clone Wars on Sunday with my wife and an avid Star Wars fan and his wife (I would have just said two other friends, but I wanted to get in the part about how one is the kind of guy who can beat you at Star Wars Trivial Pursuit in 1 turn). I think Mr. Star Wars Junkie enjoyed it at least a little, but he was also annoyed whenever the droids talked.

Personally, I couldn’t get over the fact that Anakin’s padawan looked just like one of the Olsen twins. I’m sure that was not a coincidence either. I mean that, and the whole thing was another one of those political games for trade routes in space. I think if I were reading a book about it, it would be easier to understand and probably much more interesting. In fact, I just did read a book about it; called Tempest, part of the Legacy of the Force series. It was all about the political intrigue and motives, but the author could take the time to explain things better (even while showing and not telling). But when you (or George Lucas) try to make that kind of thing work in a 90 minute kid movie (yeah, it’s a kid movie), a lot of the political tension that could make it deeper gets lost.


It’s too late to apologize August 19, 2008

Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , 1 comment so far

I made it a rule when I started blogging to never apologize for not posting in a long time. That’s what RSS feeds are for. So, without further apology, let me just say that I got a new dog, and it’s taken me longer to get adjusted to him than it took him to adjust to me (and I’m still not sure that I’m fully there yet). Yeah, I know, I was worried that this guy would get bored from laying around all day while I work from home and turn on his masters in a show of bored ferocity:

But seriously, look at those fangs:

In other news, I started and stopped StarCraft: Nova. I made it through about 50 pages and then just couldn’t handle the writing. I imagine it’s mostly because it was written more for a teenage video game playing audience than a mid-twenties video game playing audience. I did like the concept, though, and it was exactly what I would have wanted to read if a) I were a teenager or b) it was written in a more adult style.

So, now I’ve started A Canticle For Leibowitz. Evidently it’s a classic or something.