When in Doubt, Start a War!

This blog is about the power and fun of being a discovery writer.  That sounds so much better than being a pantster, don’t you think?  A few days ago in my current project, I started a war.  The war I started is between two equally disagreeable and disgusting opponents; the jesoids and the Nukisharans.  For the Nukisharans, I created their religion from my experiences with two particularly annoying religions, the Hari Krishnas, and the Scientologists.  

I had gotten to a certain point in my book where I was wondering what to write next.  I had a love affair brewing between my main character and the captain of the other ship, the GFSS Athas accompanying the GFSS Albatross in its travels in the Andromeda galaxy.  I  don’t want the relationship to go too smoothly and easily because where’s the fun in reading about that?  I had a character who thought herself a viable rival for Lorin’s affections.  But the reality is somewhat different.  I got an idea from watching the first episode of Netflix’s Medici  about an unwanted boy who keeps escaping death at the hands of his mother’s murderers, and turned it into a story about a boy infant who is  rejected by his mother who only wanted him as a tool to create a bond between herself and Lorin.  But her plot is foiled when he is adopted by her rival and Lorin.  

I’m tossing some ideas  around in my head for bringing the war to the quiet back water world the two ships are in orbit around.  This morning I had two representatives of the warring faiths fighting when my main characters come along pushing their hover stroller, and the two quickly turn their attention to trying to ensnare this couple with their competing brands of snake oil.  

Now I’m thinking for some more conflict, the girl who ordered the MC’s baby should come back into the picture and try to claim him.  I think she is still trying to dig her claws into Lorin, who is not at all interested in her, and fully committed to Tammy.   

Read, read and read some more!  I can’t understand why someone who isn’t already a bookwyrm would want to write.  See you next week!

Structure in my Writing

Structure in my writing.  I tried to write an outline for one of my stories once.  I used the Hero’s Journey by the late great Joseph Campbell.  I then shuffled a Tarot deck and drew cards to help me structure the plot.  But I didn’t WANT to outline.  What I wanted to do was write the story.  I’ve read a slew of books about writing, and the basic premise is to ask two questions:  What does my character want?  What or who is keeping hir from getting it?  So I guess my books grow organically from this premise.  I have it in mind when I start and it’s the overarching story, and all the other characters have goals they want to reach, but something or someone is keeping those characters from attaining it.  In a trilogy of novels which is coming out sometime, one of the characters, Master Sergeant Gorsuch wants his men to reach their enemies’ nest and destroy it, but there are many obstacles they must overcome.  The Empress wants the people of her realm to be prosperous and happy.  What will she have to do in order to attain her goal?  

Another structural element I use is the chapter.  I use it because very often the story I’m writing is for either NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) or one of the Camp NaNoWriMos, I use the division of the chapter to help me keep track of my word count, which is very important when you are trying for a word goal for the day.  My word goal is usually 2000.  It’s easier for me to count if I round up.   This enables me to almost have a little short story within the novel.This time though, I got too stressed out, so had to drop out of Camp NaNo.   I readied several manuscripts for submission, then returned to writing my WIP with renewed vigor.  Now that I was no longer writing it for the competition, I could relax and write until the words for that way ran out.  I have a tee shirt that reads:”The voices are back.  Excellent.”  That’s how I write.  A voice in my head tells me what to write.  Actually, I dictate, because I have a Dragon, which is voice recognition software.  I’d been dreaming of it for decades, so when the opportunity came along to nab one, I took it.  It cuts my actual typing time down by at least a half.  It doesn’t eliminate it completely, because I must have a strange accent or something, because it renders a lot of my speech as gobbledygook.  I was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is one of the centers for broadcast journalism, because we have no regional accent.  We speak perfect American Standard English, and this is how I was taught to speak my native language.  

Some of the words I must type are exotic, either because they are terms of art, or I made them up out of whole cloth because they are the names of aliens.  But back to structure.  We have the basic premise, which is what does the character want and what will keep hir from getting it, and the story within a story.  

What Influence do Dreams have on my Writing?

What influence do dreams have on my writing?  I would say quite a lot.  I built an entire trilogy around the dreams, nightmares, and visions of one of my characters.  Since the Moon was in Pisces at the moment of my birth, dreams and visions play a major part in my writing.  Even the fact that I write fantasy has to do with the Moon, a luminary of mystery, being in dreamy Pisces.  Whenever I’m at a loss for what to do with or to my main character, I have her (my Main Characters are usually female) I have her have a dream, and then I know how at least the next several pages will go.  

If you haven’t gathered this yet on your own, let me inform you that I am a discovery novelist.  I’ve tried to outline, really I have, but that just makes me want to dive into telling the story even more.  I’ll go into this further next week, when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Very often a dream I had the night before supplies the theme for today’s chapter.  I have a dream journal, which I keep sporadically.  I think every writer should have one.  Record the dream,then discuss what various symbols mean to you.  Dream interpretation is a very subjective field.  It isn’t like it is in the Bible, where one person tells the other what his dream means.  Some symbols are indeed universal, but the rest are best left up to the individual to interpret for hirself.  One example I got from Facebook early today was one young lady wrote about babies.  It could mean you’re going to bear a child, but it’s more likely that this child is going to be a child generated by the mind, in other words, a creative project of some sort.   This was emphatically so in the case of the young lady, who was definitely not in a position to get pregnant.  She’s single, not even in a relationship; there is no beau or suitor on the horizon.  In this case, the interpretation is definitely a creative project of some sort.  

I had one of these baby dreams about 20 years ago.  I found this baby in a car,  and nobody came forward to claim hir.  So, what did the baby represent? A creative project nobody wanted to claim?  It turned out to be my vampire novel.  I made it my own after all.  And in this book I had three main POV characters, as the story was told from three different points of view.  Or maybe it was my story about the Hopi guardian of the underground waters.  The nobody claiming the child could be that from 2009 until 2015 I had no publisher for my work, until Patricia Bates came along.  That’s the reason I’ve been so driven to write, and in this time of Quarantine and Covid-19, my dreams have been unusually vivid and memorable.  I suppose you know that the dreams that are the most vivid and memorable to us are those sessions of REM sleep closes to the time when we wake up for the day.  

Stay tuned next week when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Stay healthy and stay safe.

The Divide between Reason/Logic and Emotion & how it Affects my Writing

The divide between reason and emotion, and how it has impacted my creativity, that is, my writing.  I write speculative fiction.  My SciFi tends to be more science fantasy than Science fiction because I’m always trying to skirt around certain laws of space and time that in today’s science are inescapable.  Here is where the divide between reason (scientific facts)  and emotion (my trying to skirt about the laws of astrophysics) comes in.  From being a regular viewer of the Science Channel’s How the Universe Works every Monday evening to collecting a year’s worth of Scientific American, I have garnered a little scientific knowledge, and you know what they say about a little knowledge.  How can I bend those laws without breaking them?  One way I do it is to either set my story thousands of years in the future, or have a civilization so advanced that they’ve found ways around those seemingly unbreakable laws of physics.  There are some ways, for example, of breaking the universal speed law, i.e. the speed of light.  There is a particle that goes faster than the speed of light.  They discovered that in the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland.  Now to harness that and build an engine around it.   

Next there are the mechanics of writing (reason), and expressing my characters' emotions in any given scene.  I use the mechanics of putting one word in front of another, plus what I know about psychology (reason) to express my characters’ feelings.  Sometimes, and especially if I want to spice things up with some drama, I can get them into a real dust up.  What fun!  If you haven’t guessed by now, I am what used to be called a pantster, but which I prefer to be called a discovery writer, that is, I discover the story as I go along writing.  I’ve tried to outline, honestly I have, but it just makes me want to dig in and write the story.  

That’s another way in which the divide between reason (or as Spock would say, “logic”) and emotion has impacted my writing.  The Reason or Logic part of  my mind says “Outline.  Plot everything out.  Know what your character is going to do before s/he does it.”  But the Emotion or passionate part of my mind says “Write it!  Never mind the outline or those other silly sheets of paper!  Tell the story!  Get it all down before you forget it!”  

What I know about brain science is that my emotions are chemical reactions, combined with 1.5 volts of electrical charge, come together to form an idea.  I am left-handed, so the halves of my brain are reversed, so that the logical, language-based, sequential side of my brain is the right side, while the creative holistic part of my brain is the left side, where most people’s logic centers are.    Truly is it said that we southpaws are the only ones in our right minds.  The right side likes to get everything, all my thoughts organized in some logical rational way.  The left side, highly influenced by my emotions, just wants to go for it.

What I’m waiting on now are the edits to Takuhi’s Nightmare and Takuhi’s Daydream so we can get the trilogy released soon.  Be looking for it on your favorite platform.  Whatever news I have on it you will be the next to know.  See you next week!    

Sheltering-in-Place & my Creativity

’m currently working on a book I found when I looked at a flashdrive I hadn’t seen for awhile.  There’s at least a half dozen novels I haven’t done anything with since I won NaNoWriMo with them months ago.  I’m currently working on “And Love Will Steer the Stars.” I’ll resume working on it in May, after Camp Nano is finished until July, when we’ll have another Camp Nano.  March 31st I’ll have to reread what I’ve done on Intergalactic Encounter  so that the new chapters I’ll write next month will mesh with the first few chapters I’ve already written.  

I may write in a disease next month.  Have the politicians utterly stupid. As a writer, I’m usually pretty creative, and I don’t get out much, but I would like to eat at a restaurant once in a while.  I’m of the generation who cooks, not this lazy generation who orders in. Eating out should be reserved for a treat, not your fallback position. Of course, I’m retired, so I have the time to cook.  Even so, I favor dishes that feed an army, so that I only have to actually cook twice or 3 times a week. Cooking is a kind of alchemy, where you apply heat to “ordinary” ingredients, and come up with something magical.  I even apply the alchemical principle to luftwaffles. I take mix, water, oil, and add pumpkin pie spice and vanilla.. But I want enchiladas, which I can’t make.  

Creativity is somewhat of a compulsion for me.  I noticed about a year ago that the elastic on several pairs of my slacks was getting loose, so I set about  crocheting belt loops for them. It’s a simple pattern, really, chain 3 or 4 inches long, and halfdouble crochet around the chain, working a double crochet in each corner to square the corners.It should take no more than a couple rounds, maybe three, to complete.  I like to make at least seven belt loops for each pair of pants, Sew to the pants a few stitches at each end of the belt loop. If you’re lucky enough to have pants with existing belt loops, you can use these to measure how long to make your crocheted ones.  

What I’m hoping for is enough extra energy to do a little coloring.  Maybe if Facebook gets boring enough, I can swap out my Facebook time for some coloring time.  But the time I spend on Facebook isn’t ALL looking at memes. Outside of funny cats, and stupid human tricks, most of it is chatting with my friebds and acquaintances.   The evening of the 31st of March I’ll be handwriting what I’ll be dictating to my Dragon the next morning. I hope I write a lot.

Well, that is all for now.  If you are in Patricia’s stable of authors, you might write a blog about how you are coping with the shelter-in-place, and how it is affecting your creativity.

Bibliomancy Method of Choosing Quotations.

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune saga, and one of my heroes, started each chapter of his inspired and inspiring novels with a quotation from a source he made up himself.  Ass an homage to this series, in my Takuhi trilogy, I started making up my own “sources” and quotations.  But somewhere around the 16th chapter of Takuhi’s Daydream, my quotation well ran dry.  Then it occurred to me: Shakespeare is in the public domain.  Why no do a bit of bibliomancy?

Bibliomancy, for those of you who don’t know is the divinatory practice --mancy denotes method of divination.  Biblio--for book. Biblio-- comes from Byblos, a Phoenician/Ledanese city that has been occupied from 7500 BCE to the present day under an Arabic name was known throughout the ancient world for its parchments and papyrus, in short, supplying everything you needed to create books, or scrolls as they were shaped in ancient times. Books as we know them today or codices did not come out until much later.  Biblioteca, Spanish for library.  

Most often bibliomancy is done with a Bible.  Those who are Muslim can also use a Quran. Mormons could use the Book of Mormon.  The essence of doing bibliomancy is to pick a page at random, and without looking select a passage or verse.  Since I am not an adherent of any Abrahamic religion, I selected the works of Shakespeare. Thee is a funny story about using the Bible for advice when at a critical crossroads, indecisive about what to do.  A desperate minister used his Bible for such advice. The passage he came to was “Judas went and hanged himself.” “No! No! That can’t be right!” He selected another verse. “Go thou and do likewise.”

Accordingly, I opened the works of my old friend the Bard to a random page.  I ran my finger down the page without looking, and stopped. It was a line by John Falstaff, a man who I guess was an historic figure, although I had always figured him to be a character made up by Will himself.  I copied the quotation to the beginning of the chapter. I did it again for the next chapter and the next. I am now at Chapter 24, and considering moving to a book of Irish faery tales I received from my daughter for Yule.  This kind of bibliomancy can be used in many ways, but as the minister discovered to his horror, not to be followed in one’s subsequent actions. After all, you might end up with the suicide scene near the end of Romeo and Juliet.

Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up next month, and already I have signed up and declared my project.  How many of you, O dear readers, are participating? It’s sure to be a fun time for all. If we are quarantined, thanks to this virus everyone is panicking over, we are sure to get a lot of writing done.

Designing Names for Aliens Using Letter Tiles

You all play Scrabble, right?  Well, did you ever do anything with the letter tiles that the inventors of the game didn’t plan on?  I used a character naming generator site to name my characters. The names all sounded like they’d belong to your neighbors down the block.  I needed names that you would know just by looking at them that they are not of this Earth. I had started with small paper letters, but they were too small.  Once you hit forty, you start being afflicted by what optometrists and ophthalmologists quaintly call presbyopia, or elder eye. I acquired my first pair of bifocals and started wearing them constantly, from the time I opened my eyes in the morning, until I retired for the night, with breaks taken out for showers, naps, and putting the hair around my face in curlers.  

One day I was idly clicking through Amazon when it hit me.  I started looking for Scrabble games, then just the letter tiles by themselves.  .I could get a set with the last few dollars of the gift card my daughter had sent me as a combined Xmas and birthday gift.  To make a long story short, I ordered a set of 100, and 2 of those tile holders. When they arrived, I took a handful of letters out of the bag, and arranged them facedown on the holder.  Abdioueat. Looks Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Or maybe Native American. But sprinkle a couple apostrophes in there, and you get , Abdi’ou’eat Starts to look pretty alien doesn’t it, and if you are an ethnographer or a Kulturologist, you discover that this is the name of the chief of a hilltop village/tribe.  Never mind how you would pronounce it, unless you are reading it aloud. Now, I suppose you could cheat and change the letters around, breaking up that string of vowels with the few consonants provided. It starts to look more like this:. Baouteidai .Use your faithful apostrophes, and it starts to look more like this: Bao’ute’idai .  The ‘can stand for letters or sounds not present in our English/Roman alphabet, much like the clicks and pops in the X’hosa language of Africa. Don’t consider yourself limited to just apostrophes. The `or ~ can be used to represent other sounds not present in our alphabet. Ba’ou`teid~ai starts to look pretty exotic, doesn’t it? Pronounce it how you Will, you’re the author, after all. 

With these tools, you can come up with . people’s names, place names, and even your own alien language.  It’ll probably never compete with Klingon, but your only limit is your own imagination, and isn’t that what you’re using to write your own novel/novella/story anyway? I’ll be using this system while plugging any holes in Takuhi’s Daydream as I edit and revise it, and during April as I complete my intergalactic novel during Camp NaNoWriMo.  Patricia says she’s going to release each installment of the Takuhi trilogy one at a time, once I complete Takuhi’s Daydream, so be looking for those to come out on your favorite platform.