Words from a fictional-type writer

I love Social Media. I’m on at least five different services and spend way more time than I should on them, but I enjoy it considerably and have befriended many great people. With as much enjoyment as I get out of these services I thought it would be great if could combine together two things I feel passionately about: Social Media and Writing Fiction.

But how do you develop a story in only 140 character bite sized morsels? You could write a longer piece and serialize it, or you could even write Flash Fiction which thrives in such small spaces. Also, how do you develop characters in serialized stories when you use one account for both posting and comments? I felt all those approaches left much to be desired. What I wanted to see was a story, using Social Media where one character interacts with another using separate accounts. And what's more, I wanted the story to be science fiction.

The big problem with writing science fiction or fantasy is you usually need quite a bit of space to build your world and have your characters explore it. Could this be done in 140 character pieces and still be a compelling read? My answer is yes it can. And the way to do it is by telling the entire story in dialogue.

Dialogue is powerful. It's one of the best tools a writer has in their arsenal to convey emotion and feeling. Think of the last novel or story you read. What were the parts which moved you the most? It was when the characters were speaking. The author manipulated the words coming from the character into a stream of emotional strength. You knew how the character was feeling because they told you so in their own voice.

With this in mind, the idea for Calling Home popped into my mind. A story entirely told within the confines of a damaged ship's system status messaging and emails. Each character would have their own Twitter and Plurk account, and communicate with each other through those accounts only.

After some refinement of the idea, I'm proud to announce I have started posting the individual Plurks and Tweets for the story. Here is the information you will need to follow the story on Twitter and Plurk:

Twitter
Hastag: #chh
http://twitter/ISSMontserrat
http://twitter/JFCAllen
http://twitter/JFCSandeep

Plurk
http://www.plurk.com/user/CallingHome

If you don't have your own Twitter or Plurk account, you can get your own Plurk account by following this link and then click on the CallingHome link on my profile. For a Twitter account, go and register here and then follow the accounts in the list above.

Don't want a Plurk or Twitter account? That's a shame to hear, but I can understand. If you still want to read the story, you can go to Calling Home's Archive Page on Tumblr and see the story in the way it was posted.

This story will run for at least a couple of months, so feel free to follow and see what happens to our characters in the deep reaches of space. For the time being, there will be twice daily updates, however that could change as things progress in the story. Read and you'll find out why....

Lastly, if you enjoy the story please tell your friends about it and spread the word on any other Social Media services you're on. If you'd like to see it posted to another Social Media service then email me and I'll look into it.

Enjoy the story!

Have you ever found yourself staring at your screen and praying to your fickle muse to grant you the strength to take the words out from deep within you?  If you say yes, stop it.  Yes, I said stop trying to get a hold of her, because she’s on vacation in Cabo San Lucas and the last thing on her mind is you. So how do you get back on track?  How are you going to write that blog entry?  Finish that piece of flash fiction?  Top off the novel you’d been writing for the last six months? Try a writing burst. A writing burst is a session of writing where you concentrate on nothing but output.  It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you write.  If you wanted to you could focus on writing a letter to your grandmother, a blog entry, a recipe, a short story, or your comprehensive plan on taking over the world using only strawberry Twizzlers.   The point is you just have to write something. To keep things flowing well, I recommend your writing burst be fifteen minutes long.  Fifteen minutes is a small enough piece of time where it doesn’t feel like a major commitment, but isn’t small enough were you’ll be out of time before you even started.  It also helps you silence your inner editor long enough for you to sit down and produce.  Once your fifteen minutes are over, you’ll be surprised at what you’ve accomplished. For example, I finished this entire blog entry in fifteen minutes. If you’d like to try a writing burst, call or message a couple of your friends who also have writing to do and do an impromptu writing burst.  Have no writing friends?  Join me on Plurk and we’ll go ahead and do a writing burst together.  You’ll be happy you did, and your muse will be even happier you’ve left her alone with her tall Piña Colada sunning at the edge of the pool.

There are times when you’re writing you find yourself dead in the water because of one missing fact.  In my case this happened recently when I needed to find out some names for a couple of characters I have.  Unfortunately, the names I needed were obscure Breton names, a people who live in Brittany.

After going through the usual channels of Google, the results were lacking to say the least.  I decided to take my search to the social media networks I frequent.  Almost immediately, I received a reply from one of my friends on Plurk.  He pointed me in the direction of some excellent books in french documenting some 1800 Breton names.  This saved me a considerable amount of time and effort.

In order to have social media work for you as a research tool, you’ll need to join several social media networks.  The best two I’ve found are Twitter and Plurk.  Twitter for the sheer amount and variety of people there and Plurk for the incredible community features and helpful people frequenting the service.  Those are just two services though.  You will want to be on at least five or so to cast as wide a net as possible.

Now, in addition to being on a multitude of services, you also need to have a lot of friends. This doesn’t mean friending or following people indiscriminately, you need to cultivate a broad cross-section of people from different backgrounds.  With this diversity, you’ll be able to ask questions concerning whatever and will be assured an answer.

As writers, sometimes we don’t work well with technology, but sometimes its best just to jump into the waters and start treading.  It is a whole lot easier than performing a public reading and in most cases a lot more fun.

You might have noticed a new look to Renegade Sanctuary today, or even during the weekend. For years, I've used Movable Type as my blogging system of choice, but as time moved on and my needs changed I found myself increasingly limited by what I could do with my MT blog with the limited time I had. Now this has nothing to do with skill, because I know I could have learned what I needed to get Renegade Sanctuary were I wanted. No, it was a matter of what I wanted to spend my time doing. Instead of tinkering with the blog, I'd rather be writing, and with this in mind I decided to make the leap to WordPress. With the wealth of themes, plugins, and other extensible functions and design elements, I could easily change my blog with little effort. Compare that with the near Herculean effort of finding any sort of theme or design for Movable Type and you can see the appeal. It took a little work during the weekend (and some help from great friends on Plurk. Hello Allan!) to migrate everything, but thankfully with the use of my blogging software, Ecto, I was able to quickly restore my old entries from MT to Wordpress in only a couple of clicks. I looked around for a couple of themes and decided on a couple of them, starting with Chris Pearson's NeoClassical. A very nice and clean theme which I plan to build on by switching out the default images and adding a couple of more widgets. Since I'm still new to Wordpress, if there are some plugins or widgets you'd recommend I use, please feel free to leave me a comment and I'll look into it. So, without further discussion, I'm off to continue writing. Keep an eye out here for new features, content and for details on a new writing project I'm working on involving social media and fiction. Talk to all of you later!

Poe War is a great writing blog that covers everything from identifying ways for writers not to negatively reinforce themselves, to hilarious fun lists of annoyances that writers find out in the wilds.

While a lot of the entries deal with freelance writing, a lot of the information they give can be readily applied toward fiction.  One of the most useful I’ve found recently was an entry in how to use slang and accents when writing dialogue.  While not entirely addressing what I needed, it was still a very useful starting point for me in trying to find resources to help me with some of my character’s speech patterns.

And some of the posts under the Fun section are items that any writer will definitely get a laugh from.

Well, after a couple of emails between my mentor and I, I have started my revisions in earnest.  Right now the majority of them are dialogue related.  Which is interesting since I thought dialogue was my strongest capability in a story.

The cardinal sin I committed while writing the dialogue was that I had made the characters sound much to alike. More than likely this was due to letting my own diction seep through as I wrote the draft. Understandable, considering the speed I was trying to keep in order to finish the thing.

So now after having basked in the afterglow of accomplishment, I now start the task of making my characters sound different from one another.  I guess for starters some contractions would be nice, according to some of my critique partners.

Picky, picky. Ah well, as long as I don’t all make them sound alike when I relax their speech then that would be good. I could just give them all cockney accents, even though they are nowhere near the British Isles.

It would be hilarious though, wouldn’t it?

I’d like to know what your thoughts are on accents and dialects.  Can they be used effectively without making them look like caricatures? And can you use accents or dialects from our own world in Fantasy or Science Fiction worlds without having the reader stop and go “Why is there an Irish guy in the middle of that group of dwarves?”.

Sometimes you want your coffee table to be informative as well as being a place you can put your blessed brew down. If this is so, then this is the coffee table for you:

Yes, that's right my readers. This is a coffee table with the periodic table. Even better is that in each little square you have an actual sample of the element in question. I think you have to take their word on it that you really do have hydrogen, helium and the other noble gases in there, but I digress. And as far as those radioactive elements and elements with a half life of microseconds only produced in particle accelerators, I think those'll be nicely indicated by an icon instead.

You can find out more about it (and it's astronomical price of $,9,500!) at Element Displays. Thanks to Gizmodo for finding this.

You know, this is exactly how I think the iPhone would be like if it did get on a late night talk show.

 

 

Thanks to Jeph Jacques at Questionable Content for the great guest strip.

Wow, I can’t believe the day came, but I finally finished my 1st draft of my thesis novel on Sunday evening.  It came out to 91,768 words with a marathon 5,437 word dash on the last day.  You have no idea how relieved I am about it.  By no means am I finished (I still have re-writes to do) but those are a lot easier to do when you have a completed draft in your hands.

For the past two day’s I’ve been holding off on beginning re-writes until I head back from my mentor Gary Braunbeck, but tomorrow I will start writing again with an eye at correcting some of the too formal dialogue and perhaps even writing a short story to change gears a bit.

Either way, it’s great to be done with the first major milestone!

I’m taking a break from writing my novel today to make a confession.

I love coffee.

While I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise to you, I just felt I had to say it aloud.  Coffee’s the one hot beverage I pursue with a fervor reserved for such things as politics, religion, crusades and reality TV.  So imagine my great shame when I could not brew a pot of decent coffee to save my life.

Yes, I love coffee and yet how to produce a perfect cup via a home brewer eludes me.

But there is hope for me. Before my ancestors turned their backs on me in dishonor, I found coffee nirvana in the confines of a ridiculously expensive apartment complex leasing office: The Keurig Brewing System.

It was amazing. The coffee came in small salad dressing-like plastic cups with a foil top.  All you had to do was to put the cup in the brewer, close the holder, hit a button for the amount of water you want to use, and throw the spent cup away. Presto! Instant perfect cup of coffee.

The best part is, unlike the limited selection, and sometimes lower quality, that comes with those other systems out there, the Keurig is made by a company that only sells the system, not coffee (well, not until they were acquired by Green Mountain Coffee, but I digress).  With that in mind they have offerings from some of the best boutique brewers out there including Diedrich Coffee, Coffee People, Caribou Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, and the list goes on.  Oh and did I forget to mention a great selection of teas, too?  (No Darjeeling, unfortunately)

“What about blends they don’t carry?” Ah, well they have that covered.  You can get a My K-Cup which lets you put your own coffee in there and then brew it.  Best of all there are lines inside the metal basket to ensure you get a consistent cup every time you brew.

Coffee perfection a cup at a time!

So now I can grind my own blends (combining single-origin coffees after running them through a burr grinder) and enjoy them whenever I want.  I even made a Colombian/Guatemalan blend for my own wedding as a favor.  A nice way to represent our own respective nationalities.

I know there are other single serve coffee systems out there.  What sort of experiences have you had with them?  I’m curious to hear some more perspectives, especially when it comes to other systems out there.