Six Sentence Sunday #23

Hi everybody. Continuing with the scene of Sandy's wedding, which takes place on a California beach. The entire scene is in Neal's POV. He's feeling a bit morose because he can't seem to forget the one-night-stand he and Sophie had, and because he still misses Laurie, his first true and deep love, who died a few years earlier. Robin and Miranda are the bridesmaids.

Sandy would have Sophie all to himself during the honeymoon.

April squeezed Neal’s hand. He blinked and squeezed back. Having her next to him, especially dressed up so fine, did make him feel special.

Nobody outshone Sophie when she wanted to be the center of attention, but April didn’t need to compete; her solid gold heart was worth more than all of Sophie’s diamonds.

Robin and Miranda took their places up front and to the left, and the music ended.

 Six Sentence Sunday is a blog hop. You sign up at the SSS site, post six sentences from one of your WIPs on your blog, and go from site to site exploring the variety of writing styles and scenes. SSS attracts some pretty talented writers and it's always so much fun to see how creative everybody is.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I really appreciate it.

To know him is to love him--and hate him

A few days ago my local writers group got a couple new members. One of them asked me about a comment I made about loving my characters and writing them well. He asked if I thought it was impossible to write a character well if I disliked that character.

That's an interesting question. In my novel WIP, the antagonist, Tony, is a bit problematic because I don't fully understand why he's so obstructionist to Neal. They live on opposite coasts; while he has West Coast "associates", Neal doesn't do anything that interferes with them or with Tony himself. Neal doesn't even know about Tony for most of the book.

So it's hard for me to categorically say I don't like him. But, as far as I do know him, I can say that I intellectually don't like him because he's done some pretty awful things. He's the reason Neal's mother abandoned him. He knew how rotten Neal's life turned out and did nothing to help. He's a crooked cop who sells drugs on the side.

Emotionally, I like him because he's one of the people who help me shoot flaming arrows into the tree I've chased Neal up. Conflict! If it fits the story, throw it at the MC! Most of us love a good bad guy, and Tony's got the potential to be a favorite of mine if I figure out the rest of the details.

Personally, I have to like a character for some reason in order to write him or her well. Back in the 70s and 80s when my sister and I wrote space opera, there were a few characters of mine that I came to dislike. When that happened I found I didn't care what they did or why they did it, so if that happens, the character is not going to seem realistic.

How about you? Do write characters even though you don't like them? Do you think you could tell if you read something that had a character the author disliked?

Six Sentence Sunday #22

Hi everybody. Continuing with the scene of Sandy's wedding, which takes place on a California beach. The entire scene is in Neal's POV. The bride (Sophie) has entered the main tent. 

Sophie smiled, and lit up from head to toe. The crowd seemed to hold its collective breath. She glided down the center aisle of the main tent, her flowery perfume brushing Neal as she passed.

That smokin’ body had been his just once, in a coked-up, broken-hearted buzz. His hand convulsed on April’s. He really needed to put that memory in a locked box.

Six Sentence Sunday is a blog hop. You sign up at the SSS site, post six sentences from one of your WIPs on your blog, and go from site to site exploring the variety of writing styles and scenes. SSS attracts some pretty talented writers and it's always so much fun to see how creative everybody is.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I really appreciate it.

Climbing out of my writer's box

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My local writers group is having a public reading in about a month. I think that's a neat idea so I wanted to participate, but got stuck on what to what to read. I don't have much poetry written, and have to be in the mood to write it. Well, to write good poetry, anyway!

I've been very focused on my WIP novel. So focused that I haven't had interest in writing any other story. Well, I did play around with a short story a while back when I was seriously stumped on the novel, but once I got going again, I lost interest in the short.

A phrase used in a post at the online group I belong to, Critique Circle (also fondly known as CC), sparked an idea. It could even be said to fit the approaching Halloween season. It's a totally non-serious story. A witch receives a spell in an email, performs it, gets a different result that she expected, and realizes the spell has a typo: Hence the title, "Spell Check." It has a fairy tale feel.

I don't think I'm very good at humor but I'm giving the story a try. I'm about 3/4 done with it. There should be enough time to post it at CC for crits that will help me fix whatever issues it assuredly has.

This is exciting because honestly, I was worried about my ability to come up with other characters and other stories. When you zero in on one idea for a hair shy of four years, with only one deviation, you begin to wonder exactly what you're capable of.

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I may post snippets of the story here on the blog once I'm satisfied with it. If it comes out well enough, I'd like to try my luck in a few contests.

Do you guys normally write in different genres, or do you stick to one? Have you decided to branch out recently? I'd be interested in your forays out of your comfort zone. It's a bit scary out there, but I'm grabbing my security blanket and running straight ahead!

Six Sentence Sunday #21

Continuing the scene of Sandy's wedding. The ceremony is about to start, on the beach. Neal's in the main tent (really just a canvas roof) with April, among the crowd of guests. The wedding has a Moroccan theme. The bride appears:

The music started and everybody turned toward a smaller tent some fifty feet away. Miranda and Robin came out and headed toward the main tent, their colorful striped dresses billowing sideways which accentuated their curves.

Sophie showed herself in the doorway of the small tent, probably pausing there as much for effect as because of nerves. A wide band of pearls across her forehead kept her wild dark curls under a bit of control. Her dress wasn’t especially low-cut but the sparkly, white silky thing  clung to her body for dear life, and her feet were bare. This Moroccan thing was a good idea.

 

Go here for more excerpts from a lot of talented writers. I'll be doing my usual round of SSS reading too, so don't sit idle!

Thanks for visiting, it's good to see you.

Don't get in the way of your own writing!

The poll up at Critique Circle asks, What gets in the way of you writing? As of the writing of this post, 71 people chose "Myself. I stress myself out, and suddenly writing becomes a bond labor, a chore, a mechanism of self-torture — rather than a passion."

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Wow, guys. I feel really bad for you if you fall into that category! Not being sarcastic here. It's sad that for many people, there's such an imbalance between everyday, hardworking life and creative pursuits. Creativity is one of the things that makes us fully human. We dream. We need to.

I'm looking for a day job and it about makes me bash my head against a wall. To say it's frustrating only hits the tip of the iceberg. Being able to spend part of my time writing keeps me going. I have a story and characters I am totally in love with and believe in. It's meant to make people look hard at how we live our lives, wrapped in a tale about somebody else's misfortune and eventual coming out of a chrysalis. Without that dream, I would be a lunatic raving in the street.

I know what it's like to want to give up. My personal circumstances are vastly different from where I expected to be at this point in my life, and not in a good way. Writing lets me channel that rather than go off on a bender in some dark bar, but it also gives me hope. It's a burning torch I want to give to society but I have to build it first.

Life is really too short to let your creative self get caught up in avoidable things. Sure you need to do certain things, but don't forget to dream out loud.

Don't let this be you:

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Six Sentence Sunday #20

We're back with more from one of the scenes I wrote because I was in a dry spell for the novel itself. It's not intended to be included in the novel, at least not at this point. This excerpt is an expanded part of the scene here on my blog entitled Sandy and Neal before the wedding (Sandy's wedding to Sophie). Sophie's a rock megastar in her own right.

This scene started with Six Sentence Sunday #14. It takes place several years before Neal proposes to April.

In the scene, Sandy and Neal have traveled to Crescent City, California--Sandy's hometown. Sandy gets up early the morning of the ceremony and asks Neal to come with him to the beach so he can "settle his head." Neal brings his guitar, which he's planning to use at the ceremony (unbeknownst to Sandy). He's just started guitar lessons so he's not very good yet.

At this point, the two guys have been friends for 10 or 11 years. They're in a major rock band together. They've spent a bit of time on the beach then at the diner, and now we skip to the beginning of the ceremony, which takes place right on the beach.
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April whispered, "You look put out or something, honey, are you all right?"

"Just wondering what's keeping Sophie," Neal said. "You'd think this was an international press event."

"Women want to look perfect on their wedding day."

He planted a quick kiss on April's lips. "But nobody beats you."
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Go here for some great SSS excerpts from some very talented folks. It's a simple and elegant concept: sign up at the SSS site, and make sure your blog has six sentences from an original work of yours up by Sunday morning. It's tons of fun to read through the entries and see what other people are up to. 

My heartfelt thanks to everybody who stops by my blog today.

Eight things I love about the internet

Not ten? Well, I ran out of time :D I'm going to do this in list form without numbers, because so much about the net is connected and inter-dependent that I don't feel it's fair to rank things.

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* Search engines. I do use Google almost exclusively but any engine that works similarly will do. I looked up "getting kicked in the balls", and found stuff! People have discussed this subject on the net! (okay so that shouldn't surprise me, given what people are willing to talk about to complete strangers)

* Google. I use it so much because it works for me, but also because it's mostly ad-free. I absolutely hate sites that have pop-ups, drop-downs, moving, speaking bits of crap that I could not possibly care less about. I know they use ads to make money, but do the ads really have to be so flaming irritating??

* Discussion forums. Where I found most of the info I needed on "getting kicked in the balls." Sometimes research is about what other people experience or how they see things, and forums are the go-to resource.

* Google maps and Google Earth. Freaking fantastic. Takes me right to the front door of a specific building I have no other possible way of seeing. I can then describe that door in my WIP, and readers can say "hey, I've seen that door."

* The way it brings writers together and makes everybody stronger. At Critique Circle you can get a huge range of crits and a veritable smorgasbord of helpful resources, with a free account. At Magical Words you can connect with successful writers on a personal level. At The Bookshelf Muse you have an encyclopedia of writing resources and wisdom that, again, are shared for free. A Google search turned up the name of my local writers group, who not only provide awesome crits, but it's so much fun to get together with other writers on a regular, physical basis. Those are just the first ones that popped into my head; there are so many more.

* When I am hopelessly stuck on something in my WIP, I can clear my head by going to, for example, Space.com for astronomy news that never fails to ignite my sense of wonderment. When I'm frustrated with the quality of news reporting in my home country of the US, I go to the BBC for a different perspective or to read about stuff I don't find on US sites. I can see videos of solar flares, not artists' conceptions!

* Youtube. I'm a bit wary of it, because there's a lot of nonsense there, but that's true of the internet in general anyway. I love youtube because I can find videos of, say, people shooting off AK-47s, which I can replay to see how they handle the thing and how the weapon sounds when it's fired--in complete safety.

Photo by yoshiaka/stock.xchng

* I can download music in under a minute and use it to enhance my mood as I write specific scenes. I wrote a pivotal poem for inclusion in my WIP while listening to a Rod Stewart track. The character's voice came out strongly in the poem, and I very much doubt it would have been as good without that enhancement.

What do you guys like best about the net?  I mean, besides the cat videos.

Six Sentence Sunday #19

We're back with more from one of the scenes I wrote because I was in a dry spell for the novel itself. It's not intended to be included in the novel, at least not at this point. This excerpt is an expanded part of the scene here on my blog entitled Sandy and Neal before the wedding (Sandy's wedding to Sophie).

This scene started with Six Sentence Sunday #14. It takes place several years before Neal proposes to April.

In the scene, Sandy and Neal have traveled to Crescent City, California--Sandy's hometown. Sandy gets up early the morning of the ceremony and asks Neal to come with him to the beach so he can "settle his head." Neal brings his guitar, which he's planning to use at the ceremony (unbeknownst to Sandy). He's just started guitar lessons so he's not very good yet.

At this point, the two guys have been friends for 10 or 11 years. They're in a rock band together. They've spent a bit of time on the beach then at the diner, and now we skip right to the beginning of the ceremony, which takes place right on the beach. The excerpt is in Neal's POV.
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Neal adjusted his sunglasses as he stood under the white canvas tent roof. The music was turned up against sound of the roof flapping in the brisk breeze. Nice that the wind had kicked up, but with everybody crowded together, it was kind of claustrophobic.

As far as he could tell, there still wasn’t a cloud to be seen. If he ever did decide to get married, it would probably pour all day.

April squeezed his hand.

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For excerpts from more in progress by other writers, visit Six Sentence Sunday. It's a simple concept but it's tons of fun to see what other people are working on and the wide variety of styles.

Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you next week!

I just need to do research for this scene, that's all! ;D

Here I am writing a rock novel and there's no overt mention of sex until chapter 23! The saying is "sex and drugs and rock & roll" so will people be disappointed with only two out of three?

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Seriously, I didn't write my first sex scene until chapter 23. It just didn't fit. But now one of my two protagonists has alone time with the woman he eventually falls head over heels for, and she becomes a minor character, so it definitely was appropriate.

But I'll confess it was difficult to do because I felt like such a voyeur! It's good to know your characters and all, but aren't there some things we don't really need to know? Maybe. I couldn't think of the scene as a learning moment because, well, there isn't much new info to be uncovered. Both people concerned have agreed that they're doing it because they're lonely and they're attracted to each other.

I've avoided sex scenes in the past because I figured most people know the basics and unless the story is a romance, it wouldn't add anything important. However, a couple years ago, a writing instructor said that he felt sex scenes absolutely add something important, if they're appropriate to the story.

I've been thinking over what he said. Once I reached the point in my story where these two characters come together, I realized that I've spent 20 chapters getting readers emotionally involved with this guy, and now I can't get away with skimming over something so emotionally charged.

But it's a short section, once they get to the bedroom. It's not an erotic romance so I don't feel I need to add many details. It needs more than the usual first-draft tweaking because I felt kind of creepy writing it so it's bound to have a goofy feel. Still, once I got to the end, I understood that it provides a mid-stream minor catharsis for readers. They see he's a nice guy who's been painfully dumped (twice that they know of) and they want him to be happy. It's kind of a calm before the storm, once the story continues.

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So that means that once my other protag gets propositioned by the woman he eventually falls for, I have to show (some of) that too. How interesting, I just realized that both of my guys are not initiating, at least for these particular scenes. Maybe that says something about my psyche, but we probably don't want to go there :D

I'd be really interested in hearing how it went the first time you added a sex scene in a WIP. Were you looking forward to it, did you have it planned out, what did you feel it added to the story?