Science Fiction & Fantasy author
Think about a dream you had recently (if you remember your dreams). What about it carried the strongest emotional tug. Focus in on that and describe it with as much detail as you can. Try to recapture everything that carried emotion, evoked emotion or still creates a stir in your mind. If you are not a person who remembers your dreams, how about a day dream? The main point is to locate the strongest point of emotion and put that across.
Have you noticed that tissue boxes have become decorator accents? I only mention this as I have spent the past three days nearly married to my tissue box due to a cold/flu hybrid determined to leave me bed bound. I’ve been free to ponder the workings of the evolution of sales and the degree to which various necessities (yes, I consider the tissue to be a necessity) have taken to increase their profit. I am on the verge of believing that all these colds are merely the production of some very inventive advertising: minions (possible students earning money for college anyway they can) out wiping cold germs on any and all frequently touched surfaces. Herbert’s The White Plague comes to mind. I never will look at paper money the same way after reading that book.
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| Blurry tissue box. |
Okay, I am tired and working with a throbbing headache that has partially convinced me that I am on my way to a sinus infection. I am following my usual combative measures against the complete overthrow of my sinus system: vitamin C, Cold Ease cherry flavored cough drops every six hours, a Reliv shake twice a day, lots of sleep, and most emphatically, absolutely no grading or lesson planning allowed.
Dig out an old photo of when you were a kid. Write about the moment it was taken. Imagine the image in black and white whether it is or not. Keep your descriptions of colors in the grey scale. Go for the shadows, the bright spots; enrich your description by looking at the sharpness of the lines, the feelings the picture evokes and the story it is ready to tell.
I have spoken before about backing up one’s computer regularly (post Back up Your Computer). I have four of a seven book series drafted on my computer, so not doing an occasional back up would be downright silly of me. However, for convenience sake, I also keep my documents on an external hard drive. The drive that is inside my computer case only holds my programs. But the external drive has my documents. My father, who was an electrical engineer and computer builder in his retirement, felt this was essential to increase security, so I have been in the habit for a long time of keeping these two items separate in case of a computer virus or crash. (In the early days of computer ownership, I had to partition my hard drive to create this kind of separateness. I like an external drive much better for the reasons I mention below.)
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| Internal drive in external case |
Well, that habit paid off recently when my all-in-one computer’s monitor began to fail. Sure my files are saved, but if I can’t see them, what good are they? I can’t even run a back up or open them up and print them if the monitor won’t display. When my daughter’s computer suffered this same problem a couple years back, I had to open the computer up, pull the hard drive and insert it into an external drive case. Sure this is no big deal (though it took me some time I didn’t have handy to pull the drive, order the drive case and get them together), but when my computer began to falter, all I had to do was unplug the external drive full of my work and plug it into my laptop. Bingo, complete access to all my work, which, of course, is also backed up on my WD storage drive.
I suppose one could say I am a bit over cautious, but I’ll get the last laugh later.
Another advantage: you know that silly question about what do you grab if your house is on fire? Well, chances are I can grab an external drive faster than I can carry out a computer or even a laptop.
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| Red flowers to right. |
Open a fiction book to somewhere in the middle. Pick a page. The first image you find is the starting image in your writing. Take it from there.
If nothing inspires you, start with the red flowers to the right.
As I have mentioned before, I am working on a revision of the first novel in my Students of Jump. One of the changes I am making is running the two timelines (1979 & 2275) adjacent to each other. I am in the middle of a decision. Should both run chronologically or should one (the 1979 timeline) run chronological, while the future timeline runs non-linear, different scenes appearing based on a commonality. I like how a feature in common brings in a future event that the earlier time event is a result of. At the same time, I worry about my reader getting confused because the events in the future do not run consecutively. Maybe I can explain it like this:
Basic linear plot: Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, gets girl, looses girl, gets girl back, they live happily ever after. (Let this be the chronological 1979 timeline.)
Non-linear plot: Boy loses car keys, Boy needs to take car downtown, Boy cartwheels over sleeping dog, boy grabs keys off counter, boy must find another way to get to town, boy buys new car, Boy needs new pair of pants. (non-consecutive 2275 and happens both in the future and before the 1979 events would occur.)
With one linear and one non-linear, they might look like this.
Boy loses car keys, Boy meets girl, boy needs to take car downtown, boy falls for girl, boy cartwheels over sleeping dog, boy gets girl, boy grabs keys off counter, boy loses girl , boy must find another way to get to town, boy gets girl back, boy buys new car, they live happily ever after, boy needs new pair of pants.
In order to get the girl, the boy must need a pair of pants and must lose his keys, but these events do not occur in the same time period. One entirely precedes the other.
Is this confusing? Would it make for a confusing novel? You see my dilemma. I won’t know the answer until I put it completely together. Revise that, it is currently in this form. It is me that is confused.
Also note, these are not the actual plots of my novel. Hmmm.