Writtenwyrdd

Establishing mood & the need for variation

"The hall, seen through the doorway, became darker than the kitchen, where two low cooking fires tossed trembling shadows as well as heat.  Even the wall sconces and the chandelier candles seemed to have guttered and gone out.  From the center of this deeper darkness five pale heads gained in size every moment, until he could make out the glassy eyes within the sunken orbits, eager and hungry in their focus upon him.  Not until they hovered just beyond the doorway did he make out the folds and darts of their black cloaks.  This was the effect they strove for, of course, and though he recognized the manipulation, he could not overcome its dread intent." pp.49-50 of Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost

There are so many ways to embrace variety and to establish the appropriate mood.  But it occurs to me, reading this excerpt above, that when these two points intersect one should be careful to evoke in differing ways, particularly the darker emotions, if we want to engage our readers and make them fall into the mood/emotion we are striving for.

Evoking mood without overdoing it can be pretty difficult.   You can either put off readers by seeming over the top--thereby kicking out of your fictional dream by making them scoff; or by wearing out their sensibilities--too much of a good thing makes it all seem one level.  In dog training, we called that increasing their titration level, the threshold of response.  Just like constantly yelling at your dog or your kids will make them ignore the yelling because it becomes meaningless, maintaining the same level of description, pacing and the same sentence structures becomes like a background noise we quickly ignore, feeling subconsciously that we already know what they are saying.

The human mind (and attention) embraces novelty.  It should go without saying, but really bears repeating:  We writers must provide new stimulations in our stories in order to keep readers engaged.

It's very individual to each story and can depend greatly upon the world you've built and the genre.  But an interesting technique that Gregory Frost uses in his Shadowbridge novels (Lord Tophet is the second in the series) is that of inserting stories.  His main character is a shadow puppeteer, and she is constantly relaying stories which are framed by the main story.  I am not sure I like the technique because I am annoyed when the stories show up; yet it is an effective technique.  I do read them, become immersed in them, and leave them glad I didn't skim or skip.  These stories underscore, point out or foreshadow elements in the main story that are important.  They add depth...and variety.

So hopefully this provides you with a few kernals to chew on.

Cool site redux

Whoa!  Stuff On My Cat has a whole new look! Between Disapproving Rabbits, Cute Overload and Cake Wrecks, there is getting to be too many amusing sites on the web.  This one I thought had died the death of real life intruding; but it's back again.  Read the archives, though.  They're better than the vanilla and candy pink revisionist effort...although this new version is funny, too.

UPDATE:  The link is fixed.   Sorry 'bout dat.

Cool Site

Leigh Russel, whose psychological crime thriller was released in the UK recently, has a nice blog where writing is the topic of discussion.  Check it out here. 

Truth is stranger than fiction (again)

Here's a new ploy you might use in your fiction: A criminal apparently posted an ad on Craig's List for "construction help".  The ad specified a certain outfit, including a respirator mask, and requested that hopeful job seekers wait at a particular corner outside a bank at a particular time.  Then he/she/it proceeded to rob a bank wearing the same outfit.  Presumably, the number of similarly dressed individuals was supposed to screen the heist, allowing for a clean getaway.

I suspect though that if one were to use this in a novel it would be called too implausible.  But, hey, you never know what might come in handy!

Slush for a hobby

An interesting idea, which Editorial Anonymous mentions.  She finds Authonomy.com by Harper Collins to be intriguing and thinks it might actually work.  The premise?  Get people on the web to read the slush pile and recommend the good ones to the publisher.  I immediately came upon a description of an sf tale I would love to read, clicked on it, found the text and started reading.  Had to recommend it, and I hope it comes out some day. 

Cool site & Holiday Baking

A nice site for reference is the Dictionary of Slang.  This particular one is UK-based, but I thought it was a decent resource and wanted to share.  I am sure there are others out there, including the fabulous Wikipedia articles on whatever takes your fance.

Also, I am looking into how to make fondant as a matter of curiosity and because I've been thinking about making something for the annual holiday bash held at my house.  As we are all 50 or older except for me, and I'm the only one who actually drinks alcohol, albeit rarely due to my delicate stomach, it's mostly about the food.  Hell, it's always about the food, even when my beer-brewing and -guzzling pals and I get together down in Western Massachusetts. 

But irregardless of facts, I am considering what dessert fun I can have this year.  Last year was the terrifically awful gingerbread house.  This year, I'm thinking I want to try a fondant-covered cake.  Now, of course I'm one of those obnoxious crafters who insists on reading about it and then going off and doing it myself.  I generally manage to do fairly well at such projects, although the learning curve is a bit less curve-like and more crash-into-tree-like upon memorable occasions.  However, since I learned to do art by doing and managed to do fairly well that way, I can't seem to stop myself.  Heh.

So when I got into reading the Cake Wrecks blog last week, it made me think I Can't Do Worse Than That (despite knowing, Why, yes, I certainly could) I started looking up how to make fondant.  And, because fondant is notoriously awful tasting when I ran across this recipe for Marshamallow Fondant which is both apparently simple to make and delicious, I am going to have to try it. 

I always make a red velvet cake for the holidays.  Now I'm going to have to make a big-ass decorated-with-fondant cake.  Even if it looks awful, it'll be a hoot.  And I'm going to make a bunch of cup cakes and have people decorate them.  Or maybe not.  Might be amusing, though, if I can cozen a few people over to assist in that before the turkey is done.

Mmmm... And you can bet I'll have pictures of the disaster unfolding.

Are you pulling my leg?

"The motion of distant galaxy clusters suggests they are being tugged on by matter from outside hte observable universe, according to Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues.  The results will appear in Astrophysical Journal Letters."  New Scientist, Sept. 27, 2008 edition.

Now that's interesting.  If you combine it with talking suns you get an even more interesting situation.  What if the 'tugging' is the result of thinking universes, hmmm?  Suns pulse to talk, universes tug on each other's pant legs and speak via some odd type of rhthmic code.  

Even better, what tugs a human's pants leg?  A toddler, of course.  See where I'm drifting with this one?  Baby universes that calve off of mommy universes, and they are sort of umbilically attached for a while.  Or perhaps it's a polyp sort of growth branching off the main universe until it becomes self-aware and goes off on its own. 

Or perhaps it is not intelligent, but that's really how universes appear to grow to we humans.  You could even populate your world with the mythology of universal births, a form of religion, mythology, or what have you.  Have a wonderful difference of opinions that aren't just borrowed whole cloth from Earth's myths and ideas.  Extrapolate Earth's mythic tropes to embrace the larger scope of universes, galaxies and stars over planets as gods.  Show how a religion might grow it's mythology and dogma to embrace science and the tropes of scientific beliefs.  Both could be wrong, too, adding even more interest.

You could have a lot of fun with that last one.

Dying cockroach approach

"Using a mirror to create the illusion that a person's paralyzed limb moves in tandem with a healthy one appears to speed recovery from stroke, a Japanese researcher said Friday. The finding showed the optical illusion works faster than conventional treatment and suggests the mind plays a powerful role in the body's recovery, Kazu Amimoto of Tokyo Metropolitan University told the World Stroke Conference in Vienna."  via Yahoo news, a Reuters article dated 9/23/2008

This nifty bit of stuff might come in handy in a story.  I want to tie it to a magical healing process in some way, perhaps thusly: 

Our hero (e.g. someone with a bit of good old common sense) interrupts a magician burning sage and chanting to heal a stroke victim's paralysis.  Into the room he storms, all Indiana Jones-like, to elbow the shaman aside.  Quickly, he bends down, shines a light into the patient's eyes, pressing the flaccid cheek, telling the patient to squeeze his fingers and push against his palm with his toes.  Aha, says he, you have a stroke, Mr. Man and I'll patch you right up.  He covers the eye on the affected side, places a mirror on the bridge of the patient's nose, and has him start waving about the good arm/leg--whereupon the patient is immediately cured and the hero removes the mirror to reveal the patient waving both sets of arms and legs.  (In the Army, we called this the dying cockroach and they made us do this for punishment when we marched badly.  Instead, it was rather hilariously funny.) 

"See," our hero snarls to his stunned audience, "mind over magic every time."  Whereupon he spits on the carpet and stalks off into the sunset, leaving an incense shaman and a grateful patient.

Or similar.

Future foods

Reading about greenhouse gas emissions and discovered that, apparently, food we eat has about twice the carbon footprint as the average household has from driving.  Now, while I don't plan on going vegan, reducing red meat (which is inefficient; only 5 to 25 per cent of ingested nutrients are converted to meat) can have a big effect on environmental impact.

Another thing which may do so is vat-grown meat.

Which brings me to the today's topic.  Means of growing meat in culture are in development.  Currently it involves started a stem cell culture and introducing it to a matrix from which muscle cells will grow in colonies.  (Sound appetizing yet?  Mmmm...) PETA is even offering a $1 million prize to the developer of the first viable process. 

And the term for this is in vitro meat. 

Which got me shaking my head.  So wrong. Like the rampant Uranus jokes, there will be dead baby jokes from this unfortunate coincidencidental overlap of terms.  So wrong...

The ideas.
Given the present world problems of food shortages and water shortages and green house gas emissions and the loss of habitat and plants that are the repository of much of the carbon in the world, what is the use of vat-grown meat?  Well, it isn't necessarily a Soylent Green plot element upon which the entire story depends; but it would be a viable part of a spectrum of things that establish your world and your society in a spec fic novel. 

If your world is dystopic, could be part of a social conflict where a person wants a real steak and does something drastic to get real meat.

Or could be that cloned meat causes a physiological response (horror plot!) where people crave something because they aren't getting it from never-lived meat--e.g. a form of zombiism or some such.  Or what if a disease (zombiism, Mad Cow 300x, or what have you) develops from the lack of some unbeknownst factor/chemical/essence?

It might also be just a fact of life and get barely a mention, but other repercussions that stem from the advent of cloned meat could be seen.  Social differences:  The poor and the idealistic eat the lab-formed foods.  The ownership of cattle becomes rather like horses today: purely esthetic and with no real purpose, Bossy being regarded as a pet, with miniature versions of them raised for urban use, rather like how pot-bellied pigs have become house pets, and miniature horses grace the lawn in a neighbor's house in my small town.  (Really.  There's a mini pony in my neighbor's yard.)

But the ramifications socially, scientifically, economically and whatnot from a drastic change in how we eat?  Endless permutations stemming from the changes. 

Have fun with this one! 

Source:  New Scientist, "Dinner's Dirty Secret" 13Sept2008

Cool Site - Great White Snark

Amusing commentaries for your inner geek can be found at Great White Snark.  Also lots of funny pictures.  Found via Cake Wrecks, which I've mentioned before. 

Getting appropriately political

I have found our future leader.  Seriously.  This guy will straighten us all out so we know exactly where we stand.  (Isn't that Reagan's neck in that first photo?)

Star talk?

"Could aliens be "tickling" stars to communicate via a galaxy-spanning internet?"  This is the fascinating question that is in the September 13, 2008 issue of New Scientist. 

Since no faster-than-light travel also means no faster-than-light communications, using a source of light such as a star would be about as fast as one could expect to do so.  (Barring the maybe-possible of go-arounds such as wormholes for ftl travel.  We'll pretend these aren't possible, though.  'Cause they aren't.  Yet.)

The article says

Cepheids [a type of star] are so luminious they can be seen as far away as 60 million light years.  They also pulse like clockwork.  The reserachers say that an energy kick at a crucial instant could advance the star's pulsation, and so shorten the cycle, just as an electric shock to a human heart can advance a heartbeat.  This kick could take the form of a pulse of energy dumped into the heart of the star, such as an intense burst of 1-teraelectronvolt neutrinos.

The normal and shortened cycles could be used to encode binary 0s and 1s.  There are over 500 cepheid in the Milky Way, and countless more in nearby galaxies, so data could be shuttled around as in a computer network.

Ideas.
So many.  Frank Herbert had a universe where stars were sentient beings in Whipping Star.  I've always thought that was a novel concept.  But if stars were intelligent, how would they communicate?  Voila ici, the Morse Code of the stars: binary flash speak!  (I haven't reread the book in several years, so I cannot recall the means Herbert used for the stars to speak; the old grey matter thinks it had to do with light frequency, but I don't recall for sure.)

Or we have an ancient galactic civilization which has expanded to other galaxies.  Perhaps they are merely long-lived; perhaps they are going extra-galactic and they need to have a means of talking to the people in the gap between galaxies.

Or maybe these are the roadsigns to other would be travellers, aka Eat At Galactic Joe's

Or, and this is of course the most intriguing one, perhaps the article has it right and the stars are networked into a universe which is a computer!  Which spawns a whole subset of ideas.  We could be all part of a machine and not know it (Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss, The God Game by Andrew Greeley, the movie Tron, etc.)  Or we are more insignificant in the galactic scale of things than we thought, which we learn when we discover that the language of stars--and hilarity results as mankind undergoes a seachange of philosophy or crashes/responds apathetically and dies off.  Or we (and I like this one in particular) are 'adjusted' so that our role in the universal computer enhances the function.

However, as is noted further in the article, "But it is like someone in Marconi's time predicting future radio broadcasters will use giant spark-gap transmitters to reach audiences in large cities....Better technology means higher efficiency, so using an entire star...seems unlikely."

Sebastian II

Haha! Fooled you!  This is 'merely' another Goth rock song.  Charles Gramlich was blogging about mood in writing last week.  Mood is extremely important for dark stories in particular, I feel.  And Goth music does inspire that I Need To Slash My Wrists Now feeling of impending doom, gloom and despair and the serious need for alcohol. 

Works for me! Seriously, I do find the right mood music is conducive to evoking the proper feelings in the scene I'm trying to write.
And if you have high speed internet, you might find you like streaming radio. There are a number of sites out there, but I like this site. Pandora rocks! Create various radio stations of your very own. Tell it when you don't like a song and when you do, and it will offer up similar tunes for you.

Books for Soldiers

Found a worthy site to mention:  Books for soldiers, where you can donate books to armed forces members overseas.  Soldiers can request specific books, even, and have them sent.  The service seems like a good one, but is having financial difficulties and is requesting donations in order to keep their doors open. 

I am not affiliated with these folks, but their being a book-related site, I'm inclined to support them a wee bit.  :)

For the record...

Reading a paranormal romance which I am rather enjoying.  But when CPR is required, they leave the patient on the bed. Hmmm....

Now, having just had CPR certification, I can say with certainty that my previous understanding is still unchanged:  YOU CANNOT DO CPR WITH YOUR PATIENT ON A MUSHY SURFACE.  Put them on the floor!

Reality check over.  Back to book.

Philosophical conundrums and your plot

Not sure why, but it never occurred to me (until this afternoon) to consider philosophical nuts for story ideas.  Conflict is generally considered to be when what the character desires is limited or obstructed by circumstances or problems; but if the conflict involves a decision which has no desirable outcome, we are approaching philosophy.

Such is the problem I am facing in a short story I am trying to finish.  This would be The Redemption, which I posted an excerpt of a few months ago.  I've been letting it hang fire since Spring because I realized I didn't have a clue what the conflict was, even though I knew what the events were.  (Isn't that an odd thing?) I've been sitting her all afternoon, trying to take what I feel is a great start and make it to the end.  And I'm stuck. Stuckety stuck stuck, damn it.

So of course I start wasting time reading science articles on New Scientist, National Geo, Science Daily and all my favorite writing and time-wasting blogs. 

And I hit PAYDIRT!!! (Sqeeing sound as voice rises in pitch.)

I found an article on how the brain works at How Stuff Works, and started reading about The Trolley Problem.  Essentially, the set up is you have a runaway trolley and a person who has two possible options to stop the trolley and save the five passengers.  First, she might pull a lever and send the trolley onto a side track where it will safely stop--except there's a guy standing there and to act will get him killed because there is no time to alert him.  Second, she might push a big guy in front of the trolley becaue he's big enough to jam up the wheels and stop the trolley, which would, of course, kill him in the process.  Which is morally acceptible?  (Most are more likely to say the first option is moral, the second is not, the distinction being the first choice allows a person to die while the second one is actual deliberate murder.)

But I contend a third option is possible:  The watcher sacrifices herself.  She sees both options as bad, but manipulates the situation so that her moral compass is not wavering from her moral sense. 

And this solved the conundrum for my character, who cannot resolve disparate demands on her sense of obligation and honor.  She chooses a form of sacrifice.

Which brings to mind a thought:  Philosophical problems probably can be translated to spec fic stories fairly readily.  Where mankind meets moral choices, we have conflict that is rooted in the guts and which should tap into that strong reaction we like our stories to receive.  Or I hope so.

As I haven't studied philosophy at all with the exception of Humanities in high school and college, I admit I come to this discussion unarmed, lol; but I think there's a lot to be said for this.  Because philosophy isn't all that far removed from mythology, which addresses a lot of the conflicts and issues that mankind finds in daily living.

Thoughts?  Reading material you want to share?  I'm all ears!

Reference:  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I'm having a bad week.

Well, as expected the new internet connection switch is all fouled up.  Big time.  I spent four hours on the tech support line last night and still can't get on the internet.  And they insist that it's my hardware at fault.  Well, how would that be when their own set up disk can't recognize the frigging router they sent me?  Plus, my ethernet has been shot on the main computer which I didn't realise since I have a wireless router.  (And getting the wireless working again is an entirely different story.)  OMG this is even worse than Iimagined.  And I don't have any days off to speak of in which to deal with this crap.  On top of that it is Autumn and I have to get some work done outside (specifically patching and sealing the driveway (a huge job when you have a couple hundred feet of asphalt) and staining the deck.

On a good note, they sent me for CPR and first aid certification yesterday so I was able to get to the post office and mail off the prizes for you guys!

I am done whining, winging, crying and complaining about my internet.  But I am not done being peeved!  LOL.  Anyhow, I'm offline for email and web posting except when at work.  So I may run out of posts before I get back up!

Interrelatedness of ideas

"Put eternal inflation and the string landscape together, and you have a vast array of universes with almost any imaginable properties. Universes of antimatter. Universes ruled by magnetism, or filled with nothing but black holes. Universes with all possible values of the cosmological constant."  Stephen Battersby, "Awaiting a Messenger from the Multiverse," New Scientist, 12July08 

Quantum physics again supports the many and varied insistances of spec fic that insist anything is possible.  Heh.  Always nice being able to say nya nya to people who thought sf was stoopid when I was a kid.

Seriously, though, you can object to the rather disordered appearance of the various theories being bandied about, but they do appear to be approaching a rational explanation for the beginnings of the universe.  Pretty impressive, even if it takes twelve years of advanced maths to understand the slightest bit of the description. 

Now if they can just find a way of ftl travel...

Ideas.
I've been thinking a lot lately about future worlds for sf.  About extrapolating from current tech trends and considering where it might lead people as consumers.  Because, it occurs to me belatedly, the things that sell are the things that grow wildly and unpredictably.  You get a trend for interactive toys and you get from Teddy Ruxspin to full-size cybernetic dinosaurs (if you marry the recovery of dna from ancient fossils with invitro with genome mapping with a surplus of cash for economic lords of the land with the human tendency to flaunt their wealth and spoil their children in Western cultures.)

You can see where I am getting at with this post: Looking at current trends and combining them with other current trends or breaking (or about-to-break) research/information.  Politics, economics, human nature, science and all that stuff combines interrelatedly.

Don't forget to consider how a big change in your world would have affected other areas.  You can't have a trend in fountain of youth tech without having issues like right to death and reproduction cropping up; nor can you have ftl travel without issues of resource consumption and ecological issues (rape of earth resources and the shipping of them to other planets) coming up. 

Movies can get away with glossing over these things; but a book, with its slower-moving action and greater room for extrapolation, cannot.  And it can be to your worldbuilding advantage to use this stuff, too.  Versimilitude and wonder can be the result.

Plot driven vs. Character driven

You likely have heard these terms bandied about the net with regards to novel structure.  I've always had trouble determining which one applied because there seems to be some overlap between plot driven, because events always cause other events, making it feel like every story is plot-driven.  But there is a distinction.  So where does the character driven bit come in to play?  Apparently it is about the opportunity for the character to make choices.

The book Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt has an excellent explanation on page 5, which I now share with you. The clarity of this explanation is awesome.

Plot driven
"In a plot-driven story the events of the story move the story forward and cause the character to react to those events.  Characters are secondary to the plot.  They act in accordance with the plot and do not create events or situations on their own.

In a sense, the plot takes over like a tornado.  If a tornado suddenly comes through a town out of nowhere, the characters can't stop it; they have to brace themselves and react to what ever happens around them.  They don't cuase the tornado--the tornado causes them to react to it."

Character driven
"In a character-driven story the character moves the story forward through action adn choices.  She initiates the events of th esotry and causes the events to happen.  Each secene is instigated by the characters within it.

If  a character chooses to stay home one day and work in her garden, no event or situation will stop her from doing so, but another character may try to make her feel guilty for it.  This may cause her to decide not to garden, but it is totally her choice even if it seems like someone else is manipulating her.

If a tornado comes through town, the charcters will always have the time needed to decide what to do.  The focus is in the characters an dhow and why they make their decisions to stay or leave.  These decisions have the power to move the plot in different directions.  The characters have options and choices that affect the outcome."

Frustration

Been trying, amidst the chaos of zero days off (well, Sunday, which was so full of chores it almost didn't count, except I did write for four hours) to get a short story draft completed.  It's one I started last Spring, a lyrical style of mythic fantasy.  I love it, I know where I want to go...yet I cannot seem to get the sagging middle to work.

Now, despite my sense of direction and the elements that I know need to be in the story, I am not able to get the middle written.  So I am basically in the head-to-desk-SLAM!-and-repeat-SLAM! mode.

Frustrating.  But I am, by all that is unholy, holy or anywhere in between, going to get this story written this week.  Or maybe next.

Beginnings have footprints

I don't know the provenance of this photo; it was included with a number of other make-you-smile photos in an email. 

But it serves to underscore today's point:  Beginnings are a promise to your reader.  You have to ensure you don't sell them an entirely different story in that first paragraph, that first few hundred words than you end up telling them. 

Keep the beginning promise in mind as you write the rest.
It shouldn't need to be said that your beginning must promise what you actually create for your readers.  Right?  Am I right?  *chirping of crickets*  Oh thank goodness.  I thought you were serious for a minute there!

And, whether you make the decision for a slower, more detailed opening that gives ambiance and mood for your reader before the action starts, or whether you opt for that in media res opening where bullets or swords or nunchuks are flying, you have to begin the book so that it forms a piece with the rest.  It needs to flow together seamlessly.  (I suppose the fact that prologs often don't is why so many people hate them.  I personally love prologs that at first appear to have nothing to do with the first chapter but give me a hint how things will change.  To each their own!)

Begin as you mean to go on.
If you start a book, as in Lovely Bones, with a murdered girl speaking about her murder, you are leading your readers to expect several things. First, that it's a supernatural tale, since it is told by the dead girl. Second, that it will be about her murder. Third you tell us that this isn't a vengeful ghost story; for, if Susie is angry, it isn't overwhelming - there is a sense of humor in her.  (See this entry for a talk on that and other beginnings.)

Likewise, if you start a science fiction novel with your character in a barn milking a cow, it will likely upset the gal who bought it based on skimming that first page if you, on page three, have the alien overlords firehose the neighborhood with ray guns. Even worse, have your hero pull his homemade nuclear device out of his back pocket and save the day with it. (Even worse than that, having a homemade nuclear device in a back pocket - bad science.)

Basically, you make a promise with the manner and style of your beginning. If you don't follow through, with rare exceptions you will be upsetting/disappointing readers. It is possible to start SF with an agrarian scene; but you must be careful to foreshadow or involve elements that give the majority of readers an understanding that it's science fiction.

Lots of things give a clue. The words you create for this world, the names of characters, the tone of your language. Most of this is basic, but it is hard to keep all of it in mind in trying to also find a hook that grabs the reader and sucks them into your fictional world.

This post is partially taken from a post done in August 2006. 

I don't know why I keep thinking about beginnings.  Perhaps it is because I'm always jotting down beginnings.  Or the fact that I have over 30 novel beginnings collecting dust until I get to them.  (In fact I wrote down notes for two new story ideas just today.)  If I got around to finishing all of the ideas I've knocked into a rough outline with a couple of chapters I'd have more books than Asimov. 

Science gone awry.

Okay, you  might recall the CERN was worrisome to a number of folks who suspected it might have created black holes and destroyed the Earth when it was initiated last month.  Well, this is their story.

Just thought you guys might get a kick out of it.

For those of you who travel

Living here on the Canadian border, I am aware of various trends and issues regarding travel in the Northern Hemisphere.

Specifically, U.S. citizens didn't used to need a passport to take a cruise to Bermuda or to travel to Mexico or to Canada.  Now you need a passport if you are flying and various approximations of proof of citizenship if you are crossing landborders.  (Although in this 'interim period' up until 6/1/2009 a copy of  your birth certificate and government issued picture i.d. is acceptable*.)

Effective next June 1st, however, a passport is required...unless (and here is the confusing exceptions list) you have another acceptable form of identification.  Most people do not know about these options, so I'm sharing.

What I am specifically touting here, for your travelling pleasure, is the US passport card, which you can get in addition to a passport for $20, or which you can get instead of a passport for something like $50.  Applications can be obtained online or you can pick them up at the post office.  The advantage of these is that the passport card is the size of a drivers license and fits in your wallet.  And if you have an expired passport that is less than fifteen years out of date, my understanding (from actually calling the Dept. of State) is that you can still get only the passport card at the $20 rate.  Any older and you will have to pay the full pop.

There are other acceptible documents which are only relevant to vetted persons who travel frequently across the landborders.  These are called Trusted Traveler Programs:  FAST for commercial operators; SENTRI for commuters across the Mexican border; NEXUS for the Canadian border crossers.  If any of these apply to you you can look them up via the acronym.  They all cost about $50 and may be obtained by US permanent residents and Canadian or Mexican citizens.  There are other benefits too such as special commuter lanes to expedite the cardholder's entry, and you can use SENTRI and NEXUS for flights as well, with certain additional requirements including, last I heard, an iris scan and other biometric data.  Oh, and to confuse you even more?  I just learned that the NEXUS card can be used for boaters on border lakes for remote entry, e.g. they call in and report their activities!  So confusing...

I know you are all excited by this stuff.  But I hear so much confusion around the "what identification to bring" question that I thought I'd muddy clarify the waters a little more.

* This does not apply to those who are required to carry immigration documentation or passports, such as those who are not either Mexican, Canadian or US citizens.  And I am sure some of those folks may require their passports.  Diplomatic types and crewmembers (ship or aircraft) come to mind, and I am sure there must be other categories of traveller that fall into this I-do-but-I-don't area. 

Musical Monday - Catfight!

In case, you know, you needed this...

The Morse Code Alphabet
A  .- B  -... C  -.-. D  -.. E  . F  ..-. G  --. H  .... I  .. J  .---	K  -.- L  .-.. M  -- N  -. O  --- P  .--. Q  --.- R  .-. S  ... T  -	U  ..- V  ...- W  .-- X  -..- Y  -.-- Z  --.. 0  ----- 1  .---- 2  ..--- 3  ...--	4  ....- 5  ..... 6  -.... 7  --... 8  ---.. 9  ----. Fullstop  .-.-.- Comma  --..-- Query  ..--..

Found at glassgiant.com where they have a Morse code translator.

Sweet humor

For endless laughs, you might want to check out Cake Wrecks, a site dedicated to memorializing the absolute worst of the cake decorating offerings out there on the web.  I couldn't look away.  It's like a train wreck that causes diabetes.  Especially t his post. Or, um, this one.  Yeah, that last one.  Definitely.

Belated Talk Like A Pirate Day Post

Yaar, mateys!  Thought you might get a kick out of this song, Zombie Pirates In Love.  You can listen or download it at the link.  To get your pirate on all year 'round, you can check out the original Talk Like A Pirate Day web site.  I gather they talk piratical all year long.

The Lyrics:
You've heard of Captain Blackbeard,
How he had a dozen wives,
Well, we've got something more weird,
And it's surely changed our lives.
You may not think us gentle or kind,
But we're all gallant swains,
We admire a lady for her mind,
Or more precisely her BRAINZ!

Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love,
We used to be normal buccaneers
Till those lights came from above,
Our ship met a glowing fog one night,
And we came out with an appetite
For human flesh, if it's Miss Right...
Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love.

We've got that rakish swagger,
And we've got that roguish charm,
We've got that bug-eyed stagger,
And we've got somebody's arm.
Now, you may think you're faster
Than a zombie on a boat
But all we need's a pastor
And you're Mrs. Undead Cutthroat.

Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love,
We may be dead, but we'll be wed
When pushing comes to shove,
Come on, me beauty, take a chance
On eternal love and true romance,
At the wedding we'll do the Thriller dance....
Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love.

Our honeymoon will be a terror
Of connubial bliss
For no bride's mother can prepare her
For a night like this,
In matrimony holy
Our bones will groan and creak
And if we both chew slowly
We could make it last all week.

So let's hear all the cannons roar and
Let's all celebrate.
Raise the Jolly Roger, Corman,
I've acquired a mate.
You'll be my wife long after life,
You'll always have my heart,
We'll keep love fresh with living flesh
Until we fall apart.

Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love,
We'll roam the sea eternally,
My rotting turtle dove,
It's not the life you might have had,
But zombie pirating ain't all bad,
And I can't wait to eat -- meet! your mom and dad --
Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love.
Zombie pirates in love, yo ho!
Zombie pirates in love.
Yo, ho, yo, ho, we're zombie pirates in love!

Mmmmkay...

After I mop up the drool I'm gonna name all my heroes Sebastian!

Friggin' Awesome!

Check out this video Dwight sent me of  a robot under development.  It's called Big Dog, and it can keep it's footing on ice, after it's been almost knocked over, and while carrying about 350 pounds! 

After you see Big Dog in action, you will probably have a million tech application ideas for your speculative fiction writing pleasure.  Awesome.

I'd make a list of possibles, but where would I stop?  It's also slightly amusing due to the fly buzzing sound when the gas power is on. 

Vonnegut's rules via Stephen Parrish

Stephen Parrish has a really cool blog on writing.  This post in particular has a lot to offer in terms of plotting your  novel so your reader can't put it down. He paraphrases Vonnegut's rules for writing a great novel. 

Oh, and take the Horror I.Q. Test at Horror Garage's site.  Be sure your sound is on for the creepy music!

Let the embarrasment begin! (A meme)

I threatened some while back to share some of my childhood scribbling.  I dug out my journal from 1977.

And I tag ALL OF YOU to share at least a few hundred words of something you wrote when you were a kid.  Anything, so long as you do NOT edit!

Okay, here goes, about 330 words of pure drivel.  It's--ta da!--my oldest science fiction story, never (thankfully) finished.  I recycled the character and the general idea into something else, though.

Kanda too felt the heat, even in the shade before Ali Benhana's Exotic Emporium.  She rattled her wrist chains, feeling them slip against the sweaty flesh beneath, thinking of the several methods she could use to rid herself of them.  Pointless, since a slave was conspicuous on Witchblood.  Unless there was a way to get some clothing the synmu couldn't walk across the square without being accosted.  Nude exotic females in the central square were slaves, and exotics were always valuable enough for a reward at their return...

Human nature often had a way of irritating Kanda, especially when it worked against her; she kicked the dirt in pique, jerking the chain linking her ankles.  The sound and movement caught the attention fo the guard, sitting on a stool against the 'dobe wall of the shop, wide-angle paralysis rifle suddenly trained on her.  The fat, turbaned Ali Benhana, the synmu's erstwhile [ed. ack! I didn't know what this word meant back then, obviously! I thought it meant 'supposed'!] also looked up from his game of cherkha, an almost pained expression on his sweat-polished face.

The girl read the reactions from face and b ody, carefully avoiding the use of esper as she quieted down again.  Things would be worse if that talent was known, too.  As it was, the girl had already exposed her self-sufficiency and the slight consolation she allowed herself at the other's fear and worry was little.  She had not planned on being taken to the slave market when on the pirate ship Shennanigan; Kanda had only wanted to escape the physical violations of rape.  Now, however, she was a known fighter , a troublemaker; hobbled and even a little humbled because of her stupidity, Kanda was now on Witchblood. She should have expected it, for this synmu body was technically that of an exotic mutant, and hence highly prized and valuable, not to mention noticeable.

This was why Kanda was angered by human nature; she hadn't included greed as a factor until too late.

Truly mortifying stuff, this.  You may now laugh.  But I did eventually learn to write somewhat better than this.  So much to blush at:  The smeerp of cherkha (checkers derivative); the goofy names of Witchblood, Ali Benhana (I was picturing some Arabic style open market, thus it had to be an Arabic name, so stupid); and later on you learn the money is Italian-derivative fiorinetti, which is from florins.  *eye roll*  Such a paucity of elegance, such stilted speech, such overdependence upon multisyllabic verbiage!  I could cringe, but I'm laughing instead.  When I wrote it, I thought this was good!  ROFL!  Still, the synmu idea is pretty good and I've reused it.

Self-confidence

Good thing I don't believe my own snarkiness.  Inverting my attempt at humor, do you regularly go over old ideas, failed ones, and consider what doesn't work, what you wanted to do, and what surprises you?

Maybe you might do so in odd moments, to stir up the bottom of the pond and see what floats to the surface.  Maybe you'll find some really lively fishies you didn't know were there!

My poetry professor in college suggested we jot down notes and keep copies of early drafts.  She also had a file for Failed Poems.  These were great sources of future pieces.  It works.  You  might try it with oddments and scraps of your own writing.  Keep a journal and glance through it.  Write free verse. 

But letting one's thoughts be too settled, stagnant--it can choke your writing.  it can choke your creativity.

On the other hand, you could just go do some other hobby for a bit and rejuvenate your enthusiasm!

Happy writing!

Say what??!!

My short-listed flash piece has been accepted and will be published this Fall.  Maybe I should write a bit more short stuff.  Or at least finish the three short stories I started last Spring... Now I have to decide if I want to share my real i.d....

Drawing is another oddment from the sketchbook. 

Snafu alert!

Sorry, gang, but I won't get prizes mailed on Friday as expected.  Just got volunteered for a shift and won't have a day off until the 30th. 

Bare bear(s)

Something I scribbled in charcoal in 1994. 

I'm reminded of colloquialisms.  Here in Maine, there's a tendency to say plurals as singular.  I specifically note it in collective nouns and animals.  "One bear, two bear, three bear, four..."  Or "I saw two herd of deer this morning."  Even, "We drank a couple beer apiece."

Charles found the saying, "Jeezum crow," which I presume is used instead of "Jesus Christ" to be intriguing; and I always loved the rarely heard, "By jingy!"  Not sure where that comes from, but I presume a euphemism for something even more colorful and not fit for mixed company once upon a time.

I like fantasy or science fiction that has a dash of such sorts of language uniqueness.  Ear candy, if you will. Uniqueness, things that salt the prose and give it personality that earns the reader's trust or their loyalty.  Their willingness to perservere to the end of the book, if you will.

Artistic metaphore.  If you will permit a tangent, take a close look at the drawing above.  Will you note that I never outline the animals?  That there are no outlines at all, just shading and lines to indicate fur.  Many beginning artists outline their subjects, and this is the biggest lie their unpracticed eyes tell them: That there are edges to things in a drawing, that there are crisp, hard lines when there are not.  Yes, you can draw them that way, but it's pretty simplistic when you are drawing to do it this way.

Of course, there are no hard and fast rules that always apply.  Just like writing.  It's the media (genre) and the story (subject) and theme (lighting, colors) that dictate the choices, in large part.

Just once...

So now you know. 

A menage

A humorous cartoon via Laughingwolf regarding beginnings;

Sex Scenes at Starbuck's post on Painting The Air, which speaks of writing through a lush and lovely artistic metaphor;

Dwight used to have a great post about openings, but I'll have to settle for my post regarding them here, where I list the Ten Most Common Story Openings (paraphrased from Julie Earhart via Dwight);

WriterJen's thoughts on Voice;

And a lovely new discovery, the Context SF blog, in particular this entry, which I quote below.  Have a lovely weekend of writing!

Speculative fiction in all its forms is a literature of freedom, freedom for the author to lose the chains of conventional thought, and freedom for the reader to lose themselves in discovery.  David Wyatt

An amusing time waster

Try this to kill a couple of minutes.  Be sure the sound is off if you are at work!

I am sad...

I cannot get the time off for WorldCon in Montreal next Summer. :(  And I am suffering from migraines, which (although dampened almost to non-existence by the 3 meds I take to tame them)  leave me light sensitive, nauseated and with the weirdest damned head.  Not so much pain as being unable to think clearly.  Might I have some cheese with that whine?

Contest results!

Sorry, I had to share one of the demotivators I subbed to EE's blog.  What can I say? I had all these photos of cactus and nary a use for 'em...

Aaaaanyhow, I received six entries for the contest in honor of the 2-year blogoversary.  I liked them all, and find it difficult to choose a clear winner. 

Scott from Oregon:  Establishes a great setting and a lot about the characters and made me want to read more.  Can't imagine the havoc of a lit torch when the guy falls off the ladder onto the scrapheap, but something about your not-so-nice character grabs me. 

Charles Gramlich: I could draw that landscape, I think.  And I loved that last line!

Bernita:  Lush and lovely.  I can practically hear Clannad crooning in the background.

Gutterball:  I'd not choose eternity there, either!  Pretty close to a finished flash story there.

Whirlochre:  Your usual bizarre entrapment of the mind...and carpet shampooing.  (I begin to think you have a fetish.) 

Sylvia:  Nice stuff!  I can picture the disaster and the bitterness of your character comes through nicely.  A great sense of tragic backstory, pendulous over the pov character.

Like I said, all great stuff.  So I copped out and decided to pull numbers from a hat.  Then I felt guilty for copping out and decided I'd have to make a Decision.  So, based purely on my visceral reaction to the snippets and not the wearing of any editorial hat, I call it a tie between Scott and Bernita, and Whirlochre gets the prize for making me chuckle.  (If you don't want a coffee mug that's likely to get broken in the Queen's mail, WO, I'll send you a print, too.)

So congrats to the winners and do send me your snail mail addys and I'll get the goodies in the mail in a week or so when I have another day off! 

Such great stuff!

Well, seeing as I only had a handful of entries and all of them were good, I'll give out a first and second prize.  All the writing was lovely stuff, and it'll take a day or so for me to think it over.  Thanks everyone for your good wishes and the entries if you submitted!

The final straw

Are we building an extinction debt? "Which means," [Steven] Gaines said, "that by going in and mucking up the system, we may have already created the setting where too many species have been packed in, and we just haven't waited long enough to see these extinctions start to happen.  Science Daily

In the cited Science Daily article, scientists speculate about the effect of human introductions of species into island ecologies.  The evidence is that the net change in the environments of islands hasn't been that drastic.  But it's not that simple.  Basically, the question is whether or not we haven't had time to see the long-term results of ecological changes; or whether the biospheres are undersaturated with life, the niches aren't all filled, and our interference is actually not harmful (or possibly beneficial) in the long term.

How this relates to spec fic.
Well, it occurs ot me that a story might be predicated upon humanity assuming one option in this study and finding out the opposite is true.  To whit:

• What if your hero is trying to solve an ecological dilemma on a terraformed world and the common belief is that more variety is beneficial and he/she adds one species too many, thereby proving the opposite argument is true?  (And I'm not talking a snakehead fish or something that agressive, but something more subtle, like a simple seed-eating songbird or a mosquito that transports a bird virus to humans unexpectedly.)
• What if the misunderstanding of how much is too much leads to a spin on evolution, a reaction where DNA decides for itself that things need to change?  (I heard in college of a theory by someone whose name escapes me that life is nothing more than DNA's attempts to replicate itself, that life is essentially extraneous.)
• Mankind takes up genetic engineering with glee and abandon.  The resulting mix of genotypes escapes to the wild, and the cross-pollination begins a massive collapse of the environment...or does it?  Something is going on in the woods and jungles of Future Earth, and when man knows about it, something comes from The Green and it's hungry/angry/wants human women to breed with.  (Atomic horror movie theme music in the background here.)

• There's a bioterrorist group that keeps pushing the envelope by jiggering with environmental balances, say something like Earth First but with the intention of improving the world's systems until mankind is unable to keep frigging with the environment.  And the final straw is when the world produces something monstrous, like the real, living biosphere of Gaia.