Six Sentence Sunday – The Storm Mirror 4

First six. Second six. Third six.

So, Melvin is at the village market, and finding out more about a possible reason for the storm that killed his brother…

“Well, I don’t believe that I’ve ever heard any of the witch’s name,” Auntie said, smiling up at him.

“I asked a few times, but she said that for her kind, names had great power, and asked me every time to call her Sunshine. She lives in a big grey house up on the cliff-top, and used to pay me in the most creative and splendid ways for my most unusual weeds. Until – just after the New Year, she told me that my services were no longer required. It was a few months after that the first storms came, but you know what? Whenever there’s a bad one, the storm clouds don’t seem to come from over the water, or from the lowlands, but they just sort of appear at the cliff-top.”

Not blogfesting today – again.

I’d hoped to join into the I’m hearing voices blogfest late with a flash fiction, but it was a long day at work and I just don’t think I’m up for a flash fiction now, sigh. (So much for the promise that we’d get to go home early on Friday, sigh.)

But I’ve been thinking about emotion in short stories lately, mostly because of my still-untitled story in progress. (Maybe I’ll call it ‘Mirror of Storms’ for the time being.) Happiness, unhappiness and grief are all definitely driving engines of this idea – one character, Sarina the witch’s granddaughter, has used a magic mirror that was supposed to rid her of unhappiness, but at a cost. Whenever she has gets angry or sad, the mirror sucks the bad mood out of her, turns it into a storm, and releases the storm over her house. Unfortunately, she lives by the sea, and when one of these storms went out on the water, my MC’s big brother got washed overboard.

Oh – and there’s a curse on the mirror too, of course. If it’s broken or taken out of Sarina’s vicinity, then the storms will stop, but she’ll be unhappy for the rest of her life. When she’s truly happy, though, that will stop the storms too, and the mirror will crumble to dust.

What do you think so far?

A self-introduction for my campaigner friends.

Hey there, I’ve noticed a few people already dropping by from the Platform-building Campaign. I’m afraid I won’t be able to make the rounds myself until I’m back from Dragon*Con, so I’ll be starting around Tuesday, but I thought I’d say a few things about myself so that fellow Campaigners, especially my group-mates, will be able to get a sense out of who this Chris Kelworth guy is.

I’m Canadian. I get a steady paycheque for programming field service technician websites. I write science fiction and fantasy, for middle grade through adult readers. I’m trying to focus on rewriting my collection of short stories and submitting them to publishers.

I’m a huge fan of many things: Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Doctor Horrible, Doctor Who, Star Trek. I love to read Diane Duane young wizard books, just about anything by Larry Niven but especially Known Space, and also Madeleine L’Engle, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series. I’ve recently discovered the fun of going to fan conventions – which is what brings be to Atlanta this coming long weekend. (Never been to a convention as high-profile as Dragon*Con before, though.)

I have created fan fiction, fan art, and fan videos. I have a fairly impressive collection of portable digital electronic devices, and love to write my own apps for them when I can. I’m love National Novel Writing Month, Script Frenzy, and several other online writing challenges, and belong to a few local writer’s circles and critique workshops. I love playing games of many types, though I’m not a serious gamer in any particular type, such as console or tabletop RPG.

Thank you so much for dropping by. If you’re a campaigner, please use the ‘follow that blog’ widget or the NetworkedBlogs box to subscribe to the Kelworth Files, and leave a reply telling me something about you!

Spotlight: Orlando Ramos

I think it’s time for another spotlight, so I’ll introduce you to somebody who’s left me many nice comments over the past few months, Orlando Ramos.

Orlando’s got some interesting things to say about television, movies, technology in culture, and what to take out of your writing. (Literally, as in what to remove, not what you can learn from it.) Plus, he’s obviously a nice guy!

Workshops

W is for…

I’ve had writing workshops very much on my mind lately, and it occurs to me that there’s a remarkable variety in terms of different events and organizations that use that phrase to describe themselves. For instance:

Odyssey, the workshop that I’ve been waiting to see if I’ll get into. I got word two weeks ago that I was on the short waiting list, and that spots would most likely open up around the end of April, though there might be a last-minute drop-out as late as May 25th.

Odyssey is a six-week session with about sixteen participants, lectures, one-on-one consultations with the instructure, guest lecturers, and intense but constructive critique circle sessions between the participants. It’s held in Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, New Hampshire, with all participants living in residence.

I’m not really sure what to expect if I get into Odyssey, but the odd thought flashed through my head as I was listening to ‘Starship troopers’ on my audiobook player that it would likely be a writer’s version of ‘Boot Camp’ – intellectually and emotionally exhausting, but an experience that, if you got through it without cracking, would make you forever a stronger person inside and a much better writer.

Wish me luck on the waiting list thing, by the way!

While I was waiting to hear about Odyssey, I got good news in my email inbox about a completely different writing workshop. Lindsey Grant posted over at the Office of Letters and Light blog asking for suggestions about ‘revision tools’ to help National Novel Writing Month writers work on editing their stories through the year. I was really excited about the call for suggestions, since I felt I had a bit of experience with what worked and what didn’t over at places like Nanoedmo, Nanopubye, and Stringing Words, and so I put together four suggestions and posted them without even really paying attention to the prizes that Lindsey had waved to try and encourage feedback.

Outlines

O is for…

For a lot of years, I was very much a ‘Pantser’ in terms of my writing, and have the very long and rambling Roswell fanfic manuscripts to prove it. Recently, I’ve tried to outline in more formal ways, including trying the snowflake method with Nanowrimo last year, and the Blake Snyder beat board with Script Frenzy, which is working out quite well.

I used to think of my usual ‘writing by the seat of my pants’ approach as a way of taking a journey – whether walking or driving, but trying to get to a particular destination, and possibly visit certain landmarks along the way, but without a map or a planned out route, just a vague notion of which direction I’d find my goals in.

Outlining, so far, isn’t like scouting out the path ‘boots on the ground’ beforehand – it doesn’t have that same sense of immediacy that actually writing does. But, depending on how I approach the outline, it might be like working out a plan with a map, or on Google Maps, or even scouting out the territory in a helicopter ahead of time.

I haven’t made up my mind whether it’s always better to outline in a structured way, like with the snowflake method or the Blake Snyder approach, or more intuitively, just trying to write the storyline out in bullet points, (perhaps working back from the ending.) Maybe both approaches have their points, depending on the situation.

Either way, outlining is a pretty cool way to prepare for a writing trip, and I think that I’m going to keep experimenting with it, in more detail and trying out more approaches.

Infinite Horizons

I is for…

Infinite Horizons was the name of a little website I put up years ago for some of my original science fiction writing. It started back when I was at York University, because I couldn’t think of much else to do with the website space I got as a computer science student.

It stayed with YorkU CS for a while, until my accounts got closed after I graduated, and then I used a couple of different free web hosts for the next two years. In the spring of 2001, when I moved into my own place and got cable internet, I put Infinite Horizons up on my ISP web space, but never gave out the link to it anywhere, so it’s just kind of an archive mirror on the dark web now.

The one complete project on Infinite Horizons was “Voyage: Triton”, which I finished before putting the site up, during my freshman year at York. All of the rest of the writing up there was related to the Star Patrol universe – a chapter and a half of a first novel, and a lot of other little snippets and unresolved drabbles. A lot of them were written in the summer of 1998, when I was taking an adult extension course in Creative Writing as an elective, where the curriculum was big on writing stream of consciousness, so when I was doing a class exercise I’d just start on one of the story ideas that I had running around in my head, and never really finish it. That was the same course that started my career in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction.

Critters

Critter: (noun, dialect.) A reader who undertakes to provide a constructive critique or helpful feedback on behalf of the author of the piece being read.

Critters are great. Critters are indispensable to my writing process, and I suspect that 90% of successful writers have critters of some sort.

Where to find good critters can be a difficult problem. Non-writer friends are often not the best critters, because they don’t always understand what kind of detail is helpful to a writer. Writer friends can make good critters, but not when they’re busy with writing first drafts of their own.

Critter exchanges can be a very good arrangement, or writer’s circles in which the entire group acts as critters for each of the members in turn.

I’ve found some good critter exchanges on the ‘Nano swaps’ forum of the National Novel Writing Month online community, and I’m attend two local writer’s groups that do critiques of pieces that members bring in. I’ve even acted as a critter wrangler for the Stringing Words online forum, organizing their third CritMo (Critter Month) event and pairing up authors with volunteer critters who read their pieces and send in feedback.

Recently, I’ve also joined an amazing online workshop called… (drum roll please,) critters.org, which runs something like the same program on a much larger scale. Here’s how it works, basically:

Action scenes.

A is for Action, as in writing action scenes. Fights, stunts, anything that has your characters moving, struggling, in fear for their lives. Writing for some genres can do without the action scenes, but they can add a lot to fantasy, science fiction, and thriller genres, and of course, for adventure writing it’s just unavoidable. Action and adventure just naturally go together, don’t they?

I’ve had a bit of a knack for writing action scenes for a long time now, and found it a bit surprising when I first heard other writers saying that they had a hard time with them. They say that when you can do something well naturally, it’s a bit hard to dissect it and figure out just HOW to do it in a way that you can teach to someone else, but I think that I’ve come up with some useful tips for writing action scenes. By the way, a lot of these are phrased for fight sequences, because that’s the way a lot of them seem to go in my stories, but you can probably apply the same ideas to death-defying rescues or horrible accidents or what have you, with a little tweaking.

1. Start from motivation. Figure out what each character wants in the scene. Does the hero just want to stay alive, is he dead-set on getting the amulet back, or does he want more than anything, to beat the shit out of the bad guy? Is the bad guy out to kill your hero, or is he play-acting to further some deep scheme of his own, or creating a diversion so that his henchmen can trash the hero’s house? Figuring out what’s motivating the actors in the scene, and how they tend to react in tense situations, will inform all of the action.
2. Sort out the space, where the characters are, where they go. If you have trouble visualizing this mentally, then sketching it out in a graphics file or on paper can help.

My much-belated snooper description.

So, I’m finally written something based on the ‘Super-snooper’ prompt – I can’t even pretend it’s for the blogfest anymore, but hopefully you’ll have fun playing along anyway.

First, here were the instructions:

Describe a setting that tells us something about your character’s personality. Characters can be of any age, living in any time or place. But don’t tell us about the character, tell us about his or her stuff. We’ll get to know the character from what you write.

 

The room is fairly high in the castle tower, with five large windows, three facing to the north and two towards the east. There is a large canopy bed in the corner opposite the windows, with purple blankets and sheets spread across it and blue trim on the canopy. The bed has been made, but still manages to seem somewhat askew.

On the north wall sits a heavy oak desk, expertly crafted. At the front of the desk there’s a small pile consisting of four ballpoint pens, (each with a different color of ink,) two wooden pencils, and a well-used lump of white rubber. In the back left corner, several heavy books are piled – going up from the bottom, we find the following titles: ‘An Apprentice’s Guide to Magikal Spell Notation,’ ‘A history of the seven families from the year 200F.R,’ ‘Advanced topics in geometry,’ ‘Intermediate geography and geology of the North American Continent’, ‘Pirate Peter and the Spanish Secret’, ‘Pirate Peter and the island of the Lost Girls,’ and a small pamphlet, ‘How to take care of your pet ferret.’