B is for Writing Buddies

My 2012 A to Z challenge is showcasing Script Frenzy.

Writing, especially writing a 100 page script in 30 days, can be a lonely thing. Sometimes you really need friends to help you through it, to cheer you up when you’re down – or to motivate you with the fact that they’re clearly ahead of you in terms of page count.

That’s what the Script Frenzy writing Buddies system is for. You can tag any other Frenzier as a Buddy of yours, (even if you hate each other, actually, though you probably shouldn’t be a jerk about it.) Once you have your list of buddies set up, anybody who looks at your profile on the site will see your army of Buddies – and how many pages each of them has written so far.

You can find buddies in a lot of ways. You can search for other writers through the search menu of the Script Frenzy site. You can buddy people who’ve sent you a FrenzyMail. Or you can buddy people who you see on the forums – especially people who replied to a forum post that you wrote.

And then you see who can get to 100 pages first.

Who’s your best Writing Buddy?

Mission – Spotlight on Chris, day 1

Okay, so, the Fourth Campaign has wrapped up, I’ve got nearly two weeks before the A-Z challenge starts, so I’m going to start a new series and put myself under the spotlight.

This is inspired by FantasyWriterGuy’s Two weeks of reflection challenge, but I’ve decided that I’m going to tweak the prompts as well as the timing that FWG laid out, just because some of them are really more personal than I want to get, and I’d rather do substitutions or skip rather than do a lot of excessive tap-dancing around the raw subjects.

But today, I’m doing pretty much by the book – Share ten things you want to say to ten different people right now.

1. Thank you so much for all of the time you’ve spent helping me practice over the past year. I couldn’t have done it without you.

2. What’s going on in your life now? Are you doing okay? I’ve been wanting to say something since you cancelled.

3. Are you having technical problems returning my call, or are you just too busy?

4. Take care of yourself, and feel better soon.

5. We really are going to fight zombies sometime – my evenings are just crazy right now.

6. You do a lot that nobody in the group sees to keep things running smoothly, and I’m so grateful for it, and the way you’ve welcomed a loner boy from Hamilton.

7. I love you very much.

8. It’s been so long since we’ve talked – how’s the family doing? What have you been up to lately?

9. I’ve never done this before, so tell me – what do I need to ask you about buying a car?

10. Good luck with labelling and commenting on chapters four through ten!

I’ll see you soon with another dose of sharing!

Second Campaigner Challenge – Imago? Are you kidding me??

I’m getting tired of challenges with ridiculously obscure requirements.

This is a picture of a cicada imago emerging. Isn’t that really gross? Just looking at it gives me the screaming jeebies.

For thousands of years, people thought that diseases were caused by miasma – foul or unclean air. This theory has been around for longer than we’ve had written records, and only got debunked after John Snow proved that cholera was spread through infected water, not through the air.

Lacuna was a minor character in Piers Anthony’s Xanth series – twin sister of Hiatus, (whose name basically means the same thing, a gap,) with the talent of making print appear. Eventually, she managed to get a major role in ‘Question Quest’, saved Magician Humphrey from Hell, and got her life retroactively changed to include a happy marriage and kids as a reward.

I remember reading an old speculative science fiction short story about what life would be like if the principle of causality in the universe was suddenly replaced with synchronicity – the idea that simmilar things happen at the same time.

So, that’s my answer to the challenge. Isn’t all of this boring? It’s enough to make me oscitate.

My flash fiction for the first Campaign Challenge

I think that I’ll reverse the usual pattern that I’ve seen before, and give you my story first, and then the challenge rules:

The door swung open, and a beautiful girl hurried inside, her finger held up to her lips and her eyes asking me an urgent question. For a second I was confused, and then I lifted the far section of the sales counter to let her come back behind. She crouched into the storage cubby under the cash register, and I was just starting to get naughty thoughts about the whole situation when a hand reached out to stop the door from quite closing.

The man who came in next had periwinkle blue eyes and his feet didn’t seem to quite touch the ground. “Excuse me, sir, did you see a…”

“She went out the side door, didn’t even close it behind her,” I blurted out, realizing that I could use the fact that I’d left the door open for the summer breeze to the girl’s advantage. “Why are you looking for her?”

His eyes rested on me for a moment, but he didn’t answer, and took a moment to close the front door behind him, then stepped calmly over to the side exit. I busied myself with an order form to avoid giving the girl away. The door swung shut.

 

First Campaigner challenge:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “The door swung open” These four words will be included in the word count.

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), use the same beginning words and end with the words: “the door swung shut.” (also included in the word count)

For those who want an even greater challenge, make your story 200 words EXACTLY!

(And just for the record, I achieved the highest level of the challenge – at least, according to MS Word’s wordcount.)

Social Media versus the Zombies – follow me to victory!

Some of you have heard this story before, but I have an update on recent developments. To others, especially participants in the third Campaign, it may well be news.

About a month and a half ago, I posted about a challenge from a writer I met at the CSSF short fiction workshop this summer, Chuck. Chuck got a little zombie story published up at the ‘Tales of the Zombie War’ site, and said that he’d never been convinced about the idea of using social media to get readers, but that he’d give those of us with blogs or twitter accounts a chance to prove their worth – if we got 40 people to post comments to his story by next summer, he’d wear a t-shirt admitting defeat to the next Campbell Science Fiction Conference in Lawrence, Kansas.

I eagerly took up the challenge, and did what I could over July and August to spread the news about Chuck’s story and urge others to leave their comments. I sent an email to the 2nd crusader’s Yahoo group telling them about it. And the comment count on the story rose one at a time, or a few at once… up to 36.

We’re so close, and having risked all of my blogger cred on this little challenge, I am not about to give up before hitting 40. So please, my new Campaigner friends, I beg of you if you haven’t already done it – go read the story and reply with your thoughts, whether they’re good or bad.

We can’t let the zombies think that they’re better than bloggers after all – can we? 😉

Prove the Zombies wrong! Social platforms can build readership.

I got this missive in my inbox yesterday:

Subject: My Zombies Challenge You to Prove Them Wrong About Social Media

I have a previously workshopped story up on Tales of the Zombie War.  Now, one thing I’m a bit of a zombie about is the alleged power of social media.  I’m just not convinced that it does all that much to increase readership or sales.  But it strikes me that this might be an opportunity for those of you who have drank the social media cool-aid to prove me wrong.  Tales of the Zombie War is one of those places where readers can leave comments.  Typically, a story on this site averages 25 comments.  So throw your followers at me, urge them to check out my story and leave comment.  If the power of your social network raises the comment count to 40 or greater, I will have to admit I am Luddite and will wear a t-shirt so saying to the next Campbell Conference.  Here’s the link:  http://www.talesofworldwarz.com/stories/2011/07/11/running-on-ahead-by-chuck-von-nordheim/

Now, Chuck is a really great writer, the winner of the best revised story at the short fiction workshop that I just got back from in Kansas, and you really should check out his story, because you’ll probably like it a lot.

But also – for reasons of my own, I really would love to prove Chuck wrong about this and make him wear that t-shirt.

So please, for my sake, go to the link and post a comment whether you enjoyed reading the story or not! Thanks very much.

Update – well, as of the afternoon of July 28th, we’re at 26 posts and rising. There’s still plenty of time to reach 40, unless interest dies off entirely. If you want to take part in the battle between social media and zombies, please link on your blog, facebook, or twitter – either to me, or directly to Chuck’s story on the talesofworldwarz site. Together, we can do it!

Pizza

P is for…

I’m a big fan of pizza – with meat on it, thanks, and tomato sauce of course, and a nice helping of cheese.

Stuart McLean wrote that the secret to feeling rich beyond your wildest dreams is finding the feeling that you’re getting a deal on something, and slipping into excess with it. For him, it’s picking up 30 pairs of socks at a discount, for some reason. Apparently a freezer stuffed full of pizza does the trick for me.

The Little Caesar’s across the street from my apartment had Customer Appreciation days yesterday and today, so I appreciated five medium pepperoni pies for twenty bucks plus sales tax. One pizza got split into half for yesterday’s dinner and half for this morning’s breakfast, and the others got split up into little plastic bags, three or four slices at a time, and into the freezer. The only thing missing is Canadian bacon.

So, dare I ask it… what do you like to put on a pizza? And what makes you feel rich if you buy enough of it?

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.

Hamilton

H is for…

I’m not sure if it’s irony or serendipity that the A-Z schedule has me on H for today, because I’d like to write a little about my Hometown of Hamilton, and I’m not there at the moment, nor will I be all day. (I’m up in Toronto for the Ad Astra convention, whoohoo! More about that some other day.)

I was born in Hamilton, grew up there, and through my life there hasn’t been a time where I didn’t have my permanent address there. Even in my university days, I might sleep most nights in a dorm room or rented room in North York, but every other weekend I’d be taking the trip back home.

Hamilton isn’t a really big city, or a small town – the population signs have slowly climbed up over the years to cross the half-million mark though. It has the reputation of being this really gritty blue-collar city, but I guess I’ve never really seen that, unless I’m taking the bus on the Bayshore route past the steel plants. Half of them are shut down now anyway.

Hamilton is a college town – my Dad taught for years at McMaster University, and we have Mohawk community College and a lot of smaller schools as well. It’s a popular filming town, (The train station scene in the X-men, anybody?) It’s a city with a small, but determined and stubborn artist community. It’s the biggest hockey town in Canada that will never ever get its own NHL team for real. (We’re just a bit too close to the Maple Leafs and the Sabres, alas.)

I suppose nearly any city or town has all of those different neighborhoods and places that can surprise you and jump-start your imagination. But Hamilton’s are the closest to me, and I’m satisfied with that. Well, again, except now, because Eglinton avenue is close to me now, and if that can’t jumpstart a story I don’t know what can.

So, what’s your hometown like? (Either where you live now, or where you grew up.)

Games

G is for…

I’m a big fan of a lot of games. Not so much the active sporty type games, and I’ve never really got into hard-core computer gaming, but card games, some board games, and a lot of other types of games. I’ve tried making my own text adventure computer games several times.

If I’m pantsing a story, (as in writing it by the seat of said pants,) having my characters play a game is one of my standard stock tricks. Often, the resulting scene isn’t something that should survive the first draft, but a lot of the time it helps me figure out something new about the characters. For instance, in Children of the Molecule, I had a game of alien hide and seek as one of the events at the Prince’s naming-day party. I was really just going through the motions, as were some of the characters, because they couldn’t leave that planet and go on to the climax of the story until the party was over. But after that game, in the final concert stage of the party, I realized that Aunt Shelda seemed to be fixated on her niece marrying the Prince, and that was a plot thread that I’m really glad I picked up.

“It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.  The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better.  It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are.  It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden.  The graphite’s not important.  It’s just the means of revealing their indentations.  It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”