Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Nothing Woos Like Prose

  • Of all the major forms of art prose seems like the least romantic.
  • Example: Poetry produced The Body Electric by Walt Whitman (lulz quivering love jelly). To cover the exact same topic prose has produced Greys Anatomy (a medical textbook).
  • Which seems the least likely to provoke a gushy emotional response?
    • A love poem comparing the subjects eyes to the sky or diamonds and what have you.
    • A love song (pretty much the same as above with slightly less class and significantly more guitars and cliches)
    • A painting of the artist and his beloved on a hill looking at the stars or some crap
    • A five paragraph essay outlining the pros and cons of copulation with the paper's author.
  • Actually I think that essay thing might work on the right girl. (Something tells me I should run that idea by my people first though.)
  • Fiction prose might work better than non-fiction now that I think about it, but it also seems like it would have a much higher chance of of being creepy as all hell. (Writing fan fiction about real people seems like it would be frowned upon and I'm pretty sure slash fiction counts as grounds for sexual harassment charges.)

Sunday, February 26, 2012

I Swear I'm Not An Asshole (I Think...)

  • I do this thing where if I hear someone who speaks in an interesting manner I will subconsciously start imitating them (I think everyone does this but I do it to a greater extent than most.) This occasionally leads to situations my friends find hilarious where I seem like I'm making fun of people.
    • The most memorable instance of this was one of the many times I ordered a pizza. When I order food I don't just give my order and get out (that's boring) I try and chat up the person I'm interacting with so my orders can take longer than normal. On this particular occasion the nice perky pizza hut employee had the most pronounced ridiculous lisp I have ever heard. When I had finished ordering my friends were giggling and giving me the expression I have learned means I just did something hilarious without realize it. I asked what it was and immediately realized (only then) that I was speaking with a RIDICULOUS lisp. I asked how quickly I had started doing it and they said I had spoken to her like that for 90% of the order.
    • I bring this up now because today I watched The Godfather Part I and Short Circuit back to back today and have had to constantly stop myself from speaking in an increasingly bizarre manner.
    • "You come to me on this the day of my daughters wedding and you say to me, 'Don Corleone I need input...'"
      • How the fuck do you punctuate a quote within a quote?
  • Big Big news, two whole people actually commented on one of my posts! They were both positive (which you could have read for yourself but i felt like saying it anyway). One of them said it is very helpful to him and he has learned a lot which is an enormous surprise (and mildly confusing) to me.
    • I can only assume he/she/it/them mean they have learned about writing from me which would make me oh so very happy and surprised (and a little bit afraid for them; I'm not exactly Heinlein)
    • Happy Note: the post box's spell check actually has the correct spelling of Heinlein.
  • In writing related news there have been a few developments:
    • I finally decided on a new years resolution: to write every single day (no exceptions) even if it is totally unrelated to any of my current book projects. I decided improving myself as a writer was more important than trying to force myself to complete projects.
      • I think stipulating that I don't have to advance a current project will make it far more likely that I actually follow through on this vow.
      • I also think that having a vow I will stick to will in the end make me far more likely to end up working on actually finishing projects.
    • On Thursday night/Friday morning I wrote an entire outline for a brand new novel from scratch.
      • It has all the parts a beginning, a middle, even an end (which I can usually never come up with.)
      • Having said all that it isn't very in depth (its only 920 words), and I think the end is kind of weak.
      • I have writen several other book outlines and then never (as of yet at least) done anything with them, but I think I'm going to commit myself to this one and try and actually hammer out a full manuscript for it rather than just fiddle around with it for a while before moving on because: 
        • A: At the moment I'm not heavily working on any other project (other than slowly going through Modsoldiers and cleaning it up line by line).
        • B: I like the main characters I've developed for for it, and for science fiction and fantasy (this one is low fantasy) I think the characters, more than the plot, are what make or break a good novel.
      • I'm going to try and do something new with this project which is tell it in a non-linear fashion i.e. start about half way through the story and reveal the first half through occasional flashbacks.
        • I think this will make the story much more interesting by creating more suspense/drama/what have you by making the reader wonder about previous events and the characters motivations. Also it should make the characters seem much more dynamic by juxtaposing scenes taking place at wildly different points in time. The changes in a character between scenes taking place at different points in the plotline should show far greater contrast than between scenes taking place one right after the other.
      • I'm also going to try something fairly new with perspective. Typically I write from an omniscient 3rd person point of view only occasionally poping into the mind of a character for a limited 3rd person perspective. For this book I'm planning on telling the whole thing from that limited third person perspective with each scene being from the POV of one of the characters in it.
      • My project name for this book is MartArt2. Yes I already have a project named simply MartArt (it is actually one of those outlines I completed, didled with for 2 days then never returned too) but this project is so different I felt it needed a different title.

Friday, February 17, 2012

I Accidently The Silmarillion...

  • Most all of my fantasy story projects take place in more or less the same fantasy world I've created.
    • I've worked quite a lot on these stories but unlike other story projects which I more or less have one version of that get slowly refined over time the fantasy writing I do often ends up using some or all of the same characters to create totally different storylines often incorporating one or several of a number of various recurring scenes or story elements from one another. I quite like writing these but I find I really like only a certain specific scene or plot section from each story. In new stories I'll try to jam the various scenes, plot sections, and characters I liked from previous attempts all into the same plot. This leads to many rambling or disjointed plots as they can't all really be crammed together like that.
    • As I keep writing various different similar and dissimilar story attempts in this world I think I might be gradually moving closer to having a really neat epic story many years from now.
    • I enjoy working with the characters and having them interact with eachother in various different combinations.
    • The longer I play around with them the more good ideas I have and the more developed and refined the setting, characters, and so on become and hopefully one day I will be able to assemble theses elements into a real sweeping fantasy epic like the lord of the rings or (hopefully) a wheel of time that doesn't drag on.
    • I used to be frusterated with my inability to create a single solid plotline with these various elements but now it has become quite interesting and rather fun.
    • Even if I'm really not actually making any progress towards someday combining all these disparate ideas into some masterpiece the time I spend cranking out new scenes, characters, and plotlines is certainly great practice and making me a better writer.
  • Hmmmm that was one of the more poorly explained streams of thought I've jotted down here (For Shame!) I hope it made some sense.