Arrant Nonsense

And they are assigning... homework.

This week's episode is on idea generation, and the homework is this:

Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:
1. From an interview or conversation you've had
2. From research you've done (reading science news, military history, etc)
3. From observation (go for a walk!)
4. From a piece of media (watch a movie)
5. From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and I've gotten them from all these sources. So I'll do this particular bit of homework as a retrospective.

1. We were in Glacier National Park, and the Hubby mentioned that bears are "big, dumb, and dangerous." I wondered what would happen if you ended up with a bear that was big, smart, and dangerous, and "Bear Essentials" was born. It's available in the "Far Orbit" anthology.

2. I was looking at pictures of prehistoric bug fossils and wondered "Why don't we have dragonflies with two-foot wingspans anymore?" Research revealed that we'd need about twice the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere than we have today, I thought about how to achieve that and what other effects it would have, and a couple of articles in Popular Science later, "The Road to Hell" was born. It's available at DomainSF.

3. Visiting the Hubby's sister in St. Louis, we walked down an eerily empty downtown street. No traffic, no people, closed businesses. Even the homeless weren't hanging out there. It was creepifying, honestly, and some of the architecture was... hah, interesting, to say the least. It had personality. So I wondered what would happen to turn a bustling city center into... well, that, and wrote "Guardians of Public Safety." It will be available soon in "First and Starlight."

4. Wait, I have to pick one? Well, my spaceship crew was inspired by Firefly. Alex Jarrett is a sort of Tony Stark without the asshole gene, who does Big Pharma rather than weapons. Ben started out as Harry Lockhart from "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and morphed into someone completely different. And "The Cow and the Beanstalk" began from the premise of "why in the world would a guy pay actual magic beans for an ordinary cow?"

5. "He won his soul and lost the war," a lyric line from "The Death of Johnny Mooring" by Enter the Haggis, inspired "Better a Millstone." That line haunted me for a good long while while I noodled exactly how that would happen and what kind of character it would happen to. This one hasn't found a home yet, because it's dark and kind of depressing and I kill lots of things in it they say you're not supposed to kill. Also, it's long. I consider it a dark fantasy rather than horror, because it's a secondary world rather than ours. This is also one I can point to the roleplay and say that it had a direct effect on my fiction, because the angel and demon characters will be very familiar to anyone who's read any of the fun stuff I've done in that with werewolf_hacker and guriel.

Where do you get your ideas? EVERYWHERE.

And I shall post one of the results I wrote here for your entertainment, seeing as I haven't done a snippet in awhile.

One of the lectures was on "How to Scare People" with the handsome and hard-working Dan Wells. If you haven't read Dan's books, you should be, because damn. So he pointed out that you need to give the reader time to concoct the monster in their head--and then you have to outdo it. If they understand it, then they guessed what you're going to do and they'll be disappointed. Subvert expectations. Hannibal Lecter is scary because he's so normal. He could be your Uncle Phil. However, you guys don't get that one, because I'm entering it in the new 99Fiction contest (you may have to join the site to see the link).

We also had a "Writing Humor" lecture from the handsome and hard-working Howard Tayler. I believe the object of this exercise was to write a piece that was just dialogue, and also funny, that would tell us who these people were, where they were, and what they were doing, with no descriptors. So, I'll slide that under the cut because, while it's not really long, per se, it does take up a lot of space, because All Dialogue.

( See if you can guess who this is... )

Is that I need to do a massive re-write of the meeting scene between my protag and my preacher and I DUN WANNA. I've already written it, but I need to go back and re-do it because then I'll be able to make that snippet I posted on Sunday actually resonate instead of lie on the page like a dead and smelly carp.

And that feels like going backward, because I've Already Written That Part, Dammit. But it needs to be done. And so I am putting on the Firefly soundtrack (since it sets the appropriate mood) and I'm doing it.

Half the battle is getting the cursor on the Word doc, you know? I keep letting myself get distracted by Shiny Things instead of just sitting down and scribbling stuff. This is really the part where I should turn the damn internet off and write for an hour, even though I hate the story right now.

But, as my lovely and effulgent RP partner said "You'll never stop hating it if you don't finish it." She is a wise woman. And I need to stop worrying about the structure of the thing and where what looks like the climax is falling. Like they said on today's mini-cast of Writing Excuses (paraphrased because I suck at remembering exact quotes): No one ever finished reading a book, set it down with a happy sigh, and said, "I really loved how the author used the three-act structure."

Tell a story. The structure will take care of itself.

So, the Writing Excuses folks are having a writers' retreat next year, in June. I've registered for it (after madly refreshing the page from 10am my time on and talking the Hubby into a loan, since I only had half the money saved up for it, so I've worked out a payment plan with him). ...and it sold out in twenty minutes. WOW.

Also, if you're not listening to Writing Excuses every week, you totally should be.

Considering the fact that my writing is stalled like a big stalled thing at this point, I'm hoping that by the time this thing rolls around I'll actually be back in the groove. And, to that end, my RP partner and I have made a pact of "no RP until we've each written 500 words of original fiction."

So, I'm staring at the steampunk werewolf story, and also at the new Alex Jarret story, in no small consternation right now. The steampunk story is failing because (a) it seems to be ending too soon, and (b) there doesn't seem to be a point to it at all. The Alex Jarrett story hasn't even got off the ground because I have no idea exactly how the Law of Unintended Consequences has bitten a mad genius pharmaceutical researcher on the ass yet.

OH GOD SEND BOOZE.