Endings

    I am trying to write the last chapter in the book I’m revising. My crit group opined that I hadn’t tied up enough of the plot thingymabobbers. Let me just say right here, endings suck.

    So, I’m going to ask you all what kind of endings you prefer. Does the protagonist need to be happy, healthy, and satisfied with his lot? Does the antagonist need to be dead, incarcerated, or reformed? Do you need to know if the secondary characters are living productive lives as you turn the last page? These are the nagging questions I’m asking myself on behalf of my prospective readers. I just don’t know how much I want to tie up.

    Time for some ferinstances.

    Egon, the protagonist, has some feelings for this girl he met while recruiting men to help him defeat the witch, Katerina. He kissed her, he thinks about her time to time, he’s kinda got a thing for her. When last he saw Jessica she was pissed because two of her brothers were killed and one maimed while fighting Katerina. Heat of the moment, he’d just told her they were dead, she tells him she never wants to see him again. Done? Or do you need to know more in the last chapter?

    Acinom, a secondary protagonist, a winged humanoid female and the last of her kind has helped Egon become a leader and gave him tools to defeat Katerina. She’s kind of a mentor though a very unconventional one. She has been flirting with Egon throughout and the two developed a psychic connection. She is an alluring, wanton, free spirit without many boundaries and has told Egon that she and he should start a new race, half her, half him. Oh, and she’s okay with Jessica being in the mix. Haven’t seen much of her toward the end because mentors have to fade. She’ll make an appearance in the last chapter but do you need to know if Egon is going to father her babies?

    Lars, a sixteen year old boy and one of the first to join Egon. He’s a smartass and he hears the whispers of dragons. We last saw him on the back of the dragon circling above the castle. He’ll have at least a mention in the final chapter but how much do you need to know?

    I see him living in a stone cottage near a cavern high atop a cliff. Gradually, the constant whispers of the dragon drive him mad. He takes to stealing chickens and kidnaping robust middle-aged women. I won’t go into detail here but suffice it to say, mental illness is a terrible thing. But, someone else might have a different imagining of Lars’ future. Someone else might imagine him married with three kids living on a small farm. He’d have a herd of dairy goats, the dragon would keep the predators away and he’d teach his children to make yogurt. How do I end it with Lars?

    How much does the reader want? How much do I give them? How much control do I exert over the direction the story takes from here? That’s the real question isn’t it? And I haven’t a clue.

    How about you? Do you like everything wrapped up? Do you like to wrap everything up. Or do you like to let your reader’s imaginations wander willy-nilly?

Disturbing Characters

    I have a book that lists among my weaknesses the word, ‘DISTURBING’ Just like that, all caps. The only thing that disturbs me about that is that they consider it a weakness. Hell, if I can disturb somebody and there are no consequences, like getting arrested or fired, I’m going for it. Besides, we’re all disturbing in one way or another. Religion, politics, social and societal convention, we are all disturbed and disturbing by and to someone. The question is: should you make your characters disturbing?

    Hell yes. Even if you are writing a piece about well meaning people on two sides of a divisive issue and everyone will be redeemed in the end through compromise and group hugs, someone needs to be disturbing or the boredom will be excruciating.

    I can hear you thinking, ‘Huh, I’ll just have my antagonist be disturbing.’ Does it disturb you that I can hear your thoughts? Now, you can have your bad guy be disturbing, most of them are in one way or another; they’re bad guys. So make them disturbing in their actions. Have them swerve to hit bunnies on the highway, pee in the office coffee pot, try to see the future in the entrails of their victims, etc. That’ll disturb some readers but we expect that sort of thing and we expect bad guys to have disturbing thoughts if they have a POV. By all means, make the bad guy disturbing but also do the unexpected. Give your protagonist disturbing thoughts.

    Heroes are better characters if they are flawed, we all know that. This is just one more way to bring them to life. I don’t have room here to give examples because there are too many possibilities. Think sex, murder, torture, violence, kinky sex, violent sex, torturous sex, vandalism, suicide, autoerotic asphyxiation, homophobic, homosexual, pee in the office coffee pot thoughts.

    I can hear you thinking again and some of you are reluctant to sully your good guy with less than heroic thoughts. You love him because he is so strong and brave and virtuous. He is your idea of a perfect person. You can’t have him think stuff like... No!

    Okay. Many books have been written and published with nary a thought out of place on the part of the hero. The tension comes from insurmountable odds, the hero’s fear or feelings of unworthiness, or his desire to save the villain, etc. There is a large audience for that.

    Not my cup of tea.

    I prefer Han Solo to Luke, Rooster Cogburn to Marshal Dillon, Ironman to Superman, Grace Anadarko to Joe Friday. I want heroes with grit. I want them dirty, nasty, sociopathic in their thoughts and borderline criminal in their deeds. I don’t care if they fight their demons or embrace them. I just want them to have demons.

    Now, I realize this sort of thing can be overdone. So don’t obsess over thinking up and putting in inappropriate thoughts. But there are situations where a reasonable person might think something that would get them arrested if they said it out loud. If one occurs to you, try it out.

    What do you think? Gonna do it?

Real Heroes

I've started Book Three in "The Fae Dragon Chronicles," (meaning I'm profiling my characters, creating scene sketches, improving on my story bible...ya know...brainstorming). I've decided book three, "Love Desired," needs to be Queen Morgana's story (which everyone will understand once books 1 & 2 come out, lol).
I know Morgana, inside and out.
However, I do not know her hero, yet. I've met him once, briefly, but he's still a stranger.
In "Love Dared" (Book 2), I learned: this character is strong enough to lead the enemy's army, yet a gentle father-figure to a young boy. Until yesterday, I didn't even know his name.
But poor Morgana has a story and she desperately needs some love.
So, this has me thinking about heroes and what makes a great hero, a hero the reader doesn't forget, a hero we all want to take home and... let's go with cuddle up to...
I have a hero I took home, and I find bits and pieces of him in each of my stories.
My husband is my hero, and yesterday he reminded me of this several times:
He rushes to help damsels in distress: My brother (well he might be happily married with kids, but we always called him Josephina, which makes him a damsel to me) had broken down out of town. My DH didn't hesitate. He dropped his chores, because I asked, and saved my brother (and the car).
He romances the heroine in little ways: Out of the blue, my hero said and did the sweetest things, like he brought me a watermelon (because it is my absolute favorite fruit!), and he came up behind me and whispered, "have I told you how sexy I think you are?" as he walked by.
He romances the heroine in big ways and solves complex problems (which showcases his superior skills and big heart): (I know, I'm rolling two in one...) My hero installed my dishwasher. I know, you're probably wondering exactly how that's sexy; but, trust me, watching him install the beast and knowing he was making my life easier? Totally sexy!
The hero slays the dragon (or other totally monstrous beastie): At ten-thirty last night, we were all so tired. We'd worked on the yard, pulled potatoes from the garden, pulled weeds, saved my brother, installed the dishwasher, played with one of our grandsons, and did five thousand other things. So, at ten-thirty, I look out my window and what I call the 'Danger Will Robinson light' is flashing in red neon, lighting up the dark yard.
Oh poop.... "Um, Honey?" I say, a bit cautiously. But I'm wondering, if I close my eyes and tap my heels three times, will it shut off?
"Yeah?" He says.
"The light's on."
"What?" He's getting a bit exasperated.
"The light. The light, dear. It's flashing." I sound a bit disjointed, I know, but it's because I'm quite stressed out by now. How could this happen? Why now? I really just wanted to shower and go to bed, and now I can't.
Argh!...
He glances out the window and sighs, presses his lips together in a stiff line, and kind of stomps outside.
The door shuts quietly behind him.
Later, I'm holding a flashlight and he's up to his elbows in...well, we live in the country and when that light goes on it means something is wrong with the pump connecting us to the city sewer system. It's a pre-warning system, so our house doesn't flood with, well, everyone else's waste water (can you say, "ick?").
Some people hire a plumber (who would probably hire an electrician, since it's electrical), but my husband's an electrician so...
And as I'm holding his flashlight, and my honey is slaying my latest nasty, stinky dragon, I'm thinking I have an amazing hero, right here in real life. I think I tend to model my romance heroes after mine, in one form or another, when I write.
What about your heroes? Do you have preferences? Stories? Please share...
P.S.- It should be noted, however, I don't always feel quite so sweet and admiring toward my hero...we are married, after all, lol!

Character Kinks

    Yes, it's about exactly what it sounds like.

    Hey all, I’ve been really busy with...stuff and such. But, I’m here now and I think a short set-up for the blog topic is in order lest you think some untoward thoughts about me. Not that they couldn’t be true but I want to keep up appearances in case I ever want to run for public office. I just finished reading one of my crit partners subs. In it she, or rather, one of her characters refers to Spanx Shapewear. I wrote in the margin, (Spanx = Spanks. Is she Kinky?) From there my mind went hither and yon as anyone who knows me can imagine. So, lets get to it.

    Some of you may avoid putting kinks in your characters because you don’t want people to think you enjoy a good spanking yourself. Okay, that might be valid but I write female characters and nobody thinks I’m a woman. My reason for not putting them in is that I just hadn’t thought of it...yet. Oh sure, I’ve got Katerina who is a nut and a deviant of sorts, but that’s just her. I haven’t given any sane characters kinks and I’m rather disappointed with myself. How could I not have thought of that?

    Now, I’m not suggesting you start writing bondage erotica but if you have a sexual component in your work, put a little something different in it. Suppose your heroine is a bit of a sadist and she is attracted to your hero. That’s going to put a whole new level of tension in there: first, in her internals and second, in their interactions. Now, for a happy ending, he’s going to have to be a bit of a masochist whether he knew it before or not. But, what the hell, it’s fiction and it ought to be fun. And what’s more fun than kinky sex?

    Now, suppose this same heroine needs to get some information from a bad guy. Ha, she’s got a set of skills that the reader knows about and she can really show her stuff. I’m laughing just thinking about it. The hero is a little reluctant to use force and she just wades in and starts clamping stuff on. He, the hero, is incredulous and much to his surprise, a little turned on. Now we’ve got some fun stuff happening.

    And you can go the other way. A strong willed heroine likes to be spanked. She obsesses over his hands: their size, just right shape, how rough and rugged they are, perfect for spanking. Or, a determined hero has a foot fetish that distracts him. How fun would it be if the hero kept looking at the heroine’s feet, enough that she notices and says something. Freudian slips create awkward moments. Thoughts unbidden create distraction and attraction. I can hardly wait to start something new to work this in. And research. I’ll have to do research. What fun. I usually hate research but now I’m excited.

    But, don’t go overboard, I’m prone to that. Just put a little in. Unless you want to write bondage erotica, then go for it. I’m thinking of using it to round out the characters. And not every character and not in every story. Maybe even keep it within the character and never let it be known to the others. A festering kink yearning for expression could be worse that unrequited love.

    A kink will influence a character and that’s what I’m after.   

Sense of Place: Writing Settings

I spent the weekend in New Mexico helping my son and his family clean up after the fires in Los Alamos. I did get to attend a workshop in Taos presented by the University of New Mexico. The subject was “a sense of place” led by author Summer Wood.

We visited the farm of Patricia Quintana. A former Washington D.C.lobbyist, she’s living her dream on the land she inherited from her grandmother. Churro sheep, who were brought from Spain as many as 500 years ago, wander on her fields. She has kept the culture of her ancestors and integrates her lifestyle with land. So how do you incorporate setting into your writing? The main point I came away with is that characters need to be placed into the landscape or the descriptions will sound like a travel log. The “character” can be a human or one example given was animal, perhaps a dog, moving across a landscape. History, food, building styles, and human interface with their environment are all a part of “place.” Examples include nostalgia for a time when the land was in a healthier condition or a desire to profit from development. Summer’s list of books that “contribute something fresh and valuable to the role of place in writing” include:

The Meadow by James Galvin

Home Ground by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney

Mayordomo by Stanly Crawford

Power by Lin Hogan

Wisdom Sits in Places by Keigh Basso

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Is that “sense of place” important to you as a reader/writer?  How do you write setting so they are more than the physical location of your story?

<posted by Vicki Law, however written by Gail Saunders>

Not Captain Kirk and A Lil' Morgan in my Writing

Spoiler Alert: I'm not talking about Captain Morgan here...
So...life has been amazing and busy. Two weekends ago, Vicki and I went to Crested Butte for the Crested Butte Writers' Conference (huge Shout-Out to all our new friends). OMG, the town was such a surprise. Quaint and haunted... Need I say more?
My manuscript, "Love? Please!" placed third in the final round of their contest, the Sandy. And GREAT things came out of the weekend.
I decided to change my writing name to Marne Ann Kirk, but I'll talk about that and Branding another time.
And this last weekend, I spent four nights partying with my honey, Lady Antebellum, Little Big Town, Craig Morgan, Sawyer Brown, Alan Jackson, and two thousand of their closest friends.
So, what I have NOT done for the last two weeks?
Write much :-(
But THAT isn't what I want to talk about.
I had one of those thinking "aha moments" while drooling over Craig Morgan in concert, and THIS is what I wanna know...
Are your characters the real deal? Do they have those qualities that make them human? Make them characters readers can relate to?
Craig Morgan is an incredible entertainer, and as close to a real-life superhero as I'll likely ever meet! (He saved two children from a fire, because he was there and it needed done)
But, and here's the part I started asking myself questions about with my characters, his heroic qualities are revealed, not by his current profession, but in the little things he does and says in his daily life.
The day of his concert, he spent time quite a while with a little girl from Grand Junction who has cancer. Then he brought the girl on stage and sang a song to her (doesn't that just melt your heart?). During his performance he spoke about the men and women serving in our military, and how thankful he was for their service (yet he didn't talk about his own service, which includes something like nine tours to Iraq). He talked about the love of his life, his wife of 23 years (and sang his newest song, not yet released, but written for her...). His song, "This Ain't Nothin'," came out after he and his band went to perform in (I believe) Oklahoma, and ended up elbows-deep in Tornado aftermath cleanup instead. Why? Because it needed done (and then he wrote a song about the experience).
My point is, I learned so much about this man from what others said about him or from what he said while extolling the strengths of others.
And those little details make me feel like I know him, like I can relate to him, like I can connect to him.
Do your characters have that connectivity? The little details that make the reader feel what I felt?
Do you think the little details are vital to your protagonist? What about your antagonist?

What's it like?

    What’s it like?

    I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure that out. So do you, probably. If you’re a writer of fiction, things happen to your characters that never happened to you. Likewise, your characters do things that you’ve never done: evil things, noble things, courageous things, things they can’t help and things they relish. What’s it like?

    What’s it like to gouge someone’s eyes out? Or rescue a child from drowning? Kill someone for personal gain? Or in self defense? What’s it like to meet a sentient being from another species? Witness a murder? Be hung by the neck? Save your one true love? Save a people? Save a world? Save a galaxy? Destroy the universe? Sheesh, we writers get ourselves into a hell of a pickle.

    Fortunately, we don’t have to experience everything we write about. Were that the case, my genre would almost certainly be erotica. What a wonderful excuse for hedonism; “I must do research for my book.” But alas, we have imagination, darn it.

    However, raw imagination is not enough. We, as writers, have to direct our imagination, personalize and internalize the scene. If we imagine something as an observer, the best we can do is a newspaper article. To write it like we want to write it, we have to live it in our imagination. We have to be the aggressor or the victim, the hero or the coward or the killer, the rapist, the husband, the wife, the doctor, the patient...you get the point.  We need to be actors. We need to immerse ourselves in the role. We need to imagine ourselves the character and live the scene.

    That’s the way I do it anyway. As I write, my imagination forges ahead twisting and turning, wringing my brain like a threadbare dishcloth. Often, I look up and ask, “What the hell am I doing here?” Then I have to back up and unleash the imagination again.  But, most of the time, my imagination gets me where I need to go; deep inside the head of one of my characters as they endure or perpetrate, flee or pursue, or fight or kiss or whatever. Until I started writing and took control of my imagination, I never knew you could have so much fun and never leave your head.

    Well, reading is kind of like that, but not exactly. Reading is like a roller-coaster ride; you are put aboard and the thing takes off twisting and turning and wringing your brain but your imagination is on rails. Writing is akin to flying an F-15; no rails, you are in control, you, with the help of your trained imagination, direct the action. The twisting and turning are free-form, the route and destination are up to you. That’s what makes writing fun, and torturous, and disturbing, arousing, humorous, frightening and fulfilling.

    All of it is something. Imagining what it’s like to fly on the back of a dragon is exhilarating, imagining what it’s like to be tortured or worse is disturbing. But it’s all important. It’s important because I want to take others where I’ve been. It’ll be on rails for them, that’s true but I want to make it a ride they’ll remember. I want to scare the crap out of them. I want to make them laugh, make them cry, arouse them, make them hate and love, ache and burst. I want control of their feelings. I  want to take them deep inside my characters and give them a dragon ride followed by a little time with a pair of thumb screws. That’s what I want.

    How about you? Do you imagine what it’s like to make love, or whatever as one of your characters?

POV Characters Immortal or not?

    Hey everybody,

    Can, or rather, should you kill off a POV character in the middle of a book? Obviously it would be a mistake to kill a POV character in a one or two POV book. And, we all know that the bad guy can, and often does, die near the end of a book, that’s okay. But what if you have multiple POVs? Can you kill one of those?

    I’ve seen forum posts on this very thing and often, it depends, appeared somewhere in the post. It depends on how you treat it. It depends, does it further the plot? It depends on the phase of the moon. Well, maybe it does. But I’m going to take a stand and say, “Damn right you can, and you should. Why? Star Trek.

    That’s right, Star Trek. The original series with Captain Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty, that Star Trek. The greatest sci-fi series of it’s time and progenitor of movies, tv series, action figures, and worldwide conventions. But, Star Trek had a flaw.

    Only the guys in the red shirts that you’d never seen before ever died. Oh sure, every now and then a main character was put in mortal danger but you knew they weren’t going to croak. You knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt so, no matter how artfully contrived the pickle, your fear and dread were less than they could have been. Now, I understand that sort of thing is a constraint of an ongoing tv series but we aren’t writing a tv series. Even if we are writing a series of novels, I would argue that you have to kill a main character once in awhile and, if you have multiple POVs, you ought to kill one of them.

    The argument against killing POV characters seems to be that you might upset the reader. Okay, that may play in certain genres where there is an expectation of a ‘happily ever after’ ending. But fantasy, my genre, isn’t one of those.

    Killing a POV character changes the dynamic for the reader. The reader, once invested in the characters, will fear more for them. Tension will increase if anyone in the cast can die. The momentary, “Crap! I liked that guy.” reaction will soon be overcome by the need to find out if the rest of them make it. The reader will have to see what peril the rest of them face. Will they overcome or succumb?

    I have a novel that needs a lot of work. It’s the first one I wrote and it’s sitting in a drawer, and on my hard-drive, and on a couple sticks and one day I’ll pull it out and work on it. Many things will change; the antagonist needs some redeeming qualities, the protagonists need some work, I might pull a few scenes and write new ones. The one thing that will not change is the title character being killed two thirds of the way though. He dies for a reason and that reason is central to the book. He dies to demonstrate to the readers and the characters that the danger is real and imminent. He dies to demonstrate that his plan, no matter how vital and necessary, is likely to get some, maybe all of them, killed. And that, even should the plan fail, they must try again, no matter the cost. 

    That’s a pretty good reason to kill him. But I don’t need one that good. POV characters find themselves in threatening situations all the time, They can’t survive them all. If they all do all the time, the story will become predictable just like Star Trek. I don’t want any guys in red shirts in my books. POV characters will never get a free pass in my books. But those are my books.

    What do you think as a writer? As a reader? I’d love to hear it.

Does knowing too much suck the fun out?

Good morning Blogies

    Can you still do it? Can you read for the fun of it? With all the rules and tips and pet peeves floating around in your head, can you still just pick up a book and get lost in the pages?

    It’s one of the hazards of writing, I’m afraid. I should have known that. Before I started writing I was involved in theater as an actor, director, stage manager, stage hand, set builder, you name it and I did it. Well, except anything to do with music, no talent there. Anyway, the more I learned, the more critical I became as an audience member. I was ruined as a patron of the theater. Even when everything was great, I still analyzed why rather than let the cast take me to a place and show me a story. The wonder, the experience, the thrill; all gone. Crap!!

    Then, along came writing. I went to conferences and workshops. I joined a critique group. I read books and articles and blogs and forum posts and I analyzed books I should’ve been reading for enjoyment. Double crap!! I tell you right now, I vow never to pick up a book on deviant sexual behavior. You know, just in case I ever...I want it to be fun. Well, enough said.

    So, back to reading. I found myself critiquing the works of, published authors. I’d try to figure out why the author did this or inserted that? What was the authors intent? Is there some hidden meaning?  I puzzled out motivation; oh, so-and-so works at the shelter because he wasn’t allow a puppy as a child. Looked for tell-tales; and he’s going to kill the neighbor for kicking his dog. Anticipated plot twists; then he and the widow will fall in love. Agonized over internal and external goals; he wants to open his own non-profit shelter for abused dogs but really he just wants to be loved. Ditto for internal and external conflict; Oh, no, the police found his footprint in the neighbor’s garden. But worse, he doesn’t feel he deserves the widow’s love because he killed her husband.

    #@(& it! Reading wasn’t any fun. So I quit. Reading, not writing. Can’t quit writing. What reason would I give for banging my head against the wall? I probably didn’t read fiction for more than a year. I’d like to say I was in a dark and brooding place, but I wasn’t. I just had no interest in reading a novel. I read my crit partners’ stuff because that’s what crit partners do and you are supposed to analyze that stuff. I read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader,  Ripley’s Believe it or Not and that sort of thing for distraction. But I read no books.

    Things were going along fine until my wife wanted to get a Kindle. Somehow, I ended up with one too. So I read. And I put it down. And I picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up. So on and so forth until I got lost in a story.

    Ha, this is fun. I read another, and focused on the characters, listened to the characters and it was fun again. I’d discovered the secret.

    Just read the damn book. The characters may have motivation, goals, blah, blah, blah, but the author didn’t put them there, didn’t decide anything. In fact, there is no author. The story just appeared out of the ether. The characters are the story. It’s the characters telling the story and they don’t know squat about writing. Remember that when you read. Remember that when you write. And, have fun when you do both. And that other thing too, deviant or not.

    Simple, huh? So, can you still read for fun?

Let's Write About Sex

    Hey all,

    How do you like your sex? Do you want all the slippery details or carefully worded suggestions of the action?  I like details but not everyone does. One only has to look at romance to see variation in our tastes. At one end of the spectrum the door closes and the book ends, the other, the book opens with a coffee table orgasm. What’s a writer to do?

    I say, write what you like to read. You’ll be more comfortable with it and you’ll know what to call the pieces and parts. That’s a big concern. Cock, shaft, member, manhood, himself, what do you call it? Female anatomy poses a similar problem. Your choice of names plays a big role in the tone of the scene. The nature of the scene dictates some of the choices. Hot monkey love calls for more vulgarity than the gentle bedding of a lover after a romantic candle lit dinner. Not that the scene can’t change as it progresses. Characters are only human and sometimes get carried away by the moment.

    That’s an important point. Characters ARE human. For the most part, your characters will be narrating the action. How would they describe it? Not how would they describe it to their mother? How would they describe it in their mind? What are their thoughts? How interesting would it be if your prim and proper heroine thought, “Yes, yes, shove it in, you big burly stud.” in the middle of it all. (Anyone wants to use that line, take it, it’s a gift. ;) )

    Now we’ve hit on the most important reason for writing sex; you can use it to give the reader important insight into your characters. The calculating become impetuous. The bold become timid. The reserved become wanton. Normally hidden character traits can be revealed and explored during sex. You can use those traits later to justify some unexpected action.

    You can also use sex as a motivation. Once a person has been intimate with another, their relationship changes. They can become dangerously jealous or overly protective. You can turn cowards into heroes with sex. You can pit friends and siblings against one another. You can incite murder and betrayal. You can inspire greatness, forge alliances, topple governments or conquer the universe with sex. Sex is powerful. But for it to be all that it can be, ya gotta write it.

    Long, long ago, in a coffee shop not so far away, I had a protagonist going along with a dangerous plan because he was attracted to a girl, maybe even falling in love with her. Her motivation was helping the creatures they had encountered, his was helping and protecting her. My critique partners weren’t buying it because he’d only known her a couple days. “He could die,” they said. Sex to the rescue. I wrote my first sex scene and his motivation was no longer in doubt. They’d had sex, he thought he was in love, he would go along to protect her.

    However, the scene, in the opinion of one partner, was purple, whatever that means. So I rewrote it. Made it more detail oriented and submitted it again. The critiques I got on it were very short, punctuated by pauses, and accompanied by pink faces. Exactly what I was going for. One more reason to write sex; the fun of it. I still have that scene, maybe I’ll post it in my stories tab.

Creature Feature

Hi Everybody,

     This is for all the fantasy fans out there but I suspect there may be a bit of character building information in here also. I say, I suspect, because I haven't written it yet and I just don't know.

      So, do you prefer building your own creatures or going with the tried and true? Little of both maybe? That's me, a little of both. I use dragons and wyverns because they are just so cool. Bad-ass, usually sentient, able to attack from the air or ground, how can you top a dragon? They are almost too cool to be really scary. Fascination gets in the way of the fear. Also, how many times can your guys battle a dragon and win? Once? Okay, maybe, but more than that and it's not believable. We need other, less formidable foes. But, there is one quality these lessers must have. 

     I need stuff that scares the hell out of my good guys.

     It's for their own good. How could they think of themselves as courageous if they never faced something that made them want to run home screaming and waving their hands? And I need them to know they are courageous or they will not do courageous things. (I used courageous three times in that paragraph to illustrate the usefulness of repeating a word deliberately. For impact or some such thing they told me. Just don't spread them out all over the page. They need to be close together or it looks like you don't have a good vocabulary. That's the theory anyway.)

     Back to building scary creatures. How do you make them scary? Their method of killing is one component. What's more frightening than being eaten alive? Nothing. So I built a creature to do just that. I started with an octopus. They have a nasty beak at the center of their arms, perfect for biting off bits. Ouch! Then, I made the body the size of a sheep. Uh-oh. Then I gave it claws like a sloth's and put it up in the trees where it hangs upside down. As it turns out, the supot is a mindless solitary ambush hunter that drops on its victim from above, wraps it up like eight constrictors, bites repeatedly to get blood flowing then presses its fleshy outer lips to the wound and sucks the prey dry. You'll want to be very careful wandering the woods in supot country.

     What else is scary? Big, big is scary. In this case, I borrowed a creature from my friend, Marne. She invented a disgusting, smelly, gargantuan, man-like thing called a golgea. It's similar to the cave-troll in 'Lord of the Rings'. Great for cooperative heroics on the part of my protags. However, mine are dwarf golgea, only seven feet tall.

      Sneaky and stealthy is a worrisome thing in an opponent. Nepdak change the color and texture of their skin to match their surroundings.  And, they attack in groups. Like camouflaged werewolves in a pack.

      Okay, there are three creatures I built for my current project. There are more but you get the point; pick something scary and make a creature to fit. What's scary? Getting strangled. What strangles? A snake. Can't be just a snake. How about a two hundred pound carnivorous squirrel with a long muscular prehensile tail. It clings to the trunk of a tree or bough and whips its tail down around the neck of unsuspecting prey then hauls them up the tree, hanging the unfortunate animal...or person.

      You can do this with your human characters too. What would be frightening in a person? A fascination with edged weapons. Okay, but it can't just be a guy with a knife collection. How about a skinny pencil necked guy with an overbearing mother and a collection of vintage surgical tools?

     Got creatures? Tell me about them.

Torture Can Be Fun

Hey all,

     What sort of stuff do you do to your characters?

     Do you torture your characters? Do you pull the rug out just when they are about to make some progress? When they're celebrating some small victory, do you visit disaster upon them? You should.

     As you know, I'm a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants, the characters tell the story to me and I write it down. That is not to say I don't have input. I do, for I am their god. I don't think they realize that, probably a good thing. Better to be a secret god. That way I don't have to be bothered with their whiny prayers and righteous indignation. I won't be asked, "How can you let this happen? Or, "Haven't I always believed in you? No, no, better they don't know about me because I am a sneaky, rotten, no-good s.o.b. I don't want to have to answer for that.
 
     I once, just when my protagonist amassed enough men and weapons to pose a serious threat to my poor little disturbed, misunderstood, antagonist, I whispered in her ear, "Time to ride the dragon." She did, discovered the army and wiped out three quarters of them. I could only shake my head. "Egon, Egon, Egon, why was no one watching for Katerina and her dragon?" It's sad, but some lessons are really, really hard.

     Lest you think I only do bad things to protagonists, I let an arrow shot by Egon part the collar holding the charm that allowed Katerina to control the dragon. That is a horrible sentence but I'm letting it stand to underscore the importance of reading your work out loud. Give it a try. Now I can hear you thinking, 'Egon shot the arrow. This lunatic with the god complex didn't do anything.'

     That's exactly the point; I didn't do anything, I allowed it to happen. I could have summoned a gust of wind to blow it off course. But, I let catastrophe befall poor Katerina. She had to leap from the angry dragon, turn herself into a crow to save herself and spend the night in the mud under a bush because she didn't know how to get airborne. More importantly, the dragon was lost to her.

     Okay, I told you all that because, 'Do bad things to your characters to make your story more interesting.' would be a very short blog post. That's it in a nutshell though.You have to be evil for the sake of the story. You must make your characters suffer, sometimes die. In my first manuscript, I killed the title character two thirds of the way through. Albert actually killed him but it was because of my tinkering. Overcoming disaster, tragedy, insurmountable odds and well meaning idiots builds character in protagonists and antagonists alike. And that's what we're after; strong, interesting characters.

     It's up to you, as their god, to forge them with pain, disappointment and sorrow. You control their world, use that: floods, earthquakes, meteors, a rolling boulder, a toppling tree. You can arrange circumstances to rouse their greatest fears, use that: a loose lion, a raging river, an unstable rope bridge over a chasm. You can foster misunderstanding, paranoia, and hate. You can make their lives a living hell, and you must. It's for their own good.

     So, tell me some of the things you've done to your characters. Or, some of the favorites you've read.

   

Summertime is almost here. Time to blow out the cobwebs.

Just like everyone else, I wear many hats in life. Wife, mother, friend, daughter, grand-daughter, sister, aunt, office manager, volunteer, critique partner, animal lover, dog walker (or at least I should be) and cat scratcher. And of course, writer. In the summer time, I’m also a gardener.

And summer is almost here! (I know, I only get two of those exclamation points in my whole life. Do blogs count, too?) I love flowers. I love grass. I love bees and birds and I love getting my hands dirty (although I really hate it when my cats have been in my garden).

On Saturdays, I head outside as soon as I get up and sometimes it’s getting dark before I remember to come back in or eat. My days seem like they are only a couple hours long. And normally, what is going on in my head is my current wip.

While I’m digging holes, pulling weeds and rearranging plants (you know, kinda like furniture, moving them from one side of the yard to the other), my characters talk to each other. While I’m deadheading or raking leaves, my make-believe world is blossoming and growing. I sit in my lawn chair or on a log and hand-water, (because I like to, not because I don’t have sprinklers) and I plan the next scene.

Then, when the sun goes down, I come inside to my computer and get it all down on paper, so to speak. For me, writing comes easier in the summertime. I don’t understand why, but digging in the dirt clears my mind and makes way for creativity.

I love the summer and it’s almost here! (Crap. I’ve used both of them now.)
I’d love to know who else gardens. And if you don’t, what helps clear your mind?