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?

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.