Current Writing Projects

This week’s entry is all about me. I couldn’t think of anything useful or instructive to write, so I thought I’d just share a little about my own current writing projects.

Besides writing this fabulous blog, I am also working on two novels. They’re both part of the fantasy trilogy that has been my main creative focus for the better part of the past two years. The trilogy is entitled The Light-Whisperers of Kalevala. I’m about half-way (okay, maybe one third of the way) done with the first draft of book two.

I really enjoy writing a first draft, even when I find myself deviating from my original outline. Or when I get to that trouble spot of my outline where I just had a big question mark and now I’ve got to come up with something.

First draft writing is pure creation, pure exploration. I’m learning about the characters and having adventures right along with them. It’s fun and it’s freeing.

Editing, revising, and rewriting are not quite as fun. This is where I am with book one. Yes, editing, revising, and rewriting are all different processes, but I’m currently engaged in all of them. Mostly that last one.

I have rewritten many scenes in the first two chapters—more than once. And each time a scene is rewritten, I know it’s better—the plot flows smoother, the clunky boring parts are trimmed or gone, the characters become more three-dimensional and consistent. The total word count is going down, which is a good thing (the first draft clocked in at 175,000 words, which is a tad long, even for a fantasy tome). I’m excited about the end result of a more streamlined and readable novel, but I’m becoming less and less excited about the process to get said result.

I’m sure all writers (or artists of any sort) experience this feeling of being so tired of a piece of work that you just want to give up on it and call it done so you can forget about the thing. Yes, there will come a point when I have to call it done—without doing that, it will never be published. But I know that time is not yet.

My critique group has been very helpful by providing feedback. They have pointed out the slow spots (there are lots of those), the places where characters seem to fall flat, and those little inaccuracies that aren’t a big thing but could trip me up later. Of course I don’t automatically make every suggested change, but when multiple people point out the same things—repeatedly—it’s probably important.

Hence, the rewriting. And more rewriting. My goal is to have the rewrites and revisions of the entire first book done by the end of May. That’s a little over a week away, for anyone who’s counting. And how close am I to accomplishing that goal? I’d rather not talk about that…

Well, sooner or later, I will finish this revision of book one. As sick of it as I am right now, I’ve worked too hard on it to just quit. And besides, since I’m industriously writing book two (and sketching ideas for book three), that kind of makes book one necessary.

So now it’s back to the rewriting/revising board again (with the occasional hop over to first draft creative freedom on book two, when I just can’t stand it anymore). Oh yeah, and cranking out a blog entry of some sort every week.

So what sort of projects are you working on?

An Interview with your Character

There are so many tips, tricks, and exercises to help a writer with developing their characters. I’ve written a couple of posts about that myself.

One technique that I recently learned is to answer questions about your character as if they were being interviewed. To really get into our character’s psyche, try answering these questions in first person, in your character’s voice. Write it out, and be sure to use your character’s speech pattern, mannerisms, everything. How would your character respond if someone in the story were asking them these questions?

Some of these questions would be most applicable to a human character in modern day, but I’ve tried to make some of them general enough to apply to fantasy/historical/sci-fi, etc.

So your character sits down to answer these interview questions. What does he or she say?

What’s your favorite band?

Who’s your favorite athlete or favorite sports team?

Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account? Why or why not?

What makes you laugh?

Are you right-handed or a lefty?

What’s your favorite hobby?

Do you have a nickname? Are you proud of it or embarrassed by it?

Have you ever killed anyone?

How many countries have you been to?

If you could permanently change one thing about your physical appearance, what would it be?

Feel free to share some answers or dialogue exchanges! What are some other interview questions that could help with character development?

A Mother’s Day tribute to Great Moms of Literature

Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday, so I thought I’d devote this post to some of the great moms in books. I have a wonderful mother, as I’m sure you do, too. But here are my top five favorite fictional mothers.

5. Mrs. Rabbit, from Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

Poor patient Mrs. Rabbit, who had a son who always did exactly what she told him not to do, and lost his shoes and his jacket repeatedly. Even so, she didn’t punish him harshly—she just put him to bed with some chamomile tea. For all the headaches Peter gave her, she stayed a gentle and loving mom.

4. Missis, from The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith

Sure, we all loved Perdita in Disney’s various film versions of this story, but I’m talking about the original. In the book, Perdita was a different dog—Missis was Pongo’s wife. First off, she gave birth to fifteen puppies. Props to her for that alone. Then, when the puppies were kidnapped, Missis risked her life facing the wild outdoors and Cruella De Vil to get her kids back. And she wound up being a mother to 97 puppies by the time it was all over. Now that’s a mom.

3. Leia Organa-Solo, from The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

There are hundreds of post- Return of the Jedi stories out there, but the ones I have in mind are the Thrawn Trilogy, which basically launched the Star Wars multi-media franchise back in the 90s. In this story, Leia gave birth to her twins Jacen and Jaina Solo. She dealt with all the joys and struggles of raising two infants while traipsing around the galaxy, rescuing Luke, fighting off the remnants of the Empire, and holding a government post in the New Republic. A true super-mom.

2. Molly Weasley, from the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

Molly raised a herd of wild red-headed kids, and managed to keep a lid on things despite those kids doing things like quitting school to open a magic shop and flying their father’s car into a Whomping Willow. But she still had enough love to all but adopt Harry into her family, and she had enough ferocity to take out some Death Eaters and Bellatrix Lestrange. Another super-mom.

1. Marmie, from Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy lovingly called their mother “Marmie” when they were young, and as they grew up, Marmie stayed central to their lives. Through marriages, births, deaths, career struggles, and the general pains of growing up, Marmie kept her family together. She encouraged her daughters’ creativity and independence, wasn’t afraid of disciplining them, taught them how to be loving by showing kindness to strangers and neighbors alike, and stayed strong while her husband was away at war. Marmie was just an all-around awesome mom.

Any other literary mothers you’d like to add to this list? And don’t forget to wish your mom a happy mother’s day!

Where do you get your ideas?

Speaking just for myself, I’ve always found it odd when someone asks me where I get my ideas. I get my ideas from everywhere, from life all around me. A song, a conversation with a friend, a scene in a movie, a picture on the wall, a tree, my pet rabbits, a rumpled pillow on a sofa… Anything and everything is fodder for ideas.

For me, ideas—whether they be plot ideas, character ideas, or something more ephemeral—hit me at random times, from any sort of random prompt. I’ve got a notebook full of story ideas. So I have never really had the problem of thinking “I want to write, but I don’t know what to write about.”

Even so, I often feel uninspired, and sometimes a writing prompt of some sort can help jumpstart me back into the process. My primary go-to writing prompt is music of some sort, but pictures often help, too. So here are some pictures that can perhaps help you to jump-start those creative thoughts.

A pen and a notebook. What will you write?

Something’s about to happen here…

What a cute wee door! Who lives here?

A lone man and a great wide view. What does he see?

Funny name for a train platform…oh, wait, some other author already used this one…

What song is he playing?

Tree creature

There’s gotta be a good story behind this one!

What kind of stories did these pictures prompt for you? Please share in the comments, or even share a link to your web page where you’ve posted your ideas!

(Feel free to copy or repost these pictures, but PLEASE give me credit by linking back to this blog. That’s not only the properly legal thing to do, since I took all of these pictures, but it’s also the ethical thing to do. And the law and ethics so rarely coincide these days!)

Storytelling Techniques from Babylon 5: World-Building

This is the last post of my series about storytelling techniques for epic fantasy. I’m drawing my examples from the 1990s sci-fi TV show Babylon 5. If you’ve never seen the show, that—hopefully—won’t affect the validity or usefulness of my storytelling tips. If you do want to see the show, you can probably find it on Netflix or the DVDs on eBay.

The plot of Babylon 5 was told over five television seasons and a few TV movies. True, there was some bad ‘90s hair and low-budget CGI. But the story itself was a sprawling epic fantasy with a space-opera setting, a story that spanned thousands of years and dozens of characters. J. Michael Straczynski was the mastermind behind this dramatic tale of humans and aliens, ancient prophecies and futuristic empires, villains and heroes.

I wrote a two-part post some time ago about world-building for fantasy and sci-fi. Like any good epic, Babylon 5 has a complex fantasy world to build—so here are some more tips for building the world for fantasy.

1.       Don’t build the world all at once. Introduce information at a natural pace.

In other words, avoid an info dump. If you’re writing something long and epic, there is plenty of time to introduce important information. Even with a shorter work, no reader wants to spend pages of exposition reading a textbook entry about your amazing fantasy world.

Babylon 5 begins with a bare-bones intro to the world. The audience learns that the setting is a space station in the future. Through action and dialogue, the main characters are introduced, and the main alien races of the series all make a brief appearance. Emphasis on brief. The story—and the setting—begins in the middle of the action (see the post about how to begin an epic.)

During this five-year-long epic, the world is developed, personal back-stories are revealed, alien cultures, languages, and technologies are explored. In real life you don’t learn all about a person or a place or a new situation in thirty seconds, so don’t make your audience try to learn this way, either.

2.       The little details can enrich the world and make things more believable.

As you’re building your world at a natural pace, and putting in the big points, don’t neglect the small, easily-overlooked details.

For example, in Babylon 5 it is vastly important to the plot and the environment of the fantasy world that humans and Minbari used to be at war. This fact is introduced right away to set the tone of cultural tension and shaky peace. However, it’s the little details that are tossed in throughout the series that shape the Minbari into something much more than just “the aliens who used to be at war with Earth.”

Details add flavor, like adding spices to food. Details like Minbari beds being at a forty-five degree angle instead of flat, or a throw-away line by a supporting character about a Minbari city that is carved entirely out of crystal.

How about other world-building details? Like the detail about cities on the Drazi homeworld having streets too narrow for any vehicle to travel on. And Narns are apparently marsupials (or something similar), because they refer to their children as “pouchlings.” And the colonists on Mars have their own baseball team, which competes in a futuristic World Series.

Are any of these details vital to the overall plot (or even supporting plot threads?) No. But they add depth and character to the fantasy setting. Just like real life, the best things are often found in the minutia.

3.       Be consistent!

This is the most important thing. All of the good pacing, character development, enticing details, and general creativity falls flat if you’re not consistent.

No writer is perfect, and the longer the story, the more details there are to keep track of. Even in Babylon 5, there are a few inconsistencies—like the slight changes in some of the alien make-up during the early episodes.

But overall, the world of Babylon 5 is consistent, and that is part of what makes the story so engaging. If a character dies, they are not forgotten about two episodes later. Each alien race has a distinctive and unique look to their space ships, so the audience always knows who is who in a space battle. The Narn language is written from right to left, and every time G’Kar is seen with a pen in hand (which is frequent, since the character is a writer), he is making his notes from right to left. Even the Minbari’s slanted beds make the periodic appearance right up until the very end of the show.

What are some other world-building do’s or don’ts that you have seen in your favorite fantasy or sci-fi epic? Comments are welcome!

Storytelling Techniques from Babylon 5: Foreshadowing

This is a continuation of my series about storytelling techniques for epic fantasy. I’m drawing my examples from the 1990s sci-fi TV show Babylon 5. If you’ve never seen the show, that—hopefully—won’t affect the validity or usefulness of my storytelling tips. If you do want to see the show, you can probably find it on Netflix or the DVDs on eBay.

The plot of Babylon 5 was told over five television seasons and a few TV movies. True, there was some bad ‘90s hair and low-budget CGI. But the story itself was a sprawling epic fantasy with a space-opera setting, a story that spanned thousands of years and dozens of characters. J. Michael Straczynski was the mastermind behind this dramatic tale of humans and aliens, ancient prophecies and futuristic empires, villains and heroes.

Foreshadowing can be used in any sort of story—not just epic fantasy or sci-fi. Foreshadowing means to show or suggest something in advance, to leave hints and clues for something coming later. Here are three aspects of foreshadowing that are used in Babylon 5, and that can be used in a saga or series that you may be writing, too.

1.       Foreshadowing can be subtle and easily forgotten.

In a long saga or a series, foreshadowing can be taken to an extreme—something mentioned on page three may not prove important for another 800 pages. While this can be exciting for the reader, if they catch or remember that detail, the foreshadowing can easily be lost if too much time passes.

In the first season of Babylon 5, a Centauri seeress comes to the station. She gives several prophecies, including a prediction that the space station will be destroyed in fire. When the station doesn’t blow up immediately, everyone relaxes and scoffs at her prediction. The character never appears again, her prediction is not mentioned again, and the whole thing is quickly forgotten by the audience and the characters.

Until the final episode of the series. The story of the last episode takes place twenty years later, and Babylon 5 is destroyed in fire—but not in the way that everyone expected years before when the moment was foreshadowed.

2.       Foreshadowing can be emphasized by repetition.

An example of repetitive foreshadowing is the telepathic character Lyta Alexander. Periodically during the course of the series, references are made to the fact that Lyta is a P5 telepath, meaning she ranks with just average strength and skill. This emphasis on her “average” ranking foreshadows the ending of the series, when Lyta has changed into a telepath stronger than a P12 (the highest ranking of strength and skill).

It’s important to note with this repetition technique, it still must be subtle. Characters comment on Lyta’s “average” P5 ranking only a handful of times—both before and after her powers start to change and increase. This is just enough to remind the audience that Lyta is either a) normal at the time, or b) ceasing to be normal. It serves to get the audience’s curiosity up about Lyta without making her the focal point of every episode and without beating the audience senseless with obvious clues.

3.       Foreshadowing is not the same thing as prophecy.

Destinies, prophecies, visions, and time-travel are often staples of sci-fi and fantasy. And while these story elements can be used with foreshadowing, it is not the same thing always. My first example did involve a character giving a prophetic vision; however, it served as effective foreshadowing because neither the character nor the vision appeared to be important at the time.

If the main plot of your epic fantasy is about an old wizard who tells a vision to the young farm boy and says that the gods have chosen him to be king and it’s his destiny, that’s not foreshadowing. In that example, prophecy and destiny are the plot, not a clue or hint leading to one specific element of the plot.

In Babylon 5, the storyline involving the Babylon 4 space station relied heavily on not only time-travel, but prophecy and destiny, as well. Both Captain Sheridan and Delenn are told by the alien Zathras that they have great destinies, and Commander Sinclair’s great destiny (which had been foreshadowed earlier in the series) is revealed. But that storyline is not foreshadowing, because destiny, prophecy, and time-travel is the plot.

Foreshadowing can sometimes be tricky, especially in a long tale. Hopefully these guidelines can help you if you’re wanting to utilize the technique. Read some of your favorite stories over again, paying attention to the little details that turn up later.

What are some other good stories that use foreshadowing without it being either too subtle or too obvious?

Music Review: “In the Silence,” Greta Salóme Stefánsdóttir

I’m taking a break from my series about Babylon 5, fantasy epics, and narrative technique to do another music review. I’ll be back next week with more writing tips and sci-fi geekiness.

There’s a lot of musical talent in Iceland, and frankly, the rest of the world needs to know about it. Greta Salóme is a young Icelandic musician who just released her debut album, In the Silence (released in 2012 by Hands Up Music). Greta began her career as a classically-trained violinist and still performs with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.  But on this album she displays other talents, as well—composing, lyric-writing, and singing.

Most of the songs (written and composed by Greta) are in English. “Mundu Eftir Mér” and “Aldrei Sleppir Mér” are the two Icelandic songs on the album.

The song “Never Forget” helped to gain her international recognition as it was Iceland’s official entry for the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012. She sings a duet with Icelandic music star Jonsi (real name Jón Jósep Snæbjörnsson).

Folk, rock, and even dance styles are featured on this album—punctuated throughout by Greta’s violin, especially evident in tracks like “These Last Days of Summer,” “See you There,” and “Never Forget.”

For those who want an easy folk-rock sound, there are songs like “Take this Empty Heart” and “Coming Home Soon.” For a faster beat and more of a rock or dance feel, try “In the Silence” and “Everywhere Around Me.”

Greta’s clear, powerful voice shines in every song. “A Thousand More Goodbyes” is a beautiful showcase for her voice alone and the simplicity of the arrangement can make you want to fall in love just by hearing it. And her voice is not diminished in the slightest by sharing the music with Jonsi in “Never Forget,” and “Mundu Eftir Mér,” the Icelandic version of the song.

All of Greta’s lyrics speak of love, life, and hope. Personally, I enjoy songs that are positive in their words, even if it’s a song of sorrow or pain. “We Are” and “Everywhere Around Me” are songs that just make me feel good. And a song that makes me feel good, I’ll listen to again and again.

For anyone who wants some new music with some musical and even linguistic variety, I’d recommend this album. Greta’s first releases were a couple of singles (“Vor” and “Bethlehem”—not on this album) and I’m looking forward to more singles and more albums from her. Here’s to bringing more Icelandic music to the world!

Greta Salóme’s Facebook page

“Never Forget”