Category: storytelling

Dreamchild

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 45 Comments

What do people do when they’re done reading a book they’ve purchased?

(1) Do you put it on the shelf like a trophy, “See, I read this!” perchance to read again?

(2) Or, if the book was all right, but not really your thing, do you donate it to a library or second-hand store, or trade it in for credit at a used bookstore, hoping it will end up with someone who might like it better?

(3) Or maybe the thing is absolute drivel and you can’t believe someone actually killed a tree to bring it into the world. So you take the book and say, “No more trees shall die on thine account! I cast thee into the recycle bin!”

(4) Or maybe the damned thing is so offensive, it’s not even worth that, and you dump it right in the trash hoping it ends up smooshed with dog shit in some landfill where it will ROT!!!?

Well, this last book I finished yesterday, “Dreamchild”, almost got the number #4 treatment. It wasn’t a badly written book, it was even sort of intriguing. It was definitely pulp fiction–someone’s take on the whole Roswell/Dreamland/alien/Majestic mythology, explored from the POV of people involved in the whole aliens-are-among-us events in different ways. So I was eating it up like movie popcorn until they introduced the villains of the piece, the Evil Lesbians. Oy. Basically, these two women are conspiring to kill the aliens who are, as it turns out, the saviors of mankind, and killing any humans that get in their way/whom they need as Guinea pigs. Eventually, one of the pair (’cause they’re usually a pair who of course use remorseless killing as foreplay) sees the error of her ways and betrays her lover. The only reason this drivel isn’t going in the trash is they didn’t take the Evil Lesbian cliche to its usual end point and get the redeemed woman together with a man.

But it’s already in the recycle bin.

Now I’m hankering to watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and Steven Spielberg’s “Taken” to get the taste of this out of my mouth.

Next up on the list: Laurell K. Hamilton. I know, I know, but it’s early Hamilton, and I’ve never read her before.

“A Wizard of Earthsea”, Ursula Le Guin
“Proven Guilty”, Jim Butcher
“Dreamchild”, Hilary Hemingway and Jeffry P. Lindsay

2006 fic round-up meme

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 17 Comments

I think this meme is for fanfic, but I’m going to do OF as well. Accomplished in 2006:

– Finished season 1 of “The Destroyer”, started season 2. Eppies included:

121: Heart of Darkness
122: Beneath
201: Dead
202: Knowledge
203: Inappropriately Neurotic
204: Dramatis Personae

Only six episodes the whole year? Well, I traveled a lot. My favorite episode of this lot, I think, was “Heart of Darkness.” Although “Beneath”, the season ender, was about Connor’s inner struggles (which is what TD is, in the end, about), “HOD” had some good Unholy Family stuff I enjoyed writing.

Second favorite, “Inappropriately Neurotic.” I don’t know what it was last year, but I got on this Goth and Noir kick. I wanted to explore things with a darker, kinkier edge to them. So I invented this OC, Alix, and this nightclub setting, Sekhmet, in part to do that. Expect to see more of them in future eps.

– Co-wrote/edited “Reconciliation“, and wrote “Rise” in the AtS Season 6 series.

Those two episodes were the only ones to come out in that series in 2006. The Mutant Existential Scoobies were having lots of RL issues, good and bad. “Rise” was a lot of fun to write, ’cause of the Faith+Wesley. I also enjoyed tinkering with the Connor+Spike and Congel bits of arethusa2‘s Reconciliation script.

– In April, I did my so-called “NaDraWriMo,” thirty original fic drabbles in thirty days. The best of that was posted here.

I was really hoping this effort would kick-start an idea for an original fiction story of some length greater than 100 words, and I did sort of glom onto a character towards the end of the month (who, judging by my commenters’ icons, reminded them of Faith), but I couldn’t seem to get a handle on what her story was about.

– I gave it the old college try, though. For the next couple months (May-July), I posted eight story bits to the community, hoping to get a critical mass that would enable me to participate in NaNoWriMo in November. But the story wasn’t setting fire to my butt. The only thing fueling it was my desperate desire to write original fic, not anything compelling about the story itself. So that fizzled out.

– I did participate in NaNoWriMo in November. With a fanfic WIP! (*headdesk*). And I won, ’cause their word counting machine doesn’t actually check to see if you’ve written a self-contained original novel.

I’m not going to pressure myself by having some New Year’s resolution to “get that original fic story going already!” I think the wiser course of action is what I decided to do, read more, see more films. Feed my muse.

Un-Nano, day 2

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

Words at start: 19,395
Words slain: 1259
Total words: 18,136
Goal: 5000
Percentage: 25.2%

Didn’t have a lot of time for writing today, so I still have a ways to go with cleaning up TD 204. I always say, “A day without fiction is like a day with too much sunshine.” Icky, in other words. But I’ve set aside the next two days for fictioning. None of that annoying socializing to get in the way.

But tired, tired now. I’m hitting the hay.

Un-Nano, day 1

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 15 Comments

Words at start: 19,395
Words slain: 909
Total words: 18,486
Goal: 5000
Percentage: 18.2%

Ah, this is better. I like my stories trim and pretty, not lame and bloated. No puppies from this batch to share, I cut those words out one at a time. 4,101 to go.

Oh, and then there’s this:

Yet another reason me and NaNo don’t mix

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 20 Comments

I wrote too much. I already have a problem with over-writing! NaNo just encouraged it. TD 204 draft 2 has 19,395 words. No matter what criterion I use, I have a lot of work to do to whip this baby into readable shape:

Longest episode length: 15,726 (eliminate 3669 words)
Average episode length: 12,450 (eliminate 6945 words)
Average season 2 episode length: 13,361 (eliminate 6034 words)

I think if I can cut 5000 words, that will be doing good.

Tomorrow, I begin the Un-NaNo. How many words can I cut? Stay tooned!

Yet another reason NaNo and I don’t mix well

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

I edit as I go. And you know, it was a skill I had to learn. I used to be afraid to edit. “I want to change that… but what if I decide later I like this old material better and it’s *gone*!” Well, sometimes editing’s necessary just to move on *at all*, so I learned ways to deal. Like backing up every day so I have old versions available if I need them. One other thing I do is create a “puppy pound.” My old writing coach had this saying from one of her editors: “This story’s great, except for one thing. You need to kill the dog.”

The “dog” is some part of the story you’re emotionally attached to that you refuse to get rid of even though it’s not contributing to any plot point. For me, the “dog” is often a cool squib of dialogue or description that could have been part of the story, but then didn’t fit once I had most of the story written. Sometimes, I’ll bend the story into pretzels to keep the dog there. But I’ve learned to get rid of my dogs by taking them and putting them into a separate file. The dogs go there, and all the other story snippets that could-have-been but proved extraneous to or wrong for the story go in the puppy pound.

I’m so used to having my puppy pound now, I forget it’s there unless I’m dumping verbage into it. But I have two puppy pounds going, one for TD 204 and one for TD 205/206. These are bits of text I wrote for the episodes in November that I just clipped out and stuffed away. I didn’t consider them as part of my “word count” because they’re not part of the “official draft”. But by NaNo rules (which I flout with impunity), they count in my total word count.

Right?