The Beginnings of an Idea

It's really interesting where some of my ideas from. Like most other authors I get most of my ideas through the media. I get inspired by watching movies and TV shows, by listening to music, by reading books and magazines. For example I got my idea for my first book from a combination of a book on Dragonology and the cartoon Yu-gi-oh. So you can use media to get get your ideas too.


And then there are life experiences. A few years ago I wrote some poetry. Most of that poetry has a theme and that theme was being close to death and surviving it. About a few months before I became ill with Ulcerative Colitis. I lost more than 30 lbs in the period of a few months. But in the beginning I got dehydrated and was throwing up. So I used that experience as inspiration for my poetry.


I also used to play a game that I got some of ideas from and even used to improve some of them. I called it the game of pretend. First you find a quiet place where you can be left alone and where nobody can hear you talk to yourself. Then you put yourself in your mystical place. Then you allow yourself to be as many characters as you want and you banter back and forth (yes, banter, as in to jabber like an idiot). You can do this till the cows come home or at least until the kids wake up. The best place to do it is inside your head, but then you can't record it.


How do you get ideas? What do you think about how I get ideas?


stats:
Mood: same
Chapters written: same
Watching: Dr. Phil
I'm on twitter @Sorica2001 and on Facebook.

Knots, ellipses, and notes: Three things that are driving me crazy.

When I write, sometimes I find it hard to write strait through. Which is why between some paragraphs I put double ellipses. And I always rely on notes. Between the notes and my literature & every two consecutive notes I place a single ellipse. Of course, the biggest problem with this method comes when you have to fill in the ellipses  and the double ellipses. Yep you guessed it. You need to fill in the gap between two ideas that might have been placed minutes apart. Which is where I get to knots. They can carry on a story for pages without end. They can be resolved easily with a "let's change the subject" or a change of the paragraph before or the paragraph after. Or they can be impossible to sort out. In which case you can delete either all or part of it and start over.

Now I am in no way advocating that this method is right for everyone. You may find it easier to write strait through. But you might want to try it if your a little scatter-brained like me. Or you could try your own method. As long as you write for at least 15 minutes a day, you'll do good.

stats:
Music: the Otherside by Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Mood: ;-)
Chapters: still working out the ellipses in 11 and trying to avoid the knots

It'll take a miracle

I finally finished chapter 10 with no ellipses and no knots. And now I'm trying to get chapter 11 done by this Monday, May 16. There's nothing particularly special about that date except that it's two days from when I promised myself I would be finished with a third of my promo animation. And I've already completed that. But now I've got another problem. My right arm has been cramping up in the evening. And my right arm is my primary writing arm. I am not ambidextrous. So the process of writing this chapter is going to be slow. It's going to take a miracle to get this chapter done in time.


Stats
Mood: content
Chapters completed: 10
Promo Progress: Finished 1-12 on storyboard
Music currently: Your Decision by Alice in Chains

Stats on my book writing

I really enjoy writing. But there are some problems that have been occurring lately with writing my first book. The first one is lack of reference material. Seriously I can't find one thing on one-on-one dragon fights let alone how dragon boxing matches are supposed to happen. The good news is that I have a lot of room in which to bullshit. The bad news is that there are no established guidelines. So I'm sort of the first to write about dragon boxing. If I were to guess I would say it would be a combination of kangaroo and human boxing. The second is the inability to fill the holes. There are gaps in my chapter 10. Normally this wouldn't be a problem except that my non-hole parts already have more than 4500 words in this one chapter. And I'm not even done with the bulk of this chapter yet. So in the end I'm going to have one really long chapter. My third problem is knots. Knots are places in the story that either force the story to go on longer or screw the story up completely. First you have to find them. And sometimes they're there and sometimes they're not. When you do find them you can either delete and go around them or you can try to comb them out. Either way it's a big pain in the ass.

Mood: tired
Music: none
chapter:10.5 out of 21

Amelia and Prag

This entry is my first blogfest I have ever participated in. I already had most of the following written down already, but I didn’t finish it until now. Note on the following scene: It occurs in a much later chapter than the one I’m working on now. Amelia is a dragon whose gift/power is form-shifting (which is similar to shape-shifting only you get a limited number of shapes). At an early age she decided her other form would be human. So in this scene, both her and Prag are dragons in human form and they are currently dancing. Enjoy! :

Amelia peered over Prag’s right shoulder and started laughing.

“What is so funny?” he asked.

“You’ve grown a tail.”

Prag looked at his behind and saw that his dragon tail had returned. Not only that but the chair he was sitting was stuck in the middle of the tail. He laughed right along with her. “So I have,” he said. “Do you want me to get rid of it?”

“No,” Amelia replied in a kind and loving manner. “It’s a imperfection I can handle.” Then she pulled him close around the waist toward her and she rapidly pressed his lips onto hers.

Being that this was Prag’s first kiss made it very confusing at first. Dragons are not known to be physically intimate. So Prag’s first reaction was surprise and shock. And for a split second he thought about attacking. But then Prag instinctively closed his eyes and started to relax and enjoy the sensation. Slowly discovering that he was mimicking the same actions she was making. He noticed that her lipstick had the delicious aroma and taste of cherries. At one point she gabbed his hair and he proceeded to do the same. To him each strand of her hair felt as slick as satin and as soft as silk. Her kiss was soft and warm as her lips caressed his. He wished she would never stop.

But she did stop. And as Amelia pulled away from him, she noticed that his eyes were shut and a tear was crawling down on one side of his face.  “Was this your first kiss?” she asked.

Prag nodded with his eyes still shut.

Amelia felt angry with herself “That was all my fault,” she cried. “It’s a sin not to ask you first and it’s especially a sin just to outright kiss you like that.”

“You’re right,” Prag replied with his eyes starting to open “That first kiss was a sin. But what innocent a sin is the first only to crave for the second.”

With that she smiled and she quickly engaged in the second kiss.


For more on the First Kiss Blogfest visit http://www.melissaddean.com/2010/03/first-kiss-blogfest.html

Stinkin' Knots

I’ve got a HUGE knot in my story, one that I can’t delete even if I wanted two because it’s critical to the story. It’s a boxing fight scene between Prag and Lore for the title of Prince of the Celtic Realm. The reason why it’s so critical is because Praxel tries to kill Prag. This reestablishes a theme I had in chapter three through six of Praxel being homicidal. But my knot is how do I get them to the ring and secondly I don’t know how to do a fight scene.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been spending more time on Illustrator than on Word, Twitter, and Blogger combined. Why? My brother has a school assignment in Video Production that involves stop action. So far he’s got some Google Earth and some crappy looking Flash animation from my mother. I can do much better animation, and I think my woman is far prettier than her woman. And because Illustrator is better at vector graphics than Flash, that’s what I’m using.

Anyway, here's my version of the girl

Critiques vs. Outright Rejection or Approval

Remember in school what would happen when you got back a paper. Unless you were Mr. or Ms. Perfect, you’d usually have red marks all over the page. Your paper would be bleeding to death. There would be marks on your grammar, spelling errors, capitalization,  and/or punctuation. And you would correct them so the next time you’d get a more perfect grade.

Your word processor follows the same method. Only that under a spelling error a red squiggly line appears and under a grammatical error a green squiggly line appears. But the effect was the same.  You would correct them in order to produce a more perfect document.

A similar situation occurred when I was doing my capstone project in college. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we would go up to the front of the class with the projects we had worked on that week and present them to the class. Then with his famous laser pointer, Mr. Rodrigo de Toledo would point out what we needed to work on to make each project  perfect.

But in the world of publishing, the red pen does not exist. There are only two grades for a book: A and F. There are only the books that are accepted and those that get a rejection slip.

We as human beings do not learn that way. By accepting or rejecting whatever we do, we cannot learn without the input. That’s why one of the worst places to be on Project Runway is at the very bottom. The second worst place is in the middle without any input from the judges. The best place, of course, is at the top, but those people get input from the judges and (if they’re the winner) they get immunity for the next week. Even being at the bottom is better than being at the middle  due to the input, just as long as it is not the very bottom.

If a kid got a paper back with only the letter F on top he would ask, “What did I do wrong?” That’s what a rejection letter is, a gigantic letter F that deserves the question, “What did I do wrong?” Take J. K. Rowling and her “Philosopher’s Stone.” She got tons of rejection letter’s and she would ask the same question. Finally, when it was published  in America she got the answer. The publishers didn’t like the name and they changed it to “The Sorcerer’s Stone”. If that was the only problem they had with the first book, then they should’ve said something.

At the same time a kid who got absolutely no marks on the paper would ask, “Did I get a good grade or have you not graded it yet?” There are some books that are published by famous book writers that don’t have great stories. Books that aren’t graded by the publisher, but are given the stamp of approval just because of who wrote it. Take Sarah Palin’s book. I’m sorry Sarah fans but this is a BAD BOOK. I heard the reviews and I decided I wouldn’t buy this book even if it was free.  Over a thousand pages and only five chapters, a PhD would have trouble looking at that much text. Eyes need to breathe. And if the publisher read the finished product they would agree.

So what would happen if publisher’s would take off those beer goggles and pulled out their red pens. Then the publisher’s would be forced to read the whole thing. An they would be able to determine what is good (A’s), what need’s work (B’s and C’s), what need’s serious work (D’s), and what needs a miracle to reach at least a C- (F’s). They’d also be able to lay out to the author’s “what did you do wrong?” Then they would write the author’s an email or at least give them a phone call. After all it takes months to write a book. It takes only days to read it. And it takes only twenty pages to get hooked on a good one.