Almost there! One more day! Then I can maybe get back to normal prompt exercises.
For today I did a little more with my fantasy cop character. Doing something a little more policeman like. I’ve combined him with a couple of other characters that I had lying around for a long time. Maybe it’s time to do something with them all. This is about 700 words. Continue reading
Didn’t get a chance to post this last night, so I’ll put it up now.
It’s odd that I don’t write more fantasy. I grew up on fantasy. As I got older I gradually leaned more toward science fiction, and then in college I had to read a lot of non-genre stuff. Fantasy just kind of fell away, for the most part. It doesn’t help that a lot of fantasy tends to be pretty bad. By fantasy I’m talking about classic sword and sorcery.
It seems incredibly difficult to me to come up with something genuinely fresh for fantasy. I also have a hard time truly identifying with fantasy characters. Really, they’re nothing like us. Complaining that your cell phone reception is bad? Really? Well guess what, Rolf’s village was burned down by a fucking dragon last week. And what are the interactions between ancient people’s like on a day-to-day basis? I have a hard time imagining conversations that aren’t rife with corporate logos and movie quotes.
So here’s a little bit of a fantasy story I might work on. It seems like there are a few things today that we can link to fantasy settings–religion and its influence on people and governments, systems of justice, and politics. Those sorts of stories are pretty prominent in fantasy stories. Kings and clerics and holy wars and what not. So I thought I’d focus on the justice system. I imagine some of the problems police forces run into in a fantasy setting are not terribly different from what they run into today. It’s at the trial and judge level that things begin to get really different. At the most basic level, cops are cops. So I made my main character a cop. About 700 words. Continue reading
You’ll have to take my word for it that I wrote today. I actually am really liking this piece. It’s called (at the moment) “The Parisian” and is about a paratrooper in World War II. I think I’m going to work on this one a bit and if I like how it turns out look around for a place to submit. For that reason, I will not post what I’ve got of it.
I’ll need to do a little research and see if some of my French-speaking friends can help me out with some dialogue.
In case anyone is curious, I have purchased a laptop. It’s an HP and fairly spiffy. It unfortunately does have Vista installed. Tried as I might, I was unable to get around it. So far it’s been fine, though I haven’t been able to load any important software on it. My perfectly good copies of Office XP and Photoshop Elements won’t work on it. Which seems odd to me, as Microsoft has left me with essentially two choices: pirate the newer software or go without, employing instead the perfectly good free stuff that is on the net. I’m not sure who they think the loser in this equation is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not me. At the moment I’m using the free Office trial that came with the machine, but once that expires, I’ll probably just download Open Office. And once I’ve gotten used to Open Office I doubt I’ll ever find cause to go back.
In general, I’d say if anyone was considering switching over to Mac, this is the time. Vista is just as compatible with your old stuff as a Mac (i.e., not at all), so that excuse is gone. There’s really no reason not to switch, at least when it comes to a laptop.
Other than the software issue, I have no real issues with Vista. It’s got some odd little interface things I could do without, but I’ll get used to it. I recall having all the same irritations when XP came out. I have noticed that the OS seems to take a rather unhealthy amount of hard drive space and I’m not even going to bother trying to run any games on here (if they would even be compatible). For my purposes, which are scant, it is working fine. I would hate to have it on my desktop, though.
And it fits perfectly in this nice messenger bag Hope gave me a few years ago. This bag and the laptop together are lighter and easier to carry than my old bag with all the notepads and folders. Overall I’m quite happy with the whole arrangement.
Some of my favorite villains are the ridiculously big terrorist organizations. Cobra, Hydra, AIM, HIVE, the list goes on. They can always be counted on for a fun story, even if they’re just serving as a bunch of cannon fodder for Captain America or the Justice League to plow through. Here’s a little tribute to the organized henchman. Just the beginning.
I rather like this one. I like the idea of a gang of international art thieves using names from popular children’s fables as their code names. About 590 words. Continue reading
I got absolutely no sleep last night. Literally. Take whatever you got, subtract 100%, and that’s how much I got. No reason. Just couldn’t sleep. So today was not fun.
And yet I persevere! I just whipped this up. I’ve been kinda wanting to do a space western, as I mentioned a few posts back. This might serve as a good starting point, though it’s very rough. I’d probably cut a lot of that action out to get to the interesting stuff faster. What mysteries does the cargo hold…er, hold? Is Jered and his men in over their head? Almost certainly! 1100 words or so. Continue reading
Or maybe I should count this as Day 2? I didn’t get anything done yesterday due to a sudden respiratory infection. I have the necessary narcotics now, so I was able to churn out a little work.
Enjoy this little bit of steampunk! About 730 words. Continue reading
Alien infection has overtaken this mortal frame. I’ve slept most of today. However, Chicken and Stars have been applied according to ancient tradition, and I will endeavor to produce something tonight.
I’ve joined in with a few fellow writers over at the iFanboy.com forums. (If you’re into comics at all, I highly recommend the iFanboy Pick of the Week podcast, it’s fun stuff.) We’ve each set a mad dash-style goal for the next couple of weeks. Mine is to write a story every day for the next two weeks, minus weekends. It’s crazy! Just crazy enough to work? We’ll find out! This is the exactly the sort of thing I created this blog for.
My first entry was inspired after seeing a few minutes of tonight’s episode of Super Nanny. Looking over it, I should have started way later, and fleshed out a lot more of the various heinous activities of the children and how the parents played a part in that development. I waste a lot of space in the first few hundred words. But a lot of times that’s how things are. Things like that always get trimmed to make room for the stuff that matters.
Anyway, hot off the presses, here is Day 1 of 10. 1,500 ridiculous words.
I just got word that Every Day Fiction has accepted my 1000-word mystery story, “Aftershocks.” I’m particularly proud of this piece, so this is awesome news.
Thanks to everyone in the writing group who helped me polish it up!
