Meanwhile…

Or whatever day we’re on.

Not really sure where this one was going, but I kind of like the beginning. I was up late watching Whale Wars the other day. People that feel so strongly about issues that (ultimately) don’t affect them interest me, regardless of the cause. I have no idea what it’s like to be that passionate about anything, unless we’re talking about casting Summer Glau in a Scarlet Ranger television series.

At any rate, here’s what I’ve got.

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This might be another solid one, though it’ll need a lot of polish, it’s quite rough. An early adventure of a certain masked heroine. Perhaps the most fun writing this was coming up with her terrifically horrible early ’80s costume (the Doc Martens go without saying, of course). Brief excerpt after the jump.

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I may have something with this one. Finished with literally about 30 seconds to spare. Here’s a bit. Exciting!

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I almost forgot, but the writing group is doing our annual Story Every Day contest this month. For the next couple of weeks we’ll be churning out a short story every single day. It is crazy!

Thanks to some forgetfulness and a minor communications snafu, we’re actually starting today instead of yesterday like we’d originally intended. But no biggie. So I’ll be trying to post excerpts of my attempts each day.

This is a little of what I wrote last night at the write-in to kick things off. I thought this might serve as a good companion piece to a story I’ll have appearing in A Thousand Faces later this year.

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As you can see to the right, I’ve added a new column, within which you can see daily nuggets of fiction. I’m not totally satisfied with it, as I’m using Twitter to create the feed, and from time to time the character limit is a beast to deal with. But it will do for the moment. I’ll be posting material from my daily hint fiction exercise I did last year and mixing in something new as often as possible.

If you have Twitter, you can follow the feed directly here.

Last Friday I decided to bring my little daily hint fiction exercise to an end. It was great to keep me writing during these past overtime-laden months, but it’s starting to become a chore. I need to get back to my regular writing. There are 73 little nano-stories over there. If I’d realized the number I might have churned out a couple more just to hit that nice round 75. A handful of them are actually good.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it before, but the talented Rumjhum Biswas wrote a nice article over on the Flash Fiction Chronicles that complements my “Make it Fun!” article.

As I mentioned yesterday, on a whim I have decided to undertake a little twitter story exercise. Each day (weekends? not sure yet, though I feel like I should) around noon (US Central time) I’ll be posting a new piece of fiction on my Twitter account. We’ll see how it goes! I actually wish I had done this before the Hint Fiction contest, as I think the two items I’ve posted already are better than what I turned in for the contest (even with the embarrassing typos in the first entry).

Anyway, I’ve taken the step of favoriting the stories, to separate them from the rest of the chaff of my twittering. So you should be able to just go straight to my Favorites page and see only the stories. You don’t have to create an account of your own or sift through my tweets about fighting bees or my pop culture commentary. I’ll see if there’s some way I can integrate that feed into the site here. I think some fun stuff can be had with this.

If anyone wants to join in, let me know and I’ll make sure to follow and shamelessly plug you.

It’s been a while since I posted any writing exercises. To be fair, I’ve been just as remiss in actually writing any writing exercises. Hurm.

So here’s a few I just came up with for the writing group. Feel free to use them! And let me know what you come up with!

• Begin your story as something horrible is crawling toward your protagonist!
• Put a twist on one of the clichés listed here. You can just change a word (I dunno, write about a Lifetrap, or the Bad Old Days) or put whatever other kind of twist you want.
• Feature a character who loves something you hate.
• Set your story in a cramped place, like a train, airplane, or locked room.

And speaking of exercises, I’m thinking of trying my hand at posting super-short Twitter fiction each day. I just posted my first clumsy attempt. Feel free to follow me and watch me stumble and fail!

And of course it would not be a true Burns story without a glaring typo. Or two.

In case you haven’t noticed it already, there’s a flash fiction contest going on over at the Flash Fiction Chronicles. If you have an urge to write a few 250-word stories, based on prompts, head on over and check out the guidelines. Prizes include publication and copies of EDF’s Best of 2008 Anthology. Best hurry, it’s only running until Sunday.

I’ll see what I can get written up!

I’m determined to win the writing group’s writing contest this month, though this is actually the first piece I’ve found the time to finish lately. Actually, I wouldn’t say this is even a finished story, it’s really just an action scene.

For some reason I thought it would be fun to create this Mexican crime-fighting duo. Goyo is very much the standard Luchador, but I have an interesting idea for Lady Remedios that I may expand into a full story.

I should note that, for a Texan, I know virtually no Spanish, and visiting Mexico has never appealed to me. You can’t drink the water, right? And it seems like lots of people die there, often of falling on bullets. Doesn’t sound like great vacation material to me. I have good Mexican friends here, anyway, no need to go. I do, however, find the people quite interesting.

As a result, there isn’t really any Spanish in this piece. As a fun nod to comics, I did encapsulate the dialogue in <>. Comic book letterers used to do this all the time to indicate that people are speaking in foreign languages, why not here? I’m not sure it’s a technique that you could use for a mass audience, as they’ve probably never heard of it, but I think in the right circles it could work.

Anyway, here’s the scene. It’s really just a big action scene, me getting a feel for the characters, how they look, and speak. I’d originally intended to make Remedios an empath, with the power only to heal (which you can kind of see there in the paragraph introducing Goyo), and I think I’ll still do that. Telekinesis was a little more handy for this, though, and it just kind of naturally popped in there. So that probably makes all this useless, but who knows?

I like the villain, Subterráneo. He almost fits into the Mole Man archetype, but rather than some mad scientist or megalomaniac who feels the surface world has wronged him, he’s basically just a lunatic who likes to occasionally surface and fuck with people. That’s pretty much all I had in mind for this. I may develop him further at some point in the future.

Based very loosely on this prompt:

Write a story where an earthquake is/has taken place. You can decide the severity of this natural disaster.

Almost 1,200 words!

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