Meanwhile…

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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Clearly, I’ve fallen way behind on my Story Every Day exercises. I just barely squeezed one out for today.

Still, I thought it would be fun to play around with a minor bit character I created for Shades of Red way back when. I had to look him up just to remember his name. In a way this is sort of a follow-up to that story, one of the consequences of that adventure. Some of the best genre stories are from the point of view of someone not directly involved with the big epic that’s taking place. The little guy on the side who’s a witness to these big events can offer a fresh perspective on the action and help flesh out the universe at the same time.

This story involves Radio Gal, who if you’ve been around here long enough you’ve seen once or twice before. Just the first few hundred words. For some reason I have a blast writing these scenes of superheroes just sitting around talking. Continue reading

Wow, already almost half-way through. Well, I guess not. Nine days to go? I have yet to need to turn to the emergency prompts, though, so I take that as a good sign.

I just whipped this piece up, inspired by the current goings on in Iran. There are some incredibly moving images and stories coming out of there. I can’t hope to do any of that justice with my meager skills, but I was inspired nonetheless.

I tend to avoid political discussions, because for the most part they are losing propositions regardless of ideologies, logic, or reason. But I see things like this and it just blows me away. We may be seeing history in the making. Given that we just had eight years of a president pissing all over the Constitution and nothing happened, I don’t know exactly what it would take to have that sort of political unrest here. I’m not sure if we’re the lucky ones or not.

Just over 500 words. Continue reading

I started this mostly as a pretty basic post-apocalypse story, survivors living among the ruins of civilization type story. I kind of like the direction it’s taking, though, so maybe at some point I’ll work some more on this concept. A little over 800 words. Continue reading

Didn’t really get a chance to work on much yesterday, so I’ve already missed a day!

Occasionally I dip my toes into the pool of fantasy, though I’ve yet to finish anything of the sort that I’d consider submitting somewhere. There’s a certain built-in formality to the language of fantasy, a by-product of the epic nature of the genre I guess, that I’m not sure I’m any good at. Plus there’s a lot of world-building to do, which has a lot of different pros and cons involved. And don’t get me started on attempting to cull something new from the genre that doesn’t get mixed up with some half-remembered Tolkein myth or D&D rulebook.

For years I’ve tinkered with a story involving an elf and human teaming up for some quest. It always starts off with the two of them tracking some villainy in a forest, and the elf crafting a weapon from a dead tree to exact vengeance. The names and genders (and even the species – the human was originally some half-breed goblin or something) have shifted and there’s several different versions on various notebooks in my bookshelves.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to finishing it. Here’s yet another version of the opening, about 600 words.

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First day’s writing complete, a little alternate World War I steampunk-style war scene. The full story came in just under a thousand words. I don’t know if there’s enough story to it to consider submitting it somewhere or not. I’ll have to think about it.

Excerpt after the jump.

Edit – gah, sorry, some intertube gremlins ate the second half of my post. Should be good now. Well, visible, not necessarily good. Continue reading

I nearly forgot, but tomorrow marks the Writer’s Ink Story Every Day contest. We started this last year after my own fool-hearted attempt at something similar on my own. Now all the cool kids are doing it. Every day for two weeks we’ll all attempt to churn out a piece of flash fiction of at least 500 words.

So keep an eye on this space for terrible, hastily-written exercises for the next couple of weeks. I usually get about 9-12 pieces done. With a little luck one or two might be worth polishing up.

Just playing around with Chuck Chaykin and his pal a little bit more, I came up with this fun scenario. Mostly I just wanted to write Chuck fighting some space shark pirates.

Something that I haven’t really had to worry about before is how to handle character development and description for characters who I’ve already written about (and, hopefully, published). It’s something I’ll have to start thinking about if I keep writing about these two particular characters. I can’t assume that people have read a previous Chuck Chaykin story, so some basic retreading will be required. But at the same time, I won’t want to bore returning readers (hah!) with the same exposition every time.

I’m getting ahead of myself, of course. But it’s fun to imagine that someday that might be an issue.

I’ll need to finish polishing up “Telepath’s Lament” and get that submitted before really working on anything else, but this might make a fun flash piece some time. About 300 words so far, currently untitled. The last line is silly, so I apologize in advance.

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