Meanwhile…

This morning I found myself thinking about my abandoned Scarlet Ranger novel (begun in a NaNo event a couple years ago). Maybe I’ll give it another go. Is there a point? Even if I finish it I’ll almost certainly have to self-publish. Maybe I should do it just to get it out of my system.

My Daily Sketches don’t seem to be updating properly. This is annoying.

Heading out this afternoon to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World again with a couple guys who haven’t seen it yet. If you are among those who haven’t seen it – well, I don’t want to say you’re a bad person, but, well. Here we are.

I wrote this little bit over the weekend. I think if I can hit the right tone with it this may turn into a fun dark humor piece. We’ll see.

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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 finally got around to watching the animated Wonder Woman DC produced this year.

I thought it was pretty great. The voice cast is excellent – Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, and Alfred Molina lead, with smaller roles for the likes of Rosario Dawson, Oliver Platt, and Virginia Madsen (oh, and now I see it also featured Beth from NewsRadio – I’ve always liked her). It’s a solid telling of Diana’s origin story that doesn’t pull any punches (though there’s a suspicious lack of blood on the swords – I guess decapitating someone is okay unless there’s actually blood, then look out!). My only complaint would be the same as with Justice League: New Frontier, that it needed another twenty minutes or so for some character development.

On a personal level, I thought it was awesome that they didn’t give Wonder Woman the ability to fly on her own. She had to use the old invisible jet to get around (actually, I always thought a jet would be the best way to get around even if you can fly – I imagine it would only take one mid-flight bug swallowing to send you scrambling to your local superhero vehicle dealer). As I watched her kicking the crap out of a monster in a dark New York alley, I couldn’t help but think of my Scarlet Ranger (whose origin is rooted in Greek mythology as well). In the Justice League animated series I never quite connected the two, as Wonder Woman was always flying around, but here I really saw it. Really, Kelly and Diana are nothing alike in terms of personality, and Diana is a far more skilled combatant, but it was fun to to see how Kelly might look in battle.

It put me in the mood to write her again, so we’ll see what comes of that.

It seems this sketchbook has been too long without a sketch!

I’ve been planning since the site launch to have art depicting various scenes or characters from my stories. I have received a couple of preliminary sketches from friend Katie and it is pretty exciting!

Well, we’re nearing that time of year again. This morning I received an email from the NaNo people warning that they’re about to prep the site for this year’s contest.

It’s still over a month away of course, but I think the biggest thing that kills NaNo attempts (or at least mine) is lack of preparation. If you’re writing a fantasy/science fiction story, you’d better have your world pretty well built by the time you sit down to even outline, I think. That can take a lot of time. I tried to do all that on short notice two years ago and it didn’t work out so well.

I’m determined to get a lot of material written for Kelly Sienna, The Scarlet Ranger. I’ve already got one published short story about her, plus several short exercises (mostly posted here somewhere, if you look around). A lot of her life story is written out in my head, so I think I can put together a pretty decent outline. It might be roughly broken down into something like this:

Part 1 – The Early Early Years, about Kelly as a young girl, when she first receives her powers and massive events that will shape the rest of her life happen.

Part 2 – The Teen Years, when she discovers just how different her powers make her, and must decide what to do with them.

Part 3 – Early Hero Years, involvement with the second generation Liberty Gang

Part 4 – The Experienced Years, as she comes into her own as a hero and her rocky romance with The Chicago Defender.

Something like that, anyway. That would be 12,500 words per section. 

 So now I’ve got to decide on a couple of things. Do I want to write it as several novellas? Should I avoid the decades-spanning story and focus on just one of those periods? If I decide to write a later period, will I regret limiting what I can do with the earlier times?

I’m leaning toward a novella of each time period. This way I may be able to avoid Star Wars-style continuity issues, and if I feel like there’s enough story in one, it can always be expanded. I may add another Part, which would give me five 10,000-word stories. If some fall short I can always fill in with much shorter one-off adventures. I don’t have a solid villain for her yet, so I could maybe do little flash pieces about whoever that turns out to be to fill in the gaps.

Anyone else out there doing NaNo? It’s daunting, but as I understand it, it becomes easier once you get it done once. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

I absolutely love writing action scenes. I feel like I’ve always been pretty good at it, and that probably stems from growing up reading a lot of books with great action scenes. (Michael Stackpole, I would have to say, is a huge inspiration for this; his action scenes are always stellar.) I’ve been complimented on my clear, fun, descriptive action scenes. It’s one of the few times that my tendency to over-visualize is an asset, I think. I don’t know if I’m any good at writing the stuff in between the action, but I’ve got that, at least.

So when Jens sent out this prompt this month, it got me a little excited (and I didn’t have to grab a dictionary to understand it ):

Prompt: Write a story with the best dang fight scene ever. But it also has to mean something. Within the context of the story. A spectacular, mind-shattering fight scene, but with emotional heft and moral repercussions, in under a thousand words. Yeah!

So I took the opportunity to fledge out a little more the Scarlet Ranger’s history. With some expansion, I think this might might a pretty good stand-alone short story, so I’ll just post a brief bit of it here. This is set in the early days of her career, before Kelly even took the mantle of the Scarlet Ranger. A member of the Liberty Gang, Lieutenant Governor (formerly sidekick to the Governor, of course) is featured as well.

The more I think about it and the more I write about her, the more I want to NaNo Kelly’s story. I enjoy writing her enough that I think I could keep it up for a month, and portions of the story are already rolling around in my head.

Anyway, on to a dark, dingy Chicago alley, mid 1980s… Continue reading