Meanwhile…

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!

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

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.

I haven’t posted a writing sketch lately, so this seems like a good time. To be fair, I haven’t had much to post. I’m still working diligently on my Chuck Chaykin space western (which is shaping up well, I think). But I managed to churn out this little prompt during some downtime at work.

Prompt: Write about a post-apocalyptic world (doesn’t have to be post-nuclear war – could be a world after the financial system collapsed, after a deadly plague, after the zombie apocalypse, etc.).

I went with a zombie story, pretty much. I’ve talked plenty about zombie stories in the past, so I’ll just post the clip and move on. I’m not sure ambassadors actually have any sort of power like this in real life. The idea of a civilian whose job is to help secure peace (presumably) forced to make the difficult decision of whether to wipe out an entire city (or country even) to which he’s been assigned struck me as a powerful one. About 500 words or so. Continue reading

Zombies are fun, and they have several qualities that make them a great plot device to tell stories. They’re simple – just take dead people, add animation and a ravenous hunger. Stir and repeat. You don’t really have to explain them, or explain how they happen. They are implacable, but not incredibly difficult to kill or even escape for brief periods of time. So there’s the sense that even a normal human being can handle themselves, if they’re careful. And yet there’s a constant sense of tension and dread at what might be trapped in that locked house, or shuffling across the camp ground. They’re also a way of having an apocalypse that wipes out much of humanity, but then sticks around afterward to harass the survivors. There is a constant threat looming, but it’s slow.

Which is really the key. Zombie stories allow for a lot of human interaction. Once your survivors have escaped the initial onslaught and barricaded up the building, what do they do? Do they turn on each other? Band together to survive? Split into factions and fight over supplies? To me, zombie stories are a great showcase for how terrible human beings can be to each other. Theoretically, I guess, you could use it as a showcase for how people can overcome even this, the worst calamity to befall humanity, but it usually doesn’t work out that way. Most people don’t handle stress well even in every day life, much less with monsters chasing you. I guess it all just depends on your view of humankind’s nature.

So for today’s sketch, the beginnings of a zombie story. Just a few hundred words. Continue reading