Monthly Archives: March 2011

I require a certain amount of interactivity in my entertainments.  That’s part of what turned me into a gamer in the first place. I need something to engage with, something to do. Sitting and passively watching are not things I am very capable of, and though there are a few TV shows I never, ever miss  (ahem, Doctor Who) I am usually doing something else while watching them.

Crafts. Housework. Playing with the cats.

Sitting still and reading, however, have never been a problem. I have to be careful not to pick up a book before bed because I will continue reading until the end, not even realizing what time it is and not feeling any exhaustion or tiredness. Until I finish the book, at least, and look over to the clock and realize I have to go to work in three hours.

Strangely enough, this same sort of “I don’t even realize it’s past my bedtime” engagement has always been how I judged video games as well. When I’ve played it late into the evening without even realizing how late it is, well . . . that’s a good game. When it’s 8:30 and I’m already falling asleep with boredom? Yeah, not such a good game. Or book, as the case may be.

It is that sort of engagement that I want to inspire in my readers. That “It’s 3:00 AM and I didn’t even notice” excitement. I don’t know that I’m quite there yet, but I’m working on it.

Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What’s good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It’s happy for deep people.

(Doctor Who: Series 3 – “Blink”)

I like old things. Buildings, particularly. For some reason, they never fail to catch my eye, no matter how fast I may be passing them in my car, or how little of a glance I get.  And immediately, the gears in my mind start turning.

To borrow a phrase from one of the early heroes of my life, Anne Shirley, of Green Gables: “There’s so much more scope for the imagination.”

There is something so inherently beautiful in a decaying building, or even a lone chimney standing in a field. It is the last remnant of a place that has seen life – or possibly multiple lives – pass through.  Nature is beginning to encroach, bit by bit. The paint is peeling, the windows are broken, leaving disjointed shadows on the ground no matter how bright the day.  You can’t help but wonder what that building has experienced, through its years, what those bricks or that rotting wooden frame have seen.

Just as certain character types tend to recur in my fiction, certain settings also seem to appear with frequency. Some of these are settings that I am most familiar with, the sort of places that feel like home to me. Red dirt roads, unpainted farmhouses, abandoned graveyards, mysterious railroad tracks to nowhere in the middle of a forest,  spanish moss draped over live oaks or cypress on the riverside.  Decaying buildings.

Images that I find beautiful, and familiar.  Because there is a beauty there, in the old things, even when they are falling apart, that simply does not exist in anything that is bright and shiny and new. The beauty is in the history of the place, and in the way that these buildings somehow cease to be a relic of human civilization and become, slowly but surely, a part of the natural world that surrounds them.

It’s not from some sense of morbidity, or because, like Sally Sparrow in the above quote, old things make me feel sad. It is the beauty of them that I am drawn to, how somehow in the midst of falling to dust, these remnants of civilization become something amazing.

You can’t help but imagine what, and who, come to this place before.

Related articles

• Beautiful Decay (indiapiedaterre.com)
• Amazing urban decay photos by Brian Roach (lostateminor.com)
• Blended Abandoned Buildings – The Dormer House by Ben Wolf is a Collage of Decaying Structures (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been on a Superman kick lately.

This is unusual for me. I’ve never been a huge Superman fan, especially the old-school, classic Superman.

I like a hero with flaws, who doesn’t always do the right thing and who has to take substantial risks in order to be a hero.

It’s part of why I’ve always been a Marvel girl – the Marvel Universe is almost entirely made up of  flawed heroes. It also tends to show up in my writing, where no matter how “super” my heroes or heroines might be, no matter what skills they have that make them awesome, they are also supremely flawed individuals.

Somehow, to me, it has always seemed more heroic when part of what a hero has to conquer is him-or her-self.

Classic Superman is the very definition of the Heroic Archetype, but without any sort of Tragic Flaw. He is unfailingly good in a world of black and white, where truth and justice are always easy to see and right is always clearly distinguished from wrong.  He is as close to immortal as is possible.  There is only one thing that can kill him. He is God, come down to earth, and always, always doing right.

More modern adaptations of the character have succeeded in making him more three-dimensional, giving him flaws and insecurities and dealing with the whole nature-vs.-nurture aspects of his life: Had he been raised any other way, could this god have turned into a devil?

In these adaptations, the character has a good bit more appeal to me than previously, but his world still seems very black and white, especially when held up in comparison to another DC Universe character.

With Batman, we have a human, mortal man, in an almost noir world.  Everything for him is just one shade of grey out of many.  It is vengeance, not justice, that drives him, and yet he becomes as much a hero as his friend. He protects the public, the innocents. He seeks out and conquers villains. And he does so in the certain knowledge that should one villain get lucky, should his technology prove even slightly inferior, he will die.  He is an angry bundle of neuroses and anxieties, addictions and lies.  And yet somehow, he seems so much more realistic. He is not a god. He goes out and does his job anyway.

How do you write your heroes?  Are they flawless, like Superman? Do they always do the right thing? Do they always know what the right thing is? Or do they, like Batman, carry on with their quest in the hope that, maybe, most of the time, they’re doing something good, even if they stumble along the way?

Related articles

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Image by madamepsychosis via Flickr

I don’t talk about my works-in-progress.  I try to avoid mentioning my ideas to people, except vaguely and in passing, and then only if they ask.  Those that know me best have learned not to ask.

Why? I am not a superstitious sort of person. I do not think that I will jinx my project by talking about it. But over the years I have learned that talking out a project, discussing it and my characters with other people before and during the initial pre-write, or even telling anyone what I’m writing about seems to act like a needle to a balloon.

My enthusiasm for the project pops and vanishes into thin air.

After watching dozens of potential stories die a withering death in this manner, I eventually stopped telling people what I’m writing, beyond the vaguest of genre references. I keep it to myself. I keep the characters carefully locked away in my mind, and ensure that they know that the only way they’re getting out is to perform – to give me their story to tell.  Only when the story is complete can they be free to go and dance about in someone else’s head.

Keeping the story to myself means that I discover it as I am writing, rather than telling it to someone else and then never sitting down to actually write it down.  It is fresh to me, when I sit down at my computer and start typing. It is new and exciting.

Keeping the story to myself ensures that I don’t get bored with it before it is written. And this is key, because my excitement about what’s going on in the story infects the story itself, and I want my readers to share in that excitement. Writing a story I am bored with will only ever result in a boring story.

So I keep it secret. I keep it safe.

Related articles

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If you follow my Twitter, you know that I’ve been giving ecstatic recommendations for Scrivener lately, which is by far the best piece of writing software I’ve come across. But I realize that what works for me won’t necessarily work for everyone else, and as I’ve tried just about everything available, I thought I’d give a quick comparison.

yWriter – Free, Open Source – Windows/Linux

yWriter 5 Main Window

yWriter is typically seen as the “Free Alternative” to Scrivener, and I have used it extensively.  It is excellent as an organizational tool, but the interface is inelegant and somewhat complicated to deal with, and can be a distraction from the writing. With yWriter, I found that it worked better for me to do my actual writing in a separate text editor, like Q10 or FocusWriter, and then import the finished document into yWriter for organization and editing.  It does not have a true full-screen editor, and jumping between scenes is a little more obtrusive.

However, if you cannot afford Scrivener and are looking for a free option, yWriter is a great alternative, especially paired with a separate full-screen text editor. The import feature in yWriter is simple to use, you just have to use a standardized separator (Three asterisks: * * * ) between your scenes for it to recognize and separate them in the organizer.  I used it for a long time with a lot of success, and while I sing odes to the joy of writing with Scrivener, I can’t deny that yWriter works well, even if only as an editing program.

I do still use another program created by the same programmer, Sonar 3, to track my manuscript submissions.  It is a wonderful little program, and I’d recommend it wholeheartedly to everyone, especially if you have multiple manuscripts “in play” – in the submissions process – at once.

Liquid Story Binder – $45.95 US (30 day free trial) – Windows

Liquid Story Binder XE

LBS is beautiful, and the user interface is absolutely wonderful to look at and play with.  And therein lies the problem.  There is a point where a piece of software might just have too many features, and those features actually work to impede rather than assist your writing productivity. While I am sure anyone writing a particularly research-intensive project, comics writers, screenwriters who draw storyboards, and the like would find this program absolutely wonderful, I found that I spent all of my time fiddling around with the “features” and not actually getting any writing done.  The program was more fun to play with than it was useful, at least for me.

Scrivener – $45.00 US – Mac OS (Windows and Linux versions currently in Beta)

Where LBS was overwhelming with too many features, and yWriter’s interface makes it difficult to work with, Scrivener is perfect in its simplicity. It has all of the organizational and outlining features you could need without any unnecessary bloat, and the interface is unobtrusive and easy to work with.  It is everything you need without being too much, and for me, the perpetually distracted, it has been an absolute lifesaver. I get more work done with Scrivener than I have ever been able to accomplish before.   Where other programs seemed to hinder my productivity, Scrivener increased it.

While I love Scrivener for its simplicity, it still has plenty of features for those who want them.  The difference is that all of the features are actually useful through every phase of the writing process without turning into time-wasting procrastination apps.  And when you don’t need those features, they’re not screaming for you to go play with them. You can hide everything behind a full-screen editor. You can make the world go away and let it just be you and your text.  Scrivener helps you get the thing done.  For that, it has my everlasting affection.

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