Paper Towns

I was thinking, in the shower, about paper towns. Really, I just said, out loud, "What if they were paper towns?"

By "they" I, of course, mean the weird locations in The Long Road. Obviously. I think a lot about stories even when I'm not actively working on them. I'll randomly come up with new ideas for stories I wrote five or ten years ago. This is by no means a stretch.

But anyway. If you're not aware, paper towns are towns that exist only on paper. They're fake.

A Proliferation of Portals

I've been watching 11.22.63, and spoiler alert for the first half hour, there's a portal. Not anywhere that would make any sense, it just is. And I'm only a few episodes in, but it’s not explained how it got there. In true Stephen King fashion, I suppose. Sometimes, weird things just are. I mean, in From a Buick 8, there's a portal to a hell dimension or whatever inside a car (I think, it's been a while since I read it). He can get away with it. But can I?

To be honest, The Long Road is really shaping up to be some kind of homage to Stephen King. The weird town with the sheriff is very Desperation, whether I meant it to be that way or not.

And that's where we run into trouble. There's a fine line between "inspired by" and "a rip-off of." You don't want to be on the wrong side. Especially if you hope to eventually publish something, which I do.

So on the one hand, I might be able to get away with giving no reason for the portals and reality jumping. On the other though, I kind of want to have one. It's seems kind of cheap to just say, "It's happening, just because."

What do you think? Would you want a reason to eventually be revealed, or can you accept a mystery with no answer?

Today's post is a little short, because I don't have much time. I'll see you Saturday.

Travelling Through Places Unknown

I want to write a journey story. We've been over this. And the more I think about it, the more I think it's going to be an Oz/Wonderland sort of deal. That is, where someone from our regular boring old world finds themselves in another, far more interesting world.

But will they stay there?

In those kinds of tales, typically the goal is to get back home, because they're stuck on the other side. But that needn't be the case.

The World is My Discarded Oyster

I'm going to continue getting distracted from my assigned task. It's just who I am as a person. I keep finding other things to talk about. And in a way, that's what today's post is about.

How I let myself down all the time.

It's not as pathetic as it sounds, not really. I just build up all these great ideas with such potential and then… meh. I focus on something else entirely.

I'm going to tell you a story. About a story. I wrote this last spring. You can see all the posts about it here. It was the adventures of a small town sheriff when faced with a larger and modernizing world. Okay, fine.

But the world, man, the world.

No Hourglasses in Zero G

I've started fitting out an extensive character sheet for Elsbeth Zogg, sci-fi villain. I'm not going to share all the answers here, because frankly, I don't want to. Describing characters makes me uncomfortable. Extensively describing them, even more so.

Now, I thought that this was just going to be an exercise in character creation, and a plot and everything would come later. World building and all that tiresome nonsense. But I realized something right off the bat when I started the character questionnaire. Something I need to think about in this story. Something I need to figure out.

How do you tell time in space?

Worlds Collide

I randomly came up with the best analogy the other day. I was trying to explain what I was talking about last time, about needing the perfect words and the best sentences in a story that anyone's going to read.

It's like building a brick wall. You only want, good, high quality bricks. You don't want a brick made of Styrofoam, or Jell-O. That's going to make holes in your wall. You don't want a poorly constructed story with holes in it.

Granted, my original explanation had a lot more swearing in it. I try to behave myself on here, for some damn reason.

So I've had a poll running for the past couple of weeks, and I didn’t quite get the volume of responses I'd hoped. But that's okay. The votes are in, and it's a three way tie between Subterranean Fiction, Occult Detective, and Romance. Which means I have to combine all three.

Bottled Inspiration

I got on here to write my blog post, but then I got distracted reminiscing over the 100+ year history of my old university. I'm not even sure how I got started on that in the first place. Oh, bomb shelters. That was it.

I haven't been doing much writing, sorry to say. Mostly just working and sleeping. And thinking about writing. A lot of good that's doing me.

When I'm at work, I just think about how I want to come home and write my story. But when I get home, I just… don't do that. What's that all about?

How Many Universes Fit on the Head of a Pin

All right. Universes. Within universes. That's what I promised.

I found this site recently. It's a universe. And if you open it up, it's full of galactic superclusters, which are full of galaxies. And you can keep going down, smaller and smaller, into star systems, into planets, into towns, into people.

Yes, into people. What they're made of. What they're thinking. What's in their pockets.

What? No! Who would do that?

Whatever Doesn't Make Me Stronger Kills Me

Well, we're back on vampires. Specifically, what kills them. Really, what causes them harm at all. It's a question of how much I want to follow tradition, and how much I want to make it up.

Traditionally, vampires are vulnerable to stakes, sunlight, decapitation, fire, silver (sometimes), garlic, holy symbols, and running water. Sometimes, they can’t enter a home without being invited, and they’re obsessed with counting things (suddenly Sesame Street makes so much more sense).

Setting a Foundation for Urban Fantasy

I’ll be honest, most of my time lately is spent on trying to become a real adult, and desperately trying not to be a real adult. So I've been slacking in the writing department. I was trying to do some plotting while I was at work, but people kept coming in and wanting things. Very distracting.

It falls into the realm of urban fantasy, in a contemporary world with supernatural elements. This involves something called the Masquerade, which is the outward appearance that the world is normal. The public at large is unaware that creatures of the night roam the streets or what have you. So I can have an ice cream parlor, but no one knows it's run by vampires. Because that would make people uneasy, to say the least.

This saves me, like, half of world building, since half the world is already, well, built. It's just the supernatural underworld that I need to work on. And of course raises the question of whether there are creatures besides vampires in this world. But that's a slippery slope. First you add werewolves, then ghosts, then rakshasas and shtrigas. Then angels and demons. You get my point. Once you add one thing, it's hard to know where to stop. So I think we'll stick with strictly vampires for now. We can always add later if we have a good reason to.

On the Nature of Immortals

Sorry about the lack of post yesterday. I've been a total slacker lately.

I've spent the past few days thinking about vampires. As one does. The thing about most vampires is that they are deceptively old. Sometimes a story will follow a fledgling vampire, but there's always some in the fictional world that are 100 or 300 or 5000 years old. That's just how it works. What else would be the point of being immortal? That brings up the issue of backstory. Because there is a lot of it.

So, my story involves vampires and apparently ice cream, but I have no idea about the plot or the characters. I've been trying to figure out just who my main characters might be. And when vampires are involved, that involves things like how long they've been a vampire, and what shenanigans they've gotten up to in that time.  That's potentially a lot of history. And you may or may not know how much I love history (It's a lot).

We All Scream for Ice Cream

Now, this was not an independent idea. It was a collaborative effort with some friends at work.

The Creamatorium. It's an ice cream parlor housed in a former funeral home. They keep their ice cream in the corpse cooler, and give all the flavors morbid names. I think it's the best idea ever. And I don't have the resources to make it a real thing, so it's going in my vampire story. I'm not sure the role it's going to play as of yet, but maybe it’s run by the local vampire den (or whatever you call a group of vampires. A colony? A wake?¹ A warren?).

A quick google search tells me that the Creamatorium is not a new idea, and other people have thought of this. I didn't look into it too much, as I don't want it sullying my ideas. I don’t want to steal anything from anyone, but if I happen to come up with something similar, well, that's all right.

The Perks of Being a Vampire

I'm thinking about writing a vampire novel.

At the moment I'm in between projects. The Camp NaNos are over for the year, and NaNoWriMo proper isn't until November. What’s a wayward writer to do?

I'm not sure if I should just start writing something now, or start planning for November. I think that an undertaking like this is going to take some preparation. For me, this involves charts. Tables, technically. Spreadsheets?

I said to myself, "Self, wouldn’t it be great if there was a list comparing all the vampire folklore?" It would be great, and there is a list (Thanks, wikipedia). I copied all the relevant information into Excel so I could do… nerdy Excel things. I'm not going to get into that.

Through the Looking Glass

Well that was a super short weekend. Here we are on Tuesday again. I thought I'd be more prepared by now.

So I guess today I'm going to talk to you about a specific genre that I'm apparently fond of. I mentioned in a previous post that there are different types of fantasy stories. One is that a secondary world is entered through a portal.  And this is something I love.

It’s the plot of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, MirrorMask, and The Chronicles of Narnia, to name only a few. Someone finds themselves in this other, potentially magical world, and they have to find a way home. It’s something I've used before on… several occasions. It's the basis of The Midnight Carnival. Our young protagonist gets trapped in this other world where nothing is what it seems. How will she find her way back home? And perhaps more importantly, who can she trust to help her?

I'm actually super excited to have another go at this story. But, the rewrites are going to require me to develop the secondary world of the circus, and figure out the rules that govern it. The issue I have with writing any kind of fantasy is that I can imagine the world, but not describe it. Why not? They’re just words, use them!

It’s not quite so easy, and I'll do my best to explain why. It's not just a matter of the physical space. "The room is set up like this and that. There's a wall here and a table there." While doing that effectively can be tricky, it’s not the problem. It's more that I can imagine the, I don’t know, aesthetic of the place. Like how it feels to be there. Maybe it feels like 6 in the morning in mid-July. Maybe it's like listening to a song you swear you've heard somewhere before. Maybe it’s like the sky is too big. I don’t know how to turn that into words that make sense to anyone else.

I don’t know. Maybe my weird-ass metaphors will fit in this fantasy world. Maybe that's what it needs, and the reason it never seems right is because I keep trying to normalize it. Maybe it's late (it's still Monday for me) and I need to go to bed. You decide.

Worlds Without End

I know I've been a little behind with the blog lately. I have no excuse. Not a good one anyway. I could blame it on the time of year or my oh-so-busy schedule, but that's all bull. Mostly, I just haven’t been feeling inspired lately. And that's a problem.

I have every intention of finishing my current story. Whether I have the willpower to do it in the next couple days is another matter. I want to, so maybe I'll just have to force myself to work on it.

Then there is the issue of Camp NaNo, which begins on Friday. Last week I talked about a potential plot. The issue that I have with that particular idea: World Building. It's not something I'm good at. At all. So of course I'm going to talk about it like I have some kind of authority.

World building is, to me, a huge task. You can't just say, "This story takes place in Seattle in 2002." You have to be like, "In this world, the economy is like this because of a conflict that took place 400 years ago. This is how their government is set up. They have three suns and the pomdeter is the staple foodstuff of the common people. It's basically a potato." Because there's always potatoes.

Now, you might say that you still need all of that even when you're using an established world. And you do. All worlds have a backstory. But you don't have to make it up, and you probably don't have to explain it. You say "Seattle" and people know what you mean.

Even if you go to all the trouble of inventing a world and its geography and economy and society, you still have to somehow explain all this. And that is hard as hell. You're basically stuck doing a giant wall of exposition explaining the world before you can even get started on the story itself. And that's lame. You want to draw your readers in, not put them to sleep. I'm more a fan of revealing details bit by bit during the actual plot. If you have the sort of story where some ordinary person is transported to a magical fantasy kingdom, then they act as an audience surrogate, and other characters have to explain this new world to them. I've used this a few times myself. But that's not always an option, like in cases of straight up fantasy where all the action happens in another world.

Basically, when it comes to fantasy worlds, there are three versions of the "secondary world" (the "primary" being ours).

1. Primary world doesn’t exist (Discworld)
2. Secondary world entered through a portal (Alice in Wonderland)
3. World-within a world (Harry Potter)

In types 2 and 3, you can have an audience surrogate newcomer. In type 1, not so much. And that is where the trouble lies for me.

I'm notoriously bad at describing things. Even if I do have a world built and I can picture the whole thing, it never comes out on the paper. So I'm a little hesitant to jump into a fantasy world with so little preparation. Or maybe this is just the challenge I need. We'll see. Stay tuned.