Writing exercise: images – 2014-03-06

Posted on March 9, 2014
by Tim Yao

Sometimes we do writing exercises based on images we’ve gleaned from the Internet. At this week’s jabber chat, we looked at choosing one or both of these two images: a picture of a girl encountering a large, burly, anthropogenic tree or a guy holding open a briefcase filled with something brilliant.

Here are our unedited entries (each written in about 15 minutes). Feel free to add yours in the comments!

Ajey

Mueller, the old professor, pulled out his collapsible PATT (Peek-Around-The-Corner, in spy-speak) mirror, extended it, and took a look down the corridor. Seeing that it was empty, he silently snuck to the next doorway. He hopped from doorway to doorway, crisscrossing the corridor, until he reached the end. There was the sound of a violin being played in one of the soundproof music rooms. Mueller liked violins, not so much for their beauty, but because they could hold secret messages.

Listening carefully for a few more moments, Mueller concluded that there either were no other people in the building or that what people might be in the building were busy in their own musical worlds, in their own soundproof practicing rooms. At this point, he tore off the silicone mask to reveal a much younger, and much more dangerous man. Mueller the spy.

Catherine

He said little, once I agreed. He simply opened his briefcase.

The contents blinded me, and I understood why he wore the odd glasses with opaque lenses. He looked off into the distance, waiting, while I tried to focus on what he had in the case.

“Bright,” I said.

He made a noise. Possibly it was a grunt acknowledging the truth of my observation.

“It’s for sale, you said?”

He nodded.

I couldn’t even see what it was, to tell the truth. I’m used to being a bit behind the eight-ball. I usually try to vamp until I figure out what everyone else is so interested in. Sometimes I figure it out. Often I don’t. I’ve gotten tired of pretending. Finally I said, “People want this?”

He nodded again.

“I don’t get it.”

He shrugged. No skin off his nose, he seemed to imply. Of course, that made me all the more convinced that his merchandise must be very valuable. Otherwise he’d try harder to sell it to me, wouldn’t he?

“I’ll take it,” I said. “You said it was 99 dollars?”

“A bargain,” he said.

He shouldn’t have spoken. I suddenly had second thoughts.

It’s tough, not knowing who to believe, or what really has any worth. That was how I’d ended up in this dive bar, with only 101 dollars to my name.

Frank

Sally loved the woods. Especially her woods. The woods behind her mother;s home was what she called her own. Since her parents had divorced it was the only place that she really felt in control. In her woods the trees and the ground would do whatever she wanted. Most of the time everything went according to plan, but sometimes it was different.

Saturday morning Sally got up and did her usual routine. She ate breakfast with her mom, watched a cartoon, then got dressed to spend a day with her friends in her woods. She combed her hair, put on a light yellow dress to keep her cool in the hot summer weather, then gave her mom a peck on the cheek.

“I’m going to play with my trees,” she sang. she stood on her toes and let her mom give her a tight squeeze.

“Stay close to the house,” she said giving her a hard look. “Last time you got so deep in the woods that I had to go out searching for you and it took me an hour. It practically ruined my lunch.”

“Sorry mommy,” she said as she ran out of the door. The weather was perfect. The sun was out. A dry breeze was keeping everything cool, and the woods were beckoning her.

She ran into the shade of the trees and laughed as she threw her hands out, touching the bark of all her friends as she ran by.

“Hello everyone!” she yelled. “I’ve missed you.” The leaves of the trees all rustled in response and she felt their joy as she ran among them.

Deeper into the forest she ran, jumping over a brook, and clamboring up to the top of the hill that rose above the rest of the forest. It was here that her most special friend live. Maximilian was a massive old tree that she loved most dearly. She would sit in his arms for hours and watch the world go by. Last time she was here she stayed long past the time she was supposed to go home. In fact t was getting dark and shew as still sitting in his branches looking at the evening sky. As the first star appeared she wished, more than she had ever wished for anything before, that Maximilian would be able to move, to be able to hug her if she wished. She giggled as she made it, but she knew there was magic somewhere. She just hoped it would help her with her special wish.

Sally ran up the hill, reached the top, and yelled. “Hey Max…” but her voice trailed off. Max was gone.

She ran all around the top of the hill looking for him, but he was no where to be found. She went so far as to look behind a tree. As she looked around a rather old and large pine she heard a loud rustling and dragging sound.

“Sally,” a booming voice said.

Tim

They were poor, not quite desperately so. Alice’s gruff woodcutter father shielded her and little Giuseppe as best he could from that. Alice would take Giuseppe a little ways into the woods to gather edible plants and mushrooms and roots. Giuseppe was too young to be of much help, but was barely old enough to not be too much of a distraction. Alice’s father worked hard to cut enough wood for his family and to sell in the village.

Their own rude, little cottage was half a day’s walk from the village, so it was up to Alice to take care of herself and her brother while her father was gone during the day.

Though she missed her father, Alice enjoyed the freedom and didn’t mind the cold too much, despite her thin, ragged clothes. Giuseppe adored his older sister, tried to emulate her accuracy with her leather sling, though more often then not his stones ended up tumbling to the leafy forest floor.

It was on a gently cold autumn day that Alice’s wandering took her past the cold stream (Giuseppe didn’t cry even though his pants were wet through from falling off of one of the stepping stones). The sun’s dim light filtered through the tree branches overhead. It was almost time for a small lunch.

Alice glanced at her basket. It was less than half full. A small handful of smelly berries, some mushrooms that were only somewhat shriveled and a rock lobster that still wiggled now and then, testing its bonds of vine.

“Would you care to join me for some lunch?”

Alice looked up in surprise. Sitting with his back against tree was a little man wearing a tall hat of dark green fur with a wide brim.

“Is that roast duck?” Giuseppe’s little voice was filled with awe.

“It is indeed,” the man said smiling. “Come, sit beside me.”

“We don’t have much to share, I’m afraid,” Alice said, trying to remember her father’s warnings about strangers.

“You need not share anything of what you have,” the man said. “I am here only to grant your wishes.” But something glinted in his eyes as he said it and Alice shivered in spite of herself.

Diana

When I was a child
I wrote poetry of dreams

I put the stars to bed with stories of trees
that walked and cried and felt anger
like burning kindling, happiness
like bubbles
and every character
was a child
lost in the woods

I wrote for her
who brought me golden light
she whispered rhymes
and metaphors and gave
me worlds

I dreamt of poetry
as a child
to wake with words

Scoreboard Update & Party!

Posted on March 7, 2014
by Catherine Brennan

wikimedia commons image, artist unknown

I suppose it’s no secret that I’d like to have a fabulous writing career. I haven’t figured out exactly what that means. I’ll probably flesh it out as I go along, kind of like an outline. Here’s what I do know: I want to write things that people are interested in reading and I’d like to be paid for doing so. I hope that will lead to more people discovering it, and enjoying it. Upshot: I’d like to be published in the traditional way, by folks who have been at it for a while and know what they’re doing.

There’s a whole discussion on the interwebs about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing (aka independent publishing). I don’t know what my entire writing career will look like by the time it’s all over. Independent publishing might figure in, but not until I’ve learned a hell of a lot more about it.

My plan for now is to submit my fiction to magazines when it’s short and agents/publishers when it’s long.

However. I don’t have total control over how soon anyone will be interested in publishing my fiction. One thing I can do is to improve my writing, and thus my odds. There are multiple ways to do that, and I’m trying a few, but the underlying tenet is this: I need to keep writing. That’s why I post ad nauseum about writing daily, with a heavy emphasis on 750words.com.

The other thing I can do is to submit stories. It does me no good to sit on a story, stew over it, or endlessly show it to various groups for critique. I’m still working on when to let a story go. I may blog about that some other day. For now, I’m trying to aim for sooner rather than later. I have one story that’s as ready as it’s going to be, and which has, in fact, been submitted to several markets. I have another story that’s close, I hope. It’s the one I submitted to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction a while back, and which I’m revising next week. I will be looking for new readers for it soon. It’s already been through alpha readers and beta readers. What’s next, gamma readers? Omega readers, since I hope this will be the last pass? Anyway, if you’d be willing to read a 6000-word story for me, please leave a comment below, or facebook message/tweet/email me to let me know, and we’ll work out how to get it to you.

Ahem. I promised scoreboards today, didn’t I? Here’s my progress report.

Updated Scoreboard 1: Submissions

March 7, 2014
Submissions: 3 Acceptances: 0 Rejections: 2

I win!

If that’s not immediately clear, let me explain. As I said above, I have limited control over how soon my writing will be published. Two things I do have control over are:

my writing process (practice makes perfect) and
my attempts to get it out there (it does me no good sitting on my hard drive)

As long as I keep writing daily, with an eye to reducing suckitude, I’m doing what I can for the first part of the puzzle. As far as the second part goes, here’s my goal:
#Submissions + #Acceptances > #Rejections.

Since 3 + 0 > 2, I win!

As long as #Submissions + #Acceptances > #Rejections, I’ve done what I can on my end.

Updated Scoreboard 2: Words Written

March 6, 2014
-885,494 words- from a 478 day streak (out of 907 total) on 750 words.com

That word count puts me within 115,000 words of the million words Ray Bradbury says you need for mastery.

Bradbury Image by Rev. Terry Canttel*

If I can manage to write an average of 800 words a day going forward, I can have my million-word party in about 143 days. As of this writing, that makes it July 25th, or thereabouts. I’ll firm up the date later.

So here’s the plan. If you want to come to my million-word party, leave a comment below, or message me via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to let me know. I’ll make sure you receive all the relevant information.

I don’t know what all will happen at this party, but there will definitely be singing and alcohol. And seriously, I’d love to see you there.

* Bradbury Picture Creative Commons License

Um…Little Help Here?

Posted on March 1, 2014
by Catherine Brennan

Okay, sometimes it’s not easy

I’ve written a few posts talking about what I do to keep writing. After fielding a few responses, I realized that what I’ve posted up to now were pretty much along the lines of “Just do it.”

People wrote or grabbed me to say, “Hey! I’ve tried to write (or exercise) on a regular schedule and I just can’t keep it up. It’s all very well for you to say, “Just do it.” What if that doesn’t work for me?”

Fair question. Developing good habits is hard. Getting rid of bad habits is hard. Anyone who pretends otherwise is an annoying prig, like this girl I knew in high school, Angel McPrissyface. Here’s the background: I experimented my junior and senior years with smoking a cigarette while walking into a liquor store, hoping that smoking made me look old enough to buy alcohol. Since beer-and-wine age in Illinois at that time was something like 19, it worked better than it probably would nowadays. Ah, my halcyon youth! But the point isn’t that I was a degenerate who bought alcohol before I was old enough to drink legally. The point is, I was a degenerate who learned to smoke.

If you have never smoked, I cannot possibly convey how addictive nicotine is. By the time I was halfway into my freshman year of college, I was definitely a smoker. So: I smoked for maybe a year, maybe a year and a half. It took nearly as long to quit as it did to get hooked. I might still be smoking if BK, who I was dating at the time, refused to kiss me as long as I smoked. No question, kissing beats smoking.

Anyway, while I was home from college that summer, kissing was not an available smoking substitute. I was in Illinois, and BK was in Tennessee. I mentioned to someone I knew, who was still in high school, that I was having a hell of a time quitting. She put this prissy look on her face and said, “Well I never started!” as if I ought to give her a medal, or at least a cookie. Good thing I had a friend who heard the exchange and said Angel McPrissyface was an annoying little prig. Which she was.

I would like not to be like Angel; definitely not the kind of person who says things like, “Just do it.” (Sorry, Nike, but seriously). In the service of that ideal, I am coming clean. I didn’t always write every day, or exercise 5-6 days a week. I started the exercise habit first, and eventually got around to the writing habit.

And here’s something else I hate to admit. Unlike Stephen King, I don’t write 2000 words of usable fiction every day. I write at least 750 words of something. Sometimes it is dreck: just a mind dump. That’s certainly how I started. Or sometimes what I write is a blog post, like this one. I hope this isn’t dreck, but I’m not in a position to judge.

Finally, after well over two years of using 750words.com faithfully, the proportion of fiction to dreck is slooowly inching in the direction of more fiction, less dreck. Usually that happens best in November, or any other time when I’m able to write 2000 (or so) words daily, rather than just 750. Even so, much of that fiction might be a later draft, and much of what I’m doing in a later draft is actually cutting words I’ve written earlier. Transforming myself into a prolific fiction writer is definitely a work in progress.

So…I belatedly realized that when I posted (in my 3-Legged Stool entries) some of the reading I’ve found helpful , I left one really important book out:

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit may or may not help you, but it was a relatively quick read, and it got me back on track when I hit a rough patch.

But let’s say you don’t want to buy the book or you’re too busy (or cold, if you live by me) to go to the library. Here are a couple of interesting posts on using the peculiarities of your brain to trick yourself into good habits:

Graphic from Robbie Blair’s site

I liked this post by Robbie Blair. He offers 14 ways to make it easier to start a writing habit. He mentions Charles Duhigg’s book, too, so maybe it’s not just me.

Graphic from Wait But Why site

And this post by Tim Urban (maybe with help from Andrew Finn?) was entertaining and seemed to have more than a kernel of truth about procrastination.