The Space Turtle » writing

Plotting a story for Winston’s benefit book

Chivalrybean — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:04:00 +0000

I had an idea for a story when Winston from Critical Press Media sent me the details of his latest project A Voice in the Wilderness. My story idea turns the concept behind the project on its ear a bit, but I think that’s just how I operate.

I was overwhelmed at the idea of the story until I started using yWriter to organize the story into three acts and into scenes in each act. I have scenes set for the first act and can already get a handle on what’s going on instead of trying to fathom the story as a whole.

Even if the story doesn’t work for the project, I’ll have written a story.

The Remodel

Chivalrybean — Thu, 19 May 2011 04:26:06 +0000

I wrote the following story for one of my Fiverr jobs. I enjoyed writing it and the customer was happy as well. Win win! {:0)

—

Professor Armitan looked over the blueprints of the old mansion and scorned the amount of wasted space, especially in the attic. The attic would be perfect for an observatory! he thought. It’s always important to know where the stars before researching the more esoteric topics.

Armitan sat on the porch and watched the sun sparkle over Puget Sound while he called Flying Dormer to set up a consultation. Due to the limited space around the mansion caused by trees, the fact that some of the construction would be done off-site would make it a lot easier to manage.

At the consultation Armitan explained the windows he’d want in the attic for the observatory, as well as the expansions he wanted for a larger library, and the laboratory for the smaller experiments. Storage for chemicals, essential salts, and various compounds would be required for the latter. Plus plenty of ventilation. The largest part of the project would be the basement. Plenty of room for storing large boxes.

The consultant considered the drawings and made several suggestions of ways to improve on the ideas the professor had, for which he was very grateful. He was a professor, not an architect, after all.

When construction started, the crew was very professional and answered questions with easy to understand explanations. A few issues arose when they came across unexpected deviations from what was on the blueprints and what was actually in the house, but they easily were able to adjust their plans, and even made some special editions that the Professor wasn’t expecting, but would very much enjoy. Who doesn’t want a secret passage in their mansion?

When all the construction was complete, the professor was able to research and experiment in comfort and seclusion, where the eyes of modern science would not pry.

Send In – Now on Smashwords

Chivalrybean — Thu, 13 May 2010 05:13:04 +0000

I’ve uploaded Send In to Smashwords. Now you have one more way to buy it!

A progress bar moved!

Chivalrybean — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:14:37 +0000

Started walking/jogging again today. Made it 1.86 miles in 30 minutes.

Yesterday I wrote two sentences for the ‘compassion’ story for Winston Crutchfield’s benefit book for Compassion 365. Last night I decided I had the wrong viewpoint character and changed him to a her and wrote the rest of the opening scene, or most of it at least. It is a horror story, and I am working compassion into it, just hopefully in a way that people wont expect.

I’m in the process of editing a story I finished that was for a winner of last year’s Podcasting For Water winner (who won a story by me about them, or his son in this case.) I had planned on about 1000 words, and it’s over 2k at the moment. I don’t expect it getting any shorter, since I think I need to add to the story to make it any good. I’m fine with the plot, but the main character needs developed so the conflict is dangerous and personal to the viewpoint character. I set up a situation that hinders the main character, but not very well, so when I tried to tap into it at the end, it made some sense, but I couldn’t put the emotion I wanted into it, plus the fix at the end felt anti-climactic to me.

I don’t know if I’ll catch up on the 12 stories finished this year, but I know I can catch up on the miles ran. Getting my time organized and using Remember the Milk and Google Calendar and putting those on my desktop with SMS reminders is really helping my get things done (as opposed to forgetting to do them.) Like the Mad Poet says, 2010 is not the year to step back, it’s the year to step up. I think I’m making that happen.

(Thanks to my Star Wars Game Master Jason for the tip of Remember the Milk)

Send In – Now Available on Amazon, and How I Did It.

Chivalrybean — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:32:35 +0000

My story ‘Send In’ is now available at Amazon! (You can still buy it direct from me as a PDF too.)

Getting it to the Kindle format was a challenge. Now, before you start reading how I did it and start trying it, note that after all this, I found I could have uploaded a word document and maybe that would have done all this work for me, but I didn’t know that at the time.

So I have the PDF, it’s nicely formatted, has some nice looking pages, etc. I put quite a bit of effort into making the page graphics look nice. If you printed it out, I hope it looks fantastic. But when I converted to HTML, all that went away (aside from the little rocket that notes scene breaks.) At first annoyance filled me like a cheap balloon on an overactive helium nozzle, so I decided I didn’t want to explode, so I got over it really fast. PDF is made for setting up pages. The Kindle format is made for putting words on a page that you can zoom in and out of. Both are good and have their distinct advantages, and some are mutually exclusive.

Once I got that figured out, I had to get the formatting right. All the text ran together, the paragraphs weren’t spaced right, it was a mess (I used Kindle for PC to test.) I tried using Find/Replace to add and remove HTML code I didn’t need, a friend offered to go though and work on it, and he did, but it still wasn’t working right (not his fault, that code was nuts!)

Then an idea hit my like a helium bottle whose overactive nozzle broke off and let the bottle fly through a glass window and right into my head! What if I took the text from the Word Document (with the scene break images) and pasted it into the WordPress visual text editor that I am typing to right now then clicked over to the HTML tab, and copied that into a new HTML file? I tried it.

It worked.

I had to fidget with the code to get the images to work right, but that wasn’t hard. I also had to add tags and added the site’s CSS info at the top. Then I used the MobiPocket conversion tool to make it into the eBook .prc format, and uploaded to Amazon.

There might be some extra code in there, but it works, and I’m not running a program, so I’m not entirely concerned about it. Next time I’ll try uploading a Word doc and see what happens … it might be a whole lot easier.

I also noticed my cover image says ‘Send In Justin Lowmaster’, which is odd, and unintentional, and kinda funny (to me at least.)

I hope everyone who gets a copy enjoys it!

I talked about 100 word stories at Toastmasters

Chivalrybean — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:37:14 +0000

Last week I spoke my second Toastmasters speech. It was project #2 about organizing. My speech was How to Write a 100 Word Story. As I appear to have a problem with putting my hands in my pockets while speaking, I write the following story as an example:

Edward Prairie Dog Hands

When talking to people, Edward habitually put his hands in and out of his pockets.

While visiting his forest-dwelling grandmother, who many of the cousins claimed could cast dark druid magic, she confronted his habit, telling him he had atrocious manners for a young boy. She warned him that something terrible would happen if he didn’t change his barbarous ways.

Sadly, Edward had trouble breaking the habit. One day he awoke to find his hands transmuted into wood. His habit remained until one day the friction of moving his hands into and out of his pockets set them aflame.

All I did aside from that in preparation was to make a simple outline on the areas I wanted to talk about. I did practice a few times, but I really needed to a few more times.

I did rewrite the story a few times as I practiced, realizing it wasn’t as good as it could be, and not a great example. After I finished it, I was much happier with the story and I could use the parts I rewrote as part of the speech. I did for get to mention how I changed the detail of the grandmother from simple being accused of casting dark magic into where she lived in a forest and cast druid magic. I did that so the fact Edward’s hands turning to wood would be less random and have foreshadowing.

Overall I did ok, but I botched the ending by adding some unplanned comments that trailed on and degraded the clear and strong ending. I’ll get better.

First story of the year almost completed

Chivalrybean — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:15:47 +0000

I went through one of my short story called Send In today and changed a bit of the prose. I wrote it originally in Google Docs, but moved it over to yWriter. Once there I ran some of the ‘problem words’ searches and found I had a lot of works that ended with ‘ly’. I wasn’t sure what this meant so I asked Matt Selznick on gTalk about it and he said I was probably taking shortcuts of descriptions. To clarify I asked if ‘The car quickly sped up’ versus ‘The engine revved as the car sped up’ is what he meant. That was exactly what he meant so I went through and changed most of the ‘ly’ instances to have more detail.

I did a few other changes, the program suggested and aside from just better description, one part of the story near the end has a much stronger narrative now, plus a hilarious joke.

All that is left is correcting typos and making sure I stayed in the proper tense, then I think it will be good to go. It will be over 3300 words.

Burst of creativity

Chivalrybean — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:51:27 +0000

I took my wife and daughter to the park today and they hung out with some friends. I then took my wife’s laptop to the library and wrote. I didn’t know what to write so I opened up my Moleskin and paged through it until I found an idea that seemed like something I’d like to write at the moment. I found one and in about an hour I pounded out 1198 words. I had no internet active, typed in wordpad, and just wrote. With little distraction aside from the faint smell of body odor when a dude sat near me and nothing to do but just write, I got a lot done. I didn’t finish the story, but I have a good idea where I’m going. I based it all on the single sentence I wrote down who knows how long ago.

This would be an awesome thing to do more often. Wife gets to go out with friends, daughter gets to run around and get tired out, and I get to write a lot all at once.

Of course with NaNoWriMo coming up, this can’t be done every day, so I’ll have to work in the normal home environment for the most part. It’s good to know that sometimes the words can just flow out though. Been a while since I managed that.

Music to Write To: E.S. Posthumus

Chivalrybean — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:40:39 +0000

While writing more on my Stories of the Children story, I listened to E.S. Posthumus. You might have heard their song “Nara” on the opening of the TV show “Cold Case”.

They have a variety of music that can fit many types of scenes you might be writing. If you like to listen to music while you write, check em out!