Story Starters - Science Fiction

The story starters I wrote for today, the genre being science fiction.

"Welcome to 1965, Cindy," the mechanical voice said as the door slid open revealing a foreign panorama before her.

In the caves of planet Allelle evil lurked in the shadows of the city. She knew this, but the caves still called her.

In a system where nothing usually ever happened Jen threw the emergency reverse on the shuttle dodging the first attack wave.

Shuttle pilot for hire had sounded so much more interesting when he'd first signed up. Now here he was in this boring sector

So much for the stars like in the novels of old, Klinda thought. She glared at the deep water through her bedroom portal.

Story Starters

Short post tonight, I mainly wanted to highlight the fact that it's genre week for Story Starters over on Twitter this week. Today was fantasy, yesterday romance. Clicking the link will load a search for story starters on twitter.

I also figured I'd share some of mine for today here:
~Derick ignored those around him on the busy sidewalk. The light shifted and he found himself in a forest, he looked around.

~The sea of Irella glowed in the gathering dusk, casting the mage poised at her shores in a blue light.

The knight raised his sword challenging the dragon. In a blur of motion, the maiden sword in hand was blocking him.

Me on Twitter

Query Letters and Revision

Is it ever to early to start practicing the art of writing query letters? That's a question I've been mulling over for awhile and decided that no, it's not to early to practice them. With novel writing, a good query letter is your foot in the door with agents. No matter how good the novel a bad query letter won't get the manuscript read.

That being said I don't currently have any novels ready to start sending out queries for. I'm planning on my query letters serving a dual purpose. In addition to the practice I figure that taking the time to write a query letter now would be a perfect opportunity to look at my novel and highlight the important parts for myself. What are the selling points? What is the main conflict? Where do I see the direction of the novel? All those sorts of questions.

Yes, I'm working on revision. Once take that good look at where I want my novel to be I can look over my draft and work on getting my novel there. An outline will help, I already have one from writing the first draft. But the outline I'm talking about for this stage is a revision outline. I'll use the main points from my query to start the outline, and work in parts from my draft outline that fit in. I'll also see what scenes from the draft will work where for the revision outline. With writing first drafts, I always have more stuff in the draft then was planned ahead of time on the draft outline.

Of course I have to figure out which novel do to this with. I have two that I want to focus on with revisions this year. My mining mystery I'm working on as part of the 2yn class over at FM Writers. I'm planning on following Zette's lesson plan for that novel revision. Which leaves me with my magical fantasy novel draft. That might be a good one to work with as I need to figure out my audience. After writing the first draft part of me feels that novel could almost be young adult. Looking at the novel and writing the practice query letter should help me figure that out.

I'll post updates on the progress here on how well (or not)this works out for me.

Characters with mental illnesses

Have you ever wanted to or have included a character with a mental illness in your fiction? If so it's good to look at the character as a whole, to help avoid a walking group of symptoms in your story. Writing is stronger with well developed characters and a character primarily comprised of said symptom list will fall flat rather quickly. Plus to you wouldn't want to fall back on stereotypes either; i.e. the depressed character who is there only to be sad all the time.

Start with your character like you normally would. Who is he or she? What dreams, goals, aspirations do they have? What challenges do they have to overcome to achieve their goals and dreams? Who is their best friend, who is their worst enemy, and so on? You should have a good feel for these sorts of things before moving onto the mental illness portion of character building.

When it comes time to work on their illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) contains various illnesses and the symptoms associated with them. Again be careful of a symptom list. When making a diagnosis of a mental illness the therapist would look at how the symptoms are affecting the patient's functioning. For our depression example a person's normal behavior would be changed in some way for the diagnosis to be made.

With the illness figured out you can then go back to your character and see exactly how the illness affects him/her. If he's the type to normally go out with friends every Friday night would depression keep him home alone instead? And how would the changes in his behavior because of the depression make him feel?

I've only scratched the surface here, but I hope I have pointed people in the right direction. The Wikipedia article I linked describes various versions of the DSM along with the categorizations of disorders. Wikipedia isn't a very scholarly site, but it can be a handy place to start reading on a subject.

Disclaimer: I am not a clinical psychologist, which means I am not qualified to council anyone on their psychological illnesses. My bachelors degree in psychology merely gives me more knowledge about these types of topics which I am sharing here so they may be helpful for your fictional characters.

Write an hour a day

Sure, writing a draft is easy to measure the progress be it in terms of words or pages. Revising can be as well, depending on your process. But what about all those other writing steps that can't be as easily measured in words and pages?

I've been thinking about my writing progress recently with these in-between draft stages. I have more world building to do after a rough novel draft before I work on the pre-revision outline. I can count words in the notes, but it would be nice to have some daily goal to set for myself.

When word/page counts fail, enter time. I'll admit I am huge on the word count in terms of measuring my progress. It's great for writing drafts. But now with the planning the amount of material isn't as important as the ideas I'm working out. So I figure I can aim to spend about an hour a day working out various details of the novel's world and characters.

Who else does time goals for any/all writing stages? Do you all pick the same amount of time each day? Aim to write longer some days then others? Take days off during the week? I know at times with my word counts I'll like to write a bunch one day, then take the next off. Or write a shorter more intense scene the next day. It does depend on the story.

Everyone is different, there are probably many writers out there doing a time goal for drafts as well. And even different parts of the novel/story writing process can be approached differently.

Muse Prompting - an introduction

A while back I had a blog for posting images, which writers could use for inspiration if they wanted. Long story short I hadn't updated that blog much, or very recently. I still like the idea of posting images and other prompts, so I figured I could have some muse prompting in my writing blog.


I do tend to gravitate towards scenery, it's fun to imagine what sorts of characters might wander into the setting. I made this with Bryce, a 3D rendering program. I also have a program that works with figures (DAZ studio) which I'll use for more prompts sometime soon.

The old Muse Prompting blog.

Expanding Worlds

Well, part of the reason for this blog is to update my progress on my various writing projects. The lack of posting hasn't quite been lack of writing, more so I keep thinking of what to post and haven't had much time in which to do so.

Anyways today's post is about fictional worlds, specifically the one for my related group of science fiction novels. While I have the first draft done for my Mining Mystery (nano 09) I still need to do more world building before I work on revision. Part of that world building is history on how humans expanded from Earth out into the other planets they live on for the novel. I have some basic ideas on how the migration happens it is the details I'm working out now.

Enter a scene I wrote for a Forward Motion monthly challenge, about 2 years ago now. The scene is about 500 words long and follows a young woman ready to board a space shuttle to a distant planet. I had my novels in the back of my mind when I wrote the scene, as it's a link to the populated universe in the novel time line. The scene has the framework down for something larger, which I'd like to expand on. It has a short story waiting to be told.

Said short story is being "notecarded" currently. I have index cards in my purse, on my desk, in my other bag, ect, and I have been jotting down scene and character ideas. The scene I wrote is a smaller part of this larger story. I already have in mind some obstacles the crew on the shuttle will face on their trip, political intrigue which will threaten the trip, and other goings on.

Moving back to the world building link. Everything that takes place in the story will be historical events from the novel's point of view. In a way I'm making up future events so that they can be historical events. What do the characters of this era have to fight and overcome in order to lay the foundations of a society in the next era? It's a fun question to work out through the different characters I have in mind already.

Though I have to keep telling myself, "This is not a novel" and repeating that mental mantra.

Twitter and Writing

Some may wonder about the point of Twitter, why would people sign up for a service to post 140 character messages. Sure it can be useful for quick information, I've seen it used well in this way for a variety of topics.

What I use Twitter for is community, connecting with those similar to me. It may sound weird to look at Twitter that way. But there is more to the service than the posting of those 140 character messages aka "Tweets".

Hashtags are one way to connect with like minded people. Unlike tags in a blog which organize your own posts Twitter hashtags are hyperlinks to a search for any tweets on twitter using that tag. (As an aside for those unfamiliar with Twitter a hashtag is typed into a tweet by using the # key followed by the word(s) one wishes to use). As a writer, my two favorite hashtags are #amwriting and #storystarters. When I tweet about my writing I use the #amwriting tag in those tweets. #storystarters are for posting well story starters for other writers to use.

With the hashtags I've found other writers on twitter, and I've added followed them. Now their tweets show up in my home feed enabling me to reply to tweets, re-tweet helpful tweets, and simply to have a feel for how others are doing with their writing. I have also posted a few story starters with plans to post more.

Me on Twitter

Goal Management

As can be seen by the previous post, I have picked some writing goals for 2010. While it's nice to know what I am aiming to accomplish over a year's worth of time there is more work to be done with my goals to make them manageable. I need to look over the year, figure out when to work on what, and how much time to give myself for each goal. Keeping in mind of course that some things can be worked on in the same general time period.

When it comes to breaking down my yearly goals into smaller blocks of time, the forum I'm a member of helps immensely: Forward Motion for Writers. On that forum they have two areas of the site designed for writing goals. Not only can members share their goals with other writers, but we can also encourage each other. Both of these areas of the main forum are only viewable to FM members, but signing up is free, and there is nice group of people there. Though I'm hoping this post might provide some ideas on goal setting weather or not anyone joins FM (though it's a great site - I'm hoshikaze over there).

Anyways, the first area is Goals Workshop & Updates (Year/Month). This is where members can post their yearly goals. I've already posted mine to a thread there. But it's more than only checking in once a year. Each person who uses that area posts in their own thread, one thread per year. Within our thread we usually set monthly goals, picking from our yearly goals what to focus on for the month. Then at the end of the month we usually update the thread to show how many of our goals we've reached for that time period. Goals not met for that month can be carried over, or set aside, whichever the writer setting their goals wants to do.

The other area is Daily Page & Word Count (Weekly/Daily). Each week threads are started for members to post their goals for that week. With the shorter time period we share threads, 5 people each. At the start of the week, members will decide what they want to accomplish for that week, posting it to one of the threads. Then each day we update our section of the thread with what we've done for the day on our writing goals.

When I participate in these areas of the site it helps me to relate the two together. I first establish my goals for the year. Once I have that then I can figure out what to work on for the current month. It's those monthly goals I keep in mind when posting my goals for the week in the Daily area. Right now my goals for this week are to finish figuring out what I want to accomplish in January, in addition to some critiques and working on my 2yn/mining mystery novel. By the end of this week I want to update my yearly goals thread with my January goals. With my January goals established, that will help me figure out my weekly goals for this month.

So in closing, with goals it's good to break them down. For me I like to take my yearly goals, then pick what works for me each month, keeping in mind what will be left to work on for other months. Posting them on FM has the added benefit of support from other writers, and in turn I'll be posting encouragement as well.

2010 Goals

Well it's that time of the year to put together writing goals for 2010. What I mostly want to accomplish is revision, getting through a complete pass on a novel would be great. And yes, I'm planning on multiple passes, starting with big things like plot and characters then moving down to grammar and structure.

2yn/Mining Mystery - I'm aiming for a complete revision pass on this draft. At the very least figuring out exactly how my main character solves the mystery at the detailed level would be a good start. Maybe the mystery clues would be good for the start of the year. I still have more world building to do for this one as well, having written the first draft helped me to see where I need more work on the world, and where it's got enough planning.

Magical Fantasy 1 - World building for this. The first draft is done, and it's really rough. I'd like to get details down about how the world works, magic, politics, history, etc. Doing some more work with the characters as well would be good. I want to have this one ready for a revision pass come 2011.

Magical Fantasy 2 - Write the first draft. This goal depends on the work for book 1 of the series. I want to have more things figured out before going into book 2. This also depends on the mining mystery work. I'm not going to write this until I'm most of the way through the revision pass on that novel. I'd like to not keep adding to the number of first draft only novels I have.

Short Stories - Depending how the novel work goes I'd like to read through my short stories and see which ones I may want to revise and start submitting.

Critique - I'm a member of 2 groups, and I'd like to critique others work on a regular basis this coming year.

Back to School for Busy Writers - A Forward Motion class, offered by members for members. Depending on the scheduling they have planned for these next year I have an idea for a class.

Organizational wise - I need to set up my writing area better at home. I still have boxes around my desk from when we moved along with random things on my desk. I'm planning on moving my pc tower to the other side of my desk then I can move my shelf closer. Most of what is in the boxes is for that shelf. That will also leave me with some space for storage containers for the various stuff on my desk (which is mostly jewelery related).