TLIF - Free Special Features

AKA - what I learned about writing from watching DVD's.

Okay, so technically the word 'free' doesn't belong in the title of this post. It's uncessecary, unneeded, extranious, redundant. You get the point.

Which is my point. Recently we've started watching the special features parts of our DVD's more and more. The documentaries are frequently educational. Though we don't really watch the commentary much.

But my favorite part is the deleted scenes. Frequently they either lead-in or end with a snippet that made it into the movie, but sometimes they're entire scenes that just got cut. I love even more when they have the director's commentary with them, so I know why they got cut.

I can tell with each scene how it would have added to the movie. There's sometimes little snippets of information that make other parts of the film make more sense. Frequently it's a dialogue exchange that just got shortened, and is a lot of fun to listen to but the story didn't lapse without it.

I love watching these scenes because it's a great reminder of what goes into editing and revising. It's not just about cleaning up sentence fragments or clarifying things, it's about tightening. Every single word counts. Something I haven't fully learned to implement yet, but I'm getting better.

Do you ever watch the extras on movies, or are you all about the theater experience and/or just in it for the feature film?

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My Uriel's Fall Blurb is Finally Succinct

AKA - My CP's Rock Like Pop Rocks

As promised - real post today. Though I'm tempted to say in the blog title again today that I'm giving away free manga, because apparently that drives epic ammounts of traffic to my blog. Not that I got any new followers, but who needs them? You all are awesome.

I have no idea how anyone writes without feedback. When I wrote my first novel I asked a friend to read it, and she was actually really honest and constructive about the whole thing, but I was sooo not ready to hear it. Since then, I've discovered the support and feedback of this awesome writing community is the perfect accessory to writing.

For anyone who doesn't remember, a couple of months ago I had a Loki sad. And I received some fantastic input on my dillemma. Did I keep my story set on earth, with earth gods as the main characters, or did I move it to an entirely new universe and change the names so I could more freely work outside the confines of the gods I'd modeled my characters after?

When all was said and done, the votes were fifty/fifty. Including an even split from my critique group, and just as even and distinct a split between two people in real life whose opinions I trust implicitly.

I think I only ever told one person what I decided: to do both. Both may never see the light of day, but the stories will become two separate entities. The original will go back to what it started as - paranormal romance. The new will become something more like high fantasy. New universe, new rules, new names, new everything. Except I get to keep my core characters.

Which means world building, which I loathe, but my Sweetie is awesome at. So...easy for me. But it also means I have to fix another issue the story has always had. I've never been able to summarize it. I go to write a pitch or a query and there's so much I think is important, that I can't keep it short or clear or comprehensive.

Something I've started doing with my other novels is before I write them, I blurb them. It doesn't always end up the way it started, but the 1-2 paragraph summary reminds me what the main focus of the novel is and keeps me on track. So I decided I needed to do that now, before I started rewrites. I needed to figure out what the number one most important aspect of this story was, after all the sub-plot was stripped away.

Turns out it's not Loki (Kii, as he'll be called in 'new-land'). I sketched something out yesterday, asked for some feedback, and this is what I have now:

Elle is a penumbra - a shadow servant of her god - tasked with separating errant auroras from the mortals they possess. Her work takes a toll when she begins to hear voices no one else can. Based on whims of the gods who have answers, Elle must separate fact from fiction. If she can't discover the truth about the auroras and the voices, her spiral into madness will become a one-way trip.

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Help Me Get Rid of Some Manga and Such

***Edit I have a taker on the entire lot. Thank you to my kind benefactor for taking them off my hands so quickly ^_^

Afternoon happy blogger peoples! Today I have a sad, but very real tale to tell. This isn't a contest, but I do need to give some things away.

Many years ago, my brother and I each went through an obession with all things anime and Japanese. I'm still obsessed, though I tend more toward posters and figurines and DVD's.

He's 'grown up' now and moved past that, but back in the day, he was quite a collector of magazines and manga. Not the US magazines, the original Japaense magazines. And when I say manga, I mean before there was Tokyopop in order to go under. These are some of the first edition US printings from Viz by people like Rumiko Takahasi.

That also means all of this is a minimum of two-three years old, most if it older.

Here's the sad bit (for me). Neither of us has room for these boxes and boxes of magazines and manga that fill my living room and basement. I've been given an ultimatum that I have one week to figure out what to do with them. The only option I see is to donate them.

But because of what they are, and because the magazines are largely in Japanese, I think it would be keen if someone who will actually appreciate them would give them a home.

The sad bit (for everyone else) is that books and magazines are heavy and cost a lot to ship. I'm not kidding when I say we have a minimum of three banker's boxes full of these, and they must weight 30 lbs each. So shipping them either in bulk or one at a time isn't really a practical option.

So instead, my plea today: if you know anyone in the Salt Lake area (or 50 or so miles in any direction) who has a use or desire for these, leave me a comment or email me. I'd be happy to deliver and hand them off to a school, a library, or a private collector. Honestly, you could paper your rabbit cage with them if you wanted, but I'd prefer if you did that you don't tell me that's what you're doing because I might cry.

PS I'll be back tomorrow (probably) with more writing-related ramblings ^_^

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Visual and Literary Reorg in Process - Pardon My Dust

I'm in the process of updating the look of my site, so please pardon my dust. It's not complete yet, but it's pretty close. So hopefully if I commit to it publicly, in the next week or so I can get the rest of the visuals all nice and pretty. Don't get me wrong, I love the new template anyway, but it's missing something more...personalized. So with any luck we'll all see that soon.

So, you know how everyone always says "Writers Read"? And how we're all told to read in our genre? And all that kind of rhetoric? And maybe how, if you've been around here for a little while, you know I don't 'read in my genre' because most urban fantasy and paranormal romance makes me wince and slam my head into the books I'm reading? I do like some authors. Please don't think it's a knock against the genre's as a whole, but it takes work for me to find the really good books.

So...Friday I went a little eBook nuts. I don't have an eReader, but I have this spiffy little phone with an Android OS on it, that lets me have all sorts of eReader software. So I downladed Google Books and the Kindle app.

And then started grabbing stuff from Amazon. Not a lot of stuff. I grabbed a couple of books from authors whose blogs I follow. That was spiffy. I grabbed a couple more that looked like they might be interesting. I scanned the first few pages of those - the random picks - and couldn't get into them. I'd be like 'read, read, ooh, shiny..., read, rea...what?'

I went through three books like that. Fortunately, they were $.99 books and not from authors I know, so I don't have to tell them their books didn't hold my attention. The thing is, they were well-written, I could tell that much. But suddenly I found it so hard to care whether or not Sally Jo Marriweather liked her new school clothes or her old ones better.

At this point, my attention wandered back to Amazon. I started thinking "You know what I liked a lot? Microserfs. A story about people who work in the industry I do and have gone through a lot of the same things I have, and blah, blah, blah." And I decided to play a game I call link hopping. You pull up something - anything, it doesn't have to be on Amazon, it can be on someone's blog - and you click on a link that looks interesting but takes you somewhere else.

On Friday I did this with Douglas Coupland. I clicked into his book 'Generation X'. Which looked okay, but the concept didn't really grab me. But I saw people describing it as a combination of 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk and 'Less than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis. I'm a big fan of Palahniuk, but I've read a lot of his stuff and wasn't in the mood that day. So I followed the Less than Zero link, read the description and said "Why does this sound familiar?" And then realized Bret Easton Ellis wrote 'American Psycho'.

Trippy, screwed up concept. And like Palahnuik, more graphic than I was in the mood for. So this went on for a while. Jumping from one male litarary author to the next until I discovered someone I'd heard of before - everyone has I think - but had never read just because I hadn't. Kurt Vonnegut. Not 'Slaughterhouse Five', because where would the fun be in reading the same book everyone's read? 'Cat's Cradle'. And I was hooked. Absolutely engrossed from the first chapter. I blew through more than half of it in just a couple of hours.

I read, and I started connecting the dots of my own psyche, and figuring out I might be having a problem writing because I'm not writing what I like to read, I'm writing what I'd like to pretend I like to read.

That wasn't confusing, right?

I've been trying to conform my voice and style to fit something that isn't actually me. Once again, don't misunderstand. There are talented authors in all genres and I'll read them regardless. And I think everyone should read what they enjoy, whether or not it's something I like. I mean, enjoy your leisure activities ^_^

However, we did conclude that this revelation doesn't make me enjoy David Brinn, Frank Herbert, or JRR Tolkien any more than I did before. All three men are amazingly talented writers who have built brilliantly complex worlds...and they like to write about those worlds. In detail. Great. Extended. Somtimes excruciating. Detail.

I suspect from the way people talk that most of you already know your preferred genre to both read and write in. You're comfortable with urban fantasy, or YA contemporary, or historical romance, or science fiction, or any and all of it. So I have to wonder...did you always know? Did it take a lot of trial and error to figure out what genre you enjoyed writing in, or were you fortunate enough to stumble on that delectible gem early on in life?

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