xxxi - Day 01 - Your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with.

Sorry about the late post.  Apparently "Saving" =/= "Publishing", so it sat in limbo for a day.

Anyway, you're going to get the patented half-answer on this one.  If we draw the line at "published work", well, you don't get an entry.  So, everything is fair game, including any and all writing exercises I may have completed in high school.

I won't burden you with the text in question, mainly because I no longer have it.  Let's pretend, instead, that I want to take mercy on my audience and not subject you to my earliest fumbling attempts.  There are two pieces that immediately spring to mind when I mull over the topic for today.  Both were put to paper in my first years of high school, and if my memory serves me right, would have been written in the 9th and 10th grades.

Like many young would-be science fiction or fantasy writers of my generation, I dabbled a bit in fan fiction.  The answer therefore to the implied question: the Star Wars universe and Middle-Earth.

For the former I wrote a short cloak-and-dagger yarn about a double agent in the employ of the Empire, whose family was killed in the orbital bombardment of a rebellious planetary government.  Nothing earth-shatteringly innovative there, but I got to play around in Star Wars for a while, which was a lot of fun.

Another year and another writing assignment later, I wrote a short piece about a patrol under Faramir wandering Ithilien.  This one was written diary-style from the perspective of one of the soldiers tasked with guarding the area.  It was mostly an exercise in creating atmosphere, trying to meld the sense of wonder I got from reading the trilogy with the sense of impending danger as the shadow of the enemy grew into the west.

Obviously neither of those settings are mine, but it was a lot of fun to get to play around in them for a while.

A New Meme

As promised, in the interest of generating regular content, I present the next in a series:

30 Day Writing Meme
Day 01 - Your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with.
Day 02 - How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
Day 03 - How do you come up with character names?
Day 04 - Your first stories/characters
Day 05 - By age, who are your youngest /oldest characters?
Day 06 - Where are and you most comfortable writing? Use the 5 W’s.
Day 07 - Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? How do you relate music to your writing?
Day 08 - What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?
Day 09 - How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
Day 10 - What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?
Day 11 - Who is your favorite/least favorite character to write?
Day 12 - In what story did you feel you did the best job of world→building?
Day 13 - What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
Day 14 - How do you map out locations, if needed?
Day 15 - A writer you admire, whether professional or not!
Day 16 - Do you write romantic relationships? Are you good with those? Do you write sex scenes?
Day 17 - Favorite protagonist.
Day 18 - Favorite antagonist.
Day 19 - Favorite minor that decided to shove himself into the spotlight.
Day 20 - What are your favorite character interactions to write?
Day 21 - Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?
Day 22 - Tell us about one scene between your characters that you’ve never written.
Day 23 - How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story?
Day 24 - How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it?
Day 25 - Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
Day 26 - Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them?
Day 27 - Do appearances play a big role in your stories? How you go about designing your characters.
Day 28 - Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities?
Day 29 - How often do you think about writing?
Day 30 - Best source of inspiration?
(Taken from From: http://30daymemes.tumblr.com/)

Here's where I apologise for seeming presumptuous.  I'm just starting out, you see, and I can understand a certain cynicism on the part of my audience.  Why, you might ask yourself, does this particular Internet phantom with no publishing credits to his name feel the need to burden us with his opinions?

The answer is simple: I'm no one, yet.  That's not to say I'll be published in X, Y, or even Z years, but somewhere in the back of my mind a switch got flipped and I've decided to stick with this desire of mine. Who knows how successful I'll be, but I'm going to continue putting words to paper.  Thus, a thought dawned on me last week.  There are stories I can't tell you, for whatever reason.  Sometimes, as was the case when I wrote about my parents, the story is not mine to tell.  In other cases, it's because I need to save my best material for a (hopefully) paying audience.

There is one story I can share, though, and that is the story of me becoming a writer.  I can't tell you if it has a happy ending or not.  But if by chance at some point in X, Y, or Z years, someone comes along with the same dream, hopefully what I have here can serve as some small piece of advice: "beware, these are the methods of an unpublishable hack," or, of course, preferably, "herein lies a seed of wisdom of one who is paid to make up sentences."

Appendix - I'm Not Dead Yet!

Interestingly, this blog is still getting hits even ~2 months after my last post.  Ok.  ~3 since I last posted regularly, and ~5? since I posted anything other than "I'm writing, really!".  Believe it or not, these hits are (mostly) not from my mom.  I can tell because Blogger has this neat little tracker that colours in where your visitors are coming from.

Also interestingly, a great many hits to my blog are for the entry I made on October 13th, "Posting Schedule."  This leads me to assume that either a) people out there are interested enough in what I had to say that they want to know when I'm supposed to be putting stuff up (please allow me this conceit, even I know it's far-fetched), or b) they're looking for some information on what other people think a proper posting schedule ought to look like.

Actually, it could be c) Google somehow translated the content of that one post into "naked ladies" in a variety of foreign languages.  At any rate, and whatever the reason, it got me thinking that posting whenever the urge struck me probably wasn't a winning strategy to maintaining a presence on the Internet.

As my thoughts meandered onward, it also dawned on me that a complete unknown starting a writing blog is a TERRIBLE IDEA.  Why?  As pointed out in one of the many articles I've stumbled across in my lurching attempts to get the contents of my head on a blank page in some semblance of readability, I can't put anything I want to try to sell on the Internet.  The quality stuff I generate (hey, it could happen!) should be making its way to editors.

Where does that leave us?

Well, it means you're going to have to wait until I get published, or thoroughly crushed if what I write is really that bad, to read my fiction.  However, I'd be delighted if you decided to stop by from time to time to visit.  I'll try to document the perils I encounter as I pursue that loftiest of goals: getting someone to pay me to make things up.

So, I've got a writing-specific meme lined up, and starting next Sunday, and every Sunday thereafter, I'll give you something to look at.  It should prove interesting enough while I work on converting "I'm writing, honest!" into "I've submitted, honest!" and beyond.