Signature Balloon

Absurd Plot:

Here's another:

A man works as a model for balloon figure designer. But he decides that one of his poses is so "him" so it's trademarked. After he sees people making his signature poses with balloons he decides to take the designer to court over it. But before that he snaps and goes on a rampage with a pellet gun shooting all the balloons in the world.

The balloon appreciation society is aghast and decides to hire a hitman to take him out. At the end he's killed while doing his signature pose. But in Malaysia, on a Wednesday while in a silent movie theatre watching an avant-garde expressionist film about gingerbread men.

Then the cloned intelligent dinosaurs from the future show up.

Absurd Plots.

As a writing exercise I like to try and come up with the most absurd plots I can think of. Usually they end up being funny but not always. Thinking about the previous post...

A trio of robotic alien clowns are lost in space in a damaged spaceship. Their home world was lost in an unfortunate full-scale Dyson Sphere experiment and they barely escaped the planet's destruction by stealing a damaged ship low on fuel, that was being towed away after a crash outside their circus tent.

Mulgador, the lead robot alien clown, has his dead wife's memories encrypted on an old bio-chip, (the gov't backup in case something like this would happen) made before she married the clown, and needs to get it decrypted because as the former president of their galaxy she was the only one left who knew The Secret. And who controls that knowledge will rule the known universe.

That's when the notice a big metal crate in the cargo hold marked "Never Open."

So then...

If you get blocked or loose inspiration try making up an absurd plot or imagine a really horrible description for a novel that you would read on the inner sleeve or rear cover. Sometimes that's enough to get your creativity flowing again. It's a lot like the random association method of overcoming a creative block but I'll post about that later.

Romance Writers Competition

I have no real personal interest in writing romance stories unless by romance I mean hot giant-robot on giant-robot action and building sized mutant rats all against one human with an alien ray gun of which he lost the manual to 200 years prior while escaping an exploding planet with only a chip of the recorded memories of his lost girlfriend. Oh, and that chip is encrypted by some lost alien race. Around then is when the nano-clowns show up.

But...if you ARE interested in writing romance novels and aren't too busy with your 70 days romance novel, check out the Gather.com First Chapters Romance Writing Competition.

Here’s How It Works: From August 1 through August 22, aspiring romance writers will have the opportunity to submit a full-length romantic fiction manuscript for consideration. Over the course of the competition, authors will post chapter one of their manuscripts in the First Chapters Romance Group. These chapters will be rated by the Gather community and the Gather Editorial Team, and five finalists will be selected through two rounds of voting. (See our new voting guidelines.) One Grand Prize Winner will then be chosen for publication by a panel of judges.

So yeah. There's that. Oh, what do you win?

This unique opportunity will enable one talented Gather member to win a guaranteed publishing contract, along with a $5000 cash advance!

$3.75 Million for a Vampire Trilogy

This is kind of, and still kind of not, unexpected given the popularity lately of Vampires in media.

Last week, we hear, agent Ellen Levine at Trident Media closed a deal for a postapocalyptic vampire trilogy with editor Mark Tavani at Ballantine.

For $3.75 Million dollars.

Read about the deal here.

Online Free Writing Workshop

Rosina Lippi is hosting a writing workshop on her blog. It's free and interesting so far. Check it out.