Malevolent vs. Benevolent

Okay, make sure you get these straight because I'm tired of seeing them getting mixed up in newspapers.

Malevolent:
1. wishing evil or harm to another or others; showing ill will; ill-disposed; malicious: His failures made him malevolent toward those who were successful.
2. evil; harmful; injurious: a malevolent inclination to destroy the happiness of others.
3. Astrology. evil or malign in influence.

Benevolent:
1. characterized by or expressing goodwill or kindly feelings: a benevolent attitude; her benevolent smile.
2. desiring to help others; charitable: gifts from several benevolent alumni.
3. intended for benefits rather than profit: a benevolent institution.

The Scriptorium

The Scriptorium is a nice site that has some good info on so-called "experimental" authors all in one place.

If you want to further explore experimental fiction a handy link to have is The Modern Word.

Wordie

What if LibraryThing and Flickr had kids?

Wordie.

Wordie lets you make lists of words—practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. See who else has listed the same words, add citations and comments, and discuss.

Slang and Profanities in other languages

The Alternative Dictionaries
Slang, profanities, insults and vulgarisms from all the world

What else is there to say really?

Blondes Have More Macrobez

An escaped prisoner in a foreign land trips over a dead platypus and is knocked out near a river while being chased by the local militia of retired police officers since it's a national holiday. Over the course of the night, laying there unconscious, his DNA is examined by intelligent microbes not known to science and who have never seen a human before.

The intelligent microbes decide to alter their own dna so they can have arms and legs and in the matter of a fortnight they do so and grow rapidly. By this time our escaped prisoner has made it to the nearest small town which doesn't speak a language he knows.

That night the band of intelligent DNA modified microbes descends upon the town trying to find their creator. To fit in they steal clothes and drink at the local bar. They only talk in gestures and by drawing pictures.

Getting frustrated with the locals who don't understand them they fax a drawing portraying them holding the town hostage to the country's president saying the town is under their rule and everyone's a hostage until their creator is found. But he's been recaptured and is now in another country in solitary confinement for escaping.

Then the country's swat team laughs after a newbie hot blonde at SWAT HQ figures out that the fax isnt' a hoax and that the microbes are holding her grandmother and her 3 yr old daughter hostage as well. The microbes are getting smarter and more dexterous every minute. No one believes her so she steals a tank, the tank's manual and some ammo and drives to the town alone to rescue everyone.

Title: Blondes Have More Macrobez

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.

Pronouncing Words

Sometimes it's nearly impossible to know how to pronounce a word. Take things like Gerund or Ignominy for example. Is it a G as in Grover or a G as in Gerald? Or Ignominy...is it Eg-nom-in-ee or what?

Dictionary.com has all kinds of charts and tables to help you figure this stuff out but sometimes it's like trying to work out a secret with your Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring. They have audio files that help you hear how a word is said but they're for premium users.

So, looking around I noticed that Encarta has audio files for a lot of words in their dictionary...like Ignominy and Gerund.

What's cool is that they're just tiny mp3 files too if you want to keep one for later reference.

Pseudo-Fiction

Alex Hutchinson in an award winning poet and novelist. He is the creator of Suburban Fiction, a new genre for writers who fictionalize parts of their lives into Bio-Thrillers. Alex has six books in print and they are all available at www.Suburbanfiction.com

(from his writerscafe.org about box)

New genre. Bio-Thrillers. It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure exactly how this benefits the reader however, because to them no matter what it's still a story. In a sense it's admitting lying to your readers from the outset and telling them, "Hey, this started out true but here's what I wish would have happened." Or what could have happened I suppose.

Now, to be fair I haven't read any of them but I get the sense that they're literary daydreams, which is fine. It's a journal of lies in a way. It's saying, "Here's what my life could have been like, had this happened, had this path been taken." I'm not against it, I'm not against even calling it a new genre, I just question how it's different to the reader, to the average Joe or Jane in a bookstore who picks up the book from them picking up a novel of complete fiction. It's like buying a lightbulb and not caring if it was made in the USA or China...it's still a lightbulb...they're still novels largely comprised of fiction. I question whether it's new as well.

It immediately reminded of the un-produced screenplay based on Bob Lazar's life where it delves into his (allegedly true) UFO reverse engineering experience in the desert of Nevada but ends up with him being chased by the government while he clutches a gun and runs through speeding traffic, something he never claimed happened. Likewise, Bio-Thrillers just seem to me -without having actually read one- to be Hollywood-ising one's life. Great if that knocks your hair back and gets you writing but I fail to see the benefit or attraction to the faceless reader over the Bio-Thriller author's shoulders.

What's interesting is that Hutchinson uses iUniverse to self-publish his novels. I have nothing against self-publishing other than I wish there were some logo or medallion on a book's outer jacket -front or back- that indicated that it was indeed self-published. Unless you know names such as iUniverse or Lulu you're likely to never know and wonder why (occasionally) there are spelling mistakes or glaring grammatical errors in your copy of whatever you just ordered from amazon.com.

Still you gotta give Hutchinson credit since he's getting his writing out there. Kudos to that.

Self-publishing is great to make your book look like a real book but it does not guarantee that it's been professionally vetted and scrutinized by unbiased eyes before being printed.

Btw, Author House is another self-publishing company.

Authors@Google

Here's a worthwhile bookmark, Authors@Google for the morning coffee warm up, the mid-day tea or the evening wind-down or the late night, "Gah..."

What is it? Authors@Google is:

The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Through the program, we invite authors to our Mountain View headquarters as well as our New York, Santa Monica, and Ann Arbor offices, where they treat Googlers to readings of everything from serious literature and political analysis to pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs

Yes, Amazon does this as well but they call it Amazon Fishbowl and really it's not worth your time. With authors such as Janet Evanovich and Stephen King, and "First-time novelist Keith Donohue then revealed the dark origins of his critically acclaimed book The Stolen Child, which chronicles the lives of a boy stolen by fairies and the changeling who replaces him in the human world" really you're better off without it.

Oh, and make sure you avoid fishbowl episode 9:

To start this show, Bill asked Holly, Kendra, and Bridget--Hugh Hefner's trio of platinum-blond girlfriends--about their life in the Playboy Mansion. Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex authors Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg were next at Bill's desk, where they explained some of the mysteries of the male anatomy. In Palm Beach, Florida, James Patterson made a UPS Special Delivery of his latest murder mystery to a customer who was "utterly amazed." And Los Lonely Boys finished the show with their unique brand of "Texican rock and roll."

Stick with Authors@Google.

Re-writing v1.1

I have this old screenplay I wrote back in 1993 or '94 (the original idea started out as an outline in 1989 I think, maybe '90) that has received some fairly positive reviews from the close circle of friends that have read it. A producer optioned it back in 1995 and a production company once wanted to shoot selected scenes from it for a test/demo reel of theirs.

Over the years the one lonely printed out copy I've had has been passed around back and forth across the USA a few times and it's not in very good shape anymore. The problem is that the original disks that contain the screenplay are lost. Gone. Period. I've looked EVERYWHERE and by everywhere I mean EVERYWHERE. I won't get into it but I wrote it on an older Brother brand word processor which turns out is not compatible with ANYTHING and by anything I mean NOT EVEN THE BROTHER WORD PROCESSOR THAT CAME OUT IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS.

The only option to get the screenplay from the the Brother disc to a format readable by a Mac or PC was a CRAZY expensive conversion service. Not even Brother's on conversion software would do it. I was one version too late.

So, what did I do? I gave up like any sensible person would knowing that my printed copy was safe in my filing cabinet for me to type up later or make photocopies of or scan in and OCR.

Fast forward a few years and one day I get the urge to dig it out and start re-reading it. Only it's gone. The folder which held the script is still there, the notes and reviews from friends are there but the actual screenplay is goners.

To make a VERY long story short the friend who had it said he didn't, I didn't know where it was until one day it shows up in the mail. My friend found it about a year and change after me asking about it. Yays!

(as a side note, I have a TON of things I've written on that old Brother WP, only the disk drive in the thing is on the fritz so one day -actually I should do this now that I have a HD Video Camera- I'm going to pop the discs in, and if they read, scroll one screen at a time while I record the WP's screen with a video camera so I at least have THAT. Guh. That's a weird thought, editing my writing in Final Cut Pro...)

So once it was in my hands I decided not only to make a copy of it but do it by hand because after all these years it was still, literally, the first draft. Sure, I'd re-written some scenes and dialogue here and there when I initially wrote the thing longhand (yes longhand) before typing it up that first time but what I typed in that first time is what it remained for all those years. I wanted to update it.

That was the key for me, an epiphany of sorts: update. I'm a geek, I'll admit. I LOVE updating software and firmware, LOVE IT. So being the person that I am, dreading any re-writes at all I decided that I'm not re-writing I'm updating, I'm improving, I'm making better. I'm updating the engine under the hood that tells the story. And the first step was to give my screenplay a version number...v1.0.

Just looking at that number made me want to update it so it read something terribly exciting like v1.1 or even v2.0. I decided to go conventional and say that any changes I did while typing it up would bump it up to v1.1. So I began typing it in. Over the course of typing it into my shiny brand new word processor (which exports as a plain text file if I want so it's compatible in the future with just about everything, screw Brother...) I noticed little lines of dialogue here and there which would be improved or fleshed out, bits of description which could be more descriptive and so on. As I got to the end of the re-type I went back to the cover page and happily typed in "v1.1." Woot!

I'll get to another post another day about re-writes in general but for me that's how I look at them. Where once I used to DREAD the mere thought of going back and re-visiting these events, places and characters, now I look forward to it mostly. I think the problem I had is that it's re-writing MY work, rather than someone else's. I'd love to re-write more things from other people, that's a natural thing to like to do. But going back over my stuff, knowing all the sweat and emotional angst and stress that went into getting those words on the paper, let alone think about what emotional mazes I'd have to navigate to re-write it was too much to bear. But...thinking about it like software...thinking about it in terms of version numbers...ok, that gets me excited. Weird? Sure, but it works for me.

The Reverse Dictionary

We all know about dictionary.com but what if you know the meaning of a word and can't recall the actual word? What then?

Reverse dictionary may be the answer. I think it's something every writer shouldn't be without.

OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

It's not perfect but it's a good first step towards finding that word. Of course the tried and true method of going through thesaurus listings is always helpful.