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MINIONS
WyrdWolf
Guru of Irrelevance and Irreverence
WyrdWolf is a talking
Lupine who occasionally brings back a nice dead rabbit or bird for
his best friends.
Locus
Information will be
released on a need-to-know basis.
Sakka-Fenikkusu
The great,
powerful and egotistical phoenix who somehow manages to hold a pencil
without burning it.
Solemn Coyote
Somewhere between five
and ten feet tall, with brown, black, blonde or red hair, bright
eyes, a skin color, and a personality.
Magnolian
Wolf
Wolf of the
Seven Flowers
Will
gobble up your grandma's cookies. (and your writing)
Olusenka
It is
tempting to write that I am a green blob of jelly that came from the
depths of the sea, but I can't. This fact about me must remain a
secret.
Burnt Bread
Underlord of the Overworld
In the last
Muffin Wars, Burnt Bread led the raisins and nuts into victory
against great odds.
YJanZ-
Providence
Godzilla Himself
Conqueror
of small cities, men among men, cook of omelettes, writer,
lunatic, and someone who thinks he's Godzilla (So Run! Run from
Godzilla!)
Also: Special shoutout to Felicia whose birthday was on the deadline. I feel bad calling it a deadline now... Maybe, in the future, we will refer to the deadline as a 'lifeline'.
Editor’s Note
Says Locus
What a wild month it’s been, huh? Fictionpress goes down, as usual, and no one knows why. Those stinkers on FanFiction go about enjoying their fancy site, using their features and replying to reviews like some medieval nobleman, while we Fictionpress peons muck about in slop and mud, at least when our site is up. But lo and behold! A few long days later, Fictionpress rises from its ashes, like a literary phoenix, and we rejoice! Sure, the site looks exactly like FanFiction, and lacks the mystique and elegance of the older, unique design, but hey, we have features!
That reminds me. November is National Novel Writing Month. There’s an event for crazy people hosted at and I know more than a few people contributing this month are participating. It’s free to join, and a great creative exercise!
Oh, right. The newsletter. This month, we’re writing around the theme of Space. Enjoy!
Picture, if you will…
It’s nine P.M., Friday night, and you’re sitting with your back to a wooden booth. The restaurant hums around you as you pick over the menu, occasionally glancing over the top of it at your date. You’ve been sitting like this for a few minutes now, and neither of you has said anything. You want to. You’ve been running clever lines through your head, but you haven’t managed to articulate any of them. Besides, they might not bridge the silence between you.
In it’s own bizarre way, writing is a romance. An idea catches the author’s fancy. The author flirts with it. Maybe talks about it to a few friends; thinks it over. Eventually, the author calls it up via word document and they decide to do something together, sometime. That’s about when the awkwardness sets in.
A blank page is the perfect listener. It’ll take in every mistype, every bit of punctuation without comment. It won’t lean in like it’s interested. It won’t look uncomfortable if you stumble over your words. It’ll just wait, with the expectant silence of a first date, for you to say something.
This is where you come in. You did ask it out, after all. So say something. Charge into the fray with a quip and a smile. Or just make small talk. Not every story needs to begin with a roar. The important thing, in writing as in dates, is that it begins. From there, it can go anywhere.
Empty space cannot have a temperature, because of the law or thermodynamics. Heat transfers from a warmer body to a colder one (also the law of a good boyfriend), and the absolute vacuum of traditional space, there is nothing for heat to transfer to. However, space really isn't empty. It is full of background microwave radiation, which is what is left over from the big bang. This does follow the laws of thermodynamics, and thus can have a temperature, which is -270° Celsius (-454° Fahrenheit and 3.15° Kelvin). For the record, the lowest recorded temperature on Earth is -129° Fahrenheit (-89.4°C).
Sakka Fenikkusu
The trouble with quite a few authors on Fictionpress is that they simply have not entirely grasped the concept of space. It seems that multiple events are happening one after another in their tales of heroic antics and yet the average reader has no room to breathe or keep track of what on earth is going on. This is obviously not the effect the budding authors intend, however not spacing out the main storyline has dire consequences. These include: negative reviews, depression of the author and even the death of an unfinished tale. Yes, the concept of space is indeed an incredibly serious issue.
‘So, how can I cope with it, Olu?’
Well, my dear author, I will now take you through some advice regarding the two main features of each story: plot and characters.
Let’s start with the Plot.
The Plot is the bones of your story. It is important to have a good, healthy skeleton before you layer the meat (also known as the Characters) onto it. A good Plot makes sense. A successful Plot avoids those awful inconsistencies commonly referred to as ‘plotholes’. Most importantly, a great Plot knows how to utilize pace and spacing.
Your story is a symphony, so make sure it plays right. If when reading a paragraph or even a chapter you keep hearing a false note playing in your head, then it’s probably high time to rewrite it. Similarly, a symphony has slow parts and fast melodies. It even has intervals of near silence. A good story slows down at the right points and picks up at the relevant twists and turns. So please don’t think that throwing in one shock after another in every paragraph will make it have more impact. For example, if you’re writing a melodrama, revealing that the main female character is pregnant with her love interest’s older brother’s child, while her long lost twin has returned from Shanghai where she had undergone a sex change but upon setting foot off the plane collapsed because of a heart attack would probably take up at least a chapter or two, not just one poorly summarized paragraph! All you get is your reader’s mind trying desperately to process this information. Stretch out your shocking revelations so the reader can come to terms with them and the characters themselves are adapted to the situation.
Characters
The Characters are the driving force behind any story. I will only say it once, but a clichéd plot can be saved by memorable characters. Characters who experience growth and change throughout the course of the story are the ones people are likely to identify with.
Yet what a lot of authors don’t do when starting out is give their characters dimensions. Often this leads to a boring, stereotypical cast which in turn makes the story a very predictable affair. Alternatively, rushing a character through a series of major tasks/changes/moral tests without letting him/her spend some time reflecting on all this in the process of the story is a no-go. Obviously, readers want to see what motivates your characters, their fears and their expectations. So give your character some space, let this character brew then chuck all of them together, sprinkle with a dose of good humor and delve into their psyches. Complications are what makes a story interesting, so pace them out but do write in a few.
On a final note, please don’t name your characters along the lines of Gh’air’thril Vig’lik’lukik’.
Honestly. If the name and surname of your character has more than 2 apostrophes, readers can get very, very pissed off at you. An broken keyboard is not a decent excuse. You can bring up an onscreen keyboard to fix up unfortunate errors.
Until next time!
Space is…
Outer space. Yes, that space. Where there are planets and stars and UFOs waiting to deliver free anal probes.
The empty area inside a young sibling’s skull.
The white, blank, area of a MS word document (or notepad!)
One of the bottom keys in the keyboard, (example: )
Vacant. Like a front lawn where the dogs and cats hide their ‘treasure’
Needed when people get too close.
A volume of something in math (MathBoreddon’t want to talk about it)
Add ‘My’ before it and you get a website.
What you need in a room full of rabid poodles.
Anything else that has nothing.
Space can be filled with many things. Anger, Joy, observations, conversations, thoughts, and plots; whatever it is, it makes the world turn everyday.
Space is required in your writing simply because it makes the piece of work easier to read. This is the idea of paragraph spaces. However, that doesn't mean that every sentence needs a space in between it. The one exception to this is dialog.
"Hi."
"What's up?"
"Nothing much." John scratched his head.
This makes the dialog flow a little easier.
Another misuse spaces is a typo, which all of us have been bugged for at some point, but the reviewer is right. They do not want to translate gobbolty gook to learn if John dies or not.
John thoughtthat Mary had aknife but she didn't theylived happilyever after.
The following mistake in spaces is one that I myself was caught in- transition of time periods.
"The queen stepped forward towards the baby, looking down at its cradle. Names were meant to capture the essence, the soul of a person. What did she see in this baby? She saw a thin, quiet child, polite and prim. She saw a child who would do nothing on her own, who would be dependent on her. All in all, she saw a horrible queen and successor.
“I will name this child….. Briar-Rose.” She said these six words loudly, as if she were proud of them. For the thorn she has placed in my heart, the queen thought.
Briar-Rose puked into the bucket again, making the previous vomit slop towards the edges of its steel rim. “Ugh… I think dinner is out.”
The readers were confused because of the sudden change of time period, and the remedy was only this:
"The queen stepped forward towards the baby, looking down at its cradle. Names were meant to capture the essence, the soul of a person. What did she see in this baby? She saw a thin, quiet child, polite and prim. She saw a child who would do nothing on her own, who would be dependent on her. All in all, she saw a horrible queen and successor.
“I will name this child….. Briar-Rose.” She said these six words loudly, as if she were proud of them. For the thorn she has placed in my heart, the queen thought.
--------
Briar-Rose puked into the bucket again, making the previous vomit slop towards the edges of its steel rim. “Ugh… I think dinner is out.”
Good luck with your writing... that's all, folks!
WyrdWolf
Space. When you first heard the theme of this month's newsletter, what did you think of? The infiniteness of outer space? Blank space, as it relates to art? Perhaps you thought about Euclidean or vector space, adding structure and mechanics to the field of mathematics. Maybe even the standard meter, which is defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
All interesting, and I'm sure that some of those topics will be covered by other contributing authors (though I'm sure you'd grow bored quickly with an article about the definition of a meter), but I've chosen something completely different. It's the most common (in the English language, anyway) of the 'punctuating marks' we use, though not really considered to be punctuation. Still interested? I'll show you and example.
There. Miss it? I have another one lying around here somewhere.
The space. Technically, it is defined as 'interword separation', and there are three different types, believe it or not. Em-quad, en-quad and hair spaces are the ones you should be able to ask your English teacher about, each with a different use. When we get into computing and interword separation, there are at least eighteen different spaces. They have names like U+00A0 and U+FEFF, and their purpose is far above me. "Why," you may ask me, "did you choose to give us this tidbit of information. Surely you have better things to write about." Well, possibly. But when I write these articles, I write about something that interests me. Interword separation is interesting? Sure, if you know the right facts.
There is a theory that a good portion of the languages spoken today are descendents of a Ur-language, called proto-Indo-European, or just Indo-European. We have no modern records of this language, but looking at the similarities of language structure and composition reveals that there are common roots to many western languages.
Ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, or any of the Sanskrit languages can be separated into two categories. Those that developed with vowels and those that didn't. Sanskrit, as you may know, has no vowel signs, and developed interword spacing to distinguish between separate words. Latin and Ancient Greek had vowels, and didn't require spacing to distinguish between words. Spacing in today's Latin was only established as the modern languages developed with spacing and vowels, and decided to update Latin to make it easier to read.
Interesting? I'll leave you with one more fact to mull over. There are four hundred and sixty-three spaces in this article. That's two more than the number of words I've used. Everything we can write is as much space as content. And no, don't bother using that with a teacher. It doesn't work.
Why do we suck at space?
Seriously, the human race totally sucks at space. We’ve managed to break our atmosphere and get to the moon, sure, but what the hell does that prove? Our planet’s going to run out of resources in the next century, probably, and our only move to survive then will be to SOS other planets, but if we can’t get anywhere, then we’re remarkably boned.
Of course, if the whole ‘corn for fuel’ thing actually works, then we’ll be content getting blown up by some crazily advanced aliens. It’s all good. We’ll be all like, “Don’t shoot us!” and they’ll be all like, “Googitty kershlaben kkkkrrrttt mooil-tyuns shoonty Bill Clinton!” and we’ll be all like, “Why don’t we just sit down and have a drink?” and they’ll be all like, “Okay, but we don’t like you that way,” and we’ll get drunk and it’ll turn into a grope-fest, then some weird hybrid will be created, the aliens will be pissed because it’s the baby of their leader’s daughter, and we get blown up. That’s how it’s gonna happen. The end.
Luke Skywalker started it, I think. I don’t mean to be too hard on the poor guy, but poorly disguised clones of his name have been sprouting in the sci-fi genre, like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Axel Soulreaper. Blade Ironfist. Dirk Steelblade. Harkening back to the really old days of epic fantasy, they sound like the kind of people who charge through dungeons leaving decomposing orcs in their wake. In the modern sci-fi universe, they’re usually hardened mercenaries, dedicated soldiers, or the victims of human-enhancing experiments. And they usually charge through heavily guarded facilities leaving decomposing men in their wake.
Over the course of their own private epics, these men gain ridiculous amounts of power, either due to their mutations or through command of more and more resources. By the end, the only person with a hope of stopping them is the villain (and we all know how that confrontation’s going to turn out.)
Some reviewers, when they stumble on a “Grit Starfury”, shake their heads and click the back button on their browser. Others tear into it via review. A few noble souls try to work with it, offering constructive advice. I appreciate their efforts, but I’d like to suggest something else: try writing your own “Max Thundersmash”.
You’re probably thinking you misread that, so let me clarify. Try taking all the basic pieces that make up a “Vince Biggerstaff” and telling something different with them. Write about the villain whose lab experiment got loose and is now tearing up the multiverse with Goku-esque powers. Talk about Mr. and Mrs. Ironsoul and why they gave their child such a distinctive name. Heck, tell me a story about how a planet recovers from being trashed by “Sean Bloodstar”.
The moral of all this: just because something is clichéd doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless. Half of fiction is figuring out how to tell old stories new ways. Or vice versa.
Burnt Bread
Well, I’ve got a bone to pick with them aliens!
Hey! Why are aliens always green? I’d kill for a vibrant orange one. And why do they always have huge heads? Do they always have to be the intelligent species? Dang, why can’t we find a dumb species for once? They’re always more high-tech than us!!!
And how can we always speak these alien’s languages in these sci-fi books / movies? These authors aren’t even trying to overcome the language barrier. Oh, yes, a civilization 10 million years older than us says “Groovy!” That’s reeeeal plausible.
And why do they always want our brains? Oh, yes, humanity holds the secrets to the universe. Well if they ask me for my brain I’ll just give it to ‘em. I barely ever use the old thing, anyway. And neither do sci-fi writers, apparently.
Space. What is space? Space is outer space. Space is I-don't-have-enough-room-in-my-closet space. Space is the topic of this article. Space.
Now, if I were you, I'd be saying, "Gee! You said space 8 times in one measly paragraph!" That brings me to the first part of this writing tip.
When you use a word, make a suitable amount of space before you use it again. I don’t even think I have to put an example for this. You’ve probably all had troubles with word variety. Soon we all understand with shock and horror that there is no real synonym for “giant falling piano” that doesn’t sound tacky (because huge plummeting-down-to-kill-you instrument doesn’t cut it) and find ourselves in peril.
Sometimes you just can’t find a synonym. You have to face the pain and just put it twice. But at any possibility that there is a similar word you can use, just use it. Use fat in one sentence, chubby in the next. Having trouble finding a word? Get a thesaurus. No one is going to persecute you for it.
It’s also a good idea to switch around the structure of your sentences to keep variety. This one I think I will use an example for. If it sounds fine to you, just say it out loud.
“Smiling nervously, he averted his eyes. Smirking, the girl looked at him with her eyebrows raised.”
A good correction might be, “With a nervous smile, he averted his eyes. Smirking, the girl looked at him with her eyebrows raised.”
It keeps the format interesting and makes it easier to read. All in all, it’s a better two sentences.
Another thing about space. Don’t just skip to parts in your story where the action is. You need to build up to them a little. You’re not in the movies. Leave a little elbow room between these events. Stories, unlike films, are more about characters than plot, so give your characters a little time to develop before thrusting them above a pit of bubbling lava. Sometimes, just letting them interact is really needed for both your readers and you. Yes, you heard me, you.
I understand that in some situations, that is impossible, but when it isn’t, let a few of them talk things out. You’ll be surprised how much it helps your fiction.
Now, it is time for me to depart. I’m taking a trip through outer space. Or…. something like that.
There is a work I discovered a month or so back, a little-touched gem that was set in a world so rich with culture and history that one might find it hard to concentrate on the story at hand. In a good way, of course. It is called Descent of Ash and Dust, written by the duo of Cyres and Ty (their names double as their pen name! Classy!) and is updated when a chapter passes through their rigorous editing and revising process. Give it a look- its one of the most professional and captivating fantasy stories I've had the pleasure of reading.
Hollywood just doesn’t make space epics like it use to. In fact, Hollywood hasn’t churned out any good galactic stories since Serenity last year and even then, it wasn’t so much a Hollywood hit as Joss Whedon with a bigger budget.
Since there is no noteworthy sci-fi film in the cinemas at the moment, I choose to revisit the classics in search of a film that was truly out of this world. Sifting through my selection of movies, I came across numerous noteworthy candidates such as Star Wars, Blade Runner and Aliens, but one particular gem caught my eye.
The Fifth Element
With dazzling special effects, elaborate sets and bad-boy Bruce Willis clad in fluro orange tops, this sci-fi fantasy will not fail to provide entertainment and inspiration.
The story follows a retired military operant, Korben Dallas, who scrapes his living from driving taxis in a futuristic metropolis. When a strange girl drops in (literally) for a ride, his daily routine is bulldozed over in the search for a cosmic weapon that can either sustain or destroy life.
One thing to look out for is the amazing mise en scene (fancy word for the way things look on screen) that carries through the flick. The contrast between bright, warm colors and cool colors establishes characters and dazzles the eyes. Snappy sequences and stylish editing act as a cinematic short hand riddled with metaphors and implications.
Another noteworthy aspect in The Fifth Element is the characterization. Movies generally follow a rigid character formula that’s easy to understand and replicate, so you’d be surprised how many films fail to get it right. The funny guy won’t get enough lines (Van Hellsing) or the hero tastes of cardboard (Matrix)... This film is not one of those. Each character is given the perfect amount of screen time and appropriate dialogue. The motivation of each character is clear, and character has purpose.
If you’re running out of inspiration whether it be for plot, descriptives or character, or even if you’re just out for a weekend movie fest, be sure to include the Fifth Element on your short list.
Lots more submissions than expected this month. I am thrilled - keep it comming, people.
Many thanks to those who contributed to Space, the second issue of Stop The Press. We look forward to writing with you again in the next issue. For those interested in writing for the paper, please email your queries and contributions to the email on the profile.
Next Issue: Money
Submissions due: No later than 20th November 2006
