Getting to know your characters.

Struggling to find out what is particular to your character? What they do when they're in a queue, waiting, when they're sat on the bus? Never thought about those wrinkles or creases in the corners of their eyes or mouth?

All of the little things that you never knew existed could be yours, by doing a few of the following. Or just one. No matter which one you choose you're bound to learn something new.

1) Have your character talk to themselves, in the second person "you", whilst looking in the mirror. One of my characters I did this for spiraled off somewhere deep and dark.

2) Put your character in a room with another character. Be this one from TV/film, another one of your creations, from a book you've read,  but as long as they are somebody your character has never seen/heard or would know about, do it. See what happens. Do they fight? Argue? Flirt? Get along? Debate? Talk? Ignore one another? What do they do with their body? Face each other? Turn away?

3) Put your character somewhere out of their comfort zone. You have an Earth bound character? Put them on a space ship. Somebody who likes loud music and the city life? Stick them in an opera theater, or in the country side.

4) You, as the creator, write a letter to your character. Start it with "I saw last Tuesday in that small cafe," or something similar. Don't talk about what they basically did... (you lined up, got a coffee, paid and left) Talk about the minute details. They tapped two fingers against their thigh. Every few seconds they had to push a strand of hair out of their face. When they sit down they bounce one of their legs. It's always the left leg over the right. You get the picture.

5) Rant and rave as your character. Put yourself in their shoes, find a topic to complain about and go wild.

6) Go shopping for them. Shop for food, clothes, books, CD's, DVD's, magazines. Anything. Shop and buy what your character would want and love. Not you, your character.

7) Interview them. Maybe create a series of questions, and start answering them as your character. Maybe add more questions depending upon the answers you're given and explore a point further.

There are many other ways to get to know your character but personally, I like these seven and I hope you'll have some fun with this and find out some rather interesting things.

Happy Writing.

2nd 2nd draft

I have decided to restart my second draft of Redux. I like the fresh start, I think, I may yet change that... ideas are a forming. And I've just restarted the opening scene on the bridge and, well, it took a surprisingly dark turn pretty quick. Look:

Charlie eyed the empty vastness of space before her. Something about it always did draw her in, but it also left her uncertain. Uncertain about what would be waiting for her crew behind the next lump of space rock, uncertain about what her crew’s next job would be, if they were allowed their leave. Redux, her pride and joy, and the one ship the unwanted people of Command went.

            Her feet sat upon the edge of the console, a still warm cup of coffee cradled in her hands. Stars winked at her. They spoke of untold secrets waiting to be discovered. But the stark contrast of the pervading black turned her stomach with an uneasy jump. The black went of forever, eating everything it came to, circling, waiting, playing the predator until the light went out.

That's only a 136 words in and I think I have a new found idea for the Captain. But seriously, that took a dark turn right? I don't even know where I'm going from here but hopefully, somewhere a little bit brighter. 

Happy Writing. 

Depression

There is no word to describe it,
only thoughts and emotions.

It is a burning hole in your chest.
Everybody can add  a plaster
  or rip one away.
You never know which they choose
  until it is too late.

In a marathon you are behind,
  wading through mud
    with concrete shoes.
Nobody looks twice
  and you wander
    what is it that they see?

You stretch a hand out
  but it is only slapped away.
So you smile
  and say that everything is fine.
It's far from it.

Silent tears will stain your pillow.
How can you express your feelings?
How do you say you are mess up
  without saying,
    'I'm very very sad a lot of the time'?

It is the thoughts you lock away
  and throw away the key for
    that nobody can see but you.
And they mock and taunt,
  tell you that you're pathetic. Worthless.

How can it be expressed
  the pain of living everyday?
How can it be said
  that you'd rather cry
    than attend that party?
How can you put it
  that everyday is a struggle
    just to smile
      and to walk, one foot in front of the other,
       without taking two steps back?

Week 7

The Youngest Guardian - Week 7 is up and it's more a less the words of Joanna Frost, Amber's mother. Go take a look, please: http://penguinsandninjas.wordpress.com/first-draft/1912014-2/ 

Redux Editing

So I started re-writing Redux. Aries. The month after I'd written it. It is now, seven months later and I want to start again. Again. Like, I've gotten to a point where I've said to myself, "What was I thinking? What is that? Seriously?" 

Yes, what I have so far is a hell of a lot better than what I had had, but it isn't quite there. I've gone back to the started, added a tiny prologue, added an extra scene with McCallister that just ends. Like that. *clicks fingers* And I just- bleh. 

I may have to start the second draft again. Just a little bit. 

And I have Uni starting again. 

Four other weekly writing projects. 

Another story for my dissertation. 

Damn. 

Happy Writing. 

Week 6

Week 6 of my weekly first draft story, The Youngest Guardian, is up here: http://penguinsandninjas.wordpress.com/first-draft/1212014-2/

Go check it out :)

Happy Writing.

100!

This is post #100 and to make it feel a little more special I'm gonna put up here a scene I've just added. It'll sit right at the start of the story, and I want to ask you a question. Do you, as the reader, want to see if he makes a connection? Or should I clear it up later? I know for a fact it will be referenced later on but I'm wondering if adding an extra scene to show who McCallister is calling is warrented.

Enjoy:

McCallister walked the length of the ship. Everybody else was in bed and asleep, or at least he hoped they were. He’d been having trouble getting there and his body was too wired. Excitement about being home circled his body with joy. Redux had had to pull a double shift straight after a triple delivery job to some of the stations out here. Sixteen weeks of pirate duty had followed ten weeks of deliveries. A little over six months, with a few days off here and there, had been grating on him. He needed to be home.

            He’d already walked from his quarters to the end of the ship when he got an urge to call home. With a sigh he moved to the Captain’s quarters and knocked. Whenever that urge arose the Captain had always let him use her quarters and transmission signal to call home. He was a private person and he frowned on the day the crew found out. No answer greeted him and he knocked again. With a frown in place he pushed open the door an inch and stopped. She was already up, somewhere on the ship.

            He closed the door and turned, forcing his combat boots to lightly tread over the metal flooring. There was one place in mind and he moved down the corridors and down a flight of stairs until the gym came into view. The sound of jingling metal, the sign of weights being lifted, caught his ear and he pushed the door open.

            On one weight bench, the furthest from the door, sat the Captain with a hefty amount added to the silver pole. Silently he crossed the room and stood at the head of the bench. Her eyes met his and she pushed on the metal bar, pushing that and the weights up into the air with straight arms. “Yes Lieutenant?”

            “You need a spotter.”

            “I’m fine.”

            She brought the bar back down to her chest and pushed. “As your Second in Command I feel I should remind you that you tell us to train in pairs.”

            “And you should know that as the Captain I break my own rules.”

            A smile lifted the corners of his mouth. The Captain pushed the bar straight back up. Mentally he checked how much weight she was benching, 80 kg, and nodded. “Zach and Soko still on the bridge?”

            “Soko is. I’ve ordered Zach to get some sleep. We’ll be home in two days and he needs to fix his sleeping before then.” He nodded. Zach had a bad habit of breaking the basic rules of life. More often than not he became a night owl. Nothing but the sound of metal pushing against metal filled the room for several minutes. “Add five for me?”

            He nodded and grabbed two 2.5kg weights, adding one to each side. He watched in silence as she pulled the bar down and struggled to lift it back up. If anybody else was pulling the same stunt he knew the Captain would have them, he would too. But this was a normal occurrence aboard Redux. “I was wondering if I could call home,” he said.

            She pushed the bar up and nodded. “Go ahead.” He nodded and continued to stand there, hands by his side in case he needed to move and fast. She didn’t move. Just lifted her eyes up to him. “What are you waiting for?”

            “I want to make sure you’re not going to crush yourself Captain.”

            She laughed and the weights wobbled in her grasp. His hand came up but she shook her head and put the bar back where it belonged with a relieved sigh. “I’m done for the night.”

            He nodded and took a step back, waiting. The Captain pulled herself up and threw a towel over her shoulder. After a few moments of silence she sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s almost one in the morning. Go make your call before it gets to be too late.”

            “Yes Ma’am. Just don’t let me find you back here.”

            “I’ll take a walk. Relax my muscles.”

            He let a smile loose and moved off back through the ship until he came to the Captain’s quarters and pushed on the door. It was closed again and he turned the screen on. It took a few seconds to load but he tapped on the ‘call’ button, dialled up the number from mind and waited. 

TYG

So I've done a bit of tweaking with the header and the background image. There's also a couple more characters added to the 'Characters' page. 

There's 5 weeks of story excerpts for The Youngest Guardian. Please check it out here and leave a comment: http://penguinsandninjas.wordpress.com/

Happy Reading.

Over 2000!

I love you guys! I just hit over 2000 views, which I feel good about! I'm glad you're finding this interesting enough to read and look through and I hope you'll pass the word on about it ;)

Seriously guys. You're all fantastic.

I hope you're all having a wonderful day and getting on with some good writing!

One problem for us writers...

... is that we look up the weirdest things when we do our research right? But as time goes by, I'm sure I'm not the only one in this boat, but as a writer you become worried by the searches associated with our works. We all sit there thinking silently to the government, "It's all research I swear. I don't want to make a nuclear bomb or develop anthrax and disperse it in the most popular places. Honest."

Here's a list of some of the things I've done research on myself, which can make one worry:

• FBI interrogation room/building/methods
• MIT
• Drug penalties
• Age of consent in US
• How many years for forgery
• Types of murder/manslaughter and the differences
• Russian swear words
• Radiation
• Death cycle of a body - rigor mortis, temperature, lividity etc
• Types of guns
• How to dismantle a gun
• EMP pulses/bombs
• Airport layouts
• Different types of poisons 
• Different type of explosives
• How to melt a body in a vat of acid

And I swear it was all for research into writing fiction. Honest. I wonder what your list looks like.

Happy Writing. 

Hey guys!

A number of things...

1) I hit 20,007 words today in my re-draft of Aries.

2) I have started a daily word count table on excel. Basically any words that I write for creative purposes - stories, as part of my Weekly project - The Youngest Guardian, or something else, then I add them all up and put them in. I have a column for January with each date and a word count box next to it. The same instance for the rest of the year. I want to see how many words I end up writing creatively this year. My aim is to get to at least 450,000 words for the entire year. It seems like a lot but spread out over 365 days that's only 1,235 words a day (ish). Which is NOTHING. 

3) Week 5 of The Youngest Guardian is up - http://penguinsandninjas.wordpress.com/first-draft/512014-2/

4) I will be replacing the NaNo word count meter for 2013 and it shall be re-labelled to "NaNo take 2 - 2014" Of course I have to be ambiguous about what  this story is, at least until the summer. Then I can show you EVERYTHING! Okay, not quite everything but I can at least talk about it. 

5) When Summer comes what I plan on doing is spending a month on Aries, then the next month on NaNo project, then Aries and so on until they both be finished. Then I'll start something else. Maybe. 

6) I feel completely relaxed considering I'm going back to Uni in almost ten days. Meh, bring it on! 

7) My New Years Writing Resolutions:

• Write at least 450,000 creative words this year
• Finish the 2nd draft of Aries.
• Re-write and finish a story I had started and then began to hate

That's it I think.  Do you have any New Years Writing Resolutions?

Happy Writing. 

Sneak Peek

Hey guys, who wants a sneak peek into what happened to Captain Dixon and his crew? Who wants to see what their mission was and get a sneaky look at what they've been doing? You do? Let me know what you guys think, here ya go:

“Where were you?” McCallister said, “And what the hell happened?”

            Dixon sighed and pushed his chair back. “Hell’s one word for it.” He moved behind the counter that separated the cooking area from the dining area and a cupboard below his knees. “Four months back we were called in to deliver a bunch of prisoners to some new off planet prison facility that had just been built. A half full bottle of amber liquid hit the counter and he opened another cupboard above his head. The sound of clinking glass lifted the corner of Charlie’s mouth. Four glasses were pulled down. “Top secret facility and mission. It was need to know.”

            Rhodes pointed to the glasses and bottle, “I don’t approve of you drinking Captain. I don’t care if you out rank me, but if you take one sip of that stuff and I will cuff you to a bed in Medical.”

            Charlie chuckled and watched as Dixon didn’t mess with orders, shoving one glass back into the cupboard above him. “It was supposed to be a simple job, we escort the prisoners, hand them off, make sure they’re secured, take a quick look at the security of the place and come back out again.”

            “Something went wrong,” McCallister said.

            Dixon nodded and brought back the three glasses that held an inch of amber liquid in each one. He sat them down in front of the three crew members of Valhalla and retook his seat. “The scientists wanted us to hang around and head of security doubled this opinion. Command authorised us to hang around an extra couple of weeks.”

            There was a tone to his voice that had Charlie frowning. “Two weeks to help with security.”

            The other Captain gave a nod, “My thoughts exactly.” He tilted his head to one side with a sigh. Charlie picked up her glass and sipped. Rhodes pushed hers away and McCallister took his with a wry smile. “But we stuck around, thing was the scientists wouldn’t let us go anywhere. Their security could come and go where and whenever they pleased. But us?” he shook his head and picked up Rhodes’ glass, taking a sip before the woman could say anything. She just glared and Charlie tried to refrain from laughing. Dixon liked to push the buttons on Doctors. He smirked as he put the glass down and let it sit for a few seconds before the smile disappeared. “We did our job though. We stuck around, bored, getting more bored with each passing day. Before you know it two weeks pass and we ready to depart. Only our ship wouldn’t work.”

            Silence surrounded them with a company of frowns. Charlie was the one to speak after gently setting her glass down on the table, “What happened?”

            Dixon’s eyes fell to the glass he’d claimed and he sighed. “Johnson and Hill were in engineering, looking over the engine when something happened. We’d locked up the ship, standard protocol, but they were talking missing valves and pulled wires when they went silent.” Charlie just cocked her head and waited for him to continue. “I grabbed my side arm, told Carter, my First Officer to come with me and my Second Officer, Hickman, to be wary. Something was off, we could all feel it.” A pause and Charlie caught the odd look McCallister was giving her. There was a slight narrowed look to his eyes and the deep look let her know that he was thinking that something weird was going on, that nothing but trouble awaited them. “Then the lights went out. Emergency lighting came on,” he passed a look about the room, “much like it is now, and we hurried up. We got to engineering to find Johnson and Hill unconscious. Then the doors closed and we were locked in. The next thing we hear is gunshots, firing all about the ship. Capello’s voice comes over the comms, telling us there’s a couple of people on board trying to get into the bridge. Hickman had sealed it off and she was shouting, there was banging, a burst of bullets and then silence.”

Happy Writing

2014

It is a new year. May this year bring forth lots of happiness to those that were down and put smiles upon faces that would wear frowns. Say goodbye to the tears and tell yourself that this year, is a year to like.

Or just chill. Whatever.

Hope you all had fun and don't have too much of a hangover or whatever.

As to the question of New Year's resolution... Pfft. I stopped making them a while back. Yeah. But, I may instigate one, just one resolution...

To have finished a second draft of Aries and to have written another first draft of another story. (Okay so that's two, but who's counting? Not me.)

Happy Writing.

And Happy New Year.