It Came From Outer Space…

I’ve gotten a lot of outline planning done for “Too Deep” over the past few days; but I got stuck yesterday. I have 20 pages of outline and am about halfway through the story (probably) I know where it’s going; but I’m still not quite sure how to get to the outcome. I had some ideas but they were a bit too cliche, and I keep scratching things out and coming back to it and still being stuck.
I’ve been thinking about actually working on the story itself and then coming back to the planning, get things out a little more, much the way you might go to www.fatburner.org to get help with losing weight if you’re stuck on your diet.
Some times changing things up a bit does help with getting things moving again, and that’s what I’m hoping to achieve.

A lot of my stories take place in the future so I tend to do a lot of extrapolating as to how things will be then. From the mundane to the highly technical.
For example the CONDOR story that I have takes place, primarily, on a spaceship. While there are a lot of television shows that think and show how life on a spaceship might be in the future I try to steer away from certain things that have been done, like transporters or teleporters. I look to other things, such as ways to keep in shape while in space, ways to generate artificial gravity, ways for oceanic species to exist among air breathers, even if they might need acne treatment creams, toothcare, transplants, artificial limbs, ocular implants, communication systems, how television would work.

I don’t think there’ll be flat screen television. I’ve always thought that television would be more projection based, a full experience rather than just flat watching, and it seems I may be on the right track with that. I also figure that there’ll be a lot more interaction, society as a whole is embracing the digital nature of communication. A lot of television shows are embracing Facebook and Twitter to interact with their fans and get direct input. I could see in the future that television shows might even embrace that to the degree of being live and getting input from their fans as to how things should go, in a sort of “choose your own adventure” fashion.

I also figure that work outs will go the way of the Wii, that they’ll be highly interactive, using perhaps gloves and leg sensors and pads that sense the amount of weight that you’re putting out.

The previous post about editing mad me thinking about fanfiction.net and how long it’s been since I’ve been there. I got my original account when I was a young proactiv-smearing college student. I, actually, deleted that account after saving anything I thought might be viable and restarted in the hopes I would actually perfect and finish some of the stories that I’d been writing.

Except it didn’t happen, partially due to the depression, and a lot due to the fact that my tastes have changed. I feel strange writing and getting comments from people who are in some cases less than half my age. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

For the most part the content on there is…strange, twisted, drivel. There are some gems, but a lot of it is just not good at all. It’s the same way with places like deviantart. They attract anyone who wants to showcase their work whether or not it’s good. A bit like an American Idol audition.

I haven’t written much about this before because I’ve yet to complete a story enough to have it really be an issue. Though the one story that I did complete (when I was sixteen) when I review that now it makes me gag. It’s full of cliches and repetitive language and melodrama.

Some times those things can be used to emphasize a point, but when they’re the entirety of the story then it becomes trite and pathetic. When you find someone to be a reviewer and editor for your work you need them to be unbiased and brutally honest about what they’re reading, like the people at the hgh website claim to be. It’s no good if you have a reviewer who just tells you, “It’s good. I <3 it!!" as a lot of the people on Fanfiction.net are known to do. Instead you need someone to point out to you when your characters appear to be acting out of type or when there’s a plot hole you could drive a car through.

They not only have to be able to correct spelling and grammar but also challenge you to improve not only your work but yourself.

I decided just to do a little mini-blurb based on some of the planning I’ve been doing for “Too Deep”. It’s when he’s telling Brad about the time that he gets re-recruited, after a resistance member overhears him having an argument with a gang member, and then tracks him down in time to prevent him successfully committing suicide.

Brad let go of his hand, so that he could reach up and wipe his own eyes, “Sorry,” he murmured.
Sam gave a shrug, “Shit happens, I guess.”
Brad shook his head, “No, I mean…most of the people I grew up around they were the sort of shallow like your ex, Roy, where they would want to kill themselves if their family didn’t buy them the best best acne cleanser, so they had to go to school with blemishes, or they’d find some other vapid way to manipulate their parents…it’s not like I haven’t seen the scars before, and there has to be more than one time, based on those…” he hesitated reaching a hand out towards Sam’s sleeve, to roll it back and trace the lines, “Of course most of them would have the scars cosmetically removed after a certain time when it was no longer cool. Us poor Earthers with our terrible problems,” he laughed sarcastically.
Sam gave a slight smile, “It’s still kinda stupid,” he said, “here I was on the one hand wanting to help make things better, and then I did that, but I was completely lost. I knew the father had connections, but everything was so mysterious, I hadn’t had time to find anything he had written. I was terrified that my leaving the orphanage so quickly meant the idiot military police had found that information and torn apart the entire resistance. Not logical thought I know, but still…”

I’m having an issue deciding on tense. I had to go back through and edit the blurb a little because it started out past tense, shifted to present somewhere in there and then back to past. My issue with the tense is based on the fact that he’s telling the story of his past in his present, so I feel as though it should be in present tense, except for the flashbacks being in the past; but I don’t know if that will be too jarring.

Some times the location of your story can be a character in and of itself, other times it’s just a background; but it has to be something that you research just as much as your background for the more animate characters.

When looking at Sanctity most of that story takes place in a town that I can picture because it’s very similar to where I went to college, so it’s easy for me to write about that I can picture my time in college and modify things slightly, whereas where Dane fled to which is somewhere in South Carolina, that I’m not as familiar with. I’ve seen South Carolina only from the other side of the Suwannee, when we visited a friend who was in Savannah, Georgia.

So, I have to look at the which myrtle beach hotels she would have stayed in when she first got there, what sort of apartments they might have in the area that she could have moved in to. I mean, a lot of dives are going to be very similar no matter where they are, but it’s still helpful. In Florida a lot places are very Spanish in style of architectural influence, or alternately they are very similar built out of an injection mold almost, but I don’t know if that’s expected in South Carolina, are designs more unique, what sort of culture would influence their designs.

These are important things to realize.

I’m expanding my knowledge on the main characters for “Too Deep”. I know I still have “Sanctity” in the pipeline but the way my muses work I have to go with what I get, and what I’m getting for the past couple of days has been Sam and Brad.

One of the main differences is the environments they grew up in. Brad grew up on Earth with a stable, loving family and good prospects. The war didn’t touch him directly, but still he grew into a conscientious thinking individual who wants to rebuild and help make things right for the future.

Sam on the other hand grew up on the Lunar Colony with little to nothing, his parents were killed in a drug raid, his older brother looked after him in the slums for a few years until the government tried to wipe out the slums with a viral outbreak which killed the older brother and then he gets taken in to an orphanage, but works out of their as a courier up ’til and after the place that was leveled, when he got roped into working for the rebellion to get out of going to jail, and probably winding up dead.

After the war he meets up with Brad at college. While he had no formal education he was able to take courses and basically “clep out” of high school. I’m working on how to do that. Most of the world is centered around Eurasia the way I have it envisioned. So, they don’t have the same sort of high school equivalence tests that I’ve become used to in the states. Rather than try to do something I figured I would just research some others, I’ve found some help looking at
LSAT prep courses. The way it would work with Sam given he has an eidetic memory is that if he took and studied the preparatory courses he would be pretty much set to take the tests and get a good grade. So, the futuristic equivalent of Knewton would be something he would wind up very familiar with, and when I research their way I find they’re extremely thorough. They have a great program, some times research gives you strange gems. I can’t believe that they offer online classes to prep you for your test, syllbi, study guides, quizzes, practice and even text alerts.

That’s very different to the way it was for me where I was basically given a huge boring book and had to slog my way through. It makes me wonder by the time that Sam is doing this how many more advances there would be. There’ll probably be computer games to help him study and information beamed directly into the living room on a virtual program. I figure the Wii style of system would have been expounded upon, where computers will be very VR based.

I was getting input and information about another story I’ve had in the pipeline which is tentatively called “Too Deep” because when I first started planning it I would always associate the main character with a certain song by Sum 41: In Too Deep.

While Kore and I were cleaning up her room I was chatting with her about a dream I’d had the night before involving a couple of the characters and that talk about the dream wound up with my expounding upon the timeline of the main character’s life. He’s really alive in my head.

However I wasn’t sure if one of the things. Initially when I’d first started talking about Sam I’d thought he wound up with one of his cohorts. It seemed a little weird as the cohort wasn’t really interested in Sam that way I’d thought, and I’d felt that perhaps I contrived it just because I wanted him to be with the cohort. However the more I was talking about the dream the more I realized that his boyfriend Brad was a decent guy and it would be really a shame if they didn’t stay together because Sam being an idiot broke up with Brad when he thought that he was going to die. One of those stupid “it’ll hurt less if I die and we’re not together” sort of mindsets. I’m not sure if Sam would actually wind up with Brad, but one of the beauties of writing the story is that I can make him wind up with Brad. In fact I’ve decided the story will come from the perspective of him explaining his life to Brad as a condition of them coming back together as a couple, given one of the main issues in their relationship had been Sam not wanting to tell Brad about his past actions during the war because he was afraid of talking about that.

I’ve been working on planning for a few stories that are in the pipeline as well as doing a bit more on the “Sanctity” story that I’ve mentioned several times. I feel it’s important to know a lot about the characters that you’re writing about.

Dane for example.
She goes by Dane Malachi, but I’m pretty sure that her name is actually Danielle. I say that because I have a few different ideas for “full name” knocking around but Danielle is the one I keep coming back to, so eventually it will stick. She had a pretty crummy upbringing with addicted parents, and abuses and the like, and she actually lived in the area of Flagstaff where the story takes place. She’s basically been trying to escape her whole life. She started out with the high school drinking and things like that, but then attempted to get away more legitimately with getting odd jobs at circuit city and local cafeterias and that with the idea of saving up money and blowing the town.
Then things kept coming up, she couldn’t qualify for scholarships elsewhere, she couldn’t get things working, it was like no matter how hard she tried she just kept getting sucked back into the town so she fell back on the less savory coping mechanisms, expanding to drugs as well as alcohol and taking St. Aurous up on the offer of going there, with some rudimentary idea of getting things together enough once she got through college. Then she met Michael who was a chronic enabler, she got pregnant but lost the baby given all the abuses to her body and the two of them decided to commit the ultimate self-destruction only she didn’t die. She woke back up with the Angel of Death very much active around her and no matter what she tried she wasn’t going to die again and she wasn’t going to get out of her Duties.
When Dan came around and activated she was secretly jubilant she figured he would take over and she could just disappear and die. However that still didn’t work…

So when she returns to St. Aurous she’s extremely, extremely pissed. She can’t get out of things and she can’t seem to do anything right.

I’ve been been handwriting out a lot of “Sanctity” over the past few days. I’ve been working on the introduction of the other characters and how their story will interweve with the Dane things I’ve already written. The new introduction of Hajime and Abigail makes a lot more sense. It shows them both at the same time and establishes the setting and also their relationship with each other.

This section is Abigail looking at the college the same time.

Around the fountain were gardens they were ill-kept and it looked as though someone had recently fallen into one of the bushes and perhaps rolled out into the neighboring flower beds.
The college itself loomed over the fountain. To get to the front entrance they had to walk around the fountain and up a flight of chipping stone stairs to a large arched heavy wooden door bound with metal. The walls were thick grey stone and red brick. Now, Abigail realized how many people were milling around them. Sveral of them were wearing bright blue shirts with the St. Aurous logo on it, and they were leading groups of students and people who were probably their parents around.
“It looks more like a hotel,” Hajime said.
She was right, with the mosaic floor and the wrap around stone staircases and the lighting fixture a huge chandelier that hung down over the center of the entrance she couldn’t help but imagine the security office used to open up to keys and receptionists.
“It was a hotel,” a blue shirt nearby said. He was sitting at a large collapsible table stacked up with folders all bearing pictures of the college surrounded by circular insets of students engaging in happy activities and studious ones with equal glee.
“That explains it then,” Abigail answered, not sure what else she could say.
He laughed and she felt her insides melting.

Planning helps. I’ve been realizing that certain ways of doing things make more sense, not just planning story-wise, but the way that the characters in the story would plan things too. It makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for someone who should be coming into the area and you’re at a college to station one of your number on the “welcoming” and “tour guide” committee for example.