It Came From Outer Space…

Oh, my gosh! I can’t even begin to express how hilarious this post is that I just read. I’m browsing through my email bypassing all the viagra things and weight loss diet information, that’s what I get for signing up for certain news letters I suppose, and while I’m doing so something pops up on my twitter feed: Tween accuses Universal of ripping werewolves off from Twilight. I just had to read.

Here’s a short-ish excerpt:

To whom this may concern:

This movie was a complete waste and I feel that it offends ALL Twilight Fans around the world, that including myself. For one, it was a COMPLETE remaking of the Wolf Pack from the Twilight Saga: New Moon. It gives the werewolves a bad name and makes them look like some deformed mutation of a rabid dog. I actually started to like werewolves after seeing Jacob Black and all his awesomeness on the big screen at the movies. That was until I saw your crappy remake of what you call to be a “were wolf”. I don’t see how you live with yourself for making it the way you did. If I made this movie, I would be ashamed to even admit that I owned it. How can a werewolf be killed with a silver bullet? Better yet, have you saw the transformation of the man that is “supposed” to be the wolf? He sits in some chair and his entire body turns in to some mutated freak. If you would watch the transformation of Jacob Black, (Taylor Lautner) he doesn’t come close to looking as fake, cheap and or mutated as the wolf man. You tell me, who looks to be the better werewolf. Your stupid Wolf Movie didn’t even make the top Movie for the charts;

To read the rest click on the link above; seriously? Wow! I know I used to get all bent out of shape about rip-offs but that was usually when some idiot on the school bus was complaining that Sting stole Puff Daddy’s song or something equally stupid. I’m just…do your research!

I can’t help but be ruffled because Stephanie Meyer has ripped off a lot more things than others, I could go on for hours about her blatant “Mary-Sueing” and what little I understand of her imprinting said werewolf on a baby! But I haven’t actually read the books so it’s entirely possible I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. All I know is that I couldn’t watch the entire “Twilight” movie because it was so appalling. I did however enjoy the new Wolfman movie immensely, particularly because of the transformation and the fact that the wolves didn’t de-transform every time the moon went behind a cloud as they did in Van Helsing, which is another travesty I’m just not going to get into (and I love Hugh Jackman).

I wonder how bent out of shape Ms. Patterson will get if she ever reads any of my werewolf notations. One of the stories I have on the back burner involves a lineage of werewolves whose line have been involved in historical events such as interpretations of King Arthur and Robin Hood. They do have a wolf-man form and a wolf form and a man form. Oh, no am I ripping off Meyer? :p This is another story of mine which came about after running an RPG for some friends. There are some vampires in it too, but they certainly do NOT SPARKLE!

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.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how thoroughly you have to plan out characters and settings. I was picking up a notebook of graph paper to map out layouts of houses and ships that are in a few of my stories and also in some games that I have going on, and we were talking also about the importance of knowing your characters inside and out, being able to picture them and know how they’ll react even if it’s not going to be mentioned in the story it’s often important to know certain motivations.

I was explaining in “Sanctity” that the character of Hajime is adopted, that’s a minor factor, she’s an Asian child with white parents. They couldn’t have children, but then add to that the extra layer that when she was twelve her Mom got pregnant and had a son, and then within two years had another daughter, and then had her tubes tied, that adds more depth. She’s a graphic artist, she’s marginally obsessed with the Japanese culture having spent so little time there and trying to understand more about her biological heritage. She’s also very determined when it comes to things and harbors various insidious feelings towards her family that she can’t help, because she finds herself fearing that she may be displaced especially as she’s going away to college and they’re there by themselves now that whole biological family and her the outsider. While those fears may be unfounded, I feel that her family, of course, love her as their own, because they’re not so shallow people, they’re still a part of her.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time deciding how the college area will look. I admit a lot of the idea of it came to me while I was at college myself and I’m bound to use that place as a basis for a lot of things, but there are other things to look at, are their copper sinks or stainless steel ones or are they porcelain? are the staircases wooden or stone? what kind of bricks are on the outside of the building? are the windows square or rounded? what do the gardens look like? is the entire campus isolated or is it integrated throughout the town it’s in? what is the town itself like? what sort of shops do the students have access to?

All these things are important to figure out because the college itself is as much a character in the story as the people are, and the way the town is set up affects very much the way certain parts of the action are going to pan out.

I’m getting somewhere. If I could just keep myself calm more often that would really help.

The air felt so clear and everything was so bright. She stepped through the room and her arms outstretched as they were couldn’t hope to reach the walls. She could feel more than see that there were thin wisps of curtains whispering in the breeze ahead of her as she walked towards the opening. It was not a window because it seemed to take up almost the whole wall, and she knew if she just stepped through she would be within the rest of the city, among the others.
Just one more step…
and another…
and soon there would be nothing just the freedom of…

She came down with a thud, it had something to do with falling off the bed. Her legs were tangled in Jonas’. She pulled herself free of his almost iron grip, clumsy with the dregs of her take. She scraped her knee on a bent soda can, stick with week-old contents as she did so.
She rubbed her eyes dry for a few moments trying to readjust. Her mouth tasted foul. Everywhere had been so warm, the walls sparkled, the huge windows, the curtains billowing, trying to caress her.
She stood slowly and lurched towards the bathroom, but stopped when she saw the figure in the mirror behind, yet in front of her. Her stomach curled in on itself and dropped towards her toes at the same time her hands clenched up as her nails dug back into her palms.
“Leave me alone! I’m not going!” she picked up something to hurl at the mirror—but it turned out to be a sock and didn’t have much strength behind it anyway.
“Oh, relax. I’m not here for you.”
She whirled around, almost falling over in her haste to look at Jonas. The slight discoloration of the skin. The stains on his clothes from shitting himself. The tightness of his arms and legs from convulsing into the next plane.
“No! No! No!” she screamed resisting the compulsion to drop back to the floor, “Haven’t you done enough?”
“Not nearly.”

I’ve pretty well gotten to the end of that section of Dane things, now I’m just trying to decide where the next few bits will go. If Dane’s piece is the best place to begin things or if I should start with the others, slot Dane in and then continue from the point where she meets with the others again. I’m trying to decide, also, if I should prologue with the events that happened to cause her to leave in the first place, or just show those in flashback throughout the story. Either way I need to write them out. Perhaps I should just keep writing what comes and sort out the order once they’re all out of me.

I haven’t had much chance to work on the story lately because we’ve been spending a lot of time with family who have been down for Yule, so there’s been a lot of time spent with family and friends catching up and re-telling jokes.

Now it comes time to plan some more about the story. I’m at the point where Dane starts her unplanned cross country moving with an angel riding on her shoulder. Meanwhile other events unfold in neighboring towns. I have to sort out what I’m doing with some of the other characters that I have plans for, such as Abigail and Hajime, and if they’re going to remain as they were originally planned or if I’ll need to tweak them a little.

It’s been just over two years since I last worked on the story, so I do need to refresh the plot line and the planning in my mind and see if it still flows the same to me.

I’ve also been having ideas for another story based on a game I ran. They were running through my mind as I went to the grocery store earlier for emergency crescent rolls.

Here’s a snippet from the writing that I did today. There is some course language.

Turner didn’t come in for another two hours, so Dane busied herself stealing a breakfast sandwich and inhaling three coffees with the super-caffinated cream put in them.
Steve whispered jabs about all that being no help at all and she tried to ignore him. At least focussing on that would better enable her to avoid the mounting pull to get into the next person’s car that pulled up and drive it to Florida.
Not going. Not going.
She changed filters and coffee pots while she was over at the station making the various cups of coffee.
“Man,” someone nearby said while he was waiting for the coffee to finish, “I’ve had it with this weather.”
“Hm-mm,” his friend said, “It’s supposed to snow today, what say we move down south it’s much warmer.”
“Yeah, I talked to my sister in Florida yesterday she said that they’re in shorts right now.”
She slammed the coffee pot on the grill slopping scalding coffee up her arm. It took a moment to register both the pain and the shocked faces of the two customers. She narrowly avoided knocking over several other coffee pots as she tried to get away from her own arm. As the pain hit she tried to tear the sweater sleeve off by pulling at the cuff.
“Dude, is she alright?” one of the men asked.
“What do you think?” Steve retorted as he took hold of Dane and started to pull her towards the rest room.
It was this point Turner arrived. As he burst through the door Steve froze halfway through saying, “For Fuck’s sake, calm down.”
Dane was shouting, “I don’t care! I’m not going back!”
Turner pushed Steve back towards the counter to check out the observant customers and then he drug Dane back to the restroom.
“You swore to me you were clean! Don’t even try. I know what you’re like. I know cops, okay? They warned me! But you’d promised me you were clean and now I look like a fucking idiot. What the Hell were you trying to do?”

It was a bit of a ‘duh’ figuring out that the character of Dane would work at a gas station. I’ve heard from my boss and co-workers issues they’ve had in the past with people of similar background coming to work for them. In fact while I was on hiatus due to health someone else was let go for using drugs while at work, while it wasn’t such a violent an interaction as Dane has with her boss, Turner. It was still rough on both parties.
Dane just isn’t the sort of person though who could work in data center services, or at a school. She’s very dark emo sort of person, and is on the run from a lot of things in particular herself, and the main point of the first part of the book is that all her avenues are being whittled down until her only option is to go back to Florida and meet up with those she’s left behind. She wouldn’t even look for a job somewhere that’s not a good temporary place in case she has to start running again.

I’ve been feeling a lot better lately, which I’ve found is showing itself in story inspiration. I had something happen at work today which hasn’t happened in a while, which was that I started having scenes of part of a story run through my head and I couldn’t get rid of it until I found a notepad and started writing it down. Thankfully the manager on duty was understanding about this, which was probably because it was a slow Sunday and I would write a paragraph and then go switch out the coffee and stock things and come back while the coffee was running and write a bit more, unless a customer came in and then, of course, I would deal with them.

I’d been planning on writing on the story that I have on the go which so far I’ve called ‘Ledger’ as that’s the name of one of the main characters. However this scene was part of a story called ‘Sanctity’ apparently the being and working in a gas station just clicked with a missing part of the story, and I wrote a scene where one of the main characters gets accused of drug abuse and fired from their job at a gas station due to being tormented by an angelic spirit trying to get her to go somewhere she’s Supposed To Be.

I’m very excited. I wrote just over 1500 words today and hope that I can continue on with this. I have a few drafts on different parts of this story and a lot of background information because I had been working on this story for NaNoWriMo in 2007, but then on the 11th of January we found out we had to be out of our apartment by the 31st of December so I stopped working on NaNo to focus on finding a house.

Or should I say that I reached my goal?
As of an hour or so ago my wordcount is at 25212, which means I beat the goal I set of 25000.
I wanted to make sure I did a good stretch of writing today because I work tomorrow from 7 a.m to 3 p.m. so I doubt I’ll get much done tomorrow, if anything at all. I ended at the end of a chapter, and am hoping to work on the story some more at a later date. There’s a lot of work that has to be done on it. A lot of things that I thought would work while planning really don’t work as I’m trying to write things out; and certain elements or rather character perspectives were a lot harder to write from than I thought.

Still I’ve written the most this month since I did this time last year, and that’s saying a lot. A friend of mine has put together a community on LJ for “Nanoing all year round” Nanowrimo_ayr and I just requested to join in the hopes that I can keep going with motivation of fellow writers all year rather than just in November and get some writing done on other stories that I’ve been trying to get to work over the years. I think the first one I might tackle is “The Ledger” which is about a group of D&D players who get to experience what is a lot of players dreams fighting monsters in real life but, of course, it’s nothing like the game and a lot more dangerous.

I’ve spoken at length about writer’s block quite often and how I find it hard to get any inspiration at times. The other night as unexpectedly as if I’d found myself participating in rv towing I found myself writing.

I wrote, by hand, about six pages of something that was completely unrelated to anything that I’d currently been trying to work on. It flowed from my pen almost as if I were channeling it. I read it the next morning and was floored by the content because it’s not something I generally write. I recognized one of the characters as one I’d written about a few years ago. I’d been mapping out his world and it’s political environment and some of his history, and here was a scene that I had glanced around because, frankly, it’s hard for me to write things involving sex at times, and here was a scene where not only was their sex, but multiple partners. However, I’m taking it as a good sign that my muse is coming back, even if she is being more than a little perverse.

It’s a bit like arranging the patio furniture in the shed so that you can get to it the easiest once the weather is suitable to use it again. That’s the way I’ve been working recently.

I’ve been making logs of the different stories I have that I’ve started. At one point when I was in high school had about 63 different story ideas written down in various notebooks. Since then I’ve realized that not all of those story ideas would work, or I’ve been able to combine some of them together to make them better.

Still my thoughts are generally cluttered and I jump from one to the other to the other without finishing something entirely. This is not a good thing. If I ever want to be published I need to actually be able to finish something, so I’ve decided to be systematic. I’ve been writing out all the various ideas, in brief, and then organizing them. I have several stories which would work along the same “time line” but be at different points, so that shows me I need to actually work on the timeline overall to make sure that I can make each story work and compliment each other without poking holes in my own universe. Others are stand-alones so they could be worked on independently or even in tandem — if I’m feeling particularly masochistic.

Sorting out the time lines and synopses is a good thing though because it means then that I can plan out my method of attack and how I’m actually going to get one story finished and then another, and then another.