Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

Astonishing Adventures Magazine #8 is out now.  Find out how to get it at DirkDangerous.com.

The hardest thing I find about writing (after the actual slog of the writing part) is naming characters. It can become a real drag to find the right name and it makes the slog so much harder. So a couple of years ago I started using names pulled randomly from the names of senders on spam messages. Some stick and end up used into the final version and some get replaced once the stories finished and I’ve time to think about a better name during editing.

When I posted a list of 13 of them as a Thursday Thirteen it was great technique that saved me no end of time and felt less like hard work than using books of names, random generators or other methods.

Now I have a problem. Where I used to have 1200+ spam messages to pick from I’m down to about 400 and the names have become really poor. With only a fraction being names and not just random gobledygook. The same is true of the constant stream of comment spam to my blog: of nearly a thousand spam messages caught by Akismet not one has had a believable or amusing name. Its almost like its become harder to spam so spammers have become a bit bored and are struggling to get up in the morning to put the effort into their job anymore.

Its a shame because at least in the good old, bad old days of spam they seemed to take some pride in having believable names to try and trick you.

Here is a little idea for creating memorable characters that came to me while watching a Marks & Spencers’ advert. Describe what makes your character stand out from the ordinary in the style of a Marks & Spencers advert.

“Gourmet salad with caramalised pear and creamy Stilton drizzled with hazelnut oil dressing. This isn’t just a salad it’s an M&S salard.”

For anyone whose not seen one here is the advert the line above is taken from (although I should warn you that you may have a craving for food afterwards).

The formula for making a character description along these lines goes something like this:

1. Start with [Character Name]
2. Now describe the character’s interesting qualities
3. End with “it’s not just an [Character Archetype] it’s an M&S [Character Archetype].”

So for example…

Lala Leig: A deep, dusky, brooding heroine struggling to understand her place in a world she doesn’t want to understand. This isn’t just a heroine it’s an M&S heroine.

Raphael Johnson: light and fruity man that goes straight to your head. This isn’t just a hero it’s an M&S hero.

Nicole Wang: A cunning, adored villain who never sacrifices his minions who are fanatical in their devotion. This isn’t just an evil villain it’s an M&S evil villain.

Its fun just to write up a character in sexy, ad copy terms that you might never use for them in your regular writing.

For a twist try describing famous fictional characters and see if your friends can guess who it is. For example who do you think these two characters from a famous novel might be?

X: An ardent, vengeful hero slowly, marinated in mysterious origins. This isn’t just a hero it’s an M&S hero.

Y: A beautiful, passionate, strong-willed heroine with a mischievous streak driven by a deep romantic bond into into misery, violence and despair. This isn’t just a heroine it’s an M&S heroine.

Short and sweet tonight: I’ve added a page to the Vue section of impworks for the Vue Preview Colour Change Script.  Need to work on my snappy title writing skills.

What is Python?

Python is the industry standard, cross-platform, object-oriented application scripting language. It is both sufficiently easy to use and powerful to let you develop complex scripts and expand the capabilities of Vue 8.5 Infinite.

Or so says the Vue manual, in an explanation that is as clear as mud (at least if you’re not an experienced software engineer).

Python is a computer programming language that lets people write things called scripts. It’s not the only programming language; there are lot of others such as C, C++, Perl and Visual Basic. Scripts are computer programs, little pieces of software that your computer can run.

E-on software included a version of Python in Vue 4 Pro, Vue 5 Infinite, Vue 6 Infinite, Vue 7 Infinite, Vue 7 xStream, Vue 7.5 Infinite, Vue 7.5 xStream, Vue 8 Infinite, Vue 8 xStream, Vue 8.5 Infinite and Vue 8.5 xStream which is why we are interested in it. Vue 7 Pioneer, Vue 7 Esprit, Vue 7 Pro Studio, Vue 7 Complete, Vue 8 Pioneer, Vue 8 Frontier, Vue 8 Esprit and Vue 8 Studio can also run third party Python scripts from Cornucopia3D but not from elsewhere. Their version of Python includes extra features that let a programmer make Vue do things. A script may do something simple, like adding stones to make a circle, or something complex, such as changing the textures of lots of objects at once.

Discovered Radio 7 is doing a series of readings of abridged versions of Heinlein short stories. Forget the endless discussion of his politics which too often ignore a lot of the “meaning” in the stories in favour of having an easy bash at something the analyst doesn’t like (and sometime miss that Heinlein made it sound bad which may have been his intention). its short stories like Ordeal in Space and next Sunday’s The Green Hills of Earth along with his juveniles that got me into Heinlein’s writing.

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

Having finished The Translated Man I felt like reading some more fiction so I’ve just finished reading Kim’s latest novella Consort.
Skipping quickly past the rather cliched cover. Not that its badly done but it reminds me of racks of second hand romance books in charity shops. At least with an e-book its not there on the shelf for visitors to see and you can skip printing that page.

Its not obvious from the cover (which at least means its not a total cliche – no blood – no fangs) that this is a vampire story.
Clearly Kim has gotten past her worries about writing the naughtier bits of romantic fiction. I’ve not counted but I’d say half to three quarters of the pages could be rated on the Scoville scale. We’re not talking Bell peppers either more something in the Tabasco pepper to the Naga Jolokia. Yet somehow Kim manages to keep the plot moving too even in amongst all the main characters hormones. And she subverts her favourite tea related scene into something a bit different this time too.

Back in the 80s the Guardian ran a series of jokes about Amstrad launching weird devices combining different white goods the PC and Tea Maker. I’m wondering if Amazon won’t need to release a Kindle with Fire Extinguisher and integral Cold Shower if Kim keeps putting out work like this…

Finished reading The Translated Man by Chris Braak yesterday. Since I’m being regularly e-mailed by a web site who’ve taken to including my posts tagged reviews are included in their review listings where the reviews are in turn reviewed I’m going to do a bit of a Corbett first. While I may tag this as a review it is in fact more of a loose collection of ideas and opinion strung together without any proper, formal review process being undertaken. Nothing that follows is rigorous or properly thought about and in fact its just my opinion in the end. If it were a review (like the ones I wrote for Valkyrie a long time ago) I’d put a lot more effort in even though I know that in the end it is just my opinion and is fairly meaningless after all that.

But to get back to my (not) review…

The Translated Man is a novel available from Lulu running just short of 240 pages in length laid out at a size that means two pages comfortably print to a side of A4. That was a good thing as I was enjoying it so much that I printed the whole of it out so I could read it away from my computer. Thats a first for an ebook I’ve bought of this length. It was a real page turner so I had to have pages to turn.

The story is an atmospheric police procedural tale that could be said to be steam punk or perhaps victorian fantasy in genre. Its set, mostly, in a city. A city where everything, including the architecture, has been shaped by various power struggles between wealthy families. A city which is struggling under the burden of war and with racial tension waiting to boil over.

The main characters work for one of a number of police organisations in the city, the Coroners. Their specific area is hunting down criminals who comitt heresy including such acts as reanimating the dead. Their colourful staff include a hard bitten detective a the young, foppish junior detective, a clairaudient and the only reanimate ever declared not to be a heresy. All the characters are interesting. Even when at first glance they might have been detective genre or fantasy standards are more than two dimensional cliches.

The story itself has an excellent plot which twists and turns from its in medias res opening to its dramatic finale. It cuts back and forth amongst the investigators. Even though the setting is fantasy it holds together logically and provides enough information to allow the reader to leap to the right (or wrong) conclusions as the events unfold.

It isn’t a perfect work. A bit more proof reading would have picked up the handful of places where typos slip through, robe for rope at a dramatic moment springs to mind because it distracted me at a crucial moment in the plot. A few sections where none of the view point characters are present are described in a slightly awkward tell rather than show kind of way. After a fair amount of thought I wonder if might have been avoided by adding a character of a lowly gendarme from a competing police force who could easily have been on the scene at a couple of points in the story and who could have acted as our eyes. Early on in the story there is also a two page info dump about the city’s architecture which I can’t think of an easy way round. While later in the story dates are given for historical events early on years relative to the main detectives time are give. Not a huge problem but as a reader of detective stories it pulled me out of the story as I started to try and look for clues hidden by the slightly awkward writing when there were none.

Those however are my only criticims of the story. I can’t go into a lot of what I enjoyed about it without risking spoiling the story. I did have a small laugh when the characters attend The Bone-Collector’s Daughter given Kim wrote The Bone Magician’s Daughter. As I said already – a real page turner. All in all very good.

Here are a few of my musings on writing.

Characters on the Couch

A Jungian approach to characters. I originally wrote this for Valkyrie magazine for role playing character creation. I’ve since reworked it for prose.

Characters on the Couch (252k PDF)

STEEPVM

A systematic method for evolving alternate histories.

STEEPVM