Category Archives: The Writing Life

A guest post by Kim May.

For some people, the call to write came late in life. For me, storytelling has been a favorite pastime for as long as I can remember. Really, it has. Now, I’m not just referring to the stories that my folks read to me-though they do play a part. I’m talking about the stories I told as a kid.

That time I told my mom’s friend that I was chased around the house with a butcher knife? Much to my mom’s friend’s relief, that was storytelling.

All those times I lied to my mom so I could place the blame on one of my siblings? Yup. That was storytelling too.

All the hours I played Barbie dolls with my little sister? You better believe it.

You see, our Barbie dolls weren’t content to sit at home and mother all the My Little Ponies, She-Ra, and Rose Petal Place dolls. They had to have fantastic adventures in far-off lands. One of our favorites was a spinoff of Cinderella. First of all, since neither of us wanted to take a back seat to the other, everything was done in duplicate. That meant we had two Cinderellas and two princes (for some reason, we never doubled up on the villains). Rather than sit around and wait for the princes to find them after the ball, our Cinderellas snuck into the palace, knocked the princes unconscious with a thunder egg, kidnapped them, and had a Stockholm-syndrome happily ever after.

Now, you have to keep in mind that I was about eight years old and had no idea that what we were playing out was morally wrong. For us, it was just a fun and empowering twist on a favorite tale. The fact that it gave us an excuse to hog-tie Ken was a bonus.

When we weren’t infringing on the Geneva Convention, we play-acted/discovery-wrote stories that borrowed elements from our favorite books and movies. Those world building skills came in handy in the sixth grade when I had to write a short story for an English assignment. Most of my classmates wrote about their dog or about a stupid, annoying younger sibling that bore a strong resemblance to their own. I, however, had no interest in writing the same story as everyone else. After drawing on Barbie skills, my story ended up being about two talking flowers that were going to save the world after they finished having tea.

In high school, even though I hadn’t touched my dolls for years, I drew on those skills again for another short story assignment. This time I wrote a paranormal YA story-twenty years before it became cool, I might add.

You would think that I would have figured out by then that it was my fate to be a writer. Nope. That realization didn’t come until college. After bopping between eight different science majors, the only thing that didn’t change was my desire to minor in writing. Unfortunately, that was also around the time my life took a sharp turn for the worse. I won’t depress you with the details. Suffice to say, when life turned back around the first thing I did was sit down and write.

I love being a writer. I get to sit down with my characters-my imaginary dolls-every day and take them on fantastic adventures in wondrous places. If those adventures take a turn for the weird, and they most likely will, all the better.

* * *

Kim May writes sci-fi and fantasy but has been known to pen a gothic poem or two. She works at an independent bookstore and dog/house sits on the side. A native Oregonian, she lives with her geriatric cat, Spud, and spends as much of her free time as she can with family and friends. She recently won The Named Lands Poetry Contest. If you would like to find out what she’s working on, please visit her blog.

Make It So: A Twelve-Year-Old’s Head Start

May 13, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 1 Comment

On a schoolyard in 1993, I made a new friend. His name was Joey, and he introduced me to Star Trek. Without seeing a single episode, I began to learn about the Starship Enterprise. It was like hearing the Gospel for the first time. I started by watching some of the Star Trek movies. I remember going with Joey to the local video store. While browsing the shelves, he explained to me those basic tenets of the Star Trek feature series that now seem as constant and self-evident as the lunar cycle, the length of day, and the colour of the sky-the odd movies are good, the even ones are bad. So we started with Star Trek II, which proved successful, if not completely a deal-sealer.

I was reluctant to share this interest with my family, because I had a sense that they would not endorse it. Little did I know that my mother had grown up watching Kirk and Spock on her family’s television-a piece of technology still mostly shunned in the 1960s by most people in the religious community where she grew up. Yes, my mother’s family was quite worldly, a fact which I am somewhat proud of.

My parents were tolerant of my interest in Star Trek, and so it was that I began catching episodes here and there on television. This was the early 1990s, of course, so the episodes I saw were reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation-and I quickly grew to love it. There is one episode that sticks in my mind. I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s the first episode I saw, but it’s definitely the one that sealed the deal. It was called “Remember Me,” a fourth season episode featuring Dr. Crusher’s escape from a warp bubble. (I’m sure that sounds like Chinese to some, but it makes perfect sense to me.)

The result is that in 1995, at the age of twelve, I wrote a full-length novel. It was set in the Star Trek universe and it was called “Warring Factions.” Oh my goodness, it is a travesty of epic proportions. I say it’s set in the Star Trek universe, but I had the unmitigated gall to invent my own new ship, and a whole new crew. Eighteen years later, I have only the vaguest recollections of the plot, but I’ve been too embarrassed to actually read it (it even has an alien character named “Hamlit,” ugh). I may never read it. A year later, I wrote a follow-up called “Nightstalker.” This one mingled my invented crew with the cast of Star Trek: Voyager, a bizarre mashup which makes precisely zero sense.

As terrible as those books are, within them are over 100,000 words, interspersed with correctly placed commas, period, and apostrophes (also a fair share of incorrectly placed semicolons). These books gave me a powerful head start, and I doubt any of it would have happened without Star Trek.

Ever since, my progression into the world of genre publishing has been characterized by an attempt to eradicate Star Trek tropes from my writing-not that they’re bad, but because they’re so very distinctive. Remember what I said about the warp bubble? Well, in my early fiction I had a tendency to write about the positronic reconfiguration of the neutrino assembly, or the baryon- particle causation effect in the warp field capacitor. Trekkers affectionately refer to this as technobabble.

But there are a lot of things that Star Trek did right, lessons it taught me and which have served me well over the years. For one thing, Star Trek, at its best, did a good job of balancing sci-fi premises with compelling character drama. After all, just about every form of fiction, whatever genre it falls into, must have a strong character component. Star Trek also taught me about immersing the story and the characters in the setting, and finding ways to actively integrate and bring to life the environment in which a story takes place.

Star Trek was powerfully inspirational to me, in more ways than I can count. It’s something I return to constantly, and it always gives me a creative boost.

Ultimately, Star Trek imbued me with an appreciation of style and setting, but when it comes to story and structure… well, that’s a post for another day. May 27, to be exact. I’ll see you then!

The Beginnings of the Quest

May 11, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Martin Greening.

In seventh grade, a classmate of mine gave a presentation on his comic book collection. I had read a comic or two prior, but had never even considered collecting them in plastic bags with backing boards to keep them fresh and unbent. That Christmas, I asked for one thing from Santa, my parents, anyone: I asked for comics so I could start my own collection.

A few months later, while strolling through the aisles of the local comic book Mecca, I first discovered The Holt. What is The Holt, you ask? Only a gnarled tree in the midst of a great forest. Within the boughs of this tree lay magically shaped rooms that were home to a tribe of elves known as the Wolfriders. I had discovered Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, and it would be the start of a long and loving relationship.

The original story introduced such great heroes as Cutter, also known as The Blood of Ten Chiefs, his trusty companion Skywise, and twisted creatures like Winnowill and Madcoil. Cuuter and Skywise, along with their small tribe, are forced to embark on a trek from their idyllic woodland home. A trek that would eventually lead them on a quest to find their true origins. The story has all the makings of traditional Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

The Pinis shopped Elfquest around to the major comic publishers, but received no bites other than a tiny independent comic called Fantasy Quarterly. The first issue of Elfquest appeared in that comic in 1978, but the Pinis felt they could do better. They founded WaRP Graphics and published the rest of the story themselves. Since then, Elfquest has appeared under the banners of Marvel, DC, and now Dark Horse (for the upcoming Final Quest storyline). The Pinis’ tale is one of the great success stories in self-published comics.

Not long after devouring the four large graphic novels (which dominated the top of the fantasy and science fiction section at Waldenbooks) that comprised the original story, I came across a copy of the Elfquest Roleplaying Game by Chaosium. Yes, I was a roleplayer, Dungeons and Dragons and all that. It’s my brother’s fault. You try growing up in the same room as a sibling who is three years your elder and not absorb whatever he is in to. That game opened new doors for me. Along with my good friend Dennis, we created our own tribe of elves (called the Kindred). We created our own stories that featured the likes of Stormpoint and his daughter Springmist and the tribe chief Swiftscent (Dennis’s character). All kinds of things found their way into our stories, including a clawed glove that was exactly like the one Lion-O donned in Thundercats and even a dark elf (courtesy of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt) we named Orebender (because he could magically shape rock and metal).

On a side note, the Elfquest Roleplaying Game had character silhouettes so you could draw your own characters. My art skills have long deteriorated, but I’ve kept the drawings of many of the Kindred, which I’m happy to share below. Looking at them is a doorway into the past and brings memories of good times with friends, both real and imaginary.

Sadly, my friend and I never wrote down any of the adventures of Stormpoint, but I still dream of their tales and parts of them find their way into my writing every now and then. Perhaps someday I will get around to chronicling their story.

To bring my story full circle (which is sort of ironic, as one Elfquest saga is titled “Kings of the Broken Wheel”), in 2012 I was fortunate enough to attend the Superstars Writing Seminar in Las Vegas. During one of the evening meet-and-greets, I sat next to one of the faculty whom I did not know, James A. Owen (who also contributed a guest post here at the Fictorian Era). We chatted for a bit about how he is a comic artist and novelist and eventually the conversation turned to Elfquest. It turned out James was a huge fan, so much so that he wrote the introduction to the second volume of the Elfquest Archives, put out by DC comics (it’s the one with the dark blue cover in the below pic).

That brief connection has rekindled my love of Elfquest and the stories I created as a child. The first thing I did after that seminar was go home and dig out Volume 2 to read his introduction. (By the way, James is an inspirational guy who has written about his journey in a fantastic book called Drawing Out The Dragons).

So there you have it. Elfquest: one of the works that has influenced me. You can read it online for free at www.elfquest.com. Maybe it will spark something in you as well.

* * *

Martin Greening hails from Southern California and has been drawn to fantasy and science fiction from a young age. He is currently working on a fantasy adventure novel and several short stories. Martin lives in Sin City working as a IT guru by day and a dreamer of the fantastic at night. He can be found at www.martingreening.com.

Virtual Virtuoso

May 10, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Brenda Sawatzky.

“I’m standing outside of Mindy’s restaurant alone about two a.m., thinking about nothing in particular, when it strikes me that I have not seen or heard from my friend Brenda for quite some time.”

Thus opens an email from my long-time friend, Jim. He is not inclined to banal salutations-“How’re you doing?”, “What’s new?” No, he’s too creative for that. Instead, the opening paragraph continues, inviting me into a short story set in a 1930’s gangster milieu. His clichÃ©-riddled prose pours onto the page like a Damon Runyon tale, the protagonist-yours truly. It’s at this point that I long for a moniker more befitting 1930s New York-like Hazel Hubbahubba. Something with panache, edging on libertine.

It seems an odd place for a writer to get their start. But this is the exact moment where a sleeping writer-spirit awoke within me and took to the stage. For Jim, it was a clever way of saying “hello”; for me, it was a challenge. Within hours my fictitious riposte was complete, having dug deep into the archives of Google and Wikipedia for historical accuracy, and eluding loosely to the real protagonist’s life. Jim, I decided, would make a fine leading man. I hit “send” and giggled with schoolgirl delight.

Day in and day out, the exchange continued, the yarn growing more elaborate, cunning, and fantastical with every tap of the “send” button. The greatest challenge, you see, was building on a story that was being weaved, in part, by someone else. A plot was near impossible, the possibilities endless.

A few weeks in and I was hooked, like a fish to a worm, a carb addict to a bake sale. I found myself rushing to my laptop the moment my eyes opened to greet the morning. Had he responded yet? What would he do with the plot shift I’d dangled over the proverbial cliff the night before? Dinner burnt on the stove, the laundry piled up, and the dog sat forlorn next to me on the sofa, speculating over his self-absorbed mistress, wisely choosing to cross his hind legs rather than disturb her reverie.

Three months and fifty thousand words later a novella was born. The madness had ended. Jim and I shared a virtual high-five and then went back to our everyday. But the sun peaked over the horizon each morning and I had no reason to get out of bed. Kierkegaard said, “Boredom is the root of all evil-the despairing refusal to be oneself.” The doldrums had set in, but the writer-spirit was too fresh to be mummified just yet.

Employing the internet I began an arduous search for writer’s workshops, short story contests, anything to restore that feeling again. I wrote a novel and paid a prince’s ransom for a professional critique. I joined an online writer’s workshop pairing myself with an author-mentor, set up to teach me how to break into print. And I’ve started my own blog, a creative and fun way to flex my writing muscles.

I’m a bit of a late bloomer, I suppose. It took me a long time to recognize the voice inside my head as my imagination clambering to escape. I’ve been involved in a long-term love affair with words and have done a substantial amount of topical writing for committees, business projects, and the like, but I didn’t exercise my right to fictional storytelling until my kids were grown and life slowed to a manageable pace.

One of the most fallacious euphemisms in the world is, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I just turned fifty-one. I don’t aspire to a Nobel prize in literary fiction (although one can dream) or even a review in the New York Times. I’m just looking for an outlet for an inner voice. A voice that’s moved from vegetative to vociferous. And step by baby step, the giant awakens.

* * *

Brenda Sawatzky is a relatively new, unpublished writer hailing from the wide-open prairie spaces of southeast Manitoba. She and her husband of thirty-one years are self-employed and parents to five kids (two ushered in by marriage). She is presently working toward fiction and non-fiction writing for magazines and manages a personal blog.