Meme: a story I haven't written

Picking this up from a favorite author of mine: Martha Wells. This meme requires audience participation, though, so let's see what happens...

Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you one sentence from that story.

You post the gist of the story in comments, and I'm supposed to come up with something snappy. Looking at other memers (kateelliot, kristine_smith) they sound like catchy first lines. I bet it would be fun if other readers posted their own first lines, too.

Challenging? Fun? I finished Disciple last night, and my head is strangely empty. Random thoughts are banging around loose in there. Anybody want to get some creative exercise with me?

Controlling the plot bunny population

Spay and neuter your plot bunnies!

Good luck with that. Now that I'm reaching the end of Disciple, I've been suffering an explosion of plot bunnies. In case you didn't know, "plot bunnies" are story ideas that pop out spontaneously -- usually branching off an existing story. Good stories tend to inspire a lot of plot bunnies. Plot bunnies interbreed freely and can lead to some wild stuff, especially on the porny side of things.

I picked up the term from the fanfic community. I wasn't a writer of it, but I did read a fair amount.

Since Disciple's my own story, these aren't fanfic ideas so much as potential future stories -- but not all of them are going to work, necessarily. Some are quite vague. Some would set precedents that I don't necessarily want in this universe. Some are openly non-canon and I'm not going to go there at all. Some are more or less porn, and... well, okay, I've written some of those already but nobody needs to know about that.

Plot bunnies are a good thing, in the long run. The headline is a joke -- don't try to control their population. Let 'em breed. I write them down once they're at least a sentence long. I check on them every so often. They mutate when you're not looking. Cannibalize each other. I've been working on Disciple for a long time, and facing its completion... and knowing I'll soon be tending my plot bunnies... it's bittersweet. A bit disconcerting. But I thought I had it under control.

And then I was assaulted by a completely unrelated tribe of plot bunnies. After starting to write this post, I watched this episode of NOVA (there's a link to the video there) and had to beat the plot bunnies off with a stick. The strongest absorbed the others, got his teeth into me, and I had to add him to the Brainstorm Zone -- which is a whole Scrivener file I created for ideas.

It brought to mind a recurring writer-interview question, since I've had to write a lot of those recently: where do you get your ideas? Good Lord, where don't you get ideas? And I've never quite understood why people are so protective of ideas. They're a dime a dozen. It's execution of the idea that takes work, talent, and ought to be protected. And charged for access to.

So watch the episode. Your plot bunnies will be different from my plot bunnies. Your final story, if you write one, will be different from mine, if I write it. No worries.

How do you manage your plot bunnies?

The lure of reviews

I have been soliciting reviews for Disciple, Part I on Goodreads, and I've gotten a few nibbles, sent out a few copies. Didn't expect someone to read and review so quickly, though. I saw the "1 review" indicator on my author dashboard and...

When I set out, I told myself I wasn't going to read any reviews at all. Because I've heard the same horror stories of nasty reviews, authors shooting off at the mouth and destroying their reputations. It's ridiculous to think that everyone who picks up Disciple will love it. There's bound to be someone who finds it -- I don't know -- pretentious or twee or whatever. Gratuitously graphic.*

But I clicked before I could think. And then I read the first half before I fully realized it. So I might as well finish, right?

So much for resolutions. I am weak. It was a nice review, too, so I'll probably be weak until I hit a nasty one.

The only good can of worms to open.
Photo by stef~, on sxc.hu.

* This is a whole 'nother can of worms, because my main character, Kate, is a sixteen-year-old girl. Somebody is bound to think "This is a YA book" at some point and then be horrified as the plot developments of Parts II - VI roll by. I'm sure I will be hearing about that. DISCIPLE IS NOT AIMED AT THE YA MARKET. Though teenaged readers are certainly welcome. I don't think that sheltering teens from the ugly real world does them any favors.

p.s. Tomorrow I'll be doing the Next Big Thing meme/bloghop over at Disciple of the Fount -- and there will be a big announcement! Though if you go over there now you'll probably notice the new tab and figure out what it is for yourself.

Five things I want to write

Strange Ink's list caught my eye and got me thinking. I know bucket lists are fashionable these days, but I don't have one. I am actually very bad at long-term planning, setting goals, etc. -- they don't interest me much. I always get distracted and wander off in some other direction.

But I'm posting this one publicly, so let's see what happens.

Van Gogh's Trees and Undergrowth, just because it's a fave

1. High fantasy -- from the mentor's point of view
Because I find myself sympathizing with older characters, as I'm getting older, and their trials and tribulations trying to steer a bunch of starry-eyed youngsters toward saving the world. No wonder they die halfway through. It's exhaustion, I'm telling you.

2. Fables from an invented world
That highly stylized voice, the mythic characters... but not our fairy tales. I want to write the stories that the main character of Disciple is going to tell her baby at bedtime. I got a name, the other day: the Red Hunter of the Winter Wood.

3. Aliens
It may sound odd given my love of science fiction, but something in my gut balks at creating aliens. They're so often used as stand-ins for the monster under the bed, for other human beings, or for deities... I want to coax my gut into telling me what it wants in an alien race, and write a story with them.

4. High hermetic magic
This may be a side-effect of playing White Wolf's World of Darkness system back in the day, but for me "hermetic" magic is that massively organized, anal-retentive down to the microscopic detail, putting science to shame with its rigor, brand of magic. My gut has always said that scientific rigor should be applicable to a magic system, and I'd like to give it free rein.

5. Utopia
You know what would be tough to write? Utopia. And I don't mean a crust of utopia maintained by some horrible dystopic mechanism that the characters will fall into. That's been done, and done well. I mean an honest-to-God clean-livin' utopia. What would the conflict be?

That's a long shot, but hey. You won't improve your aim if you only shoot at things in arm's reach.

What's on your to-write list?

In defense of MOIST

Yes, I said it. MOIST.

Some people hate this word. Recently, JEFritz listed it as a Word That Needs to Go Away. Now, I agree about the invented and redundant word "ginormous," and I agree that "special" has lost all meaning due to over-use.

But MOIST? I must disagree.

Apparently people get a creepy feeling from this word because of its application to dank, dark, musty, mold-encrusted spaces. Hidden grottoes, perhaps, where the smell of algae and moss hangs thick in the air. Let me throw some more description on that -- humid, stale air pressing on your sweat-pricked skin, suffocating as a moist wool blanket.

OK, that's just "summertime" where I live, but... we're way beyond the implications of one little word like MOIST. So you want to get rid of MOIST? Okay.

But consider the loss:

This chocolate cake is moist and delicious. 

will become... what?

Sad cake is sad.

This chocolate cake is damp and delicious.

Damp cake?

This chocolate cake is humid and delicious. 

This chocolate cake is wet. Poor thing. It could have been moist. 

I threw the dank, musty chocolate cake in the trash and mourned the loss.

English is a wonderful language. Few of our words have only one use, and we're inventing more all the time. And if you don't like a word, you can just avoid it. Or can you?