The Pecman
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Posts posted by The Pecman
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The laws about this might be different in Australia than in the US or the UK. Maybe you could query some Australian authors who have written fiction with real-life people who are still alive.
I don't think that's true, as long as you have the disclaimer indicated by Cole above.
I'm reminded of Tom Clancey's 1987 worldwide best-selling spy novel Patriot Games, where in the opening chapter, his "Jack Ryan" character saves the lives of Prince Charles and Lady Di while they're attacked on the streets of London... and after he wakes up in the hospital, Queen Elizabeth walks in and knights him! I'd call that an example of a huge, significant novel that very definitely incorporated real people.
However... when the book was later made into a (mediocre) film, they changed everybody's name and made the prince somebody else, which to me ruined the effect. I think it happened because a) Charles had gotten divorced in the meantime, and b) the studio execs were pussies who got talked out of the original story by too many nervous lawyers. Charles came off extremely well in the book, like a very courageous, with-it kinda guy who was intelligent, capable of action when he had to, and yet also upper-crust and friendly.
The only time I've done this is when I used the names of actual LA newspeople in covering a fake news event in my novel Jagged Angel, and I did it mainly because I had a couple of friends at KNBC news, plus I thought it was a) funny and b) added some verisimilitude to the story. But: a good friend of mine who read the novel told me she thought was a little too inside and that the real names kind of pulled her out of the novel for a moment. Aaaaa, what does she know.
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I love it when new laws with the word "Freedom" in the title are really anything but...
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I can see we'll need a new new addition to our bill of rights: freedom from being bombarded from varieties of forms of electrical energy. The stuff might be OK, or even beneficial for robots, but I can't see where it would do living organisms any good.
There have been a bunch of studies over the year as to whether certain kinds of RF energy, magnetic radiation, WiFi, BlueTooth, high tension power lines, and cell telephone transmitters harm the human body, but nothing's been definitive. An old pal of mine from the 1970s died of a brain tumor around 1992, and his wife insisted to mutual friends that it happened because the guy was addicted to his (then-primitive) cellphone, which had a long antenna that was about an inch from his head... and that was exactly where the brain tumor originated.
One wonders what something like a cellphone is doing for our crotches when we walk around all day with the phone in our pockets. Call me crazy, but I generally take it out and leave it on the desk right next to me, assuming I'm at work.
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That PDF of 'Pieces of Destiny' looks spectacular on an iPad. If only more e-book authors would take that kind of care with their books...
Much appreciated! My brother is a graphic designer, and he gave me some tips when I jumped into inDesign. Once you have a style created, it takes less time than you think. I believe I spent maybe one full evening throwing the book together, and it came out OK.
I deliberately went with 14-point for the body text, simply because it looked good to me on a standard iPad. I haven't tried it on a Kindle, but I know it looks OK on a regular laptop or computer display.
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So, when formatting stories for tablets, one thing to keep in mind is that iPads are missing windows fonts, and when that happens, it substitutes, usually badly. I think Cole used Comic Sans in his 2 x Ten story.
I did the PDF of Pieces of Destiny in Adobe Jenson Pro, which I felt translated very well to print, computer screens, and iPads. I embedded the font within the document, so it displays just fine. For handwritten notes, I used Lucida Handwriting, again embedded in the document. All looks great. I actually had far more control over typography, indents, hyphenation, and all that stuff in this document than I did in the online version, so I think it read a lot better that way.
You can check the results here:
http://www.awesomedude.com/pecman/Pieces%20of%20Destiny%20(V4).pdf
Remind me to update this -- there's a later draft that I think fixed some more typos and fixed some minor story issues.
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Have we had enough of the government telling us how much our lives are going to cost? This is about the dumbest ruling I have come across in all my years of driving. I'd rather look in a mirror or turn my head than look at a video screen when the car is moving. And I have never run over anything behind me yet.
Actually, my partner and I have rear-view cameras in both our cars and they work fine and do give us that extra 5% safety edge you need sometime.
Bear in mind that every new car on the market has some kind of LCD panel in the dash, and the cost of the camera itself is maybe $5 at most. This is a very, very tiny charge.
I particularly like rear-view cameras where you have the ability to leave it on all the time, just to get a better idea of what the idiots behind you are about to do. Sometimes, they do stuff out of range of the actual rear-view mirror, particularly when you're backing up.
I'm with Graeme: even if it only saves a small number of lives, it's worth it. And once you've lived with having the camera, it's very hard to drive without one.
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Mardi Gras goes back to 1699 in New Orleans, so that might have been what threw me.
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The story takes place in Sydney, Australia.
Then hard-arsed, it is! (Call me crazy, but I like it when the writer tells me in the first three or four paragraphs where the hell the characters are.)
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My partner says that occasionally: "I can't get to the computer... the cat is sprawled on the keyboard!"
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Note that Ronan is only 15 and will be 16 later on this year. Very talented singer.
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And the link is here:
http://www.awesomedude.com/mark_peters/mgm/
I agree, a good beginning... although, I've never heard an American use the term "hard-arsed." Hard-assed, sure.
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Very nice song and video from UK singer Ronan Parke, making a good case against bullying in schools:
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I do tend to procrastinate, and one thing about writing for newsstand magazines: the deadline was etched in stone, and if you were late, it'd a) drive your editors crazy, b) screw up all the production deadlines, and c) get you fired. The problem with a phantom deadline for writing on the web is, the deadline is whatever you want it to be. If you have the discipline to stick to a schedule and get a chapter done every week or every month, more power to you.
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Huffington Post reminded readers of comedian Patton Oswalt's funny and very incisive editorial against Phred Phelps from 2007. It's worth a read:
http://www.spin.com/articles/fred-phelps-patton-oswalt-essay-death-takedown-2007/
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I liked the story a lot. However, I am disappointed by one thing in the story: It's not continuing as a serial novel!
I agree! And the next chapter must have much more sex in it...
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What used to the best solution for writing under pressure for me in the 1980s and 1990s was payment. If I was facing a deadline and was getting $1 a word from a newsstand magazine, believe me, that article would be done by Monday 9AM even if I had to write 20 hours straight the day before.
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I'd rather sit by their million-dollar pools, being fanned by several muscular hunks. (It hit 77 degrees today in LA.)
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I was impressed by this editorial by a gay writer who points out, if we hate Fred Phelps and are glad he died, we're merely becoming as evil as he was. I think the right thing to do is feel bad about anybody who suffers and dies, not celebrate the tragedy, and don't do any protests or picketing at all. Read Kristen Hotham Carroll's essay:
It is now 2014. Reverend Phelps is nearing death, and the world looks very different than just 15 or 16 years ago. Gay marriage will soon be legal in every state in the U.S. Signs saying "God Hates Fags" are no longer hurtful. They are more an object of amusement at best and an eye roll at worst, than anything else. I can still quickly remember a time when that wasn't the case.It would certainly be understandable if there were members of the LGBT community, as well as so many others, who felt inclined to picket the funeral of Fred Phelps. Though the weight of his actions and pickets has dissipated over the years, there was a time when his actions and leadership cause a tremendous amount of grief for an awful lot of people. It is my hope, however, that no one will descend to the level of hatred and pettiness that seemed to fuel the last decades of his life. We would only be harming our own souls, to carry out such a callous, immoral and emotionally void action. It is my prayer that in the last moments of his life, the Reverend is able to find peace and love, as he prepares to be humbled before his maker. The time for the hurt is ending. It is time to let the healing begin. Truly, the best way to avenge hurt inflicted by our enemies is to simply forgive them, and not allow them to have a stronghold in our hearts.Rest in peace, Fred. I forgive you.-------------------------------------------------------------------------I believe this is the correct response. -
Another good way to get stimulated: write in a totally different place. Grab a laptop and go to the park under a tree... go to the public library... stop by the local Starbucks, grab a Mocha Grande, and try writing it there. Sometimes, just different surroundings help a lot.
I know of some famous Hollywood writers who get totally blocked writing in their million-dollar homes, so they'll drive off to the desert, rent a cheap motel room somewhere, and just stay there for a week until they've banged out an entire script. So that's another idea.
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The very unrighteous Fred Phelps was an asshole of assholes. Howard Stern used to put him and/or his daughter Shirley on the show to rail about how "God Hates Fags," but eventually, even Howard got tired of their rhetoric and started ignoring them... which made them even angrier.
The question I have is: why did Fred's own church throw the guy out? I bet there's a story there...
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Surprisingly, I agree with both Graeme and Pec: I do almost no outlining at all. I find if I do the writing becomes mechanical and onerous and loses all of it's appeal. Knowing exactly where you're going takes the mystery out of it and doesn't allow the characters any room to speak for themselves, which is a very strange occurrence when it happens, but it seem to happen to us all. However, most successful writers do outline, so do what works best for you.
I don't know if I'd say "most" or not. I know that Stephen King has said he has no clue what's going to come out when he sits down and starts banging at the keyboard, so apparently, he outlines very little... unless it's a historical piece that requires research (which he says he did do for 11/22/63, his time-travel/Kennedy assassination novel).
What I've been doing the last few years is keeping the outlining to a bare minimum, just jotting down the bullet points I need to hit in a particular chapter: so-and-so finds the treasure, the other guy almost gets shot, the sheriff catches them and puts them in jail, they meet a guy who helps them escape. If I know four or five highlights, I can flesh out the rest to create the chapter. There's always, always unexpected twists and turns that sometimes cause the thing to derail, or inspire me to throw out the notes and go into a different direction. I still make a timeline so I know when and where we are, and I also write up a synopsis after the fact so I know what's gone down before, and I keep an ongoing character list so that if I said Mr. B was 6 feet tall and had blond hair in chapter 3, he won't suddenly be 5'6" and have dark hair in chapter 11.
I think of it as going out on a mystery tour, where I have a vague map and a sense of direction, but not necessarily the precise path that goes from A to B to C to D. Sometimes, I might go from A directly to D... sometimes, I might stumble upon ten more places to visit on the way. But at least I know where the destination is going to be.
Stephen King has said there are quite a few books where he wasn't aware of what the ending was going to be until he was about 3 chapters from the conclusion, so there you go. Anne Rice and J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, have very tightly-plotted, super-organized outlines for every single chapter, story arc, and character. All of them have made hundreds of millions of dollars as writers and sold millions of books, and (generally) gotten very good reviews as well.
I will give Cynus one last tip: sometimes, it is stimulating (as Colinian says above) to write a later chapter first, then figure out a way to go backwards and lead into the final piece. I've done that a few times, or even started writing the middle before the end or the previous chapters, just to jump ahead to work on different parts of the puzzle. It literally is like assembling a large jigsaw puzzle, and you don't necessarily have to work on it in a linear fashion, even though that's how the reader will ultimately digest it.
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Frozen and "cracked" are a little close for punishness. Icing... eh, not so much. The whole thing makes me shiver.
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One thing I discovered some years back is that you can take out all the discovery in writing a novel by over-plotting it too much in advance. With my first novel 14 years ago, I just made some vague notes, created a timeline so I know what happens and when, plus a character list, then dove in and wrote it almost start to finish. The second novel, I wrote from a very detailed outline, but I ran into the exact same problem you did: towards the end, it became drugerous to complete, mostly because I already knew too much about what was going to happen.
All I can say is, maybe back off and just try to complete just three pages a day, and see if that eventually gets a chapter done every couple of weeks. You figure if you can even write 500 words a day (which isn't that much), in 14 days, you'll have at least 6000 words done, which is pretty much a chapter, the way I count it.
As far as getting novels done, they're done when they're finished, and not before. I've written a novel in 30 days, I wrote another novel in five years, and I wrote another one in about 16 months. Each one was a different experience.
One key for when you stop writing every day: stop while you're right in the middle of a paragraph, even in the middle of a line. That way, when you jump back in the next day, you can re-read the previous few paragraphs and you'll understand the thought progress of where you intended to go. I find that little trick to be very helpful. Resist the urge to actually finish the scene, because then it'll be that much harder to start up again.
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Wonderful words from an ally
in News & Views
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That is very heart-warming and gives me hope for the future.