Do you need to know where you’ll end up before starting your journey?
No, I’m not philosophizing. I’m planning.
I’ve come up with a few ideas for short stories, but I don’t know how to end them. A wee problem, eh? I’m afraid to start writing, as I want these stories to be short. Maybe flash length. Gershdernit.
They’re slipping from my fingers. Plots, characters, dainty ideas and robust ones. Try as I may, I fear that I cannot hold onto them, or bend them to my will.
As The Continent is still in its planning phases, I decided to work on some short stories and maybe some flash fiction (stories under 1000 words). But as I put my pen to paper, I have nothing.
Could it be that I’m just out of practice? Despite writing daily for over a year (not to mention those years through high school and early college), I haven’t composed much in terms of completed stories, only the novel and three quarters of a rather blah fan fic. I need practice with pulling together a tight story. Why does my Muse abandon me like this?
On the plus side, I’ve decided to do “research”, otherwise known as reading a whole lot, and hoping that some good comes of it. There’s no one quite like Ray Bradbury when it comes to short stories.
For days, I’ve been meaning to look up more Dutch, French and Italian names to populate The Continent.
I finally got around to it, and rediscovered my favorite name site(s):
Behind the Name and Surnames.
These sites are particularly helpful. They collect and sort names from different cultures (including seperate sections for mythologies and “ancient”) with pronounciations, meanings and statistics.
I love other languages. I took German in middle school (not to mention smatterings of Russian, French and Spanish), Spanish in High School and Italian in college, plus several failed attempts to teach myself Welsh.
CC/ Unprose
Doesn’t work.
Anyways, I like having characters of different nationalities, and using expressions/words to convey that. In The Continent, Liv is Dutch (no, his first name isn’t Dutch, but his family has a naming system they follow religiously).
Anyways, I thought it would be cool if various vessals had names in their home languages. The ship Liv served on ( briefly) is called The Beacon.
I looked it up in Dutch.
Baken. Baken. Bacon.
Although, I have also found “Baak” as another translation. I think I may go with this one.
What does your cell phone’s ringtone say about you?
Suppose, for a moment, that your main character has a cell phone.
CC Fauxto_Digit
Even if it isn’t plausible for such a thing.
But what’s his/her ring tone? Why?
Her ring tone could be the latest pop song because she needs constant change, even if its in the little things in life.
His could be the standard, preloaded one because he couldn’t be bothered.
Hers could be an actual telephone ring, to be ironic.
I think Liv, the protagonist of The Continent would probably have a non descript midi file, like the one on 24.
I wish the opposite were true.
It’s summer. The sun is shining, the birds are squawking (at ungodly early hours and in the gutter outside my window) and I find that I’m having a hell of a time trying to put words to paper. My problem could be that I adore writing, or that I think on too grand a scale. Even minor characters get full blown character sheets, detailing what makes them tick.
I’m afraid to really jump head long into this one, tentatively called The Continent. The ideas have potential, and the main characters have been making appearances in my writing journals for three or four years now. I want to write it, but I can’t seem to get myself to put much down on paper. There are too many back details and relationships to figure out.
Ned Wolfe 