Contractions in Punctuation?

This may be a matter of voice or style… but do you use contractions in your prose?

Old Books Sucked

Poor techniques used in old books.

New Genres in the Twentieth Century

Name the number of genres of literature that existed in the Nineteenth Century.

Now name the number of genres in the Twentieth Century.

Now guess how many might come to exist in the Twenty-first.

Sugar ‘n’ Spicing Up My Heroine

Earlier I mentioned the need to add some flavor to my vanilla yogurt hero. I think I succeeded. I’ve certainly been having a great deal of fun writing his scenes.

The heroine’s scenes, not so much, despite some great battles. I realized the battles were falling flat because we didn’t know enough about the heroine to care if she got eaten by Ooze. She was suffering vanilla syndrome. So I’ve added some sugar and spice to her as well — but not everything nice. She needed some flaws too.

Now I’m having a lot more fun with her scenes. What’s especially cool is that the hero and heroine have complementary strengths and weaknesses. She’s prone to tell tall tales; he ferrets out people’s secrets. And so on. I can’t wait until they actually meet. (Yeah, it’s one of those things where we follow them each on their separate paths for a while, until, bam! paths collide.)

I’m also just enjoying being a groove. You know how it is, when the story flows like punch at a potluck. Your fingers fly over the keyboard as fast as flying monkeys and every scene marches into place. And you feel like, oh yeah, this is why I write. Why did I ever think I could give this up? Why would I ever want to do anything else?

O Laundry Stacked Three Baskets High, I see you looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes, but you’ll just have to wait. I have a city to besiege! Bwahahahaha!

Wordcount: 24,541

Ecology of a Fantasy World

It’s understood that if characters travel about anywhere in a fantasy realm, they won’t be able to get more than five pages before they encounter some toothy beastie intent upon devouring them. This leads to the impression, sometimes never explained by the author (I’m looking at you, Edgar Rice Burroughs) of a landscape inhabited exclusively by vicious carnivores.

Um. Hello? Who are all the eight-legged lions eating when our hero and heroine aren’t traipsing by in chain-mail lingerie?

Violating the laws of ecology always bothers me in stories. Yes, it’s fantasy, you can make your own rules, but, for the love of crabgrass, at least take recommendations from ecology. It’s really fun to have monsters try to eat your characters, so we wouldn’t want to cut that part. (Chain-mail lingerie is another must-keep, I don’t care what the weather is.) We just need to include some herbivores for the carnivores to eat, and some herbs for the herbivores to eat.

With that in mind, I began ruminating on the dragons in my story. What do they eat? Lots of things, it turns out. Cows, horses, pigs, manatees, humans. Meat. But it would take a lot of such snacks to fill a dragon, and there are a lot of dragons in my story. (Not necessarily featured as characters, but milling about in the background, doing dragonish things — fighting, gambling, selling overpriced trinkets, charging too much interest on loans and eating anyone who doesn’t pay up.) I decided that they really needed some herbivores, and the herbivores ought to be even bigger (but much dumber) than the dragons.

Enter the leviathan!

Okay, so there are leviathans swimming around getting eaten by dragons. But what do leviathans eat? You might think, “krill” but you would be wrong, because krill are boring compared to….

…Green Ooze!

Yes, I could have just said “algae bloom” but that doesn’t sound like something from a fantasy novel, does it?

Here’s my helpful diagram:

The thing that looks like a purple gecko is supposed to be a majestic dragon. Work with me here. Anyway, the majestic dragon eats the leviathan. (The blue is supposed to be the ocean, not a flotation device.) The leviathan eats the Green Ooze.

Oh, but wait, Tara. You have an arrow from the Green Ooze pointing to the dragon. That’s right. Because, under certain circumstances — say, just when our hero and heroine sail by in a pirate ship — the Green Ooze gets all excited by the opportunity and changes, the way some molds do. It becomes Carnivorous Green Ooze! And tries to eat them!

(Cue music: It’s the Circle of Life.)

I find this kinda thing entirely too amusing. I know. Sad.

P.S. Check out Thuvia, Hot Babe of Mars. She will get her eight-legged lion to kick your ass and steal your toupee.

Mood Swings USA

Ok, this is just weird.

This is what 300 million tweets look like when analyzed by mood and number of tweets.

Researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University analysed
300 million tweets sent between September 2006 and August
2009, then produced a ‘cartogram’, a map where areas
represent values (in this case the number of tweets) rather
than the land area.

Put the video on loop, stick it next to your lava lamp, and grok the freak, baby, grok the freak.

And don’t forget to tweet this.