I wanted to keep 3S_stories . . . → Read More: Hash it out – My next great Twitter adventure]]> When I started 3S stories on Nov 17,2008, my goal was to tweet  a short-short-short story five days a week for a year. With the exception of a couple weeks holidays, I pulled it off. I learned a lot about editing, about impact, and more importantly, about the social value of Twitter.

I wanted to keep 3S_stories a pure fiction venue. But the social  nature of Twitter wouldn’t allow it. I found myself getting LOL replies, and laudatory DMs, and retweets that increased my followers by ten or 15 people a week. I replied with thank yous, responded in kind by retweeting my faves. Before I knew it, I was part of a community; sharing jokes, having conversations, doling out support and advice and receiving the same in return. I don’t have the most followers but the ones I have, I like.

Which brings me to my Twitter meme/goal/conspiracy for 2010: The Hashtag.

The hashtag functions as a sort of collective bookmark on Twitter. It’s that addendum to a tweet marked with an ‘#’.  They allow  tweets on a theme or topic to be archived and easily searched. You can see examples under Trending Topics on the right hand side of your Twitter page.

Here’s some example I contributed to the Dec 31st #BadDoctorWhoSynopsis:

Other examples from  November:

3S_stories@JodiMacArthur Captain Ahab’s Seafood Palace? Christine’s Drive-In ? Fried and Freshly Juiced? The Crepes of Plath? #literaryrestaurants

JodiMacArthur@3S_stories: That’s ridiculous. How about. Lord Of The Fries?

Chris Farley was my Sensei, David Spade my sparring partner. #iamabadninja

Uniform accidentally bleached, I am limited to missions in the Arctic.#iamabadninja

Fleeing pursuer I forward roll over parked car, get hit by passing city bus.#iamabadninja

Get the idea?

Hash tags provide context. They leverage the social aspect of Twitter and invite participation, which is a direction I want to go with 3S_stories.

Will you join me in creating random acts of creativity?  All that’s required is that you be brief, be relevant, and interesting. You can do that, can’t you?

This was supposed to be a simple, straight forward time travel story. It has expanded to includet mythological figures, redneck vigilantes, healthy doses of game theory, and the ghost of Marshal MacLuhan leaning over my shoulder . . . → Read More: No man is an island, but some of us are sponges. #nanowrimo]]> Week two started with an interesting revelation: My brain is a sponge. Writing is what happens when that sponge gets squeezed.

This was supposed to be a simple, straight forward time travel story. It has expanded to includet mythological figures, redneck vigilantes, healthy doses of game theory, and the ghost of Marshal MacLuhan leaning over my shoulder offering narrative suggestions.

Ye olde subconscious is offering up absolutely everything that ever held my attention for more than 30 seconds for inclusion in this first draft. That’s 40 years of infatuation, intrigue, titillation, outrage, and confusion gushing forth.

I’m elated  that so many ideas pop to the surface at the simplest sign of encouragement . However, trying to get them all to play nice and fit together is daunting. It occurs to me that this may very well be why I write – to make more room for soaking up more information. It’s my intrinsic de-frag algorithm. It’s how  clean house, organize existing data, and make room for more.

To aid in that metaphorical house cleaning, I have started a MindMap of the story’s constituent parts:

I find this works great for a visual thinker like myself. I can take a look and realize ‘ yeah, I need 1000 words about the Orientation meeting,’ and I instantly have a writing goal. Nice thing is, the FreeMind software cooperates with the ThinkingSpace program on my mobile. So if I get inspired while in the line up at the grocery store, it just takes a couple of clicks, to add an event, character, or a quick note.

Technorati Tags: nanowrimo, Writing

Rippling orange waves of . . . → Read More: Happy Ending # fridayflash]]> At first, the mild electrical shock and tiny horizontal rollers tickled as they brushed his eyelashes. The novelty wore off in seconds. Floating safely in the isolation tank of body temperature saline solution, Marsden relaxed, and began to enjoy the neural fireworks his cortex launched against the artificial night of his closed eyelids.

Rippling orange waves of an atomic peach color erupted from a tiny, twitching dot of black in the center of his visual field. The black turned blue, eclipsing the orange before morphing into cinnamon red jellyfish tentacles swaying and straggling in his visual cortex. The tentacles entwined when they touched, shifting colours until there was just one rope dazzling with a rainbow of colours melting into each other. The rope curled in on itself, coiling in like one of those round, too big to fit in your mouth lollipops he had as a kid. Thick, round, sugary rainbows that stretched your lips and hurt your teeth if you tried to bite through them.

The coil of light spun faster and faster, becoming a blur of phosphorescent yellow before tipping back in his field of view, becoming three dimensional. Marsden marveled as the centre dropped out and unravelled. It was like the Indian rope trick, only upside down. The end of the rope unfurled and plummeted out of the bottom of his field of vision. He watched the pale yellow rope turn white as the last of it fell out of sight, and he saw nothing but the purest, impenetrable black. Not only saw it, but felt it; that sense of the void, of emptiness on a large scale. This was what the whole experiment was about. Finding that sweet spot of sensory deprivation and sensory excitation that would override conscious interpretation of events.

Tears of joy leaked out from under Marsden’s eyelids. By his estimation, there was 3 minutes left in the experiment, then Horst would open the pod, and help him out. He would quickly towel off,  write out his observations, review the EEG read outs, and have a white paper ready by the end of the week.

He felt he change in air temp and sensed the light of the room when the lid was open. He felt two fingers against his neck. Checking and recording vital signs, making a full assessment before removing the apparatus. Good man, Horst, good man, thought Marsden.

..of my week were the first thirty seconds of . . . → Read More: The most important thirty seconds ….]]>

..of my week were the first thirty seconds of this video.

As author, you are the creator, animus prime, the provider of these details, and your responsibility is to strike a balance of physical . . . → Read More: It’s a question of character]]> A well written character, one that evokes empathy and makes the reader give a damn, is important to a book or story’s success. As the weary cliche states, the devil is in the details.

As author, you are the creator, animus prime, the provider of these details, and your responsibility is to strike a balance of physical detail, social behaviour, and psychological back story that will allow, or better yet demand, that the reader identify with one or more of the characters in your story.

There are plenty of books, articles, and software that provide frameworks, formulas, and theories for creating characters that are entirely valid.These tend to be all pencil and no eraser, if you get my drift. If you don’t, then let me explain.

A character needs to be written with a level of detail that allows the reader to recognize the type (good guy, bad guy, love interest, mad scientist, crooked cop, etc) but fill in the finer details from their personal armoire of memories, myths, senses, and images. What I’m suggesting is that the author consider writing characters as though they are a pitcher that the reader fills up. Or. if you can tolerate a little homonistic word play, a picture the reader colours in.

Back in the old days, when jeans were tight and hair was feathered, I read Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, along with almost all of his other  novels. The books were a very visual experience, and I cast the characters from the people in my small town. Even some of the location details I would borrow from local homes or store fronts, and simply transplant them to Maine, Vermont, or wherever they were needed.

King left enough space in his exposition of these characters for me to participate in defining them, and my attachment to the story and the author was stronger for it. Every time I pushed the cart around the supermarket while mom filled it from her list, I saw someone from those books. When  I rode my bike out into the valley, I rode past the house that Carrie lived in. If I rode into town, I went past the garage where Christine was worked on.

As readers, we need to be involved and engaged. If the characters are lectured at as, they remain a static collection of facts and figures, a simple point of reference. They will be as dynamic and intriguing as a tax return. Don’t tell us that “…he had hair almost to his shoulders, greasy, curly and unkempt, and he was chastised for it by classmates and teachers alike.”  Instead show us how “…embarrassed, he tucked an escaped coil of hair back behind his ear, and quietly slunk away from Jane and her cheerleader friends.”  If we weren’t that guy in high school, we know someone who was. It creates the opportunity for a personal point of reference and attachment to the character.

A detailed character sketch is great thing for a writer to have as a point of reference, but it doesn’t need to be shared verbatim. That’s like handing out the answer key instead of the test.
As authors, we need to provide strong outlines and a big box of crayons for the reader.  Leave stuff out and invite the reader in.