I was re-reading my most recent post about Disney’s Brave, and it’s protagonist Merida, and I was ready to pull my hair out after I re-read one particular part:
That being the case, I have to make sure she has a proper role model, not some silly woman who needs a Prince to save her or make her feel validated.
2nd Paragraph, My Last Blog Post
Reading that over, it’s very easy for it to be misinterpreted as some sort of man-hating comment. That wasn’t my intent, just my failing as an author in that instance. What I had meant to convey is that Merida, along with a few other of the newer Disney Princesses are better balanced than the older Princesses like Cinderella or Snow White, who are largely helpless victims in their stories who need a man to come save them. In my opinion, a relationship should be balanced with both partners seeing and treating the other as an equal.
I find myself making this sort of writing mistake more often than I should. Usually I catch it before posting a story. Writing very late in my “day” and not letting something sit a while so I can re-read it with fresh eyes has definitely hurt me more than once however.
I also left out one other thought completely: I enjoyed Brave because unlike most other Disney story (or any other show or movie nowadays for that matter), there’s also a message of personal responsibility in the story. Merida sees the problems her pride created, takes responsibility for it and fixes the damage while still still clinging to her core values. That’s a strong message.
The lack of acceptance of that idea; that you can admit when you’re wrong, and compromise without betraying your core values, is the root cause of much of society’s woes today also. No getting on the soap box this morning though. 🙂
Long story short; my writing goal for next year… and the rest of this year… is to not rush my writing so much while not procrastinating about starting either.
Picture of Witchfire created by me using Baldur’s Gate 3 character creator
I’ve gotten some mild interest here and elsewhere about the planned reboot of my Witchfire series. With that in mind, I thought I’d fill newer readers in on what the series is about.
In The Beginning…
I started the original Witchfire series (NSFW link to my new self-hosted blog’s adult section) about three and a half years ago. The idea came about as I was looking for some writing inspiration and made one of my occasional visits to Danger Babe Central. DBC is a superheroine peril website. Much milder than some other sites out there, but the heroines are rarely portrayed as competent, and always end up defeated and in “adult” situations. The site’s owner, “Mr. X”, also hosts a fan fiction page where readers can submit written stories and get them posted.
To be blunt, the fan page content runs the gamut of boys living out some pretty dark and twisted fantasies to a few authors trying to portray the heroines in a more positive light while keeping things sexy. LONG story short, there were just enough stories where the heroines were portrayed as capable and having some depth (both on the main site and fan page) that I thought “I could put a more positive spin of my own on this also”.
And So It Began:
So I set to work on my idea. I wanted a unique premise for my storyline, and I came up with the idea of a redhead Wiccan named Krystal who was a fan of the site, but had an objectified view of the heroines. She had also been otherwise drifting off the path with her Wicca, and as a result, her goddess (Freya from Norse legend)banished her to Danger Babe Central’s story world to teach her humility and compassion for her fellow women.
Krystal finds her magic works in this new comic book reality, and makes quick work of her first villain based on her knowledge of the tropes used at the website. Just as quickly, she found out life is pretty complicated in such a world though, and had trouble from heroines and villains alike as she attempted to uncover whatever big conspiracy was going on, and hopefully earn her way back home.
Crash and Burn:
Lack of planning, along with trying to keep up with another writer whom I was collaborating with, and mostly an epic amount of drama in my personal life led to my being increasingly unhappy with what I’d written, and less able to come up with new content. I finally shelved the whole storyline after 11 chapters. That was roughly two and a half years ago.
Regrouping
The desire to finish what I started was always there. I’ve kicked around various ideas to do just that for a while. It wasn’t until things really started to clear up a over the last 4 or 5 months that I really felt my focus had returned enough to start anew.
Looking over the original story, I took notes of the things that I hated, such as how Krystal was too much of a bitch, and that the grand conspiracy didn’t seem to have the right kind of foreshadowing and clue reveals. That last part made the story line feel inconsistent and awkward. I’d also partially fallen into the trap of making the original heroines less competent than originally intended.
Witchfire Redux:
Reviewing everything, I decided that a fresh start was the best option. Calling the new series “Witchfire Redux” came to me surprisingly fast. Here’s what’s changed:
First, I decided that Krystal needed to be a little wiser and more mature. Instead of an oversexed 21 year old college junior at UC San Diego, she’s now 23 and pursuing the beginnings of her post graduate work at the college. Her field of study is Criminal Profiling and Forensic Psychology, primarily because human behavior in general is fascinating to me. It also allows a bit more of a suspense and detective angle to come into play in the new story.
Krystal is still a redhead, with all the stereotypes that come with that, including a highly passionate nature. She’s no longer a spoiled brat though. She’s still a Wiccan also, which will again be the source of her powers.
The BIG shift ended up being more to do with the original characters from Danger Babe Central. I re-read every story I could find and took note of everything that could help me uniquely define each character; interests, appearance notes, how they fight… you name it. Everything from social life to their kinks ended up on the spreadsheet I mentioned in a previous post here.
I also made note of past locations used in stories, so that I could keep canon somewhat consistent, then I filled in the details for Delta City (where the vast majority of stories are set). Six city zones(NSFW blog link) with key landmarks and points of interest both from the canon stories and others added by me to flesh the city out. A massive project, BUT I’ll have everything available at a glance so I know what could or would happen where.
I did the same with organizations and factions for my story. I even put in some thought as to how the laws in that world(again NSFW blog section link) might vary from ours.
OK, but What About the Actual Plot?
Alright fine… Here’s some plot info. 😀
The story will start out similar to the original. This time though, Krystal will be haunted by very erotic but equally dark dreams. She will get called before Freya again. Freya will explain that there’s something sinister going on in the multiverse and it’s centered in Delta City. Krystal needs to go there and oppose it. Still a fan of Danger Babe Central, Krystal will initially balk, not wanting to end up like the heroines always do. Freya will tell her that she’s pulled the same move that Doctor Strange did before turning over his Infinity Stone to Thanos; after scanning all the possibilities, Krystal is the best option for preventing this darkness from spreading. If she doesn’t, the darkness will continue to haunt her in “The Real World” and eventually find it’s way fully there.
So Krystal reluctantly agrees to play the heroine. When she gets there, things are problematic right from the get go. As the story progresses, she and the other heroines slowly uncover a wide ranging conspiracy between governments and a shady collection of high tech businesses to decipher and control the unique genetic mutation that gives the Danger Babe Central heroines their powers and abilities. The conspiracy’s goal will be to create an army of metahumans that are completely under their control.
There will be a good deal more to it than that, BUT I can’t give away too much. Others might steal it, and there’s less cause to read if you know it all. I promise lots of subplots as well however.
All this coming soon to the other blog.
As a Side Note: The links to the Delta City notes, and the blog page on laws both link to pages that are themselves work safe, BUT they are in the NSFW partition of the “self hosted” blog. Don’t wander off of those two pages and you’re fine. Beyond that, you were warned. 😉
FINALLY… I got the new Silk Cords website launched this morning! It still needs some fleshing out and polishing in a few spots. I got several posts transferred over and re-written in some cases though. I even managed to set up an age gate and get a plug-in that allows me to stay compliant with all the Euro cookie rules.
As promised in an earlier post, I’ve kept the adult content completely segregated from the normal content, and intend to make sure any blog posts and notifications stay completely PG rated.
THAT was actually what caused the delay in launching. All these bright new features for WordPress are completely geared around everything on your blog being a post. The only way around that is a pretty solid knowledge of CSS code. The site will evolve as I learn there. Right now, it’s still pretty freaking awesome. How awesome?
It’ll hit you like Mjolnir:
I’m still trying to figure out how much WordPress.org ties into WordPress.com. Thus far, it seems awkward at best. All stuff to work out.
No, I didn’t bury the lead either. I’m just building anticipation. 😀
This is a slightly modified copy of the post I just made at my other blog. I announced there my intention to continue blogging, but that I wanted a different format. I’m switching to self-hosting and using WordPress.org. I’m also going to be narrowing my focus on my blog posts. I’ve been hard at work on the new WordPress.org self hosted site. It’s getting close to finished at this point, but there are still some behind the scenes things that need to be polished and tweaked. Things like making sure all my pictures have proper names for searching my media library, and descriptions to help search engines. Soon though…
Thinking over the site, and past experience here, I’ve decided that the new blog is going to focus entirely on writing. Absolutely no more social issues, political talk, personal drama (nobody cares), product reviews or even cooking posts. Just everything writing:
Vanilla Creative Writing; nothing over PG-13
Reviews of “How To” products on writing (books, videos, websites, etc..)
Critiques of movies and TV shows from a writer’s perspective; what works and what doesn’t
Erotica
Part of my creative writing is going to be going back and finishing or continuing stories that I left hanging, such as my alternate Star Wars version based on the meme where Luke killed himself with his new lightsaber:
Hell, I *may* even rewrite the prequels and sequels just to show how I believe they SHOULD have been done.
Erotica and anything “Adult” related will be in a separate section of the blog, and will be behind an age verification pop-up. I’m going to do a better job than I did with this blog in terms of keeping anything NSFW behind that age check. That means NO racy pictures or backgrounds in the primary section of the blog.
Creative writing of all flavors will have separate pages, and the blog posts announcing new stories will only have links to those pages with a note regarding whether it’s NSFW or not.
Realizations
Part of the process with the new blog has been moving some of my more relevant past posts and existing stories from the two old blogs to the new. I want to rewrite damned near everything also, and already have in a couple of cases. I noticed something though as I went back through my lists of pages and posts.
I jumped around WAY too much on the focus of each blog. With the actual creative writing, it was self doubt and too much real life drama killing my mojo. The stuff I tried to do as filler too often took over though. Not only that, I jumped from idea to idea as I tried to keep things fresh and attract new readers. Even when I tried to have a structured theme for daily posts I flopped. I just need to focus on the writing and stay consistent. THAT is my pledge with the new blog.
AND that I’ll also be upping my game across the board. No more holding back on my writing.
In Other News:
This isn’t the new blog, so I can sneak in one or two QUICK personal updates here.
First, the house that we got defrauded on is back on the market, at $50,000 higher than we bought it for. All the mortgage company or listing agents did was the most basic of house flipper cosmetic repairs to hide the defects (patching the cracked mortar, fresh paint, clean the carpets, etc…). It pisses me off that somebody else is going to be put in a likely world of financial trouble as well living in a toxic house. I have precious little idea what I can do to correct the situation though. The laws in Georgia are completely corrupt and promote screwing the buyer. I could get sued for tortious interference with a contract with most options or charged with trespassing if I put up signs, try to talk to people during open houses, etc…
Most people nowadays would sadly be content to sit back and let things unfold, especially if it meant the house would sell for enough money to put them in the clear. This level of injustice literally makes my skin crawl though. Likewise, it’s not right to be made whole at the expense of an innocent party.
And lastly, I *MAY* have a new job; a real one for the first time in a decade. I had the realtor job for a while during that time, but between my health and lack of money, I was never able to really make a run of it. I’m in the final phase of the hiring process. All that remains to be seen is if they will accept the fact that I’m a virtual blank. No social media presence, no credit history now thanks to following the Dave Ramsey plan, and really no recent job history as well.
I’m just glad that the spinal decompression and physical therapy got me to the point I can work again. The prospect of being a contributing member of society has been a huge morale boost.
I’m tempted to cite this as proof that SOMETHING about WordPress or (more likely) it’s community is VERY broken…
SO, what am I talking about? The fact that when I logged back into my “adult” blog, which I hadn’t done in over a year and a half, I consistently had HIGHER totals for views and likes than this blog, FOR THE PAST 15 MONTHS STRAIGHT.
THAT despite the fact my erotica blog has 54 followers and this one has 779 followers.
Anybody see some inconsistencies here?
Now it COULD be that I’m just that good a story teller, BUT somebody here recently told me I wasn’t a good enough writer to migrate to Medium.com. Regardless of that, I’d say it does prove what I’ve been saying for a long time now: The vast majority of WordPress members don’t give a damned about any content beyond their own. Similarly, Likes and Follows aren’t genuine, just something to trade to give the illusion of popularity. Complete social media mentality.
I can’t remember the last time I asked a question or provided a writing prompt here and got a single reply without bitching later.
A simple question, but one I’ve been pondering the last few weeks. In the case of any sort of work of fiction, I think the answer is pretty straight forward: If it crosses into the realm of a “spoiler”, thus ruining the ability to enjoy the story, it’s revealed too much.
But what about non-fiction, more specifically “how-to” works?
I’ve been pondering this because I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last month or so going over various media on how to improve one’s writing and storytelling. I thought it would be nice to share what I’ve learned, but at the same time, I wonder how much might be too much… Where is the line between a good, truly in-depth review and making it so the reader never wants or needs to go get the book or whatever for themself?
For example, one of the sources I looked at was from MasterClass.com. “Dan Brown teaches Writing Thrillers” was loaded with amazing information on general story structure, character creation, and several ways to build suspense and tension in a story.
I think I have 10 to 12 handwritten pages of notes in rough outline form, which would probably result in 3 or 4 pages of outline in a program like Word. For those not familiar with MasterClass, that’s from about 3 hours worth of lecture time (broken down into roughly 15 minute video segments). MasterClass.com has courses that are more like a TED Talk. Somebody like Dan Brown or James Patterson gets up and gives you a few hours of everything they believe has made them successful. “The Great Courses”, by comparison are taught by University academics and anywhere from 20 to 40 hours long. More akin to a college class.
Is there more that could be gotten out of that Dan Brown video “series”? Most likely, but I think my notes are a solid representation of the overall course. But how much is overshare though… where I’m morally, if not factually, cutting into Dan Brown’s income from the course?
Dan’s a good test case for this whole concept I’m struggling with. He has a very factual, academic approach to his teaching in the class. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, would be much more difficult for me to do anything resembling an “infodump” on. Like his actual storytelling, HIS MasterClass contains a good deal of info wrapped up in allegory to help solidify the lessons.
While I worry about inadvertently cutting into others’ sales, I want to do these reviews because there is enough “how to write” garbage out there to completely fill the interior of the Death Star. Most of it is written by people who have had the smallest level of success as writers, yet feel that somehow makes them expert enough to put 40 books on Amazon or several videos on Udemy about how to write. The good stuff deserves to be recognized as such in my opinion.
I was in the middle of an email with my uber small writing circle, and misspelled “Epilogue”. The spellchecker in Outlook automatically throws up suggestions before you can even do a correct yourself, and “Apologue” came up as a suggestion.
I’d never heard of the word, so I had to search it out of morbid curiosity:
So yes, an allegory or parable. The word is obscure enough nowadays that I’m not certain if I’d use it in writing… Perhaps if a character was fairly erudite and known for their vocabulary.
As I’m starting to gear up for more writing, I decided to check yet again to see if the oft promised and never released Scrivener 3 was released for Windows.
IT’S HERE!!!
Not only that, they even kept their word and gave me my upgrade from 1.x for free!
I have to be honest, at this point I’ve just downloaded it and am beginning to work through the tutorial. The only thing new that I’ve seen thus far is the ability to easily insert pictures and videos into your project. I’m not even sure if the videos have to be linked via YouTube or something similar.
Some stuff, as noted in the description I… borrowed from the Scrivener home page has been moved around and “cleaned up”. I’ll see if this ends up to be better organized or not. At this VERY early hour, the two things that I can report are:
That gawdawful, clunky Windows 95 era interface is FINALLY gone
The new version is 64 bit, so it’s a good deal more responsive.
I suspectmy previous review will hold true that you can do anything with Office that Scrivener can do. It’s just a question of IF Scrivener has finally made it easier and cleaner to do it with them; one tool instead of 3 or 4.
If you own a copy of 1.x you’re eligible for either a free upgrade or half off depending upon when you bought it, so check it out:
OK, time for a “Things that Make You Go Hmmm” post…
Now for those who don’t speak Italian or can’t guess based on the phrase’s similarity to English, the title means Private Site. I bring it up because there’s a blog I follow that’s in Italy, and the gal who runs it has a bad habit of locking most of her followers out of some of her posts. Since just about all of her posts are romantic poetry, thoughts and songs, I assume she’s younger. I likewise assume that given the rest of her posts are about romance and sensuality that the private posts are also.
Every time I hit that private site screen, I can’t help but wonder what’s being posted that she feels the need to keep it hidden from most people.
With that in mind, I wanted to offer some advice to the young women out there: NOTHING, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING on the internet is private. No matter what you do, there are people with ways around it. Anything from outright hackers to sites that index (and clone) other sites, to “social engineering” and a dozen other possibilities.
Keeping it simple, the aspect of social engineering that we’re talking about here is that whole thing your parents or friends hopefully warned you about with not sharing racy pictures of yourself with somebody you have a crush on. They’ll share with one friend, no matter what they promise, and then it gets passed around more and more until suddenly everybody in the neighborhood, at school and / or at work knows what your bare boobs look like.
My point is this; if your piece of erotica or sensual poetry is that sexual, or you don’t feel comfortable sharing that pic (nude or not), putting it behind a “private” page or site is really NO protection at all. You have two realistic choices here:
DON’T DO IT. Use discretion and common sense levels of caution and don’t post that written material or picture. You’re very likely saving yourself a good deal of drama later on down the road. Won’t happen to you? That’s what EVERY girl that ended up with nude pictures passed around school, or the star of a revenge porn video on the internet said. None of them set out to be publicly humiliated.
The other option is to accept it’s VERY likely going to happen to you also at some point. Webpage passwords are minimal protection. They might be better than just “owning it” and putting it out on display for everybody but the end result is probably going to be the same. That pic, video or story could resurface at the worst possible time too.
Hypocritical, given that I write erotica? Superficially, BUT I’m only warning you of the likely fallout. I’m also careful to disclose minimal personal information and NO pictures of myself. I’d do follow those last two steps regardless. The world has too many weird people in it.
A few of you longer term readers MAY recall I keep threatening to get the reboot of my Witchfire series underway. One of the problems I’ve run into is that instead of just doing a cancel and start all over at the beginning (like Television and movies do), I wanted to add a twist and create a situation where our heroine ends up back at day 1 via unintended time travel, and has the opportunity to correct some of her mistakes of the past few months of story time.
Part of me is iffy on the whole idea in the first place. About a year and a half ago I wrote a post on using time travel creatively in fiction instead of using it as a get out of jail free card for bad writing (among other things). It feels like I *am* using it as an easy out to fix what I didn’t like about the first nine chapters though. At the same time, I can add a few other unique and exciting twists that will keep the reboot from becoming the same old “let’s go back in time and fix things” cliche.
The bigger stumbling block for me is the temporal mechanics involved; ie ‘the how it works’ aspects that keep the plot device believable for readers and workable for the writer. Here’s the options I’ve explored:
The standard comic book situation where there just can be multiple versions of characters working side by side. Witchfire is a little overpowered vs the other characters to start with, and two of her could make the story really unbalanced. Multiple iterations of more than one character could get confusing for readers also, so I don’t see this as a viable option.
Two easy options around this would be something like ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘Quantum Leap’, where a character passes out when confronted with their future self, OR is whisked off to some ‘waiting room’. Taking the original out of the picture leaves that character NOT experiencing the events that the future version did though. THEN the future version doesn’t have those events / memories to draw upon anymore. In short, it works if the traveler is only going to be there briefly. Long term, we get plot holes.
I could make the original nine chapters a dream that Witchfire recalls as she goes forward, but let’s face it, THAT has been the ultimate writing cliche and cop out since the resolution of the “Who Shot JR” thing back in the 1980s version of Dallas. I just couldn’t do that without hating myself, lol.
NEVER do this to your readers!
The closest thing I’ve come to finding a workable option is that if a time traveler comes face to face with their past self, the two beings merge into one. This eliminates the writer being saddled with multiple incarnations of the same character running around together, and by extension makes the story easier to follow for the reader.
It’s convenient, but still feels slightly… contrived(?) to me. There’s also the question of do the characters simply un-merge when / IF the time traveler goes back to the future (as opposed to just waiting for time to catch up to the point they traveled). Easy enough to say yes, but does the earlier version retain the later version’s memories and skills that may have been learned? They did essentially share a mind and body after all.
These MAY seem like minor points or questions on the surface, but we’re talking about a plot device that will set the tone early, and may flavor various events as the story progresses. Getting everything correct and coherent is going to be HUGE in how readable the story is.
SO, is there an option I left out? A way to put a little polish on the “merger” idea that might make it feel less awkward? Let me know.
Silk Chatters 