Hey all,

So I need to do some cleaning up. I've been writing over at my new website. I'll be moving data over to there soon. Catch up with me on Calculating Normals.

Thanks,

Daniel

Larks Fiction Magazine: Issue Three, Volume Five

I find blogging as an industry fascinating. The initial boom & burst of its conception, the general confusion over how to use it, and more importantly the cottage industry it has created.

Larks Fiction Magazine: Issue Three, Volume Five: From the Desk of the Editor; Hello and welcome to another issue of Larks Fiction Magazine. Due to a recent injury (see attached photo a...

Cloudsea Chapter One Preview

Hello everyone!

So I have been reworking, revising, and rethinking the prologue and first chapter of my book project (now dubbed Cloudsea). Have a look and see what you think of my work in progress (of six years).

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Have a picture of a train.

Update 12/31/12

Oh yeah... I was writing a blog about writing... Whatever happened to that?

Building Religions in Fiction

In creating a world for fiction it is important to not work yourself into a corner. In some stories the only thing holding the entire plot together is a single idea or running gag (I see what you did there Walden--not that it was bad for its age group). This kind of lack luster world building can cause the whole story to seem flat whereas well crafted worlds can create beautiful settings to hang your characters on. Thus when deciding how people and nations worship (or don't) it is important to give the issue some thought.

Spark Songs Published at Writing Raw!!!

My short story Spark Songs will be published* on June 6th over at Writing Raw! I am pretty happy because it had been rejected more than a few times. I will make sure to link when it goes live.

*edit: is now published!!! http://writingraw.com/fiction.html#D-117,%20Spark-Songs

Once Again--Best Day Ever!

I got published over at the Scarlet Sound! They published my piece Nothing to Fear--which is about my personal fears of the dark when I was younger. I am pretty pumped. Here is a link right HERE. Maybe some day I can get a long work published from just all my little stuff put together.

Also I am totally getting hitched this weekend! So yeah writing as not so much happened. However I did finish a nifty little tale called World at End. It is the third story written in my new universe I have been fiddling with. Hopefully I can find it a market.

Also also--new term for being a writer: Unreality Engineer.

Anyway got to go--CHIRP DERP!

Searching for Meaning After College

I have been locked away in what now seems like a tall tower. College is over and now I have to make good on all the dreams and promises I was working for over the last four years. That along with the pressure to do something good with my life leaves me with the question, "Well, what now?"

Published! Again!

Indigo Rising published my piece over modern art of the early 1900's--check it: http://www.indigorisingmagazine.com/2011/05/form-or-spirit-great-wave-and.html

The Hall of Publication

Here are the stories of mine that have been published along with the links to their place of publication. Enjoy!

Just Gotta Laugh About the End of the World, September 13th, 2010 published at Weirdyear Magazine
     A flash fiction about zombies
     Reprinted at The Trend

Wet Dull Smack, published May 6th, 2011 at The Fringe Magazine
     A flash fiction about zombies

Published!

I got published today over at The Fringe Magazine! I am pretty pumped after not getting accepted for a while. Here's the link!

http://thefringemagazine.blogspot.com/2011/05/fiction-wet-dull-smack-by-daniel-j-pool.html

Larks! the Comic!

So I have been a very bad blogger--but I want to change!
Here is what I have been working on lately.

Chainsaw Pant Bandit

The town that my office is in has been on fire with the news of a chainsaw panted bandit. God bless the Southwest... Where else could this be real?

http://www.kfor.com/news/local/kfor-news-chainsaw-accident-story,0,920332.story

Pretty Excited!

My online fiction magazine made the cut for Duotrope!!! This makes need of official celebration! Woot!

http://www.duotrope.com/market_5552.aspx

Just Thought This Was Interesting

Daemon Books is doing a book give away, seems pretty cool. Here is a link if you want to enter:

http://www.daemonsbooks.com/2010/12/29/giveaway-daemons-books-favorite-things-of-2010/

Aphoristic Dangers of Show Don't Tell

On a recent paper for a philosophy of religion class I had a distinctly new comment about writing:

"My only significant problem is stylistic. Because of your aphoristic style, you often leave many things unsaid."

Now this is in no way a bad thing to be THE only thing wrong with a paper, but it got me thinking. On every writer's tips list I have seen they usually list "Show Don't Tell" as a major style problem of many writers today. I have tried being diligent to this, but now I see that as with pretty much everything else; moderation is key.

Let's expand on aphoristic style real quick (from Answers.com, Webster's Dictionary):

Aph·o·ris·tic·al , a.In the form of, or of the nature of, an aphorism; in the form of short, unconnected sentences; as, an aphoristic style.

The method of the book is aphoristic.

 So I was in a way showing too little and saying too little. I have seen authors (Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Robert A. Heinlein, and Oscar Wilde) use this style with success, but this is a slippery slope to walk. If we, to burrow a page from Kolakowski (the guy the paper I got this comment on was about)--should we take show don't tell too far eventually we can end up saying too little.

This is not suppose to make you go out and stop warning about show don't tell problems (I know it is more common than too-little-tell problems). This is just an observation that falling too often into an aphoristic style can lead to disjointed sentences that lose their original meaning.

Writing is communicating with someone else. In a way writing is laying your soul and mind open for someone to pick through--hopefully with the intent of transferring something. Be that Something love, anger, memory, or a fart--a writer's foremost importance is being a communicator.

That's all I gotz on that thought for now, but I had another...

I think I want to start a writing project. Instead of writing on it once a week very intensively (like my current projects have been) I want to do a very minimal amount of writing but do it daily. So I am proposing to start writing 250 words everyday on a novel project for 90 days and posting it here. I know I won't do it every day probably, but my hope is to do it enough that after 90 days I can be proud of whatever I make.

--Because of finals this week I will probably start doing it on Sunday.

On that note, hope to see you back here on Sunday!

*Edit/Update April 5th, 2011--yeah let's reschedule the one-page-a-day-novel till life is not insane...

FUTURE THINGS

GO HERE, Do it.

Max McCoy, live from Dogwood

I went to a journalism/writing/word-nerds convention in Kentucky a few weeks ago (just now getting things settled from the trip) and I am going to transcribe and talk about some of the seminars I went to on Concerning Fiction.

The seminar that really got me going and pumped about writing was by Max McCoy. He is the guy who wrote the Indiana Jones books, some westerns, but above all novels with mystery elements. In the seminar he told about how he became a writer and (without saying it all out loud) what it is like to be in the word-writing industry.

McCoy wore a plain dark navy suit, his hair was slicked back, and he wore a smile that said the milk in his coffee was a little sour, but he would drink it since it was free. He spoke in a dull timbre. He made sure to remind us that he had a day job, and at the end he told us the books on the table top were for sale.

I want to be Max McCoy when I grow; a shameless self-promoting writer/journalist who does and writes pretty much whatever he feels like.

Just to point out, these are his personal ideas, I cannot attest to any of these for sure--all I can say is I have heard a lot of these before so some of them are more than likely true.

But I digress. Here are the important bits straight from his talk:

World Building: Designing a People

When building worlds from the ground up it is very important to design who will live in that world. For worlds this is "simply" creating a culture of a people. In this case however I would be creating new races.

When writing fantasy the usual picks are humans, elves, dwarfs, orks, and trolls (or some mix & match). These races have generally well defined rolls already before the writer ever touches them. I for one started no different.

I wanted to have the basic rolls that elves, humans, and dwarfs offered to each other. One race to be smart and mystical and others to be strong and brave, but this got to be too much like every other piece of work in the field. I wanted to bring something new to the table. So I made a few rules:

1. No humans allowed. I wanted to make something new and humans are too relatable.
2. All races could not be one of the usual fantasy races with just something extra. No long tailed goblins or furry elves.
3. All races could not be an animal morphed to look like people. I did not want this to become a montage of furry-ness.

This in mind I did decide the best way of making organic creatures was to start with critters I knew and expand and change till I had something that felt different. So I grabbed a zoology textbook and thought about how different worlds would/could make different types of people. One of these ideas lead me to study how varying gravity and atmospheric conditions would alter a creatures interaction with a world.

To this end I wrote out a list of probably around 100 creature ideas. I played with the roles of the classical races. Then I thought about it in terms of a game.

When I thought "How would I make an online MMORPG about this?" my ideas and how I should build things seemed simpler. Designing my world to be lived in my more sense than designing it to look pretty. This also gave me a lot of perspective the people.

On an online game having hundreds of races would be just plain annoying. Also trying to talk about too much in a book would bog down the important stuff of the story. So I settled on around 7 races as being optimal.

As I created religions for these groups a lot of the story fell into place for me. Thinking about how they would interact created how the races should be like.

I settled on taking the function of the fantasy race I needed (example orks) then combined them with the attributes I found interesting (such as pachyderms) and combined those thoughts with a real-world country of the same time period as the book (the Spanish Empire) and created a race of creatures I felt was not a complete rip off of one thing, but a combination of several ideas.

Next time religion building.

On Planning of a Novel: World Building One

My first thoughts for my novel was a jumbled mess of concepts and ideas. To put it lightly I knew I wanted fantasy adventures and I wanted ultra-action. That is to say I wanted to write something fun and to have fun writing it.

I started by thinking some random things I would want in a novel for me to have fun with. I decided that magic, steam-based technology, and zombies would be pretty sweet to fit together. I let my interest guide my ideas.

After running these ideas over and over again in my head I started to think about how all those things could fit together as I wanted them to. I started off with a single idea--the airship. This single thought acted like a seed. After I started thinking of my world like a swash buckling adventure.

I asked questions like: how would you defend a city from a floating fortress? How would an army with magic and technology fight? What would people in a would like this look like?

From there I started studying, collecting, and cataloging pictures from the internet to reference as I created my world. I would Google image search things like: steampunk, fantasy, dragon, magic, troll, airship... etc. I also started looking into art from the 1700's (an era I choose to set my technology on). So I went to the local library and read everything that I had a gap in understanding for.

For example I read a book of 18th century navy ships. I contained drawings of ships by floors, uniform descriptions, and history of important battles. From this I gained a detailed look at how the warfare of the time would work.

The end result was something workable and interesting to me, but it was nothing more than a series of concepts.

To put them together I would need the people to live there and how they would look and interact...