creativity to grow on

As you all know by now, I went to Supercon this past weekend. Despite the crowds and spending eight hours on my feet, I really enjoyed it. I brought cash with me in case there was something in the vendor area I couldn't live without, and as it turns out there was.

Books.

I had expected booths from the comic books stores around town, collectibles dealers, and a wide variety of visual artists showing off their prowess rendering chesty barbarian women with tiny waists. I didn't expect the authors.

The first full aisle we walked down there was a writer set up with such gorgeous artwork on display for her book that I had to stop to find out what the book was about.

Here's a tip guys, if you want to be sure I'll buy something - put a tree on it. If you surround that tree in a high-res soap bubble of color, I'll probably buy two. (Cover photo by Richard J. Heeks)

We were early to the convention which was great because we got to spend some time milling about without the crowds. Had we seen Rachel E. Kelly and her booth a few hours later, she might not have had the free time to talk with me.

Let's talk about the book first. Per the author, The Colorworld Series is about a young woman who can sense emotions when she touches people. She's also broke (author's word). Trying to make a little extra cash, she signs up for an experimental allergy study that attempts to use energy as a form of treatment [gamma rays anyone?], only to come out it with the ability to kill people by touch. It's any kind of skin contact that will do the trick - no intent required - so she's understandably upset. Book one is a quest to find out how to stop it, why it happened, and if the whos responsible intended it all along. Along the way she meets fellow Specials who were made so by the same unknown entity.

I bought book one. I would have bought all three volumes she had with her, but I had brought the small backpack and I had a full day of Contastic amusements to get through. Not a problem though, Rachel gave me a coupon for free shipping if I make my next purchase through her website instead of Amazon or B&N.

Book one is about 350 pages and I'm only a chapter in, but so far I like the writing style and the characters. Her writing is matter-of-fact, good dialog, and so far the character is very real world.

Since I had her all to myself, I asked Rachel a bit about her writing and herself as a writer. She started writing the first book in the series in 2009. She's a stay at home mom and had three kids when she started the project. I marveled at the presumed lack of free time with a family that size and she admitted that she often wrote late at night; staying up 'til four in the morning if the idea she was writing through compelled her. Rachel E. Kelly is self-published and has invested in not one but four editors to make sure the finished product is perfect.

She markets her work by taking it on the road. Rachel, hubby, and their four children travel the Con circuit in an RV shilling the books. This really amazed me. Another thing that impressed me about this thrice-published author was the Kickstarter project she initiated to bring artwork into her novels. They hit their $20k target and she showed me samples of the new books with full-color inserts drawn by a variety of graphic artists.

Here are some other links related to Rachel E. Kelly and her writing - Goodreads and Wizardworld

Her advice to me at the close of our conversation was this -
"If you want to finish the book you are writing, pick a date and tell everyone you know when it will be done by." The theory being that you have to finish because you've committed yourself publicly. I'm really glad that kind of positive thinking worked for her. She had good energy and reminded me of other go-getter woman I have had the good fortune to encounter. Imagine the efficiency this one woman has to exact in order to write, be a mom, be a wife, publish her own books, organize the artists for her second run of press with art, and travel the country in an RV to have two booths at all the conventions. She's my hero.

I want all of you to pick a project you love, one that you know you can finish - that deserves to be finished. Then choose a completion date and share it with everyone you know on facebook, tumblr, wordpress, livejournal, at work, in the family newsletter, that aunt who spends all of her time spreading the family gossip, and anyone who lives in your house - even the animals. Commit yourself publicly, because I really want to see you hit that target.

We could call it the Kelly Date. Is that too fan girl? Considering I haven't finished reading the books, I'm more a fan of what she accomplished, so don't think me too pathetic.

I bought a few more books at Supercon, but Rachel E. Kelly is the only author I got to spend quality time talking to. I'll tell you about the rest of my adventures at Supercon next week and then we'll get back to Writing Humor.

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Be sure to sign up to write with us for July week one. A few people have pre-signed up for weeks two through four as well by simply stating their intent on the initial sign-up post. We are totally cool with that :) Check back in the wee hours of Sunday morning for the official Week One prompt. The whole month will be inspired by "All the small things" since July is a month-o-minis. I'm also considering giving away prizes for each week.

We also have a reading list and voting poll floating around out there that requires your attention. Shane is our votes leader at the moment, but we have until quarter to midnight tomorrow to unseat him (if required). As I say often, go hit up your friends who like to read - encourage them to check out the full list and vote for those what deserve it.

Be sure to weigh in on some of our other articles this week. RicoChey was talking about a different kind of color in your story world and Kathy wants to discuss how your reading tastes might skew your editing choices. Both articles are worth your time.

Hello my friendly Flames,
Let’s talk about humor. Do you write funny?
I had a couple of free hours at work the other day, so I slipped into sneak-a-peek-at-the-internet mode (thank you Samsung). I was looking for advice on a completely different topic when I stumbled across an article labeled: “15 tactics for writing humor”. I had to read it because I like to be funny, but I have trouble syncing my humor with my intent.

For example -
When leaving a job interview the other day, I found myself in the elevator lobby with a young man wearing a backpack sporting the company logo. He was also sipping from a large plastic cup with the logo and holding a paper gift bag in company colors with the three letter acronym emblazoned on the side. I’m not one for small talk, but I’d just left a very chatty meeting I was nervous about. Before I’d really considered my no talking to strangers Suburb Girl rule, my mouth started up and I found myself awkwardly saying,
“Soooo you got all the swag…”
Young man sips something like lemonade, then looks up at me with a question in his eyebrow. I sort of flap my hand around to draw a vague circle around his logo-ed stuff. He shifts his shoulder to look at his backpack in the elevator door reflection.
“I’m leaving the company,” he says. “Today is my last day.”
…
…
…
“Was the backpack not big enough?” I ask with a silly smirk.
Quite obviously, it was a joke. Yet he seemed annoyed like I was prying and explained, “I found a better position.”

This is just one example of me trying to be funny and slamming face-long into the glass.

So what I want to know is, are there really only 15 tactics? Because I need way more help than that. I’m thinking a full battle plan with that involves a map and those wooden carvings that represent troops.

What first made me lean in and really connect with the above article was the author’s statement that he disagreed with the notion that humor cannot be taught/learned. I’ve always thought that the assumption of native talent was logical because some people are funny and some aren’t. Realistically though, most of the unfunny people I’ve met did not even want to be funny. So maybe there is hope for those of us are willing to work for it.
Here are the fifteen tactics from the article in handy bullet points:

1. Overstatements and Exaggerations


2. The Understatement


3. Playing Off a Sense of History and/or Predictability
   
   
   1. On-going Jokes
   
   


4. Relatability


5. Presentation
   
   
   1. Emphasis
   
   
   2. Don’t Laugh at Your Own Jokes
   
   


6. Fish Out of Water


7. Beating Around the Bush


8. Stating the Obvious


9. Over-complication and Over-simplification


10. Miscommunication


11. Defying Expectations


12. Thoughts vs. Words


13. Awkward and Reactionary
    
    
    1. Gutter Humor
    
    


14. Stereotypes


15. Stupidity Humor

There are tons of examples (with links to visuals) in the article from pop culture and the author conveyed his points well, so I won’t rewrite the article. But pulling solely from the resource of the TV show “Arrested Development” I’d like to pick some laugh out loud moments and tie them to their bullet point.

My sense of humor is not typical. I adore the dry British humor and I find stupid humor personally embarrassing. I stay away from exploiters of it like: Ben Stiller, Will Farrell, Adam Sandler. That said, all three of these guys have one or two films in their body of work that I enjoy. Jason Bateman, on the other hand, rarely makes a movie I don’t like. This is how I got sucked into watching “Arrested Development” and evangelizing it like I’d just discovered comedy.

In the very first episode, the family matriarch (an aged, boozy, narcissist who strikes me as the dark mirror version of Nancy Reagan) points out a group of protesters on a party boat near the family’s yacht.
“Just look at those homosexuals. Everything they do is soooo dramatic. It makes me want to set myself on fire!” - That one is a combo of 1 and 14 with a little 5a thrown in.
Her daughter is standing next to her and makes a shocked face over the spoken prejudice, then she points out one of the protesters (dressed like a pirate) and muses that she thinks she has that same shirt. Her mother - ever the caustic wonder - snarks, “It looks better on him.” Mother Bluth makes a face that says she is definitely keeping score and just gave herself a point. Then sips her drink. This speaks to 3/3a, but it’s part-way through the first episode so you can only suspect. The last tidbit of humor the writers squeezed from this scene is that the daughter’s husband is on the party boat of protesters. He joined the group due to a miscommunication (10) and, also due to a miscommunication, he is the only one dressed like a pirate. It is indeed his wife’s shirt.

The whole scene played out in 30 seconds - with a bit of set up throughout the 30 minute episode for the husband falling in with the protesters. To some this might be offensive, but the writers aren’t against homosexuality, they have one character whose tiny mind is exaggerated. She looks down on everyone with equal measure, including her own family.

As a humor bonus, I’ve included this seven-minute video of visual comedy tactics for film that I find really interesting. Edgar Wright (no relation) is a British director I’ve admired for a while. He and his cohorts (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) make excellent comedy together.

[vimeo 96558506 w=500 h=281]

Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

*in case that embedded link doesn't work right, here's another - https://vimeo.com/tonyzhou/edgarwright

Talk to me about your favorite expressions of comedy. What gets you laughing? What kind of humor is a struggle for you? Is there a line or scene in one of your stories that you are particularly proud of? Do you have a favorite comedic writer? Do they write storied fiction or ironic commentaries on life? There are so many things we could talk about under this umbrella, maybe we’ll cover a few specific works in future chatter posts.

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Reminders:
There is a sign-up sheet for June writing. Don’t miss out.

The reading list has been up since Tuesday. There are a few more days to cast your vote.
Read. Comment. Vote.

Our next flamestorming session in Google Hangouts is scheduled for June 14th. Join us for the storm.

Good morning, Flames!
There are just five days until pencils down on our musings on reality.
I would ask you today if you've ever had occasion to alter actual events in your memory to reconstruct reality, but if you had you wouldn't know...

If I could do a survey, I wonder what percent of people would insist that there is one reality - one fixed set of known data about the universe - and all those who do not see it as THEY do must be mentally deranged. Probably close to 100% right? Unless we queried some crazy people. 0_o
Philip K. Dick wasn't just an author who imagined alternate realities for his characters and the future of humanity. Outside of his fiction, he suffered from the persistent belief that the reality accepted by the common man was a version given to us by external forces that wanted to control mankind. He would regularly vacillate between the forces keeping us ignorant so that we would work to attain awareness and those same forces being motivated by the power derived by our obliviousness. PKD alternately attributed the signal he had tapped into - revealing true reality - to divine powers, alien beings, and government agencies.

He just didn't know.

And he spent years trying to work it out. Eight thousand words later, he was no closer to an answer than Einstein came in his quest for a unifying theory of everything. (To which we now know the answer is 42. Sorry Al.)

PKD pushed this new information on everyone he knew well enough to pen a letter to, and made new friends with anyone who would listen. He believed that the books he'd written prior to his first true revelation - when the signal first broke through - came from pieces of that same signal he had unwittingly intercepted throughout his past. Then he began to use his own works of fiction as foundation material for his study of reality. What he wanted more than anything was to be heard and validated. PKD's quest for answers was lonely, infuriating, depressing, and manic. Even the people who listened and nodded (instead of shaking their heads in denial) were on the outside looking in. Other than the rare blurt that it was all a result of having taken too many psychotropics in prior years, he never stopped believing in the signal and the message.

RicoChey asked at the beginning of the month if it was possible that the creative mind is actually a sign of mental illness. If you use PKD as the yardstick, then maybe we writers are all on the precipice of madness.

Have you ever met a person who can swiftly convince themselves of little adjustments to their reality. I don't mean they lie convincingly to you, they lie to themselves and the next moment it becomes their truth.
I was once in a relationship with a man who had this ability. It could be a scary thing to witness. The first time I realized that he wasn't just a stubborn liar - the first time it dawned on me that he believed his own lies completely - I was at a loss on how to handle it and it made me question every anecdote of his life he'd shared. It was never about the big stuff, but there were plenty of little things to make a case for delusional behavior.

Would you tell them that they are wrong? How do you make a case with the proof of your senses against another who is just as convinced their senses reported something different? How long until you start to wonder if they're right and you're deluded? Without a live camera feed recording every shared moment, you can't. In my preferred genre of writing, it makes for an interesting character. But in the real world it makes for a terrible relationship.

Talk to me about your experiences colliding with another's reality.

Then #gowrite while there is still time.

Good morning, Flames!

Let’s take a break from reality, or at least talking about it, to discuss the future.

Being a science fiction fan, my brand of escapism comes with much speculation about the future and what we might find there. There are examples throughout the Sci-fi world of how things authors imagined fifty years ago are real objects or machines in use today. Is it a case of chance, inspiration, or foresight?

A few years ago I was listening to an audio version of “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury when I came across a piece of his speculation that completely jived with modern fact. His main protag’s wife spent all of her time engaged with the people in their dining room wall - family, friends, and even took part in a game show. Ray Bradbury described facebook (and wall screen TVs) in 1953! This still blows my mind. He was wrong about Mars (to the best of our knowledge), and he was wrong about books being outlawed (mostly), but he imagined that the television would take over our lives and somehow incorporate real-time interaction with other people hundreds of miles away. To me that’s pretty cool.

PKD did not do so well in his speculation. I find it humorous as I read through his stories that he can imagine a world populated with robots for all of the mundane day-to-day functions. They have attitude and some sense of personality (always bad) - sneering at people as they demand their payments of nickels and dimes. He refers to them as homeostatic machines, but I’m not sure what he was envisioning when he labeled them because the definition of homeostatic doesn’t really fit.

He also imagines people traveling around Earth in ships and rockets and colonizing moons as far out as Saturn, but secretaries still use typewriters and all of the data of mankind is saved on stacks and stacks of tapes. I’m certainly not criticising the imagination of a man who came up with a plot so densely twisted in on itself that a perfect clone, designed to be a weapon, didn’t even know he was the weapon or even not the actual man until it was too late. And even then he wanted to be a good human, sacrificing himself to save humanity. Or a plot wherein a man is so haunted by his nightmares and confusion he goes to a service to have his memory wiped and replaced with something happy, only to discover that his true memories had already been replaced and he wasn’t the man he thought he was. I guess we all have our strengths.

Robert Heinlein imagined the future would see data storage that would allow the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of ream of paper to be stored on a microchip the size of your fingernail, then he filled a character’s hollow prosthetic leg with them. He predicted the Micro SD card you have in your smart phone right now, and he did it in 1985. (Somewhat less ‘dun-dun’ than Ray Bradbury in 1953...I expected that date to be further back because his characters speak like they are from the Forties.)

Honestly, the plot and the characters are the most important pieces of a story. The rest is just backdrop. And if you consider the effort required to layer a truly memorable plot that catches your reader unawares (without cheating), the props and setting are definitely places a writer might save some brainpower. We certainly don’t want to see them sacrifice good characters and dialog to make their spaceship really imaginative and filled with crazy innovations.

Talk to me today about speculative props and circumstances in your favorite novels. Do you have evidence that any of your authors were visionaries? What about predictions of political changes or exploration?
When you write longer fiction, how much emphasis do you put on the backdrop? How important is it to you when you read or write? Not to leave our poets out, have you ever considered poking at the future in your verse? Do you know of any published poets who have?

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I hope you are hard at work on writing about What is Reality?, #gowrite.

Stay tuned for a new sprint coming Friday evening. Hopefully you found the weekend sprints useful, check them out here and here. We will have a flamestorming session this weekend (Sunday), possibly on Google Hangouts. Check back with us on Friday evening for more details.

Announcements:

We want you! to be a Beta reader. Support your writing community by reading and sharing your thoughts with our writers.

Since it is reminder day, I thought I would be fitting to stir up some old memories.
I apologize in advance to the people of other nationalities and generations who cannot relate to my memory.

Back when I was a kid there was a TV show I used to watch with my parents every week. Most of the spoken humor I was too young to get, but the characters would get themselves into exaggerated situations that were almost slapstick in nature and that I could understand completely.

That show, a spin-off of "Happy Days", was "Laverne & Shirley".

At the kick-off of the title music, the two main characters would link arms, do this little crouch-bob dance and say, "Schlemiel. Schlimazel. Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!". Being a child, I would sing along and do the dance. In fact, I was so obsessed with the sounds of the words schlemiel and schlimazel I would often blurt them out for no reason - at any time of day, in any social setting. Of course back then, most people identified the words with the show immediately. But no one ever told me they had a meaning.



Today, thanks to the magic of #wordoftheday and dictionary_reference. com I was brought back to that childhood memory and have something explained that I had stopped questioning long ago.

schlemiel [shluh-meel] noun, slang.
An awkward and unlucky person for whom things never turn out right.

schlimazel [shli-mah-zuh l] noun, slang.
An inept, bungling person who suffers from unremitting bad luck.

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What are you building for Act II? Be the Bard you've always wanted to be and #gowrite

Another brick in the steps to Bardishness - APAD. We are exactly halfway through the month of April go be a poet now and share it with us. It's a known fact that quoting poetry improves your posture - added benefit.

Did you read what our Flames wrote for Act I? Today is your last chance to show your appreciation for their work through votes. #govoteflames and share a little #commentlove
(Be sure to check out Willa the Wisp's story in Act I - she's a true Flame.)

What's that you say? You want to write 10k words or more in the month of April? And you want to do it from a virtual tent? Well go join the campers over at Camp NaNoWriMo - there are two weeks left in their spring event. Get your words out.

Good Flames, what cheer?

Our writing theme this month was born of Shakespeare and I have a strong desire to chatter in Iambic pentameter. Worry not, I shall refrain.

Over the centuries, there has been much ado made about Shakespeare and his reputation. Some people insist he was not educated enough to have written his plays. They even accuse him of stealing the work of other playwrights. Others will tell you he had some level of familiarity with seven languages and a vocabulary bigger than his eventual fame.

I choose Team Shakespeare. We all know that a formal education is not an indication of intelligence or ability. Being so gifted with words, then he was likely an excellent listener. For someone with the right mind, listening and observing is a kind of hands-on education in itself.

What I have always loved about Shakespeare is the way he plays with words. The sounds they make were just as important to him as the meanings. And if they has more than one meaning - woohoo - those went straight into his bag of tricks to be thrown down like an Ace in the middle of a poker final.

Did you know, that Shakespeare's word play actually created new words that are still a part of our speech today? About 1700 of them, scholars have counted. I found this article yesterday that has a cool grid linking Shakespeare's word to the first play it ever showed up in. He did for language what we still do today, he re-purposed nouns into verbs into adjectives and combined multiple words into a single one. In fact, if Shakespeare hadn't demonstrated that our language was so flexible in this way, we might still be executing a search for a person's published, public references on the internet -instead of just googling them.

Shakespeare was the Bard with googliness.

What's your take on Shakespeare? Have you read his work? Studied his sonnets? Can you quote him on the fly? How many of his plays have you (knowingly) seen on stage or in film adaptations.

I've had the good fortune to see "The Tempest" and "Much Ado About Nothing" acted on stage (in person) and I try to watch all of the film adaptations that follow the plays verbatim. My favorite of all his plays is "Titus Andronicus", but I'm morbid like that, Yo. "Much Ado About Nothing" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" follow on the favorites list.

Talk to me about The Bard today.

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There's still time to get your act together - April's week one prompt is waiting for you.

APAD - soul food - write it while it's hot.

Camp NaNoWriMo - 21 days left. Don't miss it.