In the course of writing an exercise piece for class, I ended up writing what might work as a short scene for my Miska story. It’s a bit odd, given that I changed narration style, but the core conflict feels right. I hope you enjoy it!
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Flash Fiction Challenge: Attack of the Titles
I have been driving around with my brothers today, on our way to visit our mother for a big party / art show of hers. To make up for my delayed post, I’ve overdone Chuck Wendig’s “come up with a title” challenge for this week; instead of giving you only one title, I’ll give you, um, fourteen. Or maybe sixteen, though I suppose at least four of them are either variations or jokes of some sort. Oddly enough, I found it far easier to write too many titles than to write just one. As long as I thought I only had to write one, I felt kind of stuck. Once I knew I was writing “lots,” I felt free to write whatever the hell came to mind. It worked pretty well, I think. Go past the break to read my list. Quality not guaranteed.
World Building: Where Have All The Dwarves Gone?
Today’s post is brought to you by the caffeinated musings which have distracted me from my homework and encouraged me to write world background material instead.
The setting of For The King! is largely lacking playable non-humans at the moment. There are a few dwarves or elves who might be somewhere in the realm of Duval, and there are some gnomes and halflings and others scattered around, but most people, in most places, are human. The orcs and half-orcs mostly live to the northwest of the kingdom, generally part of the large nomadic tribes which roam through those sections of the Trade Lands. Heck there are centaurs too, but they generally stick to the lands northeast of the kingdom of Duval, and don’t have much direct contact except with traders who venture out onto the northern plains.
And yet there are remnants of dwarven architecture throughout the center of the kingdom of Duval, and historical records definitely suggest that they used to live in the area. So… where have all the dwarves gone?
Flash Fiction: Barium Deeper
More Star Citizen related art, just because.
I wrote this piece for terribleminds, because my last piece was 1000 words too long for this week’s space opera challenge. This piece sticks with Barium, but is set many years after the previous one. At least ten years after it. In case you’re confused by the multiple names, Bury’em = Barium = Barry, and Casi = Cesium. Enjoy!
Flash Fiction: Barium Deep
Gorgeous artwork by George Hull, for the game Star Citizen
I didn’t write the following bit of space drama with the above image in mind, but it’s a beautiful fit anyway. What follows is another piece of “middle grade” fiction, one that holds true to the more classically action-adventure oriented stories that I usually like to tell. Enjoy!
(Note: There’s now a great deal of other Barium Deep material here. This is the edited version of this same post, and this is the collection of other posts linked to Barium Deep.)
The Middle Grade Character Intro I Actually Used
Remember how I mentioned being dissatisfied with my work on Wednesday? As you might gather from the title, I wrote another 500 word piece rather than use either of those two. I am, as ever, somewhat dissatisfied, but I still like this one. It’s… fun. And somewhat painfully reminiscent of my childhood. Enjoy.
Middle Grade Character Introductions
Part of my homework for this week was to write a “two page” character intro for an engaging Middle Grade character. I dislike “pages” as a measure of length when I’m writing, since I don’t use Word and see no reason to change that, but that translates to roughly 500 words. Of course, I wrote one and wasn’t satisfied, so now I have two that I’m not totally satisfied with. I feel like they do a better job of introducing conflict and drama than they do of introducing a particular character, if only because I have little tolerance for writing an opening scene that doesn’t start something.
In any case, here’s two Middle Grade scenes presented back-to-back, with no real relation between the two. Oh, yes, and one of them is actually about Jerome from my Elven Progenitors setting. Enjoy!
The Golden Princess, by S.M. Stirling
It’s been a while since I read any S.M. Stirling, and I picked this one up more on a whim than anything else. I’d gotten tired of the most recent spate of Change novels, probably because of a disconnect between my expectations and what Stirling was delivering. I wanted Stirling to write an active story about a smaller group of characters, with palpable progress in the plot achieved in the course of each book. Stirling did create that progress but it was far slower than I’d hoped for, and he spent more time focused on the milieu of the story rather than advancing the story that I wanted to see resolved. In fact, after the first trilogy the pace of progress slowed precipitously, until it was almost a crawl.
The Golden Princess doesn’t change that pattern. What did change was my expectations of what I’d find in reading the book. And I have to say: reading these books as milieu fiction, as much about the world in which they take place as they are about any of the characters, is far more fun and rewarding than reading them with expectations of tight and fast plot. Definitely worth starting up the series again.
Flash Fiction: I Do Not Forgive You
This brings me back to my terribleminds flash fiction habit. This week, our prompt was to use a character someone had created last week and write up to 2000 words about them. By my count, I’ve got 1847 below the fold. The character I used is inspired by the post here, by Pleasant Street. I say inspired because, while I use features of the character Pleasant Street created, I largely do away with the setting that they made to go along with her… not because I didn’t like it (I did), but because my ideas took me in a different direction. I hope that you like it, and I especially hope that Pleasant Street is able to appreciate it. Enjoy.
Fistful of Wits 