A speculative mind

In my writing journey, I have had help along the way. I had some pretty good teachers in school that got me going. But in retrospect, a lot of what they taught me didn’t stick (Subject? Object? Participle? What?). When I was in college I fancied myself as a short story writer. I churned out a lot of stories that did not go anywhere. Then I had the experience of taking a writing lab at Idaho State University. That meant one-on-one two days a week with Dr. William Gibson (no, not the guy who wrote Neuromancer, though that would have been interesting; this one was an English professor). That was painful, stressful, hard, but ultimately I would have to say it was necessary. He tore my writings apart, showed me how bad they were. Things that I thought were clever and funny, he found to be trite and overdone. It was kind of a confidence killer. But I made it through. I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that I seemed to be very fond of comma splices. Okay, I learned what a comm

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is a group (organization, cult?) that tries to encourage people to achieve the rather bizarre goal of trying to write a novel in 30 days. The rules are simple. You start writing on November 1 st . By midnight on November 30 th if you have written 50,000 words, you are a “winner”. It does not matter what you write, how good it is, what genre it is. If you write 50,000 words, you win. This has been going on since about 2000. In 2016 there were 445,000 participants worldwide. I first got involved in 2007 as a way to encourage my wife (who is also a writer) to get writing. I really wasn’t sure what it would be like. I thought I might work on it for a few days. I don’t think I really believed that I would finish. But then something happened. That something was named Nikki. See, when you sign up for NaNoWriMo at https://nanowrimo.org , you are required to join a region. This is intended to connect you with people in your area t

Here is my big announcement: My Science Fiction novel, Star Liner, is going to be published.   I actually signed the contract back in March, but I wanted to wait to announce it until I could see enough activity to know it is really happening. Yes, it is really happening. They were not playing an April Fools prank on me. Okay, I have trust issues. I wrote this novel during NaNoWriMo last November (If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, don’t worry, next week’s article is all about it). After whipping out the first draft in record time, I realized that the point of view was not the best (see last week’s blog about point of view). It was written in third person, but I found that it would really make more sense to write this in first person. The story needed to be told by the main character Jan Stot. Ugh! There was nothing for it but to go through the whole novel and change the point of view from third to first. I went through the whole thing once, then, (to find what I had missed) I u

What is this point of view stuff anyway? So a person who shall remain nameless, recently told me that they were confused about the different kinds of points of view in writing. This seemed like a good topic for my first blog post, so here goes: First Person: The narrator is telling you his or her personal story. This has the advantage of letting the audience make a personal connection with the main character, to really get inside his/her head. The disadvantage is that you only get the point of view of one character. The reader only gets to see what that character has seen and can remember. Often uses the pronouns: I, me, we. Example: Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael . . .” Second Person: The narrator is telling you what you did or what you want to do, or will do. This is almost never used in novels, more often in advertising copy. The disadvantages to this are obvious as it can be very limiting and awkward. Often uses the pronouns: you, your, our. Example: Winnie the Poo