Not dead, nor given up!
So I've been absent, you could say. Luckily for me it's just been from the blog. I HAVE been writing. Really.
I've just been focusing on my fantasy manuscript and I've also worked on two separate short stories for WoF, that are queued up for critiques on CRITTERs.
Being the beginning of the year (although really already February.. yikes!) I'm full of resolutions, right? I'm actually taking steps towards them, by looking for local LA resources. I'm going to a writing group this weekend, creative writing, to see how it goes. Supposedly I'll have material at the end of it, which I might post here, if it's any good.
Also, thinking about it, Death of a Hero is much too similar to the movie Hancock, I hadn't caught onto that because I hadn't seen the movie, so I'll just post it here. Seems like a dead end that would need major rewrite to be anything.
I've been catching up on the podcast that started all of this, Writing Excuses, and one of the episodes really struck me. It had someone from BAEN books and the president of the SciFi and Fantasy Authors of America (iirc) and it was very interesting, but the thing that hit me so hard was a comment about how people submit stores that have already been written before.
They weren't talking about plagiarism, at least I don't think they were. They were talking about someone who thinks they've got an original idea, and runs with it, but the manuscript doesn't get past the slush pile because it's too similar to something else. Now as I write this I think it was actually someone from TOR on the podcast who said it.
Anyway.
The point is, thinking about Death of a Hero, which I can only promise to those who read it that it wasn't plagiarized from Hancock, or even inspired by it, it's scary to think that some of the things I think might be so fresh and original might actually be rehashes of previously explored thoughts by someone else.
On the podcast they attributed this to someone who hasn't done their homework, or hasn't read enough in the genre, to recognize when it might be happening to them. I found this to be just a tad unfair.
I'm 36 years old. I've been reading books without pictures in them since I've been about 9-10, mostly fantasy, some sci-fi, some horror and a bunch of thrillers. You can see my list on my Goodreads profile, filled out to the best of my abilities. I admit that I've only recently started getting into anthologies (and fairly recent ones, at that) to better grasp the concept of the short story and how it's structured and plotted. My Dad actually sent me a book in pdf recently with the note "this was the first scifi book I read" (I haven't gotten around to reading it, but I put it in the queue).
My point, and what annoys me, is that there's no realistic way for me to "catch up" with all of these classic books that I'm supposed to have read. If I compiled a list of all the books that are mentioned in the podcast alone as "must reads", I'd have to go away for a few months and spend 10 hours a day reading non-stop, and even then I might only catch up on a single genre, imperfectly.
Take, for example, some Asimov stories, epitomized by the Foundation series. Talk about a classic, right? Well, sure, I read the first Foundation book last year, in my attempt to insert a classic between every two current books I read, and yeah I enjoyed it, but it didn't exactly stand as the shining pillar of awesomeness that it's been described to me as.
I'm not saying it's a bad book, by any measure, but it didn't strike me or impress me as it probably did my Dad, for example. It's like a kid who reads the Lord of The Rings after reading A Song of Ice and Fire. You might recognize the epicness of the piece and if you force yourself to think about the period when it was written, what society was like back then, etc, you might get an idea of how groundbreaking it might've been at the time, but it will most likely not impact you as much as if it had been the first or second fantasy series you read.
For me, Tolkien was actually my 4th fantasy series I read, I think, because my Dad told me I should read it if I liked Fantasy. And I did, and I loved it, it was great. I wasn't too dazzled by the constant singing or poetry in it, but the story was great. Even back then I recognized it as the precursor of so many tropes. Kind of like Dune, which is awesome. I hadn't really read sci-fi before and Dune was actually my first book in that genre if I'm not mistaken. It blew me away.
All my favorite authors stand on the shoulders of legends that came before. I'm well aware of that. Is it wrong, though, that I don't stand in awe of some of them? If I read a book and think it's just OK? I think I might be excommunicated from the writing world, sometimes, for feeling this way.
I don't know what the answer is, and I don't want to be bitter about it. Someone telling me "you need to read more" would make my blood boil, in part because I know I do ( and I would love to), and in part because when am I supposed to have read these 300 books written before I could read? There's so much cool stuff coming out now, that is current and relevant and so well written...
Maybe it''ll be something I can do if I don't have another job, but until then I will always have the uncertainty: has this been written before? Am I just treading among old ideas? I suppose I could always google the plot points in my stories.
Anyway.. rant over. I'll post Death of a Hero after this.
I've just been focusing on my fantasy manuscript and I've also worked on two separate short stories for WoF, that are queued up for critiques on CRITTERs.
Being the beginning of the year (although really already February.. yikes!) I'm full of resolutions, right? I'm actually taking steps towards them, by looking for local LA resources. I'm going to a writing group this weekend, creative writing, to see how it goes. Supposedly I'll have material at the end of it, which I might post here, if it's any good.
Also, thinking about it, Death of a Hero is much too similar to the movie Hancock, I hadn't caught onto that because I hadn't seen the movie, so I'll just post it here. Seems like a dead end that would need major rewrite to be anything.
I've been catching up on the podcast that started all of this, Writing Excuses, and one of the episodes really struck me. It had someone from BAEN books and the president of the SciFi and Fantasy Authors of America (iirc) and it was very interesting, but the thing that hit me so hard was a comment about how people submit stores that have already been written before.
They weren't talking about plagiarism, at least I don't think they were. They were talking about someone who thinks they've got an original idea, and runs with it, but the manuscript doesn't get past the slush pile because it's too similar to something else. Now as I write this I think it was actually someone from TOR on the podcast who said it.
Anyway.
The point is, thinking about Death of a Hero, which I can only promise to those who read it that it wasn't plagiarized from Hancock, or even inspired by it, it's scary to think that some of the things I think might be so fresh and original might actually be rehashes of previously explored thoughts by someone else.
On the podcast they attributed this to someone who hasn't done their homework, or hasn't read enough in the genre, to recognize when it might be happening to them. I found this to be just a tad unfair.
I'm 36 years old. I've been reading books without pictures in them since I've been about 9-10, mostly fantasy, some sci-fi, some horror and a bunch of thrillers. You can see my list on my Goodreads profile, filled out to the best of my abilities. I admit that I've only recently started getting into anthologies (and fairly recent ones, at that) to better grasp the concept of the short story and how it's structured and plotted. My Dad actually sent me a book in pdf recently with the note "this was the first scifi book I read" (I haven't gotten around to reading it, but I put it in the queue).
My point, and what annoys me, is that there's no realistic way for me to "catch up" with all of these classic books that I'm supposed to have read. If I compiled a list of all the books that are mentioned in the podcast alone as "must reads", I'd have to go away for a few months and spend 10 hours a day reading non-stop, and even then I might only catch up on a single genre, imperfectly.
Take, for example, some Asimov stories, epitomized by the Foundation series. Talk about a classic, right? Well, sure, I read the first Foundation book last year, in my attempt to insert a classic between every two current books I read, and yeah I enjoyed it, but it didn't exactly stand as the shining pillar of awesomeness that it's been described to me as.
I'm not saying it's a bad book, by any measure, but it didn't strike me or impress me as it probably did my Dad, for example. It's like a kid who reads the Lord of The Rings after reading A Song of Ice and Fire. You might recognize the epicness of the piece and if you force yourself to think about the period when it was written, what society was like back then, etc, you might get an idea of how groundbreaking it might've been at the time, but it will most likely not impact you as much as if it had been the first or second fantasy series you read.
For me, Tolkien was actually my 4th fantasy series I read, I think, because my Dad told me I should read it if I liked Fantasy. And I did, and I loved it, it was great. I wasn't too dazzled by the constant singing or poetry in it, but the story was great. Even back then I recognized it as the precursor of so many tropes. Kind of like Dune, which is awesome. I hadn't really read sci-fi before and Dune was actually my first book in that genre if I'm not mistaken. It blew me away.
All my favorite authors stand on the shoulders of legends that came before. I'm well aware of that. Is it wrong, though, that I don't stand in awe of some of them? If I read a book and think it's just OK? I think I might be excommunicated from the writing world, sometimes, for feeling this way.
I don't know what the answer is, and I don't want to be bitter about it. Someone telling me "you need to read more" would make my blood boil, in part because I know I do ( and I would love to), and in part because when am I supposed to have read these 300 books written before I could read? There's so much cool stuff coming out now, that is current and relevant and so well written...
Maybe it''ll be something I can do if I don't have another job, but until then I will always have the uncertainty: has this been written before? Am I just treading among old ideas? I suppose I could always google the plot points in my stories.
Anyway.. rant over. I'll post Death of a Hero after this.