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Ink is the strongest drug, the deepest ocean, the longest journey and the strangest love.. |
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I am a writer... A teen writer... Teen as in highschooler... Highschooler as in insanely-busy-geek-with-no-social-life-outside-of-school-and-abnormal-circle-of-friends-who-are-all-at-school-anyway-and-don't-really-count... *smacks forehead* I don't know whatever possessed me to start doing this, but you know the old quote: "Ink is the strongest drug, the deepest ocean, the longest journey and the longest love..." Okay, so that isn't an old quote. I made it up. But hey, I'm a writer! Rated "T" because I get a little heated when I rant angrily... Not scorching, but more than lukewarm... |
| Blood in literature seems to be an incredibly intamate medium. It is the innermost liquid that is acutally socially acceptible. Tears is another well-beloved and over-romanticised fluid, but it isn't quite as special. Blood only appears in injury, pain and sacrifice. Tears can be of joy: blood never comes without a price. Blood is most vital to survival and has nothing to do with emotions on the whole, except for when your face goes red when you blush. Stomach acids, urine and saliva are all important too, but if you were to write a story in which the hero emerges from battle covered in urine or vomit, or drooling profusely, how many people are going to want to hear anything more about him. (never mind it might be more realistic for someone to have emptied their bladder in a moment of fright...) But bring him out dripping with blood, whether or not it is his and suddenly women and readers are falling all over him and ruining their clothing on this fabulous blood... Blood takes many different forms... Black blood of rot, foul blood of illness, clear blood of laceration... The crimson river of life flowing through its bed of veins and spewing out in a bright fountain at the cut of a sword. (As a lovely teacher of mine says "laughter is a letter away from slaughter...") People, especially fantasy folks, seem to love this specticale of gore. (Myself included... Give me a good clean cut running with blood and I am all over them... Crushing injuries, not so much... Brains... not so much. Blood...) I once wrote a scene in which this character had been lacerated and bathed in blood that never seemed to stop flowing. I loved writing the blood as it flowed between the fingers of those who were trying to staunch the flow. To me, it was romantic having this character bleeding her lifeblood aay until it ran out from under the palm of my hero's hands... The funny thing about this scene was that humans don't even have that much blood. A few quarts is all and even losing something like a fourth of that is enough to kill without a supply of new blood. (I don't know the exact numbers, I'm not a doctor and I can't find my blood notes I wrote for that story...) But there my character was, bleeding buckets and she ends up recovering in something like a week. (You can see that this was one of my earlier works...) Blood, I think, is so popular because it does involve pain and death. A hero who sheds blood to save the world is giving some of himself for others. Jesus is so unique in this respect, that God would come down to earth to shed his own blood to save the souls of the equivalence of dung heaps from damnation... (I am a Catholic...) But yeah, blood=interest more than disgust in my experience. Of course, there are those who are squeamish when it comes to real blood. Its because when you see it before, its like watching someone's essense leaking out before you. Blood is so intamate and private that people shy away from it (even if they aren't thinking about it consciously). I'm thinking about doing a part II to this, since it sort of interests me, probably involving vampires and other such blood-related literature subjects and so on, but I'm not sure yet... Farewell and 'ware the shadows where no man treads, ~GryphonFledglingOfSilverWings |
| October 12, 2006 ~ Tuesday Okay, this has been niggling at me for some time now… Why is it that cliché-d romantic fantasies that are essentially a copy of a million other works just like it out there get the reviews, while the more intelligent works with an engaging plot and mind-blowing characters with minimal or nil romance gets hardly a mention? Now granted, I am most definitely a “quality vs. quantity” type of person when it comes to reviews; I would much rather reach three people who enjoy the story and leave meaningful reviews that are well though out and actually relevant to the content than a hundred of “OMG!! i luv it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! plz update soon!!!! ;)” But hey! I have two very different stories on my Fictionpress.com account. One is quite obviously a romance written by a very inexperienced teenage girl with ideals that were no where near reality and had no idea how to work a plot. I have yet to even consider finishing that work. However, for the 7 chapters that it contains, there are something like 35 reviews. (Not exactly an astronomical figure, but consider that there are like 10’s of 1000’s of works on FP.) Granted, most of these are at least decent reviews and I am truly grateful to have all of them. But then go to my focus work, a considerably more serious and complex story, and I have 2 currently, both from the same person and both of which are the best reviews I have ever gotten in my writing career. Is this typical everywhere? I have seen stories that have hundreds of reviews (I kid you not, 100’s) and they are all “i luv this. Jake is sooooooooooooooooo hot!!!!!  update soon plz!!!!!!!!!” Now, these stories may or may not be all that great, but they still get the reviews. (I have, I will say, read some truly brilliant works where all the author has is the sort of reviews I have shown as examples. They are not all mediocre.) Meanwhile there are some great stories nearby that have next to nothing. Why is this?I have noticed a tendency of these stories being romances, mostly boy-meet-girl, boy-get-girl, boy-lose-girl, boy-get-girl-again plot lines. Maybe it is just the appeal of romance, but still, there are more intelligent works out there… Ah well, I suppose I shall just take the good reviews as they come, shrug off the occasional flame and tolerate all those screaming fans as best I can, even with their uncapitalized sentences, acronyms, random symbols, misspelllings (ha ha, I crack myself up) and excessive punctuation, as well as having nothing useful to say about the story, characters or prose at all… *sigh* Such is the life of a writer… |
| December 11, 2006 ~ Monday Have you ever written a chapter that you hated with a vengence? You sloughed through it at the pace of a three-legged turtle; barely churning out a paragraph a day if that much, some days the keyboard or pencil just collect dust as you sit and read old drafts of other works and feel sorry for yourself. This is usually known as Writer’s Block. And THEN, when you finally have waded your entire way through this swamp of inactivity and typed the final words up, you look back over it and want to gag? I recently finished a chapter in this fashion. I swear, I hated it from the beginning. I had no idea what I wanted to do with this chapter, even though I knew what I wanted to happen in it. I just didn’t know how to treat my vision. So I wrote it. Most of it was in past-past tense (A term I use to describe things written in past tense that happened even more in the past… “She watched the old crone pace back and forth across the room…” vs. “She had watched the old crone pace back and forth across the room…” See the different moods that the two envoke? I usually don’t write in the style depicted in the second example.) and that was already out of place among the other chapters I have already written. And because of this, the chapter was summed up much faster because instead of dialogue, I just sort of wrote “they talked” or something of that nature instead of a conversation. Any actions were run over too quickly and scenes that were supposed to be quick dragged out (in my mind) for eons longer than they were even legally allowed to last. *gag* So I finished this chapter and looked back over it. . . . Have you ever written a chapter that, after you write it, you hated it even more than when you had actually been writing it? That’s about how I felt about this chapter. So now I am rewriting it and suddenly it is working. Huh? Where did this come from? One word. . . . Dialogue. I feel very insecure about writing dialogue. My characters either sound too modern for an epic “Dark Ages” era fantasy or too old and proper for a modern-day fourteen year-old. As my English teacher is so fond of saying “Speak proper English, people think you’re a freak.” I suppose my English is too proper or something because the way I would normally respond to a situation just looks like something out of a textbook on paper. Now, while it is good to be regarded as a freak in everyday conversation or personally, it is hardly believable for an ordinary character. Either the teenager doesn’t care (not that I am saying that any other teen authors don’t care or that there are not any other people in the world that don’t care about their English but me) or (my personal difficulty) most peasants in the Middle Ages were hardly educated on proper speech. As an example from my own work, I had a lovely reviewer point out that ordinary peasants in a small farming town would hardly have the education to choose the term “ill-begot” or “illegitimate” when they what they meant was “bastard.” They wouldn’t skirt around the issue like I would tend to myself, instead, they would be blunt and straightforward about it. If they were insulting a bastard child (as they are in my book) they wouldn’t call his mother a “trollop,” or “unclean woman,” they’d call her a “whore.” But then I have a hard time writing ill-educated speech without it reading like a fake Southern drawl or play-acting idiot. Just leaving off T’s and ending “-ing” words “-in’ “ isn’t enough as I have found. Right now I am working quite hard in coming up with something that actually sounds believable, between more simplistic and commonly used words and combining it with maybe some accent indicators (leaving off T’s or having the character lisp S’s). Any ideas/suggestions? Anyway, so now I am sitting at my computer currently reworking the entire chapter and hoping that I will get it “write” this time. (ha ha ha ha… *slaps knee*) *ahem* Yeah, whatever. |
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I daresay the reviews here on Writing.com are not nearly so shallow as on Fictionpress.