 Action/Adventure: June 04, 2025 Issue [#13167] |
This week: An Orphan Finds A Home Edited by: Legerdemain  
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An Orphan Finds A Home
His name is Louie...Baby Louie. The article I read was about a clutch of fossilized eggs that originate in China. I think it's pretty cool that we're still digging up the past, literally, and recording the interesting stuff we find. (Did you know archaeologists even dig up old latrine locations? That's for another article.) Anyway, the scientists pore over the hardened bones and yolk and decide they don't know what species Louie was from. All the adult versions of that species were too small to pass that size egg.
Physical semantics aside...scientists finally found the possible giant parent sized oviraptorosaur fossil of little Louie. And the ostrich-like adult would have weighed as much as a rhino and been as tall as an elephant. Not something I'd really like to see pecking around in my front yard. I have enough trouble with canadian geese thinking my mulch is a comfy place to hang out...even though my cats might disagree.
So in the span of 25 years or so, science matches a family of dinosaurs. There was always the "what if" in the forefront of the discovery, it merely took a few years to assemble the picture. It certainly makes one wonder what else lies beneath our feet waiting to be discovered, if even on a microscopic level. Like in the movie Men In Black...there could be entire constellations.
As always, dream...and Write On!
This month's question: Do you like to take news articles and twist them into a story line?
How do you use that in your writing?
Answer below  Editors love feedback!  |
Excerpt: āHow the bloody hell is a person supposed to find the correct train in this place!ā the old man shouted at the young man at the ticket counter. His voice echoed off the 15 meter high ceiling of the elegant historic train station.
Excerpt: Jenny Cornhusker ran down the road toward Wallaceās barn. She knew heād be there and Jenny needed to talk with someone about what sheād seen. After several minutes, she finally stopped outside Wallaceās barn entrance. She doubled over to catch her breath and push the sweaty, blonde hair away from her face.
Wallace, apparently having heard her pounding steps, met her at the entrance. A head taller than her, she noticed his lower lip jutted out further than normal, indicating heād just placed some chewing tobacco in his mouth. āWhatcha runninā from, Cornhumper?ā
Excerpt: Elsa and Anna were walking in the woods and heard growling noises that shook the forest and mountains. Elsa wondered what was going on. Bruni showed up and made wind and was whirling around.
"Bruni, not now. We have to see what all the fuss is about." Bruni landed on Elsa's shoulder.
Excerpt: My mom and dad were both school teachers and taught summer school most summers in Dade County Florida. During this time my brother, Bill, and I would go to Decatur, Georgia to visit my grandmother, Nanny. We loved to go to her house. The neighborhood park was just the other side of her back yard fence and the public library was right down the street. I loved to read and spent a lot of time in that library.
Excerpt: āWhat do you think of Amanda?ā I asked. āNot too friendly, huh?ā
āNo, sheās not,ā Dan replied. āShe seems to be getting worse, now that sheās on her muscle-building kick.ā
āFor sure,ā I chimed. āLittle Miss Attitude.ā
Excerpt: I can't believe I'm sitting here waiting to get a tetanus shot because a god damn dinosaur had to come up and bite me out of nowhere. Not just any dinosaur either, it had been a T-Rex, the most feared of all. That's what I had told my mom and she'd about blown my ear off yelling, calling me an idiot, wanting to know the real reason I was getting a tetanus shot that day. Of course I hadn't been bitten by a dinosaur, its 2014 and dinosaurs have been extinct for going on a couple hundred million years now. But I wasn't exactly lying when I had told her it had been a vicious T-Rex that had latched onto my arm, refusing to let go, because it had been. It just wasn't exactly a real dinosaur either. More along the lines of a 5 year old boy with, in my opinion, a far too active imagination.
Excerpt: The only thing in life my father had ever concerned himself with was money. He listened to the stock market reports and read the money columns in the Wall Street Journal, spoke of profit margins and percentages, but alas, he was not a rich man; he was just plain-old-cheap. He was frugal to a malignant fault.
Excerpt: The early morning had started out foggy, what I call dinosaur weather. As I headed into the Oakland foothills on Nomad, my Honda trail 90 motor bike, all around me was damp gray fog as far as I could see. Leaving the valley, Nomad took me up Mountain Boulevard until we reached Snake Road. The fog grew thicker the farther up the winding narrow road we drove.
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This month's question: Do you like to take news articles and twist them into a story line?
How do you use that in your writing?
Answer below Editors love feedback!
Last month's "Action/Adventure Newsletter (May 7, 2025)" question: Do you use videos to help your description process?
Rick Dean - Dinosaur  : Relying on videos for research? There's a time and a place for everything. But if its something that is of interest to the character and it's important to the plot, watching a video isn't going to cut it. For example, when David Morrell wrote First Blood he literally trained himself in outdoor survival. When he wanted to write a spy novel, he studied CIA fieldcraft at their school in Virginia. The lessons he learned are invaluable. These are extreme/expensive measures but if you're committed to your craft, the experience is invaluable. Not to mention that it will give you new skills and new experiences to enrich your life outside of writing. If you don't know about a topic, my advice would be to let someone else write that story. The saying "write what you know" has endured for a reason.
Now on the other hand, if your character is a pilot and the story is about his relationship with his wife, sure, a couple clips for background will suffice. It's no longer central to the plot.
In my own writing I created a pirate novel. But before I wrote I spent three years researching Caribbean history, global history in the 17th and 18th century, and read close to 100 books on the topic and gone and visited the settings. I'd even found replications of old nautical charts from that era that showed channels, harbors, water depths, tides, etc. that leant an extra layer of reality to the story.
Not only is my life more full from these experiences but even after the novel was done, the knowledge stayed. When it came time to write the short story, Walk The Plank (linked), that research was already done.
I understood the people and places because I'd done the work. For a short story, that'd be excessive, but to truly bring a story to life requires a bit of commitment.
Monty  : I do not never have and slowing up on writing a lot. I only have been writing Poetry here for a long time but the action news letter helps at time where I have been writing for 40 years.
S š¤¦  : When I teach writers how to construct fight scenes, videos are a primary tool I get them to use. Videos can really help writers who do not think visually or have not experienced what they write about.
Jeffrey Meyer : Only tangentially. That is, I might see something in a program or video that inspires or suggests something for me to write about. But I never consciously play a video with the direct goal of using it for inspiration.
Brian K Compton : Two examples: "Touchstones in an Ordinary World" and "Idle Adoration (I'll Sing To You)"
Embed YouTube videos and use rhythms and emotions of songs to wash over me. Rarely, response poems, itās music I identify with by artists who would get meā¦akin to Roberta Flackās āKilling Me Softly.ā
Thereās been 100s of entries. I think there is a current activity to blog something daily with an embedded video. Did it years ago when Jayne and Lilli were green.
Mousethyme : How would you use a video in a novel?
Bianca : In 2014 I had to write a sock knitting course; from this concept they made videos in which I had to explain from start to finish what the steps were. Nowadays I use the same videos to teach people. But not in my story writing though.
D. Reed Whittaker : I don't use videos, but I almost always have a picture to help me and the reader. I currently use co-pilot, now that unsplash has gone commercial. They used to be free and I'm cheap.
dragonwoman : I'm with you keysfake.I was getting my portrait done by a friend and listening to the theme from 2001 a Space Odessey and I started seeing a whole new film that had nothing to do with the original! so cool. Wrote it out later as a long story.
Thanks for your responses, they're appreciated! L~ |
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