And Now, For Something Completely Different…

Writer Zen Garden Posted on by

I know, I know. Usually I post chapters of The Night Is a Harsh Mistress. I promise, I’m working on it. I even am doing so with the collaboration of my coauthor, Rachel! I think we’re going to come up with some good ideas for it that will interest you.

But for today, I want to share with you the results of a challenge from Romance Divas. For those of you that aren’t familiar, Romance Divas is an online forum of writers, authors, and readers. It consistently is listed as one of Writer’s Digest’s Top 101 Websites for Writers, and has received accolades from the writing community – and not just romance. Composed of authors writing in many genres besides romance, it is an excellent place to learn, grow, and network.

The challenges are great fun. Authors who are interested post that they would like to play, and challengers give them a scenario. The writer must respond within 48 hours with a flash that is under 750 words, meets all the points of the challenge, and that is PG-13. It’s a good way to practice writing quickly, and one can use an existing or new WIP (work-in-progress).

My challenge this go-round was from author Jason Linetsky. The particulars were:

  • Genre of choice.
  • Scenario: Your h/h has to travel over a great distance for a very important meeting. It must be a straight through trip as in no layovers/stopovers in a method of your choice.
  • Required elements: An old owners manual, a helium tank, a fake id, and a chihuahua … KIDDING! No chihuahua! … and a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

Here is what I came up with. Enjoy!

Untitled

Zeta woke to the lovely strains of Chihuahua in full bark, accompanied by the symphony of shrill hungover White trash. God damned trucker hotels. The barking cut off with a yelp and sympathy for the stupid animal burned through Zeta’s chest.

Figured.

He rolled out of bed and took a piss, then set the coffee on to brew. He moved the owner’s manual for the ancient Helium tank back onto the bed. The tank itself sat there like a huge, half-rusted torpedo from the sixties. Here’s hoping the thing worked as well as a torpedo, or Monroe was gonna kill him.

Thank God that dump had water pressure.

Then again, heavy water pressure on bruises wasn’t the sort of thing a man wanted to wake up to…

He managed to grab the bottle of vodka from the counter next to the coffeemaker without dripping too much water everywhere. Some half-drunk yuppie kid gave it to him last night at the bar, wobbly with martinis and Zeta’s blowjob. Kid wasn’t half-bad at it himself, Zeta’s lower brain reminded him, but he swigged the vodka instead of focusing on his morning leftover reaction.

Didn’t taste nearly as good as it had the night before. The label read “Grey Goose Vodka” with a picture of a fjord and geese flying overhead against some mountains.

Mountains…

Hell, he tried everything else…

Then he heard it. The door rattled and jiggled, then the unmistakable turn of a key. He snatched his gun off the towels by the toilet and waited, heart pounding.

“Hey, gorgeous, I’m back!”

The aroma of eggs, bacon and coffee hit Zeta’s nose like a steam train and his stomach yowled like a starving cheetah. Christ. Why did his assailant have to bring food? He’d be a helluva lot easier to shoot if he’d been some snaggle-toothed asshat with body odor.

Of course not. It was the yuppie from the bar.

Christ. How the hell much Vodka did Zeta drink?

And what the hell was the kid’s name?

“I know you said you’re in a hurry to get to Oxnard, so I got breakfast for us. Oh, good. You’re almost done.” The yuppie set the food on the table by the window and grinned at Zeta. His large brown eyes crinkled at the corners, and smile lines just starting by his mouth gave him a friendly appearance.

Yup, he was as hot now as he was in the bar, vodka or no vodka.

And he was stripping… A steady pile of discarded clothing littered the floor behind him as he approached Zeta. “You just let ol’ Chico wash your back, hmm?”

Zeta stubbed his toe getting out of the shower. “No, I really can’t. Monroe will kill me if I’m late.” He paused, a towel in his hands. “You go by ‘Boy’ in Spanish?”

Chico shrugged, stepping into the water but not quite closing the curtain all the way. Man, he had a nice ass!

“My nickname is Chico, so that’s what I put on my fake I.D. You really go by the letter ‘Z’?”

Zeta flushed. “My name’s Alex.”

“’Xander’ begins with an ‘X’.” Chico winked. “And my name is Pedro.”

“To my best friend in grammar school, Xander sounds like a ‘Z’.”

“What was her name?” Chico finished in record time and joined Zeta on the mat to dry off. He pulled the towel out of Zeta’s hands and finished his back with quick movements that reawakened all of Zeta’s senses, then slapped his ass. “Go eat while I finish. We have to get on the road.”

“How do you know it was a girl?” Zeta dressed in jeans and his Elvis t-shirt, sandals and a belt. He stuffed the rest of his clothes into his duffel and then went to investigate the food.

“Because no dude would name you Zeta.” Chico bent and kissed his neck, then whispered in his ear. “So hurry up and eat, will ya? I want to see if you make as much noise driving when I go down on you as you did last night.”

Zeta’s heart started pounding. This was seventeen kinds of stupid, but damned if he wasn’t gonna do it. Monroe didn’t have to know about his new partner, and besides.

It would make the drive go a lot faster.

He grinned at Chico, chewing a bite of bacon and eggs, and the most gorgeous yuppie latino on two legs grinned back.

Damn fine truck stop.

Wiley Wednesday: Mapmaking

Writer Zen Garden Posted on by

“No, put it there.” “No, over there.” “On the bureau, can’t you see?” “What bureau?” “The one in the bedroom!”

Discussions about space sometimes plague us. Where do we file that client information? Where do we put the new hire? Where do we store all the books that we bought? We just bought a new TV, now where do we put it? What about the bin for recycled goods?

This is true for our characters too. The worlds we create for them to inhabit are places that need to be as real to us as our own home. If we put a tree in the front yard in the morning, it better be there in the evening when our character comes home from work – or a neighbor cut it down, it fell over in a storm, or the city came and trimmed it. It can’t just go “poof.”

So… How do you keep your trees from going poof? Because, after all, tree poofage is a leading cause of stress among writers, according to a recent poll.

Maps!

That’s right, I said maps. Draw a map of your space. You can draw a map of a room, a house, a street, even a planet. Even if you can’t draw very well, you can at least sketch in the main points. Where IS that pesky tree, anyway? Who lives to the right of the house? The left? What’s the name of the street?

This is an old trick of fantasy authors, to draw maps of their worlds for readers to use. Some of them are quite elaborate and beautiful. But it can be useful even for “regular” world building. For example, in our upcoming release of BURNING BRIGHT, Rachel and I have a restaurant and bar called the Factory. We sat down and drew out how many tables there are on the main floor, where the bathrooms and kitchen are, the stairs, elevator, back door, and other elements are. That way, when our characters move around in the space we know what direction to turn them, what they see when they do it, and how to avoid walking them into walls.

Try it with your house. Take a piece of paper out of your printer, and a use a pencil. See if you can’t draw your home, starting at the property line. Mark where the driveway is. Where do you park? Imagine coming home from the grocery store, and follow yourself from the moment you shut off the engine. Do you go in the back or front door? What’s the room you enter when you first come inside? Where’s the kitchen? Bathroom? Bedroom? What’s in the back yard? (A tree?) Fill in details as you go and don’t be afraid to erase and start over. It takes practice, and it doesn’t have to be pretty – it just needs to be clear.

Tell me in the comments if you tried it, how did it go? Or, alternatively, how do you manage your imaginary worlds?

Wiley Wednesday: Return on Relationship

Writer Zen Garden Posted on by

One of the social media marketing buzzwords floating around is “return on investment.” (ROI) This is a metric, a measurement, of how “worthwhile” your social media efforts were.

The problem is, when quantifying, you can’t take into consideration the depth of a networking connection–only things like how many times a post was viewed, tweeted, or commented on. It’s hard to reduce human connection down to numbers, but many marketing experts make an art and science of it.
Even the term itself is scientific. I guess since social media takes time, and time is money, it is an investment. But that implies that your followers and their messages to you are some sort of currency, which defeats the whole purpose of SOCIAL media, doesn’t it?
Then came Ted Ruben, who coined the phrase “Return on Relationship.” (ROR) This change in wording brings a whole paradigm shift. It’s not about how many followers you have so much as it is the relationship you build with them.
To increase your ROI, you employ techniques like catchy headlines, tweet blasts, hashtag abuse, and, for some, what borders on spamming followers–because it’s all about the bottom line of “how many people can see my message.” It’s a lot of talking into the empty air of cyberspace.
ROR focuses on something more important: how many people will READ my message, and, more importantly, how many will ACT on it? To increase your ROR, Ruben suggests that you listen, focus on meeting the needs and desires of your audience, engage with them in the long-term (not just long enough to get a single comment), and, above all, knowing your audience.
Genius, I say. To learn more about ROR and meet some awesome tweeters who are all about it, follow the #RonR hashtag, @tedruben, or read his blog at http://www.tedrubin.com/

Wiley Wednesday: A Useful Tool

Writer Zen Garden Posted on by

After taking a creative writing class last quarter, I was introduced to an interesting website that I think many people will find helpful.

It’s called Duotrope’s Digest.

It’s free to sign up and you can essentially shop around your story for mainly online publications, I think. It allows you to shop by genre (really specific genres, too). You can also track your submissions, when you submit, where and when you get a reply (you, of course, have to input that all yourself). It also gives you details on the publication, such as when/how often they publish, their acceptance to rejection ratio, what type of stories they accept and average length of stories they publish.

I think it’s very useful for the aspiring writer. And someone could probably just use it to find stories within a specific genre they enjoy using the search tools, as well.

Keeping the Faith

Writer Zen Garden Posted on by
I recently finished reading an m/m book from the “Heaven Sent” series by Jet Mykles. I really enjoyed “Faith”, the story of Heaven Sent drummer Darien and his burgeoning relationship with the lawyer who finalized his divorce. Attorney Chris Faith is not only every bit as likeable as members of the band, his believable flaws make him very approachable to the reader. My kudos to Ms. Mykles.

For his realism, the character actually inspired this blog post with what I consider an interesting dimension. In short, Ms. Mykles created Mr. Faith as a rather stuffy but consummate lawyer with a passion for acting. The Englishman went so far as to have Shakespearian training! This understandably impresses Darien, who wonders what it would be like to watch his new lover on stage. Alas, he seems to keep this admission to himself.

Meanwhile, the lawyer’s reason for staying out of the limelight as legal counsel to actors and musicians stems from a dislike of auditions. His career puts him in touch with people he admires without the potential risks inherent in artistic performance. That sounds exactly like fear sabotaging Chris Faith’s inner creativity.

In my humble opinion, Chris Faith has lost faith in himself. He needs to follow at least one course in Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”. I’m even half tempted to contact Jet Mykles to ask that she evolve this character into a man living his artistic potential. Do you think she’d be amused or think I’m crazy? Maybe I should just keep this fan girl notion to myself. What do you think?