Here`s a haikyo I chanced upon almost a year ago in Izu, while haikyoing with Mike (and Jason?). It`s not particularly awesome in any way, it just has some nice peeling red and white paint, and a cool Coke fridge.
story craft #7 The Engine of Fiction
Everybody knows, it`s about conflict. Without conflict a story has no reason to be, it`s just a pretty picture, a post-card.
I think about this a lot with regard to the Dawn book I`m working on. I went to a writing group on Sunday and took along three different potential opening scenes. They each belong to three separate drafts, and are different ways of presenting the beginning of the tale. I asked the 5 other members in the group to let me know which one got their attention the most, and why.
Of course I would hoping they`d choose the most recent draft as the best. I wrote it last week, and it syncs well with the new material I`ve been writing for the beginning of the book. And did they?
Japan’s abandoned Jungle theme park #3 souvenirs
Across the road from Jungle Park was this smashed-up restaurant/souvenir shop. I`ll guess it wasn`t actually connected to the theme park, though it probably survived on the tourists who came there. Inside it felt inhabited, with clothes hanging on rails to dry, but I didn’t run into anyone. The area was very still for most of the time I poked around, with hardly even any cars going by.
‘Kotobu’ (the sign on the front) may be the stem of ‘Kotobuki’ which means ‘Congratulations’.
The Servants
This is more like it. After traisping through the self-indulgent waffle-house that was The Lonely Dead, I felt ready to give up on Michael Marshall Smith, but The Servants proves he’s still got it. He IS able to follow a storyline with some rigor. He IS able to write in a non-glib/smug style. He STILL writes with occasional haunting beauty. Well done that man.
That said, I`ve got some pretty hefty reservations to lodge.
story craft #6 Building the Maze
I was writing several scenes (of my first Dawn book) set in a graveyard recently, trying to get across the wealth and variety of gravestone types within it, but not really succeeding. I got frustrated and disappointed. If I couldn`t show-case the bizarre variety of an ancient and storied graveyard, how could I expect to sell people on a whole fantasy world?
In the past I`ve got over that stumbling block by entering a kind of trance-like state (which I`ve dubbed a flashbang writing style) where I make up words, over adjectivize, pile clauses on top of each other, and turn the paragraph into a boggy maze.
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Japan’s abandoned Jungle theme park #2 inside
Jungle Park was easily the biggest green-house I’ve ever been in, and boy was it hot inside. H-O-T. And very humid. Within minutes I was soaked to the skin, and any time I had to climb something I was panting with the exertion. You can probably see that on the video a few times.
Wandering through its long tail-like corridor to the main jungle hub, I of course wondered where all the humidity was coming from. It’s sealed off from the outside, and has been closed for 7 years. Why isn’t everything inside baked and dead?
Giant’s greenhouse.
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy
I watched the first part of Stieg Larsson’s Milennium trilogy; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in movie form last week, and was seriously impressed. The next day I went out to buy the two sequels, The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and finished them both in less than a week- despite their enormous size of over 700 pages each.
They’re fast-paced investigative thrillers set in Sweden, starring a philandering reporter called Mikael Blomkvist and a seriously screwed-up hacker called Lisbeth Salander, who team up to uncover abominable acts of violence against women committed in the past. The success of the books lies in making us furious about these outrageous acts, making us want to step in and strangle the violators ourselves. This fury drives us rampaging towards the end, hoping for the balance to be reset in a moment of cathartic and bloody revenge.
story craft #5 Make Them Real
I just saw the movie Kickass, and loved it. Of all the superhero movies out there, it was the one that most made me actually get up on the edge of my seat as the main guy goes into battle. He seems real, and it seems like he could get hurt. He of course does, quite a lot.
At the same time, you`ve got Hit Girl bouncing around like your traditional super hero, just about impervious to damage, killing dudes in their slews. The film-makers get to have their cake and eat it too.
How is it done?
Japan’s abandoned Jungle theme park #1 outside
Japan’s Jungle Park is an immense abandoned green house, an indoor botanical garden sheltering nearly 10,000 square meters worth of sweltering tropical habitat. It was built in 1969, and its peak of operation came in 1973 when it received 750,000 visitors per year. By 2003 over 10 million people had passed through its vast and humid acreage, but its facilities were showing their age and fewer and fewer people were coming each year. It was closed in the fall of 2003, and has lain fallow there like a giant white tent for the past seven years.
Jungle Park`s main entrance.
Daemon and Freedom™
These books are the future. I loved them and really hope Daniel Suarez writes more set in this awesomely utopian/dystopian thriller tech world. Damn, they resonated with my world view and my ideas of human tubes and human plus so much. All kinds of stuff I’ve been thinking about and enjoying got incorporated and stepped up to the next level; extra senses, MMORPG’s, blurring reality and augmented reality, along with plenty of butt-kicking bad-assery.
Stunning.