Ape's writing thread

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Mendalla said:
My first random thought was something supernatural and gothic but that's a bit too Anne Rice. Probably need to come up with something more original.
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Maybe somehow work music in there? I think of Mardi Gras and I think of music/dancing.
 
So I have put on the "Made in New Orleans" playlist on Amazon Music as I work today. Maybe it will spark something. ;)
 
For whatever reason, maybe a bit of SAD or something like that, I have been unable to actually write a story about Mardi Gras. Several false starts, but nothing that I felt like carrying through. So, I am officially out of the competition unless my muse swats me over the head with a story idea in the next 4 days.
 
So, not much happening on the writing front, at least that I can share here.

I am in a competition on my NSFW (Not Safe For Wondercafe2) writing site. The theme is Punked and we are invited to partake in any of the myriad "punk" genres of literature (cyberpunk, steampunk, splatterpunk, etc.). Mine is a bit more generically punk, though the world is "five minutes into the future" so the general feel is kind of cyberpunk. It was only 5000 words so the fun part was trying to build a world, characters, and a relationship (I refuse to have empty, meaningless sex in my erotica) in that limit. I think I pulled it off but we'll see what the judges say. Closes end of this month. I won't post a link due to site content but have been known to share links to my smut privately. :whistle:

Now I've got a new comp on my "safe" site, Storiesspace.com. "Myths and Monsters". On the one hand, I'm all "Hell yes, baby" for this one. As someone who loves mythology and primarily writes fantasy, this is right up my alley. I should be all over it like chocolate sauce on ice cream On the other hand, I've been in the dumps writing-wise for quite a while so not sure I can muster the time and energy I will need. Even the story I talk about above only happened because an idea smacked me upside the head after a few false starts. There's only a month to get this done and they are allowing the site's maximum word limit (10,000 words) with a minimum of 1000 (so a flash is out).

That said, there's a partial draft sitting on my Google Drive about a woman who befriends a kraken (more or less, a tentacled thing anyhow) while in exile from her home city, where her family were persecuted by the powers that be. So maybe I'll finally finish that and enter it. The idea for it has only been languishing for about 3 years.:rolleyes:
 
Sometimes I think there's a marked similarity between writing projects and craft projects.

There's often something in the stash you can do something with.
 
BetteTheRed said:
Sometimes I think there's a marked similarity between writing projects and craft projects.

There's often something in the stash you can do something with.
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See, I used to be terrible for rage-quitting stories and hitting what we know in Windows as SHIFT-DEL (i.e. permanently delete without going to the bin). I have gotten better after getting chided by other writers. I still do it occasionally, but it is usually a story that I know is off the rails and I plan to restart from scratch using the same basic idea.
 
New idea came to me on a rather sleepless night the other night. Just fleshing it out in my head but wrote the opening scene last night. The story arc still needs work, but I can refine as I write. Genre will be "dark fantasy" most likely but hopefully with a bit of humour sprinkled in. Main character is a woman who is more than she first presents as.
 
So after struggling with story idea after story idea, I bashed out a comp entry today. Not one of my earlier ideas, but something that just came to me this morning so I started writing. Though the germ of it goes way back. My brothers and I joked on occasion about there being a monster in the lake where our family's cottage is located (the xx Lake Monster). I just ran with that and did a horror-cryptid story on that concept. There's a whiff of kaiju ("strange beast" in Japanese, the genre that includes things like Godzilla) happening there, too. It has a couple gruesome moments but I don't get too graphic with them. Could probably get an AA or something rather than an R if it was a movie. Won't publish for a couple more days. Need to let it stew and do some more editing. But I am like 99.99% sure this is the one I am entering.
 
Back at it (well, I did some writing, but the type I don't talk about here). I am, as often happens, trying to do a horror story for Halloween. Digging into the Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos tradition for this one. Here's a post I wrote on StoriesSpace about my history with Lovecraft and The Mythos.

The World Building Thread

World building is something we all do as writers. For s-f and fantasy writers, it is part of our… - - Forum
www.storiesspace.com www.storiesspace.com
 
So I have the new story basically done. The question I am wrestling with is what to do with it. I have a 3300 word Lovecraftian (somewhat) horror story in hand. StoriesSpace has not had a story that long in at least 3 months, since the last competition. In fact, it has turned into a site dominated by micro (100 word max), flash (1000 word max), and poetry with the odd short story creeping a bit past the flash limit. And views are way down. I have stories on my NSFW site with more likes than stories on SS have views. So I am kind of reluctant to post it there.

So, I am actually looking at trying some professional and semi-professional markets before posting on a site like SS. But finding horror markets that are a good fit for this story is proving harder than I expected. There's one called The Dark that seems promising but as a new writer, not sure how I would fare there. They publish some folks who are fairly big in the genre. Then there's a couple others that don't like they'd get me much more of an audience than SS. The only difference would be that I would get paid.

Something like Wattpad, a much bigger writing site, is also an option but my reading about them suggests my style might not fare as well there.

Will try to make a decision this weekend. I do like the story, just figuring out what method of publication would serve it best.
 
So after my sojourn in the realm of cosmic horror, I am now moving to another pulp staple: Sword & Sorcery. Though in the end, the story is more mythological fantasy, even if the hero is a muscle-bound master warrior in the vein of Conan the Barbarian. Jadek Prynn is his name, which is a weird name that has been stuck in my consciousness for eons so I finally decided what "Jadek Prynn" should be like and built a story on that. It's fairly short, maybe even a flash (1000 words or less). However, I am really just on the first draft and there's some stuff i wouldn't mind fleshing out a bit more so it might go past 1000 words eventually.

The other thing I am debating is how this connects to my other stories. I have name-checked Nethandra, The Goddess of one of my existing worlds (she appears briefly in my award-winning story The Goddess Dances, helping a lesser goddess) which would then put this into that world but I am not sure. It feels a bit gratuitous but would also open the door to the characters showing up in future stories. Jadek Prynn, in particular, is someone I would not mind using again though there's reasons I might not. But that could also be done by building a new world around him as Robert E. Howard more or less did with Conan.

Hopefully will get it done in the next few days. Of course, there's also the neverending debate over whether it does on StoriesSpace or somewhere else. Might look at some fantasy e-zines I have bookmarked to see if any are taking submissions.
 
Mendalla said:
So after my sojourn in the realm of cosmic horror, I am now moving to another pulp staple: Sword & Sorcery. Though in the end, the story is more mythological fantasy, even if the hero is a muscle-bound master warrior in the vein of Conan the Barbarian. Jadek Prynn is his name, which is a weird name that has been stuck in my consciousness for eons so I finally decided what "Jadek Prynn" should be like and built a story on that. It's fairly short, maybe even a flash (1000 words or less). However, I am really just on the first draft and there's some stuff i wouldn't mind fleshing out a bit more so it might go past 1000 words eventually.

The other thing I am debating is how this connects to my other stories. I have name-checked Nethandra, The Goddess of one of my existing worlds (she appears briefly in my award-winning story The Goddess Dances, helping a lesser goddess) which would then put this into that world but I am not sure. It feels a bit gratuitous but would also open the door to the characters showing up in future stories. Jadek Prynn, in particular, is someone I would not mind using again though there's reasons I might not. But that could also be done by building a new world around him as Robert E. Howard more or less did with Conan.

Hopefully will get it done in the next few days. Of course, there's also the neverending debate over whether it does on StoriesSpace or somewhere else. Might look at some fantasy e-zines I have bookmarked to see if any are taking submissions.
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I just listened to the CBC radio with an author talking about her book Gods and Robots that talks about how some of these Gods resemble our AI today. Look up Talus ( also called Talos or Talon)....who was a giant automaton made of Bronze made to protect Crete and Europa from pirates and invaders. Automation from 400 BC!
 
Waterfall said:
I just listened to the CBC radio with an author talking about her book Gods and Robots that talks about how some of these Gods resemble our AI today. Look up Talus ( also called Talos or Talon)....who was a giant automaton made of Bronze made to protect Crete and Europa from pirates and invaders. Automation from 400 BC!
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A lot of s-f historians do cite Talos as, if not the first literary robot, then at least as an inspiration for them. He's actually rather like an Ancient Greek mecha (giant fighting robots in Japanese comics and animation).
 
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