Musings of Two Creative Minds

Well, we're mostly settled into our new place in the Monterey Bay area, so the dust is slowly settling from all of that.  Still unpacking and organizing where we want things to go and how, but that's just normal after a move. But sometimes figuring out how to organize your story and where you want certain events or revelations to go can also be pretty tricky.  It can even lead to problems I'd never thought about, like Writer's Block.  Or, as it was with me recently,  STEALTH WRITER'S BLOCK! Now what I mean by that is a kind of Writer's Block you aren't even aware of.  To give you an example, this is what happened to me.  I had finished a particular scene in my current novel and had moved way beyond it with the rest of the story.   But for some odd reason, I kept finding myself going back to that scene and wondering about it.  It would happen every so often then I'd get back to where I actually left off writing.  But soon enough I was back...

Today's entry is not going to be very long.  But sometimes we don't need a lot of words to get across what we're saying.  Then again, it depends on what you're trying to convey in a scene.  I've recently had an interesting question come up where a friend told me they could write an action but didn't know how to fill the rest of the scene out.  Details, setting, background, etc. were the areas they had trouble with.   I knew this problem all to well, I went through it a number of times and I know other writers have as well.  Interestingly enough in my Writing Class we came across an exercise that really helped me and I'm going to share it here with all of you. It's nothing special but it really helped me and I hope it does the same for all of you. Here goes... MAIN ACTION: She walked out onto the porch. Not a lot there besides the activity.  Now here's the first layer I added to the scene. She walked barefoot out onto the wooden deck of th...

     I took these photos at the Long Marine Lab located on the campus of the University of Santa Cruz.  All of them are of a young Gray Whale skeleton that is 25 feet long and is obviously outdoors.  The creature has been put up on metal pipes to keep it off the ground and give it that more caught in the moment feel.  As you can see in photo #3 it has been placed next to a path and a mere 20-30 feet from a fence that allows visitors to look over a cliff and out at the ocean.  The view there is breathtaking and can really inspire a person's imagination.      In my case it inspired a terrifying scene for my second novel where a young female reporter has been snooping into matters regarding  Cassandra Elliott (billionaire heiress) and her lover Julie DeLuca-Cloudfoot (shamaness and internet erotic lesbian wrestler) my two leading characters for this novel.   They have been stalked by a strange figure wearing clothing...

Just a quick post here.  I put up the link where you can read another scene from my horror/mystery/sci-fi novel "The Bridge".  I'll be posting here about writing again soon.  I'm using the other blog mostly to post samples of my works, both completed and still in progress.  I hope you get a chance to check them about.  Have a great weekend everyone.

Any other writers out there feel like when you're trying to do a scene you keep working and reworking it because something just isn't right.  To me it feels like my novel is a Rubik's Cube.  I know all the parts and where I think they should go but they're just not in the right place.  And trying to get them in the proper place is a BI*** and a half sometimes.  Because every so often I do something in one area of the test and it messes up something I had planned for later.  Or I wind up hitting a dead end and have to go back restart the whole section entirely. Now this has happened to me on a number of occasions.  Some people tell me to have an outline ready but that never works for me.  This is usually because my characters start going in other directions by saying or doing things I hadn't originally planned.  Admittedly I let them get away with it but only if what they want to do seems to be working way better than what I originally planned....