Rat Dog

The Fiction Writer's Workshop resumed after a two week hiatus. This week's discussions centred around plot. My favourite quote of the evening is an unattributed one as follows:

What do your characters treasure most? Put it at stake and let your characters fight for it.


Think about any story that has captivated you and odds are the above quote applies.

During the workshop we also took a look at the last assignment from our workshop on Point of View. There were two choices from that workshop. The one I chose was as follows:

Please use the past tense for this exercise. One to three pages.
(Any point of view)
The lobby of a swanky apartment building--the doorman is opening the door for a female tenant just as a man walking a small dog passes the entrance. A potted plant falls from a sixth floor window narrowly missing the woman. The dog strains at the leash and paws through the remnants of the potted plant.

Quite the springboard. It actually ended up being 8 pages but once I started I had to keep going. I had a lot of fun with this one and it can be found over at the fiction notebook. I called it The Rat Dog.

Those who know me will recognize my long standing dislike of diminutive canines is creeping into my fiction. I have long held the belief that if it's smaller than a cat then it forfeits its right to be called a dog. And then there are the cat-sized ones that fall into the realm of what my friend Diane calls "kickin' dogs". I guess anything less than knee height falls into this category. Anything higher than the knee technically qualifies as a dog but if I need to stoop to pet it - well, that's iffy.

I'm happy to report that Loremaster's beginning has been rewritten and with some luck and hard work the manuscript will be revamped in short order. So far the story remains the same with a healthy portion of house-cleaning and technical corrections. Looking forward to getting it submitted so I can move onto something new...

Something new involving demons...

Just around the corner...

I've been assured that Spring is coming. If you believe the Press it came last week. There are even signs that the season of renewal is desperately trying to make its presence known. Over the Easter weekend my son and I played basketball in the driveway - twice. The family went for a great long walk the day before yesterday along the still snow choked-path along the Grand River but it was mild and pleasant and the water was actually flowing - moving - not frozen!! And yesterday, to top it all off - a big fat robin in the back yard! Actually a pair of big fat robins hopping merrily around the bird-feeders. Joy of joys - winter must be over if my sweet friends the robins have come back.

Today those same sweet, sweet harbingers of Spring are probably taking shelter in the cedar hedge that runs along the western edge of my property cowering and wondering what the hell they were doing showing themselves yesterday. Today, as I look out the window, my eyes are greeted by a wall of white. Yes, the day after the universally agreed upon sign of Spring shows up we're find ourselves in the grip of a March blizzard.

That's life.

Speaking of "That's life" my wife directed me to a little something on YouTube. It's actually the last lecture made by a fella called Randy Pausch - a professor dying of cancer. He was featured on Oprah but don't let that dissuade you. If you follow the link, I promise you it's worth a look.

I also found out today that a geeky kind of teenage hero of mine passed away earlier this month. That's right, folks, the father of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax is dead. Back in 1974 along with his buddy, Dave Arneson, he created a world of escape where every shy awkward kid could, armed only with a pencil, some graph paper, a fist full of multi-sided dice and an imagination become a hero of epic proportions. For those of us who were a little awkward and ...well, a little geeky...it was very empowering. It was in large part the game of D&D that help inspire my interest in writing fantasy. Farewell, Gary, you'll be missed.

Writing is going slowly. I have set aside most of this week to clean up Loremaster for the eventually submission to DAW. The writing workshop gears up again this Thursday and I'm sure there's something I should have put together for that that will need to be addressed either tomorrow or Thursday morning.

The other bit of news is that although Windows Vista, in my opinion, really, really sucks, there is one part of it that I have discovered leaves XP in the dust. That feature is the built-in Speech Recognition software. My daughter is very musical and asked if there was a way we could record her voice on the computer. I knew that there was a dusty old microphone plugged into the basement office computer from my previous flirtation with Speech Recognition with XP. Well, eventually the microphone found itself plugged into the Vista-driven laptop. Low and behold, a new interface and a computer begging me to talk to it. After a little training I was running applications and surfing the web without placing a finger on the keyboard. I am, thus far, impressed.

Better get back to the other writing now...

2008 Elora Writer's Festival

Last week I attended to kick-off for the 2008 Elora Writer’s Festival. The turn out wasn’t as good as it could have been but hey, we’d received yet another 25 centimetres of snow the previous day so that could have had something to do with it.

There were local personalities from our newspapers and the cable station. The author who hosts our Fiction workshop, Michael Hale, was the master of ceremonies. In attendance also was actor, Colin Fox of PSIfactor fame (actually his IMDb listing is as long as your arm, PSIfactor doesn't begin to describe his accomplishments).

During the festivities the writers who will be reading from their works were announced and you can visit the website for a full accounting. The theme and format of the 5^th Annual Elora Writer’s Festival Writing Competition was announced as well. This year the format is “A Harvest of Words” – follow the link to enter.

The other bit of news from the evening is that the guy who never wins anything (that’d be yours truly) won a door prize. I received 2 books from our local bookstore, Roxanne’s Reflections. The books were Helen Humphrey’s Wild Dogs and Laurie Gough’s travel memoir, Kiss the Sunset Pig. I haven’t read them yet but a quick flip through Kiss the Sunset Pig had me laughing.

Last week at the Fiction Workshop the assignment was to create a scene or situation where two characters come together and each wants something from the other. I don’t know how exactly it happened but this was a springboard to one of the most grim things I’ve ever written. So grim, in fact, was the story that I felt the need to go out in the world and be among people after I finished it. I went for a walk downtown, rented a movie and bought some goodies for the kids just to be among people and get centred.

What is this grim story? Well, it is called Just Business and can be accessed at the Fiction Notebook.

There’s no Workshop for the next two weeks but I am keeping busy cleaning up Loremaster and doing odd jobs around the house. Loremaster should be ready to go out into the world by the end of the month and hopefully I’ll have the bathroom renovated by then too…