I was going over the archives from this blog, and my previous "home" blog and I noticed that my most prevalent posts were usually about, well writing or updating the blog again. Well to the observant out there, I'm sure there is a collective... DUH, if you don't update that often, when you do it's going to be about updating, or trying to write again.
To try to stave off a deja vu type of post, I decided to do a little self examination for why, or more when does this burst of creativity usually occur? The answer? When I'm more social, I write more.
In personality terms I'm considered a borderline introvert and extrovert. Any test I've partaken of, always put smack dab on the border between being social, and being, well not. In other words, sometimes I'm social and sometimes I'm not. The frequency of which appears to be fairly well balanced, to such a degree that I can't be pigeonholed one way or the other.
I then noticed that when I slide further in to a social state, I want to write more. That is, I want to express myself in more forms then previous. When I slide back to a non-social state, I can still be creative, but I usually output my expressive nature through other non-thought laden means.
Anyways, I thought it was just an interesting observation. Now that I'm aware of it, maybe I can figure out how to bank some of this output, or at least provoke it more often.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Sunday, November 30, 2003
Nanowrimo.org
I came, I brain stormed, I wrote
Today, the 30th of November, in the year of our lord 2003 anno domino, I completed my 50,000th word for the Nanowrimo.org contest/challenge. I did it in near marathon capability, as I finally made a sort of breakthrough. Last Monday I was still pedaling around, a little over 20,000 words behind, and only a week left. I then found the capability to start cranking out 3000 words a day, and finally tonight, from around 10:30pm till 8:00am I cranked out 6,500 words of pure mayhem.
Continue Reading "Nanowrimo.org" »»
Even more odd, is that my writing did improve as I went along. The first few chapters as I now look back are weak, yes. The first few chapters averaged at maybe 1,800 words a chapter. The final chapters, at a whopping 4,000 words a chapter (including the combined 11+12 at a mega 9,852 words). I learned to work my characters, how to come up with names, how to identify with them, how to describe and I have started to learn how to balance description with dialogue.
And yet, I'm still not done. Oh, I've finished the 50,082 words, passing the mark that was challenged. I now plan on taking a week off, letting my arm heal and my brain fill backup. I do not know if I'll ever sell this novel, but I will try to at least finish it. I will also leave the first 14 chapters online, and even update them as I edit to give you the reader a taste of the book. If by chance I sell it, we shall see what happens, and hope I can retain or have some say in the electronic rights.
But now, have fun reading the novella, and remember, after chapter 8 it does pick up a bit and get better.
You can read Thunderhead to the Storm's first 14 chapters here
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Nano Nano who?
Never let it be said, that the what one person thinks of, another person can also. In from a more memorable saying, "Great Minds Think Alike". Near the beginning of this blogging expierence, I told you the reader, that the may emphasis of this site would really be about learning how, and to write. Even if it's a short story, or an article about Elephant kidneys, it was all about writing everyday in order to train myself to write. Going back over what I have done, you could say that I've failed in the exact regard, though succeded in several key intentions. Still though, I need to write. So of course I'm zipping along on a wierd tangent and come across something that might just give me the kick in the pants to do what I trully want to do, and that's write.
It appears that a like minded group of people for the last five years has been challenging people to write, just for the sake of writing, and do what they keep saying that would do someday, just right now. Over at NaNoWriMo they are challenging people, to write 50,000 words in 30 days. In essence, if you enter the challenge, you have only from November 1st, at 12:00:01am till November 30th, at 11:59:59pm to write 50,000 words. The catch is, all you win is the satisfaction you wrote 50,000 words in 30 days and your name on their winner's list. On the upside, they don't edit or read your works, so it doesn't have to be perfect or magnificent or even sane; it just has to be 50,000 words. You could of course right the word triangle 50,000 times and win your name on the board, but what's that all about anyways? Up to this point, something like 3,000 people have won that same right in the last 4 years. So it's not about being special, it's all about doing something you said you were going to do.
Thus I, your blogger in resident, have decided to enter this challenge. I will write 50,000 in 30 days; that's 1,667 words a day. I will do so with hopefully a consistent story line, characters and such, and I will finish a novella. The catch is, while others have had nearly a year to plan a storyboard, characters, etc... I have just about 8 days at this point to collect together something from the scraps I've been writing over the last 12 years.
To recap: I'm entering a contest, with no prize another then self satisfaction, to write 50,000 words of some story in 30 days. I'm doing this on 8 days notice. I'm insane. And I'm going to go down in flames but having fun at the same time. The good news is of course my new night shift of doom, which gives me lots of freetime while restricting what I can and cannot do, thus allowing me hours of time to write something.
So do you dare to try also? Cheers
Monday, April 14, 2003
[TB] Creativity in Action
Creating something out of nothing, is the virtual basis for humaity. Making new life, putting up a skyscraper, designing an aqueduct, playing music, writing a story, telling a story, are all part of the creative process enjoyed by people. For many people, this process is keyed by the imagination, in order to invoate, or invent that which hasn't been done. Since humanity has been around a long time however, this process often also occurs because someone was inspired by someone else's previous work. The problem becomes though, where does the fine line lie between actual inovation, and downright theft of an idea?
While creativity itself is a broad category, as evident by the act of destruction that in itself is unique for every event, the act we will focus on today, is the design of popular art, speficially fanfiction and fanart. The reason why this is our focus, lies in the inspiration of the author. First though, what is fanfiction (fanfic for short)? Fanfic is the art of taking popularized media, such as a favorite tv show, movie, story, or other artwork, and creating something new inside its universe. Usually such creation is a short story set in that magical universe, or a piece of art on the characters or things of said exsistence.
Fanfic itself, has been around for a long time, although the term and the genre as we know it, really came into itself just in the 60's and 70's at the height of liberalism and creationism. Prior to that, fanfic was mostly the retelling of popular stories from a parent to a child, where they change the story ever so slightly. Lifewise today's "fanfic" is still often a more personal form of creation, where one inserts themselves into the story. Thus many such pieces are never viewed beyond the artist's own hands.
However, starting in the 60's and especially in the 70's, fanfic began to rear its head into the daylight of society. Largely due to the popularity of expression, artists began to come together and promote magazines called Zines. Home made magazines, Zines were largely sold around conventions of fans. At the time, and even now, these conventions were also because of the popularity of science fiction.
These days with the advent of the internet, and cable tv, fanfic has literally expanded at light speed across the world. More and more people have learned how to become self-published, and in the process released their creative spark upon a world that might have shunned them from being to individualistic before. Herein lies the problem.
Prior to the advent of zines, and especially the internet, such fanfic was largely ignorant of other fanfic. People might write a story similar to another, all beacause they didn't know of each other. Now though that others know and often see each others works, the problem of orginality falls into a murky water of ethics and morality.
Actually, you could even go beyond that and say that fanfic itself is an immoral thing as it is artwork base off of someone else's creation, and largely done without their permission. However, in most cases the orginial creator sees this form of expression as a tribute to the popularity and acceptance of their own work. Frequently they also then ignore such fanfic, so as to not become inspired from the grey copyright complications that might arise from the fanfic. Unfortunately when they do pay attention, sometimes unforseen problems, such as disagreements, general dis-like, or the fanfic artists attempts to capitilize on the work, can cause said same legal issues to arise, but usually in reverse.
Either way, fanfic and fanart are a largely tolerated being, pandering more to the unseen consumer artist then the creator artist(s). Thus, ethically, unless the creator blantantly challenges the use of their material, and as long as no money is made off of the fanfic, ethically the fanartist is fine to do with the universe as he likes. Often this either means putting the characters into sexual situations for adult purposes, or the "Mary-Sue" style of sticking oneself into the storyline just for the purposes of playing the hero and or villain.
The real problem is, once you've accepted fanfic as imitation art off a popular art, whats to stop some imitating the imitation? And is it ehtical or moral for the 2nd party to feel wronged by the 3rd party?
Lets take an example, and why I brought this up today. Star Trek, a very popular sci-fi series, has spawned its own culture and huge volumes of fanart and fanfiction. Personally I have tried my hand at writing a new fan-series inside the large universe. As part of the process I invented my own ship, and crew, but attempted to keep myself within certain boundaries that I saw and accepted. Make the ship look real, don't override the accepted cannon of the universe, don't use any previous characters, and make it good enough that people might question why keeping it offscreen. So far, I'm 3 out 4, though the last will probably take me awhile as this writer block is hindering finishing not only one epsiode, but more to the series.
Anyways, as part of the process that lead to this fanseries, I designed a new ship, never before used in the universe. I designed based off three known designs, and one therotical design, thus making the ship possible within the universe I had envisioned. Since I like designing starships, and such I felt a little pride in what I had done within the boundaries that I had set. Such pride that I submitted the design to a fan run website www.shipschematics.net about such designs. I considered my design to be better then 90% of the other designs there, and it made me feel good. Unfortunately, the site dropped offline not long afterwards and it dropped from my mind. A year and half later and I was doing some searching and found that the site had returned once more. At this time I was more actively considering writing the series to go along with the ship and did a search to check my spelling of the submitted craft.
Eventually I found the design, albeit slightly mispelled. Nothing major to worry about there, no need to even correct it. However I did find something that did worry me. Apparently someone else had seen the design, liked it, pulled it off the website, and then proceded to edit the design. I was shocked, not because it had been edited, but because when they did, they had just slapped a wierd pair of half nacelles (something not even inside the accepted universe), didn't even bother really matching it with the line, such that it looks out of place, and submitted it with their name attached.
Initially my first thoughts were, "How dare they!", however as I thought about it, and the whole morality of fanfic to begin with, I calmed down, and started to wonder, why my design? The first part of this was to determine how and when this had taken place, it was then I got my second shock. The person in question hadn't just done this with my design, they had done this with a couple of dozen designs. They had blantantly added some pieces of psuedo Star Trek stuff to each ship, sometimes the same items, sometimes something different, hadn't bothered to match the designs, the flow, or even the tech, and had submitted each and every design with their name attached. Thus they were now in the ship database where someone would almost invariably see their name, somewhere.
Unfortunately with no way to contact this artist, I can only begin to speculate why he did this. Most likely he is minor variant on what is called a "Troll", someone who does what they do, in order to get attention, usually by angering a 3rd party. Some consider themselves artists in how they go about doing this, others not as such. In this gentlemen's case though, I still feel a little wronged by what he has done to my design.
The final question though is; In this wierd, grey area of art, imitating art, imitating art, what is the ethical and moral right that I have, or anyone has, to a 3rd party changing my work, without my permission. Should I be allowed to feel angered, or sad, or should I just not care?
While creativity itself is a broad category, as evident by the act of destruction that in itself is unique for every event, the act we will focus on today, is the design of popular art, speficially fanfiction and fanart. The reason why this is our focus, lies in the inspiration of the author. First though, what is fanfiction (fanfic for short)? Fanfic is the art of taking popularized media, such as a favorite tv show, movie, story, or other artwork, and creating something new inside its universe. Usually such creation is a short story set in that magical universe, or a piece of art on the characters or things of said exsistence.
Fanfic itself, has been around for a long time, although the term and the genre as we know it, really came into itself just in the 60's and 70's at the height of liberalism and creationism. Prior to that, fanfic was mostly the retelling of popular stories from a parent to a child, where they change the story ever so slightly. Lifewise today's "fanfic" is still often a more personal form of creation, where one inserts themselves into the story. Thus many such pieces are never viewed beyond the artist's own hands.
However, starting in the 60's and especially in the 70's, fanfic began to rear its head into the daylight of society. Largely due to the popularity of expression, artists began to come together and promote magazines called Zines. Home made magazines, Zines were largely sold around conventions of fans. At the time, and even now, these conventions were also because of the popularity of science fiction.
These days with the advent of the internet, and cable tv, fanfic has literally expanded at light speed across the world. More and more people have learned how to become self-published, and in the process released their creative spark upon a world that might have shunned them from being to individualistic before. Herein lies the problem.
Prior to the advent of zines, and especially the internet, such fanfic was largely ignorant of other fanfic. People might write a story similar to another, all beacause they didn't know of each other. Now though that others know and often see each others works, the problem of orginality falls into a murky water of ethics and morality.
Actually, you could even go beyond that and say that fanfic itself is an immoral thing as it is artwork base off of someone else's creation, and largely done without their permission. However, in most cases the orginial creator sees this form of expression as a tribute to the popularity and acceptance of their own work. Frequently they also then ignore such fanfic, so as to not become inspired from the grey copyright complications that might arise from the fanfic. Unfortunately when they do pay attention, sometimes unforseen problems, such as disagreements, general dis-like, or the fanfic artists attempts to capitilize on the work, can cause said same legal issues to arise, but usually in reverse.
Either way, fanfic and fanart are a largely tolerated being, pandering more to the unseen consumer artist then the creator artist(s). Thus, ethically, unless the creator blantantly challenges the use of their material, and as long as no money is made off of the fanfic, ethically the fanartist is fine to do with the universe as he likes. Often this either means putting the characters into sexual situations for adult purposes, or the "Mary-Sue" style of sticking oneself into the storyline just for the purposes of playing the hero and or villain.
The real problem is, once you've accepted fanfic as imitation art off a popular art, whats to stop some imitating the imitation? And is it ehtical or moral for the 2nd party to feel wronged by the 3rd party?
Lets take an example, and why I brought this up today. Star Trek, a very popular sci-fi series, has spawned its own culture and huge volumes of fanart and fanfiction. Personally I have tried my hand at writing a new fan-series inside the large universe. As part of the process I invented my own ship, and crew, but attempted to keep myself within certain boundaries that I saw and accepted. Make the ship look real, don't override the accepted cannon of the universe, don't use any previous characters, and make it good enough that people might question why keeping it offscreen. So far, I'm 3 out 4, though the last will probably take me awhile as this writer block is hindering finishing not only one epsiode, but more to the series.
Anyways, as part of the process that lead to this fanseries, I designed a new ship, never before used in the universe. I designed based off three known designs, and one therotical design, thus making the ship possible within the universe I had envisioned. Since I like designing starships, and such I felt a little pride in what I had done within the boundaries that I had set. Such pride that I submitted the design to a fan run website www.shipschematics.net about such designs. I considered my design to be better then 90% of the other designs there, and it made me feel good. Unfortunately, the site dropped offline not long afterwards and it dropped from my mind. A year and half later and I was doing some searching and found that the site had returned once more. At this time I was more actively considering writing the series to go along with the ship and did a search to check my spelling of the submitted craft.
Eventually I found the design, albeit slightly mispelled. Nothing major to worry about there, no need to even correct it. However I did find something that did worry me. Apparently someone else had seen the design, liked it, pulled it off the website, and then proceded to edit the design. I was shocked, not because it had been edited, but because when they did, they had just slapped a wierd pair of half nacelles (something not even inside the accepted universe), didn't even bother really matching it with the line, such that it looks out of place, and submitted it with their name attached.
Initially my first thoughts were, "How dare they!", however as I thought about it, and the whole morality of fanfic to begin with, I calmed down, and started to wonder, why my design? The first part of this was to determine how and when this had taken place, it was then I got my second shock. The person in question hadn't just done this with my design, they had done this with a couple of dozen designs. They had blantantly added some pieces of psuedo Star Trek stuff to each ship, sometimes the same items, sometimes something different, hadn't bothered to match the designs, the flow, or even the tech, and had submitted each and every design with their name attached. Thus they were now in the ship database where someone would almost invariably see their name, somewhere.
Unfortunately with no way to contact this artist, I can only begin to speculate why he did this. Most likely he is minor variant on what is called a "Troll", someone who does what they do, in order to get attention, usually by angering a 3rd party. Some consider themselves artists in how they go about doing this, others not as such. In this gentlemen's case though, I still feel a little wronged by what he has done to my design.
The final question though is; In this wierd, grey area of art, imitating art, imitating art, what is the ethical and moral right that I have, or anyone has, to a 3rd party changing my work, without my permission. Should I be allowed to feel angered, or sad, or should I just not care?
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