And The Second Story Rides Again

I slacked last week on writing that second entry for The Writing Show contest. I admit it...I spent the time I normally set aside for writing instead on watching Torchwood and Doctor Who specials. Torchwood: Children of Earth was a five-parter on consecutive nights and Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead was Sunday night. Torchwood rocks...despite the twist and that I wanted to punch Davies in the face for the cliffhanger...and Doctor Who could have been better but I loved the flying stingray creatures. Both of these are supposed to be setups for continuing storylines (sniff...no more Tennant?...)

Anyway, my last entry said that I had 2,971 words in my work-in-progress. My current word count is 3,883, so I managed to add 912 words tonight while also making it a palindromic number. Cool beans! (Ever wonder why the word for a palindrome isn't one?)

I'm not too worried at this point because I already figured I'm cutting a large chunk out (the rules are that this has to be less than 5,000 words). I have actually been thinking of incorporating this into a larger storyline that's swimming around in my head, so if I can properly sculpt this into something that isn't necessarily a polished turd (actually, after watching that episode of Mythbusters...it might be a good goal to make a polished turd. They're kind of neat) I might try incorporating it into a larger storyline. The big if is whether or not I can make this into a story that might be appropriate as a short story with a Halloween theme. I also need to figure out if, when writing a parenthetical, does the period go inside the parentheses or outside? I favor the outside because it just looks right to me...but I don't know.

Anyway, I'm aiming to get the rough draft done this week so I can beg my wife to help with editing it next week. Wish me luck!

What Defines a Work as "Yours"?

Here's a question.

I had entered The Writing Show's Halloween story contest. I had written, over the course of four or five days, a 5,000 word story (okay, it was closer to 6,000 at the time, but it had to be pared down for requirement reasons).

As you can tell from reading blog entries my "first drafts" are entirely in need of editing. After I wrote the story I had help from my wife in cutting sections and seeing what areas she thought could use rewording, rework, or clarification as well as grammar and punctuation alterations.

I had some very cursory feedback from the sponsor of the contest; it sounded like my entry, in her opinion, was decent. The contest goes on until the end of August so there's plenty of time for others to far outshine me but just having someone say that it seemed like a good short story to read was a nice boost to my confidence.

One thought nagged me, though. She never saw what I actually wrote. What she got was probably 95% mine, but the edits? Grammar and punctuation that was corrected? Some impetus to rewrite or cut paragraphs? Those were my wife. My story was cut from near 6,000 words to around 4,800 or so.

Part of me tells my inner voice that it's ridiculous. The story was mine. Plot. Majority of descriptions, theme, etc...I came up with all that in this case. But I still have that nagging thought of, "At what point is the story no longer yours?"

Is there a point where the editing is so different that your original writing is just too different to be really yours, but instead a definite collaboration?

Maybe that's a question for others more experienced in the field of authorship. Right now it's an intellectual curiosity for me. Anyone out there have some ideas?

My Sister's Keeper

On the way back from a recent trip, I suggested we stop and see a movie. It was the last chance we would have for awhile to watch something without having to make sure it was family-rated (for the four year old) or necessarily mainstream pop-culture (for the teenager).

The theater just happened to have a showing of My Sister's Keeper, based on the Jodi Picoult novel. My wife had loved the book and mentioned wanting to see it. I thought it would not be my kind of movie but I also thought she would enjoy watching it.

For those unfamiliar with the story the movie is based on a simple premise: how far will you go to save the life of your sick child? In this story, Kate, is diagnosed with cancer and requires a range of treatments ranging from blood transfusions to bone marrow aspirations and eventually a new kidney. The parents are not compatible matches, so they have a child that is engineered by selecting the proper sperm and egg from the mother and father to ensure that the resulting sibling will be the correct genetic match for body parts.

In other words, they had a little girl for the express purpose of having spare body parts for the sick child.

Time goes on and the little girl is loved as their own child should be but at the same time Anna has been used for stem cells, cord blood, bone marrow, blood transfusions, and when the time comes for a kidney to be transplanted, is first in line for the surgery.

For reasons that escape her mother Anna decides to hire a lawyer and sue her parents to be "medically emancipated" so she cannot be compelled to donate more body parts, thus resulting in what she knows would be her sister's death.

I didn't read the book; my wife said that the ending of the movie was different from the novel, and she didn't like some of the editing resulting from the movie.

My feeling was that the movie was based on one premise (is it ethical to have a child to use for spare parts?) and create a story by sticking that premise on a woman that had come to define her life on fighting for her daughter's life to the detriment of her son and other daughter, her husband, and her career. Her entire reason for being was keeping her daughter alive.

The movie also had a disjointed feeling as the narrative jumped not just from one person to the next, showing their perspective on the story, but also through time, showing the interaction of the family members at various stages of Kate's cancer. It wasn't a jarring feeling while watching but it was something to stop a few moments and think about so you could figure at why Kate was just in the hospital and now she's got hair.

One might think the movie was about Kate's illness and coping with the possibility of death, or it is a story of her sister's fight for medical emancipation and the right to have a say in what happens to her body. In the end, you see that it was neither. The story was the obsession of a mother doing whatever she could to save her child, obsessed to the point where she sacrificed her family and life and refused to listen to anyone or even consider for a moment that this cancer was an battle she was going to lose.

The movie was about two hours long and while it didn't seem long and boring it wasn't one of the movies where I walked out shocked at the passage of time either. The movie was more like a series of vignettes related to one another but not quite fitting seamlessly, and the time had passed as a decent popcorn movie should allow.

The only real problem that I had with this movie was that it seemed to have stretched the premise a little too much. I think the story as told in this interpretation of the novel could have been a bit shorter or had elaborated on the story more. There was no interpretation or development based on the premise so much as there was just a restatement of the premise at different points.

Overall it was a good popcorn movie with a bit of a meaty piece of food for thought for parents in the audience to think about. If you have a couple hours to kill and want to take a female significant other out to a movie this is a good choice. Just don't take a die-hard Picoult fan. I had the distinct feeling that the movie was just too different from the novel for my wife to really enjoy as much as she liked the novel.

Another Writing Show Update About the Second Entry!

I thought adding an exclamation point would make it seem more exciting. Compared to just a period, I think it does make it seem a little more interesting. For what it's worth, anyway.

I went through my previous updates for my second entry to the Halloween Writing Show contest and saw that I actually forced myself to do a little math by adding my 444 words to my first word count, so if I am right I started this weekend with 1,706 words and hoped to add a "significant" number to that.

My current word count is 2,971, working by stealing a few moments from trying to get some things done around the house and exercise fun. That means that I added 1,265 words. All the previous caveats about cutting huge amounts of crapola out of the draft still applies, but I'm hoping that I'm actually into the part that might be somewhat interesting now.

Or maybe I'm completely offtrack there. I don't know how to tell if the story is any good...my current plan is to just keep forging ahead for now and if it works, it works, and if not, then I'll try again if there's time for a second entry. If I'm lucky I'll have something with this one that can be at least reshaped a bit so it might be a contender. I figure the important thing is that I'm trying...

Update on Second Entry to Writing Show

I didn't get much added yesterday to the story, but I did get a small bit more done tonight; I compared the word count to the last blog update and found that I added 444 words. Not great, but some progress.

It just wasn't a good day for accomplishing so much. I got out of work, picked up my daughter from work, went to the gym, went home and took a bath (my first since the surgery!) and then my parents came for dinner at our house; after that I was up paying bills, which in itself was both depressing and a little nerve wracking after a snafu with paying occurred that will only get sorted out tomorrow morning when the bank re-opens the office. After the bank account was officially nearly depleted...I have roughly thirty dollars to last me the next two weeks...but the bills are more or less paid as far as I can tell...I tried to work on the story.

Probably not the best conditions under which to concentrate on the story-writing bit.

But hey, we all have off days, right? My goal was to get this story sent off before the end of July, which means I still have two weeks to get this completed (and possibly edited).

Tomorrow looks like it will also be a busy day so I don't know if I'll get more done with writing, but I will most likely have time this weekend to get significant progress in. At least that's the plan.

Four hundred forty four words. Not great, but it was something. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I'll have finally dug into a portion of the story that I can use as an anchor for the submission (as I mentioned previously the beginning will most likely be cut out because it just seems too slow for an opening bit to the story but I was continuing through it to find where, organically, the story will find its traction. Hopefully).

It's getting late, I'm going to work tomorrow...time to go to bed.

Writing Contest Entry Two

I began a second story for The Writing Show's Halloween Story Contest. I started piecemealing it together a previous day but had a block of time while waiting in line for a certain movie late last night to sit and type for a bit*; my current word count according to OpenOffice is 1,262 words.

I'm kind of disappointed at how it's shaping up. My story is not diving into the action the way I hoped it would; evaluating what I was working with, I decided the best thing to do was to keep on the course I plotted and later during editing chop it (or reshape the opening after chopping) so that once the story does kick into gear I can get a good feel for where the opening action sequence should be placed.

Why?

Because if I didn't, I'd end up with the trap of scrapping the story and starting over ad infinitum, essentially never getting anywhere with the story. In reviewing the little movie in my head I thought that maybe there was a nugget of story in the mix worth trying to save and I wanted to try to get that out there before paring it down to the short story required by the contest (although to be fair a slow beginning is a sin in writing any story; in this regard, the story would need a massive bit of beginning work no matter the format).

So I'm working on it. I'll try sneaking in more work on it here and there and see what can be done. I can only submit two entries to the contest and I already submitted the first one so I'd like to try coming up with a nice second story to submit; I have until the end of August for the deadline but I'd like to get this one in by the end of July.

* I said I was out late waiting for a particular movie to start while working on my story entry. I'd blog a review...but there's really no reason. There's going to be so much back and forth with rabid fans and miscreants blathering non-opinions just to rule up the rabid fans that my opinion isn't really worth anything in the back and forth; anything I'd say would essentially be a "me too" so someone else's review, so in a rare moment of restraint I'll refrain from adding to this battle.

Self Publishing: Why the Bad Name?

Why does self publishing have a bad name?

Probably in part because the industry allows books like this to be released.

To give you an idea of the quality of the book, here's an image of the first page from the first chapter. Think it's just a fluke? Here's the beginning of chapter nine.

Supposedly here is the link to the author's blog.

I can't tell if it's a massive joke or not. If you want some entertainment, read the comments on the Amazon link.

I don't think there's a way to adequately express my dismay at yet another example of why self-publishing is laughed at so often in the publishing community. There are so many authors that do work hard and eventually try (and sometimes succeed) the self-publishing route, risking getting their name muddied for being associated with that side of the industry, in part because of books like this.