Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 71

Wonder Woman Featurette

As I write my GALCOM series, I look at it and go “Wow!  There’s a lot of women in the story.”  It just evolved that way, even though the skipper of the ship is a man.  One of the two I’m working on is Most Dangerous Game with a woman character (and a man character).  And I remember a male writer dissing me years ago because I was writing something like that then.

There’s power in people standing up for themselves and trying to do something, even if they don’t know what they’re doing.  Way too many books have the woman as the victim, and she doesn’t do much else except whimper, “Rescue me.”

And there’s Wonder Woman.  Look near the end of this featurette where the women are defending the island.  Just awesome.  Can’t wait to see it.

Hopefully I can get a seat the theater.

Filed under: Entertainment, Videos Tagged: Wonder Woman movie

Coming Attractions for June

This weekend, I made an attempt to see Wonder Woman.  But when I showed up an hour in advance at the movie theater, it was sold out except for a few seats in the front.  So I’ll try again next weekend.  But it’s a good sign … especially for a movie the studio gave up on.  They hardly even advertised it, but word of mouth is pretty potent.

So I spent Saturday building book covers.  These are the covers for short stories coming later in June.

And these are the ones for July, including a GALCOM universe novella and short story.  It also marks the first mystery I’m publishing.

—

My research topics for this week were:

Son-Ly War
Prefecture
Province
Mistletoe
Harvey Kurtzman
Tents (research for GALCOM 3)
Grizzly Adams (no relation to me)
Japanese Battleship Mutzo
Pagoda mast
Edward Teach
sloop
Gilbert Baker
Military name tag placement (Research for GALCOM 3)
locusts
Kylfings
algebra
Auroras
Plasma meteor (doesn’t that sound cool?)
William Mulholland
California Water Wars
St, Francis Dam

It’s interesting looking at this list after a week.  There’s a lot of topics on here that I don’t remember anything about, and others that, as I typed them, I remembered what I enjoyed about the topic.  Despite growing up in Southern California and seeing places like Mulholland Drive, I had no idea why it was named that, nor did I know about the California Water Wars.  The St. Francis Dam ended William Mulholland’s career in public works when it collapsed only a few hours after he inspected it.

Filed under: Books, Writing Tagged: fantasy, GALCOM Universe, Mystery, science fiction, War fiction, Wonder Woman movie

Memorial Day Parade

I was back in the Memorial Day Parade again.  You can see the Desert Storm veterans at about 1:44.  I didn’t march this time … my foot was not up to the long walk.  I’m in the jeep immediately following the marchers.

Filed under: Military, Thoughts, Videos Tagged: Desert Storm, Memorial Day, Washington DC

Breaking Storytelling with Process

I started writing when I was eight.  I loved writing adventures.  Before class, I’d get a sheet of notebook paper and write my stories (and sometimes when I was bored during class).

My friends loved reading the stories, and I had several who got involved by drawing pictures.  That was just too cool.  Pictures can add another layer to the story.

I didn’t think much about any writing technique when I was doing it.  I was just imitating what I saw in the many mystery novels I was reading.  I wrote mysteries like Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon, with my own character Sharon McCall.

So I was horrified when I read this article by a well-meaning teacher who thinks schools should teach children storytelling.

It’s this paragraph that I have the most problems with:

We shouldn’t be asking children about fronted adverbs, but about act structures, character arcs, reversals and the qualities of protagonists (and antagonists). What is the difference between real speech and fictional dialogue? What constitutes a dramatic event? The list goes on and on.

Craft is character, setting, plot, story.

Process is three act structure, character arcs, and reversals.

I would not want to be a student in her class.  She would have sucked the joy right out of storytelling trying to teach how she thought I should write.

What is this obsession with trying to force people into a certain way of writing? Wouldn’t it be much simpler to encourage the students to read lots of books and write stories that those books inspire?

—

I’ve been trying a research technique mentioned in a book called Becoming an Every Day Novelist.  One of the important things about writing fiction is to do a lot of reading of history.  But that’s been difficult for me.  I don’t always like the book–a lot of the books feel dry.  Plus, sometimes I get a book that interested me when I got and then doesn’t a few days later.

But J. Daniel Sawyer suggests starting with Wikipedia and reading something every day and following the links.  I’m finding it’s fun because if I don’t like a topic, I can wander onto another.

These are the topics I checked out this week.

Richard Oakes
Zenobia
Quintus Publilius Philo
plebs
praetor
super user
stalagmites
U.S. Route 113
Thunder River
Powell Expedition
Naked Woman Climbing a Staircase (a painting)
Ballet Technique
Scots Monastery
Umbrella
Elephant
EIN
Star Wars
Golden Gate Bridge
Bridges
Dams

I’m only doing about half an hour a day, following whatever catches my interest.

Filed under: Writing Tagged: Outlining, process of writing, research, storytelling, Wikipedia

79th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco first opened in 1937.  This is article of the map from Popular Mechanics in 1931, showing both a drawing of the towers and maps of the area.  It must have been amazing to see it being built then!

My grandparents lived in Marin County, which was on the other side of the bridge, for a number of years when I was growing up.

We would drive up the coast from Los Angeles, stopping over in Morro Bay for a day, which was at about the four hour mark.  Probably at the point where the kids were driving the parents crazy.

The following day, it was off to San Francisco.  I could see the bridge from a distance as we approached—it was hard to miss.  Sometimes fog swirled around it—even the fog is bigger than the bridge!

I thought of it as a red bridge though it’s actually a color called international orange.  I still think it’s red.

As we crossed the bridge, it was both exciting and frightening.

Frightening because it’s so high up, with just those cables holding us up.  There’s not much on either side except a very long drop to the ocean.  And, from the backseat of the car, with the bridge rising up, no way to visually tell how far it is to the other side.

It was always a relief to see the end looming up ahead!

Exciting because crossing that bridge meant we were on the final leg to see our grandparents!

Bridges always have a sort of mystic feel to the them.  They both represent the beginning of a journey, like a trip to grandmother’s, and a sign the journey is ending.  But sometimes it’s the adventure, too.

What’s on the other side of the bridge that’s there to explore?

Filed under: History, Travel Tagged: Bridges, California, Golden Gate Bridge, Marin County, San Francisco

Star Wars’ 40 Years Ago Today

It’s hard to believe 40 years have passed since Star Wars was released, on this day.  I saw it in its original run and remember how people lined up outside the movie theaters to see it…not once, by multiple times.  People didn’t watch it twice; they watched it twenty times.

It wasn’t like any other science fiction movie before it.  The ones I grew up watching were astronauts visiting another planet at getting stalked by an alien monster; a scientist inventing a monster and getting stalked by it; a monster rising from the depths and stalking the human cities–well, you get the idea.

But Star Wars was pure adventure, and fun.  It has space battles, a cool villain–Darth Vader was so different from the standard villains who were either monsters or cackled dementedly about taking over the world.  There was something about James Earl Jones’ voice that really brought him to life from behind that mask.

But then George Lucas did a rookie mistake, like I’ve seen some writers do.  He had this hugely successful movie, and instead of spending the next forty decades writing other movies, or even TV series, or how about novels like Stephen Cannell, he fixed Star Wars.  He was never happy with the special effects of the time, so he “improved” on them.

I know the cantina scene was a challenge to shoot because there was no budget.  The actors wore Halloween masks.  Yet, Lucas did a good job shooting it because it doesn’t look like cheap Halloween masks (there are a number of movies I’ve watched where the costuming looks like no one cared).  He transformed us into a different world.

It’s also one of the scenes that fans talk about.  It introduces our naive character Luke Skywalker to the rest of the galaxy and how dangerous it will be.  And it’s fun!

And Lucas fiddled with it because all he could remember was the bad parts of the shooting, that the technology of 1977 didn’t match what he pictured.

In getting what he pictured but couldn’t do, he broke things that fans liked.

Filed under: Culture, Entertainment Tagged: 1977, action-adventure, George Lucas, James Earl Jones, Luke Skywalker, Star Wars, Stephen Cannell

Massive Landslide in California

When I was growing up, we would drive from Los Angeles to Morro Bay, which is a coastal town in Central California, stay a day, and then head onto San Francisco.  My grandparents lived in San Francisco at the time, but later moved to Morro Bay. Our trip took us on Highway 101, which had beautiful views of the ocean.

But it had a big problem, too.  The road cut through these huge sloping mountains.  Always brown from the dryness, and some years, black, because brush fires had burned away the grass.  Nothing to anchor down the dirt when it rained.

One year, it was pouring rain and we were headed back to Los Angeles.  A state trooper stopped us, dressed up in his yellow slicker, and told us the road was closed.  We had to turn back and wait a day for it to be cleared.

A landslide happened this week in the same general area and closed a quarter mile of the freeway. Check out the video in the link.

Filed under: Personal, Thoughts Tagged: California, Highway 101, Landslides, Los Angeles, Morro Bay, mudslides, Pacific Ocean

Editing vs. Revising vs. Rewriting

I’ve been taking a workshop on Editing Yourself.  It’s not the first workshop I’ve had like this; I had another one called Keys to Editing, which covered the topic if you wanted to go in business as an editor.  The Editing Yourself is very different from that one.

The editing class is on essentially taking care of the story while you’re creating it.  Like when I plopped a description of a character in the story early on and then he evolved into something different so I had to create a new description that reflected that evolution.

But one of the things that strikes me is that the writing community generally refers to editing and revision and rewriting all as the same thing when they are very clearly not.

Except in one place.

And that’s when they’re creating the story and they go back and do what I described above for the class.  They called it “revising as you go along.”  And with using that terminology comes actual revision, and often endless revision.  I used to call it that myself and had to learn what I could change and what I couldn’t.

It’s what got me into trouble working with a cowriter who was suffering from fear of finishing and me not knowing that he had this fear.

After a disastrous book where I kept getting stuck so I’d go back and “revise as I went along” until I solved the problem, I decided on the following guidelines:

If I was stuck, I had to work that out.  I could go back a few scenes to see if I’d bounced off the tracks, but I couldn’t go all the way to the beginning to tweak words and sentences.
I could go back and change things like adding more foreshadowing for a later scene, correcting a name I’d just changed, or a gender of a character.
No fixing!  No tweaking of sentences or words to make them perfect.  If I didn’t have a good reason to change something (i.e., I don’t understand what I was trying to write), it stands as is.

My writer friend would have happily revised the first chapter for years.  And this is so easy to do because you think you’re making progress and suddenly the novel takes 25 years (that’s from a writing board I’m on) and never gets done.

The only progress you make is when you can type “The End” and move onto the next one.  Sometimes the tools provided to us by “experts” get in the way of that.

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: editing, editing yourself, revising a you go along, revising as you write, revision, rewriting

Summertime Legacy: The Bathing Cap

It always found it strange when I hear that someone never learned how to swim.  That was a statement I heard often in the military, particularly from people in the Southern states like Georgia.  How can you grow up and never experience a swimming pool?!

Swimming … and going off the high dive is kind of like a kid’s rite of passage.

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, though the actual date isn’t until June 20.  Washington DC is normally sweltering by now, but we had an arctic front come in.  It was in the 40s!  We were all lamenting that our heat was off.

But no fear, it’ll be 90 later this week.

When I grew in Los Angeles, the end of school for the summer, signaled days over at the local city pool.  In the very early days, they still required a rubberized bathing cap for girls.  Those were god-awful things.  Try getting a close-fitting cap over your head while it pulled your hair.

Or worse!  Getting the thing off without taking out a clump of hair.  They never kept my hair dry, so it was ‘what was the point?’

But the worse thing about them was that the pool authorities only required girls to wear the bathing caps.   Everyone always it was so the long hair didn’t clog the drain, but it was only applied to the girls and not the boys.  My brother hated getting his haircut so he let his hair grow out long enough to mistaken for a girl from the back, but he was not required to wear the bathing cap.

One of those things disguised as fashion, but seemed to single out girls.

They did disappear after a few years, because it was on the tail end of the trend.  Now the caps are more fashionable for professional swimmers.  Men and women wear them for an extra bit of speed in the pool.

Still don’t look very comfortable.

 

Filed under: Culture, Thoughts Tagged: Summer

Ernest Hemingway – Traumatic Brain Injury?

I grew up watching TV shows where characters got whacked over the head fairly routinely, woke up, and was normal again. Not even a look at by a doctor.  And then, a few years ago, I met a former soldier who had a service dog.  She had a serious concussion and one of the aftereffects was that she lost her depth perception.  If there was a hole in the ground, she could not tell it was there!

The Washington Post published this article on writer Ernest Hemingway.  He killed himself in 1961, well before we started to learn from war what effects concussions do to the human brain.

Filed under: Books, Military, Thoughts Tagged: Ernest Hemingway, Service Dog, World War I