Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 83
July 27, 2016
Talent writing versus No Talent
Dean Wesley Smith has a post up over on his site on the dangers of being identified as having talent versus being told you have no talent.
I’ve been writing since I was eight years old. My best friend Rebekah was writing a play, and I wanted to do it because she was doing it. And it was fun!
So I wrote stories, and illustrated them, every opportunity I got. I even worked on a story before class (and sometimes during class, when I wasn’t supposed to). So I wrote a lot of stories, and created a girl detective like Nancy Drew who had adventures.
In 7th grade, the school offered a creative writing class. Rebekah signed up for it, and I also wanted to be in it. I mean, really, a class where you could write stories in class because you were supposed to?
The counselor, this older Chinese woman who always look like she’d been wrung out, summoned me to her office. She informed me that I could not take the class because I wasn’t “capable of it.”
Then I was dismissed.
I went back and cried.
In hindsight, it was probably because I wasn’t a great student. I’m visual spatial, so I’m pretty bad with the kind of details they focus on in school. I’d fail a computer bubble test by not noticing that I’d skipped one. I was also not a great speller. I don’t spell things out one word at a time; I have to picture it. But that’s not how they teach spelling.
Anyway, I probably could have given up, but I got mad instead. I continued writing, and in the 9th grade entered a school essay contest. I picked up an honorable mention.
I’m sure the counselor thought she was “helping” me or doing me a “favor.” But how can anyone tell from an 11-year old’s current skills what they will be like in the future? Maybe they would stop writing like Rebekah, or maybe they would a master at writing like Stephen King? No one is very good at that age, but doing something that promotes any kind of learning should always be encouraged.
Filed under: Writing Tagged: Talent
Hot Time in DC
We’ve had a bad heat wave in the Washington, DC area these last few days. With our heat comes humidity, especially this time of the year. The humidity is up around 71%, so our 96 degrees heads up to around 110 degrees.
So I thought I’d hit the pool instead of normal exercise—it’s hard doing anything even in air conditioning.
The pool is outdoors, unheated. Usually on the cold side.
It was like being in a warm bath.
No fair!
Filed under: Personal Tagged: Summer, Washington DC
July 26, 2016
Star Trek: Discovery
It was announced over this weekend that CBS would be premiering a new Star Trek series. I have mixed feelings about it.
I remember when Next Gen came out. It was so exciting! The show was back. I eagerly awaited for each new episode. Bit that first season was pretty disappointing because the writers hadn’t figured out what they were doing yet. They repeated episodes from the original series, and made some major missteps.
They eventually found their footing, and the series had some stunning episodes.
My mixed feelings for the new one are because the industry is focused more on dollars than story telling. They see Star Trek as simply special effects and action in space, and not what it really was. Sure, the stories had action, but they were about something. They were entertaining, sometimes funny, and always tested your mind.
A few weeks back, I heard Chris Pine say that society wasn’t ready for Star Trek as it was. I think it’s not society—we always been ready. It’s the industry that’s not ready.
Filed under: Entertainment, Videos Tagged: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: The Next Generation
July 25, 2016
The first woman who did military bomb disposal
This is the story of the first woman who did bomb disposal for the military:
More important, she was captivated by the job from the first moment she plugged a blasting cap into a block of TNT. We can really blow things up? she recalled thinking, as if she was getting away with something. She could put explosives on anything — a pile of old land mines, cardboard boxes, a wooden table — and it would cease to exist and “turn into air.” It was a revelation.
Fascinating to read about. Still not something I would have volunteered for. Much better to write about fictional characters and fictional explosives! Much safer, too.
Filed under: Military, Thoughts Tagged: ordnance, Women Soldiers
Monster Ships: Aircraft Carriers
When I went to Hawaii back in the 1980s, there was an aircraft carrier in the harbor. This was pre-military for me, and the first time I’d ever seen a Navy ship that wasn’t part of a museum (a World War II submarine in Wisconsin).
I think it was one of the smaller ones, but I looking up at this enormous ship standing so tall and high and going, “Holy cow!”
This is a video of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, otherwise known as the Big Stick. Watch the size of the sailboats that pass it by.
Filed under: Military, Thoughts Tagged: Aircraft carrier, hawaii, Navy, Submarine, The Big Stick, Wisconsin
July 24, 2016
The End of the VCR
It’s been all over the news that the last manufacturer of the VCR is shutting the line down. I remember when the VCR first came out.
At the time, Star Trek was running back to back with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as part of a Sci-Fi afternoon. One day, the station pulled Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and in the fandom crowd, we found that it had pretty much disappeared.
We couldn’t rewatch favorite episodes or ones that we had never seen. Many of us hadn’t seen the first season at all because it was in black and white, and some of the stations only showed the color three seasons.
Some of the fans were able to tape a handful of episodes, and these grainy, poor quality tapes made the rounds. If we found a fan with another episode we didn’t have (there were 110, so lots of room for this), we were all eagerly for copies.
There were still some episodes I had never seen from the first season.
Finally, after about 10 years, Columbia House came out with the series on video. It was pretty expensive and subscription based, so you couldn’t buy anything to your budget. Like grab a tape with episodes I hadn’t seen, and then pick up ones I had later, when I could afford it.
The show finally resurfaced on Sci-Fi, when it still focused on science fiction, and they showed all the episodes from the beginning to end. And it was eventually released on DVD.
By then, I’d evolved so much as a writer that the flaws of the show really stood out. I liked the actors, liked the special effects, but there were problems with the stories. And the producer tended to do things because he though the audience would never notice, so I was rewinding to see if yes, the actor in the later scene had actually already been killed by a monster.
It’s still amazing though how much VCRs and the video tape changed how we watch TV and films.
Filed under: Culture, Entertainment, Television Tagged: Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Sy-Fi, VCR, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
July 23, 2016
A Little Pool Action
July 22, 2016
The fun of being a writer
There’s so many negative things out there about being a writer that I thought I would do something on the fun of being one. Like:
Being able to write about cool things like adventuring and action—but none of the real life danger. I’ve been near an explosion. Making one up in a story is sooo much safer, and I can make sure the characters aren’t that close to it.
Traveling in space, or traveling under the sea.
Find lost treasure!
Be a superhero. Where else can you fly but in a story?
Solve a crime. My early stories were like Nancy Drew, a girl detective solving crimes.
What’s fun for you?
Filed under: Writing
July 21, 2016
Keeping track of characters
As I work on novels, it’s sometimes hard for me to remember all the character names, and in some cases, the spelling of them. Especially early in the process while I’m developing the characters.
So I just have a composition book, and on the first page it has a list of all the names. Nothing fancy, like trying to alphabetize them or organize them in any way. They’re just on the list as they come into the story, and get scratched out if I realize I don’t need them after all.
For my current project I also drew a line about two thirds down and split the page into two columns. Since this story is science fiction, one side is for the names of spaceships, and the other side is the names of planets.
I like the notebook over a spreadsheet or Word file, because if I need the spelling of the ship name, it’s a quick look. Or a quick addition. A computer file requires me to stop, open the software, open the file—and disrupt the writing substantially.
And I don’t work terribly hard on it. This is for quick reference when I’m writing.
Filed under: Writing Tagged: characters, Microsoft Word
July 20, 2016
Bouncing around in the story
When I write, I like to move around in the story and pull everything together as I go along. Dean Wesley Smith calls it cycling.
What it isn’t: Revision. I’m not tweaking words or sentences (though I fix those darn typos). I’m also not throwing out scenes because I don’t like them or I think they’re no good.
Because I’m not outlining, the story is evolving organically. Something may come in much later in the story that changes something in an earlier chapter. If I don’t fix it, it keeps nagging at me because it feels out of alignment, and eventually, if I ignore it completely, it will wreck entire the story. At one point, I’d heard that it wasn’t a good idea to cycle (then I was calling it revising as I wrote), so I didn’t, and I was shocked at how twisted the story got. It went from a ten car pileup to a plane crash took out a whole city.
Yes, it was that bad.
Right now, I’ve returned to Chapter 1. My creative brain finally said it was time to fix a couple of issues. One is that I did a little research on the setting, which is a captain’s cabin (on a spaceship, in my case). Cool military picture alert! I had fun looking at the pictures and trying to figure out what my skipper character would have, and how the main character would react to it.
The skipper’s characterization also changed from that early chapter. It was something that came in much later in the story, and my creative brain started to fuss at me about it. So now I’m going back in time to bring some of those elements in.
It’s kind of fun because it’s like seeding treasure everywhere.
Filed under: Writing Tagged: Pantser
