Robert Pipkin's Blog: Stuff I Put In My Head, page 3

May the Holidays Be Ever in Your Favor

I came up with the premise for my next writing project today. It'll be a Young Adult Dystopian story featuring tropes found in things like The Hunger Games and Divergent. The young female protagonist is one of Santa's elves. I'm hoping to have it done in time for Christmas. 

The Place Where I Like To Write

Writers Digest Short Short Story Competition

Just submitted a story for the WD Short Short Story Competition. The title is "The Secret Origin Of Miles Merrick, The Greatest Superhero The World Has Ever Seen". 1400 words of an unusual Dr. visit. http://www.writersdigest.com/writers-...

The Best Time to be a Scifi Writer, Too?

Barnes and Noble thinks we're in a great period for scifi/fantasy. Read here.

Short Story Marathon Training

I have a few friends that, for some ungodly reason, enjoy running. On purpose. Over and over again. When nothing's chasing them! Some even run marathons. I don't understand this.
I am not a runner. I am a writer. I write stuff. I read stuff about writing stuff. While reading stuff about writing stuff a few days ago, I ran across the Story A Day concept at http://storyaday.org/about/. Like NaNoWriMo (http://nanowrimo.org/), Story A Day is a monthlong writing challenge. The difference is that instead of writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, the Story A Day challenge is to write a new story each day during the month of May. 
Since it seems my "thing" right now is short stories (see my book in Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00M8QQW9C?ie=UTF8&redirectFromSS=1&pc_redir=T1&noEncodingTag=1&fp=1), Story A Day is a marathon I can understand.
I'm thinking about trying it.
Of course, just like I hear is necessary for a real marathon, one should train for these things. I think I'll try a day or two over the next few weeks to write and finish a story or two. After that, maybe a long Story A Day weekend. Maybe after I do that a couple of times I might be able to take a crack at May.
The good news is that even if I don't finish a story every day, this challenge has the potential to start several stories. From there I can polish a plethora of work after the challenge. I see this as a great opportunity to plant the seeds for several stories. I like this idea very much.
I still don't understand why my friends  run.

Heinlein's Have Space Suit-Will Travel

My thoughts on Heinlein's Have Space Suit-Will Travelhttps://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9375429-heinlein-s-have-space-suit--will-travel.

Heinlein's Have Space Suit--Will Travel

Have Space Suit—Will Travel

There aren't many books I read more than once. There are just too many I want to read. For me to read something multiple times, it has to be super special. Robert Heinlein wrote two such books. Starship Troopers gripped me with its intensity, action, aliens, and danger as the hero grew from high schooler to war hero. Stranger in a Strange Land featured one of the most interesting characters I've ever read, Jubal Hirshaw, in a strange tale about the dangers of charisma. Both of these books gripped me and drove me to seek them out on multiple occasions.

I won't have that problem with Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Admittedly, I'm not part of the demographic this book was written for. Heinlein published it in 1958 as the last of his series of juvenile novels. For that reason, the dated voice of the narrator sounds like something straight out of the film A Christmas Story or the TV series Leave It To Beaver

The story is about a high school senior named Kip who wins a space suit in a jingle contest. Soon he finds himself trekking the starways trying to rescue a young girl and standing trial for the flaws of all of mankind.

The first part of the book deals with the contest and is quite similar to the Ovaltine story arc from A Christmas Story. It was so similar, in fact, that I had a hard time not picturing Ralphie as the narrator. This made it somewhat confusing since Kip is a VERY smart older kid, well-versed in Latin, math, engineering, and a ton of other high-falutin' learning subjects.

I'd read Andy Weir's The Martian not too long ago and was struck by how similar Kip's story is to Mark Watney's. There's a scene where Kip has to deal with a tear in a suit by using some pretty high-end tape, and if he had said that he was just going to have to "science the shit out of it" I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised.

Much of Kip's story centers on his imprisonment by aliens and resulting heroism. Through some bizarre twist of alien logic, despite Kip's having saved the day, Heinlein puts the boy on trial. Technicaly, it's humanity that's on trial, and Kip is used as a proxy. It's a scenario much like the trial of Jean-Luc Picard in the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation,
"Encounter at Farpoint". Predictably, Kip survives, saves mankind, and makes it home with a super-duper crazy slew of unbelievable stories that nobody at the local pharmacy's soda counter will ever believe.

I love Heinlein. I did not love this book. Maybe I'm jaded because I'm a middle-aged man and I've outgrown wanting to be a junior spaceman. Maybe the book was influential and I should've looked into that before reading it and getting distracted by its similarities to other works I'm already familiar with. Maybe I'm a little ticked off that this book isn't like Starship Troopers and Stranger In A Strange Land.

I still want to read Starship Troopers again.

Hi

I'm Robert. I read a lot. Mostly audiobooks. I talk about writing a lot. I write some. I want to write more. When I grow up, I want to write books and stories that people read and fight over. For now, I'm keeping it simple.

Howdy

Hi folks,
Welcome to my new blog. Most of what you'll see here will be about how I'm trying to build a writing career based on fiction, much like my day job career (badump bum). I'm mostly focusing on superhero and science fiction short stories for the time being. I've written a short novel (or novella, or novellette, or whatever the heck it is) but I'm still trying to decide if it's crap or not. I've got a collection of stories on Amazon. I've got a couple of stories on Wattpad. I've posted a few things on Medium. In short, I'm trying put my stuff out there and make some things happen. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. For now, I'm having a good time. Let's see where this goes.

Robert