Aaron Polson's Blog, page 79

Live Long and Prosper: Building Characters

So I saw the new Star Trek movie last night. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie within a week of its release. Welcome to life with kids, I guess.
Despite all the special effects, glitz, and weird pseudo-scientific fantasy, the characters made that movie enjoyable. Especially Spock.
Spock has what every fictional character needs: a whopper of an internal conflict. He's a walking conflict, a "half-breed", constantly at war with his emotions and expectations others have for him and his beha

Splitting Hairs?

After writing yesterday's post, I did a quick Google search for "dark magical realism". I wanted to be sure I wasn't misusing the term or lost in literary left field. The search produced 127 hits (that is with quotation marks around the phrase...the only way to find that exact search string).

Huh?

One of the sites referred to a book about Neil Gaiman's work on Sandman. Okay...not exactly what I think of when I use the phrase "dark magical realism". Gaiman's Sandman work leaned heavily on myth

A Piece of Tail...um, The Long Tail

After reading this post about True Fans from Kevin Kelly at The Technium (thanks to Joshua Reynolds for the link), I started thinking about my little piece of the long tail...the little piece I'm trying to stake out as my territory.

That's what a creator (writer, musician, artist of any kind) strives to do, isn't it? Only a lucky few actually slay the dragon and lay claim to the head of the beast, but most of us hope for a chunk of the tail. (If you don't know what all this long tail nonsense

Sorry, Fred's Busy

Remember Fred? I introduced him in this post (in which I recommend the best book on writing short fiction, Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight). By the way, "Admiral Atlantic's Guerrilla Marketing" is now in the Land of Dead Stories. I guess it didn't find a home. (RIP, Admiral)

But Fred can't come to the blog right now. He's busy.

I'm working on two short stories (both about half done) and a flash piece that I want to finish before Fred comes running up from the basement and takes over m

The Horror

I spent the day at the mall, helping my wife pick out a new dress for a summer wedding. (i.e., wrangling Owen and Max while she shopped)


'nuff said.[image error]

Top Five Draculas

I watched a horrible old Hammer film last night, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, but it made me misty and nostalgic for old, crusty horror.

Today's Top Five FridayTM: The top five actors to play Count Dracula, as decided by me.

1. Bela Lugosi - no competition. Lugosi had the accent, the charm, the eyes. From Dracula (1931):


2. Christopher Lee - Along with Terence Fisher, Lee was the man behind Hammer Films resurrection of the famous vampire on film. And he had blood on his fangs...something Lugosi w

I Had to Cut Down Our Dogwood Tree

...last year. It used to wear the most beautiful white blossoms in the spring.
I have a flash story up at The Foliate Oak entitled "Watching the White Blossoms". It isn't really a horror tale or all that speculative, but I'll call it a tribute to the dogwood. I did intend to take the plot in a much darker direction, but the story works this way.



[image error]

Tipping Points

The Tipping Point is defined as the moment of critical mass, the threshold, and the boiling point. It is the point when everyday things reach epidemic proportions...the fact that little causes can have big effects, and that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment.

- from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

When I woke up yesterday, a lovely little email from Camille Gooderham Campbell was waiting for me. My story, "The Sub-Basement" wa

Remember the Sample Lady?

I worked at a grocery store in high school, and we had two nice older women who would hand out samples to customers. Of course, we (the employees) helped ourselves to plenty of little smokies, snack crackers, and cheese, too.

I've posted the first chapters of my current projects on their own pages: Rock Gods and Scary Monsters and The House Eaters.

Try not to eat too much.[image error]

Should I Worry About Genderfail?

I manipulated a spreadsheet to provide some data about (most of) my stories, including all sold and/or published. I studied characters first, namely the protagonists. Of 69 stories examined, this bit was eye-opening:

58 male protagonists
6 neutral gender (mostly flash fiction or non-human protagonists)
5 female

Ouch.

I then broke these categories down by age of the protagonists:

58 males = 30 adult, 18 teens, 5 children, 4 older (65+)
6 neutral = 2 adult, 1 child, 3 age N/A
5 female = 3 adult, 1 child,