C.K. Edwards's Blog, page 22

LTUE - The Dramatic Downside of Technology

That was the topic for one of my panels last week. Not only did I think this was a lame topic, but the other panelists felt the same. So we decided to play a game instead. James Wymore was the moderator and it was his idea to play the game. The other panelist was Natalie Whipple. Both of them are successful authors.

What is that, a cap gun?The game was a contest to see who could come up with the best end-of-the-world scenario that included the use of technology. The scenario James came up with involved a blood-thirsty artificial intelligence. Natalie's scenario involved genetically-enhanced wild boars (think scary stuff in Russia).

That was my competition.

I don't want to brag, but my scenario totally rocked. Sure LTUE is a sci fi/fantasy symposium, but I wanted to come up with something believable, something the common man could relate to. I envisioned a near future where every man, woman, and child has Google Glass wet-wired into their brain and a computer virus enters the system and forces all of humanity to watch a continuous string of cat videos until everyone loses their mind and jumps off the nearest skyscraper.

Hey, that not only seems believable, it seems imminent, right? I mean, take just this week, how many friends have forwarded you a cat video? Try and imagine the hell of experiencing that for an hour. Two hours. Two days. Two weeks.

Yeah, we'd be dead for sure.

Daily Ambivalence - cute girls on bicycles

You know what I'm talking about.

She's little, not much over five years old, pedaling by on that bike likely 
just emancipated from training wheels. She has golden ringlets of hair that hang and bounce, untroubled by the fetter of helmet and strap. A matching outfit so bright bees should rightly expect hidden nectar. She is radiant like sunshine, warmth a byproduct of her passing.

A neighbor waves. A butterfly flutters.

Me and my BB gun.

Cute girls on bicycles . . . eh.

LTUE insights

When I was in high school if you'd told me that once a year or so I would go to a thing called a symposium where I attended (even participated in) panels where the craft of writing was discussed, that these panels would run all day from 9 AM to 8 PM, and that I would love every minute of it, I might have jumped off a tall building or something. My reasoning would have been if something like this was ever going to be a highlight for me, my future life was going to suck. Obviously.

Yet one more reason time travel should not be invented.

I love Life the Universe and Everything. It gets better every year. On one of the panels I participated in over the weekend, the discussion revolved around making characters that live and breathe. One of the questions asked how you make a reader care about a character. A few ideas were getting thrown around and I threw out a comment about Phillip K. Dick and how most of his characters were actually quite pathetic but he made you care about them nonetheless. I said at the beginning I didn't know how he did this. By the end of the panel, maybe I had figured out how he did.

It occurred to me that in most of the fiction we read, maybe the common trait shared by protagonists that makes us care about them is that they don't give up. Faced with whatever inner or outer conflict/weakness the story assigns them, they still move on. Just that. They don't give up. Something to think about. If you are a writer and you can get the reader to believe your character won't give up ever, not because you write it that way but because of who that character is, then you've probably won half the battle.

Daily Ambivalence - I hurt my wrist

I hurt my wrist but it wasn't because I was playing a video game. Why would you think that?
The pain
Sure, modern controllers have 20 or so buttons and in some games you have to use all 20 buttons, like that last scene in COD Ghost Protocol on Top of Zombies where you use the jetpack you got under the floorboard in that mansion to fly through the post-apocolyptic version of downtown Eau Claire, Minnesota while fighting off zombie eagles and kissing the president's daughter. But that's not how I hurt my wrist.

I hurt my wrist shoveling snow out of the driveway like my wife asked me to do. And if the driveway doesn't look completely done, or if it looks like I didn't shovel at all, it's because I hurt my wrist.

I hurt my wrist . . . eh.

Shadow and Shade/Chapter 6

This is a reading of Chapter 6 of the first book in my fantasy trilogy.

Without Mother Without Father trilogy
The book Shadow and Shade

I will release one of these each week on Friday until I have read the entire series. 54 weeks in all, I think. I hope you enjoy.

There was that dream about Comic Con

There was that dream about Comic Con where I was sitting at a booth and nobody was stopping and I was kind of bummed but then I realized I was trying to sell the collected fiction works of Jan Brady who is herself a fictional character and I didn't even know Jan was a writer so I opened up one of her books but it was just bound copies of her homework and she had atrocious handwriting but not surprisingly she dotted all her i's with hearts and that seemed appropriate because it was Valentines Day and that's when I felt my hair grow long and I got pecs and a six-pack like a dude on a romance cover and it felt great for a few seconds before I realized that I would have to work out and eat right if I wanted to maintain this and so I woke up and was fat again.

Valentines Day sucks.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

One of my favorite things each year is to go to Life, The Universe, & Everything (LTUE Symposium) and listen to good writers talk about, well, judging by the picture above they're going to talk about dragons who hold pirate flags.
Actually, I'm not really sure why I go to this every year other than all the stuff I learn about perfecting my craft. Oh, and I am even a panelist a few times and I will have a reading Saturday.
The esteemed guest this year is Orson Scott Card, an up-and-coming young guy who has only written 40 or 50 books and just had a movie made from one of them. Earlier this century, when everyone was doing the top 100 of all kinds of things from the previous 100 years, any list that purported to included the best science fiction books always had Ender's Game in the top 10. Can't argue. One of my favorites. I've seen Card before and he is intelligent and very entertaining.
If you write, and you live in Utah, you could do worse than attend this symposium. Find more information here.

Daily Ambivalence - postage stamps

I heard that if you were in the know you would laugh every time someone kisses the Blarney Stone.

Well of course that gets me thinking about postage stamps. Do stamp collectors miss the good old days when you had to actually lick a stamp?
Actually, that's probably a stupid question. Stamp collectors would never lick a stamp because they collect them, right? That would be like taking an action figure out of its packaging.
Only I think you should take action figures out of their packaging. They're action figures. Note the word figure . Or was it action  that was the important word there? I forget. I'm taking this from a lesson I learned in Toy Story 1 or 2 and those kind of blend together for me. Heck, it could have been Toy Story 3 even. I guess need to re-watch the series.
Regardless, what I'm trying to say is that stamp collectors should lick their stamps.

But they can't because stamps are all self-adhesive now.
It's sad.
Postage stamps . . . eh.