Michelle Proulx's Blog, page 5
April 4, 2016
Chasing Nonconformity Fanfiction!
Two years ago, an anonymous individual wrote a hilarious fanfiction for Imminent Danger. Now, they have returned with the sequel: Chasing Nonconformity And How to Apply Social Media to It. The premise, of course, being that the story is retold via social media. It’s excellent. Read it!
Or, if you don’t have time, here are a few of my favorite gems: ((POSSIBLE SPOILERS))
Grashk has changed his name to Big Blue!
Big Blue: Help! I think someone hacked my account! I don’t know how to change my name back!
Varrin Gara’dar: I’m sorry stranger, I don’t know who you are.
Big Blue has changed his name to Grouchy Smurf!
Grouchy Smurf: Goddamnit!
Fino’jin has rated Sebara on Rate Your Rala’kamil! Fino’jin has given Sebara one star!
Sebara: Seriously!? What did I ever do to you?
Fino’jin: Nothing personal; you’re just different, so I hate you. I hate things that are different. That’s why I declared war on snowflakes that one time. Each one is unique, so they’re all godless abominations.
Varrin Gara’dar: Come on guys, we have to get the Nonconformity back!
Eris Miller: Why don’t you give your promise pendant to the damn Nonconformity!?
Varrin Gara’dar: I TRIED AND IT FELL OFF, OKAY!?
Vardriga the Fortune Teller: The destination lies within your journey! What you seek is where you left it! Don’t stop believing!
Sebara: What a bunch of garbage. That’s what I get for listening to a fortune teller.
Vardriga the Fortune Teller: Oh also, you should probably watch out for giant metal spiders.
Sebara: Complete waste of time…
Sebara: Wait Fino’jin, don’t you see? You’re a metaphor for the conflict that everybody’s faced in their personal journeys! We all hated our lives on our home planets, because we didn’t like the paths that society set out for us. We’ve been spending the novel chasing nonconformity… and you, Fino’jin, represent that conformity. And now that we’ve all embraced who we are, we can defeat you!
Fino’jin: OH MY GOD I’M A LITERARY METAPHOR!!!
March 27, 2016
A. Renfro’s “The Dead of Winter” Free Today!
Fellow self-pubbed author Anthony Renfro is giving away his short story for free today. Check it out!
A short story about an apocalyptic nightmare in a crisp frozen landscape filled with winter and living corpses.Two men try to find safety in this dead world. Hoping to ride out the night. Hoping to find warmth and shelter. Hoping not to become food for the zombies.
THE OPENING
Eric surveyed the road ahead and behind him. The world was filled with death. The highway was littered with silent, rusting cars sitting on rotting tires, waiting on drivers who were never going to drive them again. Ripped apart, torn open and partially eaten corpses littered the ground in various forms of decay. The corpses ranged from children to elderly adults. The zombies had done a number on them when they went into their “feeding frenzy.” The bodies that weren’t on the ground or pulled from their cars were still seated, and most of them still strapped into their seat belts, like they were still driving to whatever destination they had been going to before the world fell into death’s harsh embrace.
Eric breathed in deep and felt the cold air settle into his lungs. Bitter winter winds whipped at his face and tore at his clothes, trying to get inside the protective layers. Flakes of snow fell from the sky, nothing more than flurries.
“It’s something,” Eric replied, looking down at the white and grey cat in its carrier. He then put his eyes back on the man sitting with his back against a car.
US: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CR9BLB8?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01CR9BLB8?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B01CR9BLB8?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01CR9BLB8
(Note: a couple of his other stories are also free, so check those out as well if you’re a zombie fan!)
March 4, 2016
Take Bad Reviews with a Dash of Salt
A few weeks back, I mentioned something called the “Immerse or Die” report — which is basically where this guy gets on his treadmill and starts reading a book. If he finds three glaring errors that pull him out of the story, he stops reading and marks the book as failed. If he makes it all the way to the end of his 40 minute treadmill run, the book passes. Simple enough, right?
I was a bit hesitant about sending in Imminent Danger, since A) harsh criticism makes me sad, and B) the reader is a 50 year old man, and thus not exactly my target audience. But then I thought “what the hell” and sent it in anyway.
Which was an … interesting decision. Spoiler alert: Imminent Danger did not survive the Immerse or Die report. You can read the report for yourself here.
So here’s where we get to the “take bad reviews with a dash of salt” part. Obviously, I was bummed out. In an ideal world, everyone would love my book. Not going to happen, of course, but it’s a nice dream. So I was feeling pretty down on myself as I started to read his review.
Then I finished reading the review, and I wasn’t down on myself anymore. In his review, he pinpoints three details in the first chapter that made him stop reading the book. Damn, right? Those must have been some pretty massive, glaring flaws. Except they’re not. Here are the earth-shattering problems he found:
“fellow high school classmates” is redundant (as in, classmates implies “fellow”, so both words weren’t necessary)
high schools start at 9am, not 8am
Eris is facing the trees, and then gets dragged in backward (did she turn around at some point? it’s not stated)
Points #1 and #3 are actually really helpful, because he’s absolutely right, and those two things (redundant language and keeping track of where my characters are) are things I will look out for in future books/editing. Point #2, however, is just plain wrong. According to the US National Center for Education Statistics, the average high school start time is 8am. Here’s the link if you don’t believe me. But I digress.
Basically, he stopped reading the book because of A) a wording choice, and B) a mix-up in which direction Eris was facing. Which is fine. I, personally, tend to stop reading books due to larger issues, like the plot not making sense, or glaring spelling issues, or an unlikable main character … but hey, different people are different!
So, all in all, I’m content with my decision to submit Imminent Danger to the Immerse or Die Report. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? Did his review frustrate me? Absolutely. Will I be reading his books, or visiting his site again? Definitely not. We obviously have completely opposite views on what makes a story good.
At the end of the day, the only thing you can really do when you get a bad review is read it thoroughly and:
Pick out the legitimate criticisms and learn from them, and
Ignore the rest
Now I just have to keep telling myself that!
Unrelated media of the day:
More excellent book dedications …
I Am, by Matthew Hubbard
The Land of Stories, by Chris Colfer
February 29, 2016
What’s the biggest thing you ever cut from a manuscript?
In honor of leap day, today’s theme is leaping. As in, leaping over awkward plot points to get to the heart of the story. During the editing process, writers cut all number of things: useless characters, random sub plots, flowery but unnecessary description, adverbs, etc. So, I put this question to you:
What’s the biggest thing you ever cut from a manuscript?
For Imminent Danger, the biggest thing I can remember is the “descent to Alpha Centauri Prime” scene. Originally, the galactic hub planet was surrounded by a minefield–the remnants of an old space battle. So ships had to line up to be guided through the mines. Varrin, being Varrin, decided to skip that whole tedious process and tackle the minefield himself, resulting in a 1000 word action sequence where Varrin pilots the Nonconformity down through the mines, and Eris and Miguri panic a lot.
When I sat down to chop 20k words off the story, that was one of the first scenes to go. It was fun, but ultimately didn’t need to be in there. Plus, as my brother pointed out, it kind of didn’t make sense that one of the biggest trade hubs in the galaxy was surrounded by mines that no one had bothered to clear out yet. So the action sequence was scrapped, and the descent to Alpha Centauri Prime was cut down to a paragraph.
For Chasing Nonconformity … hoo boy. With Imminent Danger, I did a lot of revising, but the basic structure of the book remained the same. But with the sequel, I pretty much re-wrote it from the ground up. So almost everything got cut and then rewritten–with the exception of Trystan, Sebara, and Fino’jin, who were in the story from day one.
So I can’t really pin down the biggest cut, but certainly one of the large ones was Bax. Bax was a shapeshifting bounty hunter who Fino’jin hired to help track down and capture Varrin. During the original climax of the book, Bax shapeshifted into a jsgarn (big angry monster) and nearly killed Sebara. She did eventually defeat him, although she then had to jump out of the low-flying spaceship they were in at the time (I don’t remember why) and then broke like half the bones in her body upon hitting the ground.
In the re-write, Eris and Varrin’s plotline completely changed, and Bax didn’t work with the new story so he was axed. I don’t regret that one at all–he was mildly interesting, but definitely not a stand-out character. I wrote him as sort of a “blank slate”, in that he didn’t exhibit much personality at all because he shifted forms so frequently that even he didn’t really know who he was. But there wasn’t enough room in the story to explore his character properly, so instead of trying to shoehorn him in, I just cut him.
So, all you writers out there, what’s the biggest cut you’ve ever made? Or the most memorable? Or the cut that absolutely destroyed you, because you loved that particular scene/character and hated yourself for having to leave them out?
Unrelated media of the day:
February 10, 2016
How To Set Up An Amazon Giveaway
Amazon has recently started offering everyone the opportunity to offer a giveaway. What’s interesting about this is that you can run one for pretty much any item in their inventory – ex…
Source: How To Set Up An Amazon Giveaway
February 8, 2016
Awesome Book Dedications
I’m hard at work writing Cerulean Bound being on vacation and not accomplishing a darn thing, so I thought I’d brighten up your Monday a bit by sharing some excellent book dedications. These were collected on Imgur by PolarBlair924, so shout-out to him/her!
Thus, in no particular order, here are my favorites …
January 30, 2016
Musiville Needs Your Love: Free Download
Musiville, the second children’s book in the award-winning Niditales series created by Dimitris Fousekis and me, will be free between January 27th and 31st on Amazon. This is to to encourage …
Source: Musiville Needs Your Love: Free Download
January 27, 2016
#52 Open Call for the Arcane Arts Anthology
A reminder that you have a few days left to submit your Sci-Fi/Fantasy story to Kai Herbertz’s Arcane Arts Anthology project! Open call for stories ends on Jan 31. Check it out :)
Well met, my friends!
On Monday my Kickstarter campaign to create and publish a science fiction and fantasy short story collection was successfully funded thanks to the generosity of family, friends, and other awesome people.
In addition to the contributions by the featured indie authors, I am looking for story submissions. Here are the details of the open call:
Stories can be submitted in either American English or German until the 31st of January 2016. At least three of the eleven stories will be contributions of this open call.
The length of the stories should be around 5000 words, but anything in the range of 4000-7500 words is acceptable.
We are looking for whimsical, family friendly stories that could be shelved in the fantasy and science fiction section of a book store. The theme of the anthology is “Arcane Arts,” which should be reflected by the submitted stories.
If your…
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January 22, 2016
More Imminent Danger Fan Art!
People are feeling super artsy/crafty this week, so we actually have a second fan art post! Here’s the first one if you missed it.
From my dear friend Denise Gow-Morse, we have delightful little cartoons of Eris and Varrin. These were taped to the sides of the carton of candy she gave me for my birthday. The drawings are adorable, and the candy was delicious. Thank you, Denise!
Happy Eris and super sassy Varrin. Artist: Denise Gow-Morse
Next up, we have an offering from my very own mother, Linda Schneidereit! I sent her some Eris and Varrin chibi magnets for Christmas, and today she sent me this photo, along with the caption, “Eris and Varrin on Venesky”. For those of you who haven’t finished reading Chasing Nonconformity yet, Venesky is a jungle planet that our heroes visit on their journey.
Teehee.
So thank you Denise and Mom for the adorable fan art. And to everyone else, stay awesome, and have a fantastic weekend!
January 20, 2016
New Imminent Danger Fan Art!
The beautiful and talented Celeste DeWolfe has done it again!
So this fan art depicts the scene from Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It where (SPOILER ALERT) Eris and Miguri escape Chakra Corp with the questionable assistance of Alyra, everyone’s favorite bumbling Psilosian. Enjoy!
Artist: Celeste DeWolfe
I think my favorite part of the drawing is actually the feeling it gives me — specifically the feeling of, “Damn, Eris is awesome!” I’m wrapped up in writing book #3 right now, and it’s really fun to think back to her first adventure and remember all the harrowing experiences she went through, and how those changed her and made her into the kick-ass heroine I’m writing about today.
So thank you again, Celeste, for the wonderful fan art! If you want to check out the rest of the Imminent Danger fan art, head over to the Fan Art page.
Have an excellent week, my friends, and stay awesome!
