Bloody, Bold, Irresolute: Late, But Live!

     Due to some unforeseen technical errors (namely, the internet connection in V101 is the absolute worst), I was unable to post the first episode of Bloody, Bold, Irresolute last night, as I had promised.
     The good news is, it's up now!
     You can listen to it on soundcloud for now, and it will soon also be available on the Bloody, Bold, Irresolute Tumblr.
     In case you missed it, this was the summary for the Bloody, Bold, Irresolute podcast:


​     Wintergreen is legally dead.  And illegally living in what used to be a carpet warehouse within what is now Eastern Deserted Daylark with her best friend and caretaker, Aiden, and the many Droids she's built over the years.  She's a Scorpio; an albino; a genius with technology that's out of this world.
     And she's also the first superhero the world has thus far seen.
     Taking to the crime-infested streets of Daylark, New York, Wintergreen spends her days kicking ass, inventing, maintaining those inventions, and attempting to unravel time and space itself with whatever meager (and subpar) materials she can scrounge up from the nearest dump.  For the time being, she's perfectly content to be Daylark's dirty little secret; it's easier to stay dead that way.  Sure, everyone in Daylark recognizes her, knows what she does, but the people of Daylark also don't ask many questions concerning the past.
     But then enters The Labrynth (who refuses to allow his name to be spelled any other way):  He's also legally dead, but unlike Wintergreen, isn't content to blend into the background of a ramshackle town for the rest of his days on Earth.  Aided by Hydra, his tigress companion, The Labrynth has big plans to lay the world at their feet and polish it until it shines--plans which happen to involve a lot of stealing and murder and, well, what the people of the twenty-first century would have called "terrorism."  
     When he makes his debut in Daylark, Wintergreen is, of course, thrilled at the prospect of a challenge, and the two quickly strike up a bitter rivalry.  
     But with the challenge comes a level of public recognition Wintergreen had neither wanted nor planned for, and with that, a slew of villains and heroes she never could have anticipated, none of whom even comes close to usurping her in the public's eye--you never forget your first, after all.  
     Will Wintergreen ever be able to fade back into the anonymity she prefers?  Will she be able to kill The Labrynth before he kills her?  And who is this "Delude" figure that's the new talk of the criminal underground?  
     Aiden, at least, hopes that Wintergreen will be around long enough to find out.

Cheating Your Way To A NaNo Win, Part 2

     The other day I wrote a post about how to cheat your way through NaNoWriMo.
     Keeping in mind that these things will not necessarily make you a good NaNo novel, or even a finished NaNo novel, just a longer NaNo novel, here's some more cheat codes!


6.  What is your character thinking?

     That long bit of narration and headwork that you know is bad writing, and if ever published would rival the likes of even Twilight?  You know the one.  Where your character goes off on a long rant about how pretty it is out, and how much he likes flowers, or whether he's really in love with Billy the Cheerleader or Mandy the Jock, or if he's going to risk buying some edibles from Cynthia and Harlan Mayweather, because yeah, obviously they make the best stuff in town, but their mother is sort of the evil overlord of earth and she has this really strict policy against drugs that Cynthia and Harlan probably only get away with because of nepotism....
     That one?  It goes nowhere, it's not entertaining, it contributes nothing, you could more concisely convey the same information in like two sentences tops?
     Slap that bad boy down as drawn-out and useless as you like, my friend.  First drafts are for play, final drafts are for serious work.  Treat it like a free-write, like I just did up there; just set your fingers to the keyboard and let 'em fly!  No one will know the difference.
     Except for you, you dirty, dirty cheater.

7.  Lavish description

     Explain to me what the set looks like in vivid detail, tell me the exact shade of every single hair on the hero's head, and name every solitary scent in the princess's perfume; leave nothing unsaid, and employ every single last sense, even the extra ones!  Come on, it'll be fun!
     .... for you.
     Look, description for the sake of description?  As a reader, not my cup of tea.  But because it's not my cup of tea, as a writer I tend to under-dress my sets, which is great for the stage, where creative directors want to have all the leeway they can get, but for novels that makes it difficult to keep the reader interested--you risk having talking heads and bland settings.
     It's just so damn easy to overdo it, though--so don't even worry about it.  Just overdo it right from the start, all the words you want, all the description you like.  Then deal with the merciless cutting and hacking later, like with everything else on this list.

8.  Long dialogue

     Now, it helps if your characters are witty.  I know my characters having humorous back-and-forths about innocuous things (at least, innocuous to them) had to have made up at least a third of my NaNo Novel last year--my characters were funny, and if they wanted to show it off, who was I to stop them?
     I also delivered a lot of exposition through dialogue, which can also boost word count depending on how it's done, but witty dialogue is probably the best for boosting word count--even if it's just the characters thinking that they're witty.  Sometimes the more so, even, because people thinking they're witty tend to stumble and need correcting more often than others.
     You can also employ speech patterns to your advantage--in one of my WIPs from a while back a few of my characters have a habit of saying one another's names as a method of establishing dominance in a conversation, and I've had a character or two who liked to loop themselves around in webs of metaphor or simile, or who just plain liked run-on sentences (for whatever weird, totally not based-on-a-real-person reasons).
     As long as you keep those characters talking, your word count will keep climbing.  BUT....

9.  Try to avoid floating heads, but don't bite yourself if you can't

     Talking heads are terrible for a whole host of reasons I'll probably get into at some other time, but for now just know that a talking head occurs in a story when a character, or several characters, talks for an extended length of time with very few or no dialogue or action tags--so for six pages on end, there's just talk talk talk blather blather blather.
     And I get why--I've certainly done it before, it's easy, it just keeps flowing and flowing and flowing, and once you hit that speech rhythm it's hard to stop!--but talking heads are secretly killing your word count.  For every three spoken words you could be piling up a fourth outside of the quotation marks, just hanging out, relaxing, maxing all cool and the like; having your character perform actions as they speak will not only make your scene a million times more relevant/interesting, but it will also make that word count skyrocket, and, my good man or woman or nonbinary or genderless individual, I do believe that is why you are here.
     And this one's not even a cheat!  Totally legal.

10.  Include needless scenes if need be

     Much like those rambling headspace dealies, if there's a scene you know will never, ever make it into your finished novel, but you're running out of options?  Toss it in there.  Is it an AU fanfic of the story?  In fact, is it a fanfic of any type?  Did you write a poem or a short story?  Do you have less respect for the novel in and of itself than for the creativity upon which NaNo was founded?  Then toss it the fuck in, my friend!
     Tons of people do this--rather than attempt to write a novel this upcoming NaNo, a lot of people will attempt to slap down 50k in blog posts, in short stories, in poems, in paperwork, in scattered bits and pieces of whatever they can write in a month, because to a lot of people, NaNoWriMo is less about the novels than it is about the creativity and the community and the kinship you find within those thirty days.  NaNoWriMo is about more than writing novels, guys; it's about using the constraints of time to accomplish a creative goal, with an army of like-minded individuals to back you up.
     So maybe finishing your novel isn't going to be what's up this NaNo, but creativity will be, and part of creativity is knowing when to adapt your goals and the methods you use to get to them.
     Maybe that means using this list of technically-not-really-cheats to flesh out your word count for your novel; maybe that means writing at certain times of the day when you know you're at your creative peak.
     Or maybe it means deciding that a novel was never the real goal in the first place.

     Happy NaNoing my friends!  ... Even if it is February....

How to Cheat Your Way to a NaNoWriMo Win

     *GASP!*  Cheat on NaNoWriMo!?
     Now before I launch into this bad boy saddles a-burning, let me just say that the use of these tactics is not going to necessarily net you a good NaNo novel, or even a finished NaNo novel, but it will help you up your word count, and who knows, using some of these tactics might help you flesh out the story in your own mind, if nothing else.
     Just remember that once all is said and done and you have a finished novel in your hands, you're going to want to litter the cutting-room floor, probably in a pretty major way.
     SO, now that that's out of the way.....

1.  Adverbs and adjectives

     Adverbs are the little things that modify verbs, which everyone and her sister will tell you is Bad Writing™.  Usually they're words with "ly" at the end, like "clearly" or "slowly."  Adjectives are the same thing, but with nouns, and are usually referred to as descriptor words, ie, "beautiful," "deadly," "shiny," etc.
     Lots of writers will tell you that adverbs and adjectives (but mostly adverbs) are to be cut out of your writing at any and all costs; that's silly, of course.  But it's important not to overuse adverbs or adjectives in your writing, or things can get clunky.  Clunky is what first drafts are all about, though, so if you're looking to bump word count, these guys can help you out, at least temporarily.

2.  Use needlessly complicated sentences

     *sucks breath through teeth*  I really don't recommend this one, I mean... hhhhhh, there's no need to needlessly complicate things, but hey, if Occam's Razer isn't for you, who am I to judge?  Just make sure you simplify things down the road.  And that you do not don't not forget what it was that in the first place you were attempting to try to accomplish.
     (it's your funeral)

3.  Write parts that haven't happened yet

     This one I really do recommend--it's what I do.  When I have an idea for an upcoming scene, instead of risking its loss by waiting until the "appropriate" time to write it, I just type it up right in the document--usually at the top--then later I can copy and paste it into place no problem, and it's not even technically cheating since it was supposed to be in your story all along.


4.  Write parts that won't make it into the final cut

     This gets us back into the pseudo-cheat territory, but it's also something that I do so *applies the fuck-it adjustment* why not share it with the world.
     That scene where those two characters do nothing but banter and chat about stuff that has nothing to do with the story?  The one that you know, just know, even as you write it, is going to end up on the chopping block as soon as you go back to edit?
     Steer into the train crash my friend.  Play chicken with that sucker and watch from an out-of-body experience as you and your car are totally mangled by its twenty-ton onslaught.
     Okay, so that's a bit melodramatic; you aren't going to die.  Not from this, at least.  Probably.  I mean, I'm not a doctor or a lawyer or anything, so anything's possible.  Probably you'll just have some extra words to cut later--maybe a few extra darlings to murder.
     I know you're capable of it, though, you have big, strong arms, and what else would those garden shears be for, we're in the middle of LA for crying out loud!  I'm sure you've done it before.
     Wow, my metaphors are really just running away from me tonight.
     My point is, this is a harmless crime, and can in fact be helpful--sometimes the most telling moments we have are the ones that occur when nothing big or life-altering is happening, the little things we do in the dark that no one will ever know we did.  Sometimes the audience needs to see scenes like that, but a lot of the time it fucks with the pacing or doesn't move anything along, etc, etc, and will ultimately need to be cut; but if it's informed your work on the character, then even being cut out, it has served a very valuable purpose.

5.  When you're stuck, skip ahead and come back later

     Tied into the two above is the age old, "Do It Later" approach.  Which, contrary to what you may suspect, especially since this article is supposed to be all about cheating, is a really solid method; sometimes something with the current portion of the plot or dialogue or what have you is tripping you up, and you just need a breather.  That's life!  Sometimes you just don't have the tools to deal with something in that moment.
     What do you do when that happens?  Well, if you had all the time in the world you might get up, go someplace new, do some research, have an adventure!  But since you're a Writer and are both slave to the written word and to the sacrificial blood oath you made upon avowing to write 50k in 30 days, you don't have time for that.  Probably not the energy, either.  Plus it's cold in November, and it's probably raining today, and all your good coats are still in storage because you don't really want to admit it's winter yet, and....
     You get the picture.
     So one of the best ways to shake it up is to just skip ahead.  Narrow down what's causing the issue and bypass it completely.  Maybe writing a little will shake that crud loose for later, and if not, you can write it during the editing phase, when taking long breaks to stare at your manuscript and scream is considered healthy and reasonable.
     Sometimes you just need to work on something else for a whi


     And then the dreaded corkscrew blunderbussss threw down its MIGHTY HAMMER, and...

"Love Is What You Make It" Is Live!!!

     A few days ago I promised that I would start updating a story about polyamorous soul mates on Wattpad every Tuesday and Thursday--and it's really late on a Tuesday night, but it's still Tuesday (even in New York!) and the first chapter is up and ready to be read!
     The cover page isn't up to the standards I'd like it to meet, so I'm planning to remodel it when I get a free minute, but for now that up there is what we've got, and I'll post the summary again below.
     If you read the first chapter and like it, I always welcome feedback, and if you didn't like it and you want to let me know why I'd be grateful--just like all of you out there, I too am an imperfect sack of bones and meat (shocking, I know), and am ever striving towards self-improvement.
     If, for whatever reason, you might want access to early chapters, and in particular if you happen to also be PoC, LGBTQIA+ (intersex/intergender in particular), polyamorous, Jewish, or Muslim, I'm open and eager to having Beta readers (or even critique partners if you've got a WIP you'd like to swap chapters of)!  If that's the case you can reach me in the comments, dm me on twitter, message me on tumblr, or email me at TheSpiderWriter@gmail.com.
     And, since I'm new to Wattpad, if you have any good story recs for me (fantasy/sci fi/horror are my favorites, but I like a little bit of everything) drop 'em in the comments and I'll check 'em out! :)

Love Is What You Make It Summary:

Everyone is born with a name on their wrist.  One name.  Everyone gets one, that is all.
     Jack is born with three.
     Growing up in a world that's been shaped by the concept of one person, one soul mate is difficult when whatever forces govern the creation of such bonds have decided that you're destined to be polyamorous--or maybe that your soulmates are destined to die, one-by-one, along the way?  Jack doesn't know.  Jack is terrified that he doesn't know.  Jack tries not to think about the things he doesn't know.
     But what he does know is that when he meets Thomas Gray, a damaged jerk with too many pairs of glasses, everything is easy, everything is hard, and nothing will ever be the same again. 
     It's difficult, trying to figure what destiny is with only six words to guide you, especially in a world where lifting your sleeve too high might get you killed in the wrong neighborhood--but it's still four more than most people get, and Jack is eager to find out what that means.

Vulnerability in Art

     Art demands every piece of us.
     Art, and the making of it, commands respect, and insists on nothing less than everything we are; it's why we, as artists, choose to work dead-end jobs while we bang out that novel; it's why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a school everyone told us wasn't worth it; its why we eschew safety and isolate ourselves from the outside world.
     Art demands nothing less than one hundred percent.
     This doesn't mean that being an artist means having to give up friends and family, or needing to work a dead-end job or study art in school or live a difficult life, but it's because art demands so much of us that many of us choose to do these things.  It doesn't mean we can't live, though we often have to live harder, faster, more fully, while making time to create and support ourselves at the time.
     What it does mean is that in order to create art, we must be vulnerable.
     Art is cutting yourself open and bleeding on the page, on canvas, on stage, on screen--art is destroying yourself and giving away pieces of your soul.  If you can't be vulnerable in your work, you won't produce art--stories, sure, pictures, plays, but not something novel, fresh, stimulating--that's what art is.  Art makes you think, makes you feel.  Art is a piece of yourself, carved out of your heart and plastered up for all to see.
     In order to create art, you have to be willing to go there, to accept whatever story wanders into your heart without censorship or fear, because to an artist, nothing is taboo--nothing can be taboo, because even if you're promoting the tabooness of something, you have to be able to recreate it, to explain it, to get into the heads of those who partake in the deeds.
     One of the things I'm learning in my acting classes is how to be vulnerable--I'm not a vulnerable person in nature, I was always taught to be strong and keep others out of my head, but when you're acting on the camera you can't do that; you have to look another person straight in the eyes, and you have to maintain that eye contact except at very specific moments, no matter how hard it gets.
     To be an actor you have to be vulnerable all the time--there are times you'll have to strip naked, times you'll have to bleed out, times you'll have to bumble around and look like an idiot, and as a writer it's the same deal; you have to write characters that are totally unlike you, characters you hate that you have to make three dimensional, likable even, and characters you love that are flawed out the ass.
     You'll have to write about things that make your skin crawl, you'll have to revisit traumatizing moments in your life to access the raw emotion that makes your characters feel real, you might even have to seek out new traumas in order to understand what your characters are going through.  You have to be willing to cut yourself open, and then cut again, and keep cutting and cutting until there is nothing left of you to give.
     But the beautiful--and terrifying--thing about art is that there will always be more of you to give. Creativity isn't a limited resource; the more of it you give, the more you get back, and every time you consume the art of others it changes and recharges you.  Every experience you have, good or ill, gives you something new to write about, draw, paint, new fodder for your acting, for whatever it is that you create.
      Art is not easy; it can very, very difficult, in fact.  But it's what we do, because we love it, and because we need it.  I've never met another artist that didn't have things burning underneath their skin that didn't have a fierce and driving need to get it out, out, out, before the wind caught it up and it consumed them.
     There are a lot of reasons we produce art--to be seen, heard, validated, to make change, to make waves, to keep things the same, to express oneself, to deal with what one has been through in their own life, to help others--and art is never twice the same.  Your entire life can't be creation, because if you never lived or experienced or consumed you'd never have anything to write about!
     But you have to be willing to let yourself give the page everything you are.  A lot of it may never see the light of day--we edit and have editors for a reason--but if you never bleed there will be nothing worth editing away.
     Art demands commitment, it demands sacrifice, it demands love and hate and raw primordial emotion the depths of which are murky and barely understood by the person feeling them--but most of all, it demands you.  Because you are the only you, and trying to be anyone or anything else is inauthentic, false, a lie--art is about truth.  If nothing else, it's about the truth of you.
     So you do you.  Bleed on the page.
     (You know you want to.)

Upcoming Projects

     It's a Sunday, and I don't usually post on Sundays (anymore), but I had some exciting news that I wanted to share with everybody without taking away one of the normal blog spots.
     While I've been online a long time, my online presence in my "rl" persona is relatively new.  I don't have a lot of stories to my name, and this year I've decided to change that; coming soon to an internet near you are the following works by Meghan D. Coates aka Maggie C. aka TheSpiderWriter aka the walking encyclopedia aka the one with too many nicknames please just stop already we're so confused:

Bloody, Bold, Irresolute:

What It Is:  A podcast about superheroes, supervillains, government intervention, a lowkey dystopia, true AI, floating robots, a talking tiger, aliens, violence, and gray morality based off of a 951 page novel I wrote when I was twelve (no worries, it's being heavily rewritten).

Summary:   In which the first superhero ever is crude, inaffable, irreverent, and incondite--in other words, a total asshole who probably shouldn't be trusted with a weapon of any sort.
     Bedecked with robots, a talking tiger, shitty police networks, half-abandoned towns, and vigilantes and villains galore, Bloody, Bold, Irresolute follows the Green-Eyed Albino (known to herself and her Droids as Wintergreen) as she kicks ass, takes names, and maybe sorta tries to save the world a little bit.

   

When:  The first and third sundays of every month, starting on Sunday, 2/21/16.

Where:  Soundcloud.com/bloodyboldirresolute

Website:  BloodyBoldIrresolute.weebly.com

Love Is What You Make It:

What It Is:  A semi-episodic experimental/exploratory slice-of-life romance story about a world where one is born with their soul mate's name on their wrist, which changes colors when you meet for the first time.

Summary:  Everyone is born with a name on their wrist.  One name.  Everyone gets one, that is all.
     Jack is born with three.
     Growing up in a world that's been shaped by the concept of one person, one soul mate is difficult when whatever forces govern the creation of such bonds have decided that you're destined to be polyamorous--or maybe that your soulmates are destined to die, one-by-one, along the way?  Jack doesn't know.  Jack is terrified that he doesn't know.  Jack tries not to think about the things he doesn't know.
     But what he does know is that when he meets Thomas Gray, a damaged jerk with too many pairs of glasses, in his class mid-junior-year, everything is easy, everything is hard, and nothing will ever be the same again.
     It's hard, trying to figure what destiny is with only six words to guide you, especially in a world where lifting your sleeve too high might get you killed in the wrong neighborhood--but it's four more than most people get, and Jack is eager to find out what that means.

When:  Tuesdays and Thursdays (hopefully in the mornings, but it may vary because school) starting 2/16/16.

Where:  Wattpad.com/ispiderwriter

The Rajaqweet

What It Is:  A collection of three webcomics concerning a race of immortal universe-hopping aliens with the single-minded goal of conquering and ruling over everything, everyone, everywhere.

Summary:  

Hail To The Noose:  Dhalast is very young, very driven, very single-minded, very accomplished; at the juvenile age of five hundred years, she earns her first face-to-face meeting with His Badass Glorification, the primordial behemoth, ever-growing, never-evolving, that has ruled over The Rajaqweet almost since the birth of the universe.
     After being promoted to a stationary rank on a small green planet called Ceril, it becomes her duty to keep the local population under the keen blade of the law, with the help of a few locals that have been delegated to act as her legal cabinet.  With Dhalast's impressive wit and keen senses (and Zharresk's understanding of local custom) it should be simple enough, but when the descendant of the most infamous rebel in Rajaqweet history makes herself known, Dhalast may finally meet her match.

Hiding Heinrik:  In a cozy seven-room apartment in the city there lives a group of five very close, very weird, very queer friends.  There's Mav, the everyman, studying for med school, and Mave, his twin sister, who's studying fashion and likes to throw knives, their friend Fera, an eight-star chef (in a rating system by her own design) who loves just about every sport, the group's default mom/dad Desna, an artist as dedicated to her friends as she is to her pacifistic moral code, and of course, X, a dabbler in all things who can't be boxed in by traditional ... anything, really.
     So when X, Desna, and the girls save an alien refugee from a crashed space ship and make Mav patch it back together, they're not exactly surprised that it fits right into their life.  And they've seen a lot of movies, so those FBI agents knocking on the door, the alien they see out of the corner of their eyes every now and again that then vanishes like smoke in the wind--they're basically to be expected.  But seeing as half of them are at least pseudo-pacifists, Fera and X are the only ones who have been in a real fight before, and Mav and Mave's mother is part of the very same government they're trying to slip under the radar of, things might get tricky....

Shithouse Maggots:  Sklor is young but not extremely young; she's talented, but not extremely talented; she's loyal, but she doesn't treat her lord's word like holy doctrine.  Maybe that's why He throws this extra assignment at her the day she's supposed to start her vacation.  Or maybe her Enabler is every bit the fucknugget she always dreamed he would be.
     Whatever the reason for her most recent assignment is, she's gotta do it--Planet Earth, fleshy meat creatures, hyper-militaristic.  Get in, rise to power, get out, should only take about a week.
     Should.  It should only take about a week.  When you add in a human form, a total lack of any kind of job experience or references, two be-legged larvae she's meant to help raise, and an only half-downloaded Culture Chip, the timeline might increase a little--or a lot.
     Well, as long as she doesn't stick around long enough to get (*shudder*) attached to anything, she should be fine.  She'll just make sure her next vacation is twice as long as this one was supposed to be.

When:  
HttN:  Mondays
HH:  Wednesdays
SM:  Fridays
Starting Monday, 3/7/16

Where:  TBA

Coming Back From The Dead

     Gandalf.  Roy Greenhilt.  Harry Potter.  Most of the characters in Homestuck.  Every superhero in the history of ever.  What do they all have in common?
     They're revenants.
     The word "revenant," in case you haven't been paying attention to that hot new movie I probably won't ever see (because as a broke college student I have neither time nor money to go to the theater, and who knows when it'll be on Netflix), means one who has returned from the dead, or seems to be returning from the dead.  All those characters up there?  They're that.
     The writing community can be pretty polarized on whether or not it's acceptable to bring characters back from the dead; if you've been keeping up with my blog, then you've probably realized by now that I'm rarely polarized when it comes to writing, and that I tend to go on a case-by-case basis.
     That being said, there are definitely times you don't want to kill your character, and even more ways to revive them in such a way that will leave your audience clambering for the door.  Talking about how not to kill-and-revive might be a good article for later, but for now I'm going to focus on the positives; the building blocks, if you will.

Note--this article assumes that the period of time passing between death and revival is at least a period of several weeks.


1.  Be Wary of the Revolving Door

     The Revolving Door of Death (also known as the "Death is Cheap" trope, or a Comic Book Death) is a system set up in which characters who die rarely stay dead--in fact, they're more likely to come back than not.  Every god damn superhero in the history of ever is subject to this trope, and if you've ever had a conversation with a superhero nerd you know how little respect a large portion of the audience has for the practice.
     The Revolving Door cheapens death--it makes it just another plot construct, and usually the storyline plays out the same.  The hero dies, everyone mourns them, they make a deal with the devil for the .000007% of their soul they still have left (they die a lot, is what I'm saying), and come back just in the nick of time, saving the day as everyone gasps and is surprised for the three millionth time and maybe the girlfriend comedically tries to beat him up for dying on her, blah blah blah we've all seen it before.
     If your universe is predicated on a Revolving Door system, that's fine, there are ways to make it work--in Homestuck, most of the characters die and come back at least once (instantaneously, even!), and you'll rarely see a fan complain, but that's likely due to the structured nature of the die-and-revive system (see below)--but if death is seen as a normal facet of life which can be easily returned from, then you need to realize that it will not mean as much to kill someone.  You can't try to make the audience cry if one of your characters dies, because they know he's going to come back.  Unless, of course, it's a special case, and it's very very clear that she's never coming back--like with Gwen Stacy in Spiderman.  In this case, a permanent death will pack more of a punch, but the audience may still be wary of the character's return.
   

2.  How Do They Come Back?

     Rules.  Your system of resurrection needs rules. The system in comic books, well-hated as they are (at least in the circles I run in; your mileage may vary), don't seem to have any.  Correct me if I'm wrong of course, I'm not a comic expert, I grew up in a small town that didn't have so much as a proper store, let alone a comic shop, but from what I've read online and the conversations I've held with my compatriots, sometimes people come back from the dead and sometimes they don't and that's that.
     And that's not enough.
     There needs to be a method to the madness.  Is it magic?  Is it science?  Is it some combination of the two?  Did Gods do it, mortals, something greater or lesser than either?  Was it a bacteria, a virus, a special parasite?  Why?  Why did this happen, how did it happen?  What are the rules?  What are the limitations?
     If it's magic, they might need to get into contact with a special, high-level cleric and pay a lot of money, a la Greenhilt, or perhaps undertake a special ritual that can only be performed at a certain place at a certain time after gathering certain items and fighting certain guard creatures.  If it has to do with God or Gods, there should be a damn good reason for the God to listen to your character, and it shouldn't be done without some form of sacrifice.
     If it's science, you should do some research on the modern quest for immortality (trust me, it's amazing.  or maybe terrifying.  again, your mileage will probably vary) to make sure that your science-fiction is in line with current findings--or, if you deviate from modern findings, that you at least have some scientific basis on which to formulate your methodology.
      The less cheap you want death to be, the harder it should be to bring someone back from the dead--the more years, the more studying, the greater magic, the more complex the scientific methods.  If you want death to really be worth something, then you can't pull this trick out of your hat for any old thing; in fact, you can only really use it once before death starts to cheapen.  Once is a miraculous resurrection, twice is a fluke of nature, and at three times it starts to become just another system within the system.
     Structure, sacrifice, and limitation are key in making your system of death-and-revival believable and not-groan-worthy.

3.  Consequences, Consequences, Consequences

      When someone dies, there are consequences.
     People mourn, cry, self-destruct, move on with their lives, start to forget; jobs are lost, objects inherited by survivors, homes sold; bodies moulder, graves are dug, papers are filed.
     When someone dies, there are consequences.  Seems kind of obvious, but it's easy to forget, when you start dipping into the fantasy realm or creating worlds from scratch, that those consequences extend beyond the period of death.
     Legally, there's a precedent that's been set and upheld in America which disallows people from returning from the dead.  At least, at the state level--on a federal level, the nation wants to bring people back from the dead so they can force the families to repay all the support received.  Whether you agree with the rulings or not, there's a lot of legal ramifications you'll want to think through when bringing someone back from the dead--the longer they've been dead (and the more publicly they died) the more hoops they'll have to jump through to rejoin society, if they can even accomplish that at all.
     If you're making up your own world, the legal ramifications may be different, but there's likely to be something in place to make life difficult.  There's also the social repercussions--depending on how long your character has been dead, different people will have different reactions to their return; some will be ecstatic, especially those who worked to make it happen, but others will be less receptive.  People who have moved on may feel as though old wounds are being ripped open, people who have created new lives without them may feel guilty for doing so, or resentful that this person has come back to destroy the new status quo.
     Some of your character's loved ones might be angry at them for dying, or leaving things unsaid, or something else that had to do with their death or life before it.  Some are likely to be frightened--it's not every day you see a dead woman walk, after all.  They might even try to attack, thinking them a zombie, or else assume them to be a hallucination or figment of their imagination.
     Point is: there's a lot of room for things to go wrong.
     Even if your characters are excited about the return of another, the relationships they have will have to be reestablished, and depending on what the consequences of your revenant's return is, it could be difficult.  Certainly, their relationships won't be exactly the same--watching someone die, or even just going through the mourning process, changes things, and there will be periods of your characters' lives that your revenant just didn't exist during.
     Which brings me to the physiological and emotional changes that your character will face.
     Dying is an experience most people don't come back from; the few who do are dead only for a couple minutes at most, and it's a very life-changing, often traumatizing experience.  Unless your method of revival necessitates or facilitates wiping out the revenant's memories of what's happened to them, they'll likely come back changed--the more so if they've spent some time in an afterlife.  They may suffer from PTSD, or feel disconnected and isolated from their friends and family--if they made friends in the afterlife, they may miss them; they may, depending on your system for resurrection, not even feel fully human anymore.  What the effects of resurrection are in your world are totally up to you, but make decisions and stick to them.
   

     Death is tricky; life is even trickier.  Trying to come back to life from the dead--that's a shenanigan right there.  A straight up shenanigan that deserves your total dedication and a sharp eye for nuance and cliches.
     Keep killing it, comrades.  And then revive it, because murder is still illegal in most countries.

On A Quest For Critique Partners: The Casual Ties of War

     Hello, everyone!  Maggie here, your spideriest writeriest southern New Yorker schooling in LA.  I've been working hard on a number of projects since coming to AMDA this October, and one of those projects has been my attempt to whip one of my stage plays into shape!
     At this point, I've been through my manuscript about a dozen times with a myriad of pen colors, and I think I've reached the point where a vacuum is no longer useful; I need eyes on the ground.  So here I'm reaching out to anyone and everyone who might have need of a Critique Partner, and also has experience with plays.  It's not necessary that the piece you'd like critiqued right now be a play (though it would be cool if it were), but I do need CPs who know about play structure and what does and doesn't work on stage to help lash this bad boy into shape.
     If, after reading the blurb below, you think you might be interested, send me an email at TheSpiderWriter@gmail.com with a summary of the work you'd like critique on, and if it catches my eye, maybe we can talk shop!  Hope to hear from you soon!


The Casual Ties of War:  A ~13k dramedy of errors about love, duty, and the costs of war.

     Delial does not fall in love with her superiors!  ... Except maybe just this once.  But Soro is so sweet and kind, and better with a blade than anyone Delial's ever met!  And, technically she's not Delial's superior, just a superior.  She's not even older than Delilal, she's younger by two years and then some.  So it's not as bad as when her sister or best friend do it.
     ... Unless Delial mistook Soro for someone she's not, and Soro lied about who she really is in order to feel like she was someone's equal for once.  I mean, that could be so dangerous!  Especially if Delial wasn't who Soro thought, either--and if the mission Delial's on is meant to culminate in the death of someone that Soro's pretending she isn't.
     In the long-running war between Terra and Forma, tundra kingdoms of the frozen north, there's a lot that's been lost, but these young women will soon find out that even in a time of perpetual war, in a place of perpetual frost, there's a lot still left to lose.

Your Protagonist Should Be Popping Pills

     I like pills.
     No, not those kinds of pills; I like ibuprofen and my gabapentin and, when I need it, some good old 'cillin for those pesky hard-to-kill bacteria!
     I don't abuse anything prescription, or OTC (okay, maybe I take a little too much ibuprofen, but I do what I can to get by), but when I need them I need them. Some people think they make you weak (they don't), and I totally understand choosing not to medicate--if you've read my series on Tourette's, you know I chose not to medicate for that--but popping amoxacillin, tossing back some ondansetron, or chugging some cough syrup makes me feel like I'm doing something.  I can't get down on a germ's level to get my pathogenicide on, so I do the next best thing and drop some poison down my gullet (It's bacteria poison, not people poison, don't worry).
     Taking pills is an active measure--reactive, in a sense, but certainly not passive.
     So your protagonist should be popping pills, too--sometimes it's reactive pills, like a revenge plot, or a murder mystery, or a typical *shudder* Chosen One prophecy.  Sometimes your protagonist will be popping vitamins (or "vitamins") instead, a proactive measure, like when little kids go exploring in the attic, or a troubled youth starts plotting his first Get Rich Quick scheme, or a suspicious dude decides to stake out a sketchy guy's house just to see what the hell his deal is.
     Sometimes they'll have to procure the pills themselves (the pills are metaphors for options at this point) like when any character ever goes after meds for their grandmother (not-so-metaphorical), and sometimes they'll be handed them, like Neo in The Matrix (also not really a metaphor... Well, it was a metaphor in the movie, so I guess it's like a meta metaphor?).
     Neo ostensibly has two options--take the red pill, find out what all his shit's about, take the blue pill, pretend it never happened.  I think we can all agree that watching a blue-pill Neo would have been a really boring movie, which brings me to my next point--your character has to take the right pills--which are often actually the wrong pills.
     This is getting confusing and way too meta metaphorical, so I'm going to take a step back and stop talking about pills for a minute.
     The point is:  An active protagonist will, ninety nine percent of the time, make a much more interesting protagonist.  The actions they take may be the ones that destroy them, or the ones that eventually lift them up, but the active pursuit of something is far more interesting than passive acceptance.  If a character makes no decisions, or makes decisions only because they have literally no other choice ("I am the only person in the entire world that can stop the bad guy from killing literally everyone"), it's going to be much harder to make them sympathetic.
     Remember the friend you had in high school that always complained about their life, but never took steps to make things better, never took your advice, and did only what they had to to just barely skirt by?  You may have loved the hell out of them, but I bet they weren't a ton of fun to be around for any length of time; a passive protagonist is a lot like that friend, and unfortunately, a novel necessitates that a LOT of time be spent with them.
     We, as an audience, care more about the character that self-medicates with drugs or shrinks themselves down to microscopic size to murder their own parasites or goes on a murder spree when they find out their pharmaceutical company is screwing over people with cancer than we do about the one that finds out they're dying and just accepts it, rolls over, and waits for death or a savior.
     We like protagonists that, for good or ill, for better or worse, in intellect and stupidity and both sickness and health, have a goal in mind, even if it's a vague or reactive one, and take risks to try to accomplish that goal.
     Your audience, whether they know it or not, wants pill-poppers, and gosh darn it, they want those pills to be as red as a baboon's ass.

The Broad Strokes of Formatting

     Since I've been blogging about structural components of noveling thus far this week, I figure I might as well complete the trifecta with a lesson on formatting, the penultimate structural component (the ultimate one is probably like, plot or something).
      Knowing how to format your novel is extremely important--agents and publishing companies won't look twice at a manuscript, no matter how dazzlingly fantastic, if you haven't taken the time to bring it up to industry standards.  Chances are good, if you're self-publishing, that your audience won't stick around too long, either.
     A certain degree of experimentation can work to your advantage, depending on your genre and intended effect, but for the large majority of works, adherence to the rules is likely best.
     Your mileage may vary depending on the agent or publisher you're submitting to, but here are the basic industry standards for

General Text:

• One inch margins
• Half-inch indentations for each new paragraph
• Twelve-point Times New Roman font (black)
• Double spaced
• Alignment on the left hand side, jagged line on the right
• Include page number, title, and last name in the header for every page except for the title page

New Chapters:

When starting a new chapter, use the "page break" feature (so that if you go back to edit previous chapters, your formatting won't get fucked up)

Center your chapter titles about a third of the way down the page

Title Page:

• Place your contact info (name, address, phone number, email) and the  genre and word count in the upper left hand corner of your title page
• About half way down the page, state your title in either all caps or mixed caps ("The Fantastic Journey of Clodbourne Hammerstein and the Magic Oak Tree")
• Jump down a line and type "a novel by" 
• Jump down another line and type your name/pen name

     And that's about it, for now--at least, that's the simple version.
     Happy Tech Week from TheSpiderWriter, happy Finals Week to me, and may you all have a wonderful weekend and a happy next week, too.

4 Conventions To Use Sparingly

     When writing, there are certain things you can use judiciously--such as the word "said" when adding dialogue tags--and things you should hardly ever use at all--such as the interrobang.  Most things fall somewhere in the middle, though.  This article concerns those things that fall toward the latter end of the spectrum, based primarily on observations I've made while perusing fanfiction over the years.  
     You can't really write a book without most of these things, but you do want to be careful when using...

1.  ALL-CAPS

     ALL-CAPS DENOTES TWO THINGS:  YELLING AND YELLING.

     Nobody likes being yelled at, so cool it with the all-caps sentences.  They're great for flavor now and again, but if you find yourself making frequent use of them, go over your work and ask yourself if it's really necessary.  Most of the time your audience can already tell a character is excited, either from context clues, or written cues, or the content of the conversation they're having; there's no need to patronize them.  
     Personally, I try not to use capslock at all, but I do find it slipping in every now and again, which again, is fine: all things in moderation is basically the thesis statement of this listicle.  Personally, I find caps to be most appropriate,
 a) When a character is really, really SUPER angry, and needs to scream his little lungs out,
 b) When a character off-stage is talking to a character on-stage, and vice-versa (ie, yelling downstairs to Mom or out the window to Best Friend)
 c) When you need to emphasize a word but italics and bold type don't seem to give it the right sort of oomph (see a)
 and d), When viewing a written work that is in all caps, such as the name of a store, or if a character has chosen to use it in some type of correspondence (letter, chatlog, twitter, etc.) either because it's simply in their character to do so, or because of something tied more to the plot--a secret code, maybe, or bad handwriting, or she forgot to check to see if caps was on, etc.
     (I bet you can guess which is my favorite)

2.  ¡¡¡¡¡¡Eclamation!!!!!! ¡¡¡¡¡¡Points!!!!!!!

     I see!!!!!  That you're!!!!!  Excited!!!!  And that's good!!!!! But we got it!!! The first time!!!! 

     Exclamation points are really handy for telling us very quickly that there's some oomph to what's been said--especially useful are the upside-down exclamation marks that people of the Spanish tongue use, but if you're in American, unless you're using them in the Spanish language or for a special effect at a certain part of your novel (see above), I would resist the urge to sprinkle your manuscript with them, as they are nonstandard punctuation and would likely never make it into print.
     So yes, exclamation points are really useful, and help us do away with a lot of clunky adverbs and replacements for "said," but littering every other sentence with a slew of them ultimately results in their devaluation; it appears amateur, childish, and over-enthusiastic but under-practiced.  
     Some would say not to use exclamation points in narration at all, but personally I would say to use them sparsely in your narrative, and to choose carefully where they're placed.  Make sure also, when writing dialogue, to keep in mind the type of character you're using--would the grumperpuss who mops the floor really use that exclamation point right there?  Or would he be more likely to putz and putter around with periods or dashes or ellipses?  
     I'd also suggest that--except in cases of character correspondence--you avoid the use of multiple exclamation points in a row.  Overdoing it can be just as dangerous--if not more so--than underdoing it.

3.  Question???? Marks?????

     I??? Think????? My personality????? has been consumed????? by???? uptalk???????

     Much like the above, the overuse of question marks in your writing appears childish and inattentive, and overdoing it makes you seem incapable of moderation, has the reader wondering if your keyboard is broken, and, when use in dialogue, can make your characters seem indecisive, over-excited, and, at times, very valley-girl-esque.
     That being said, like always, there are exceptions--namely correspondence, but--and perhaps it's a matter of taste--an extra question mark slipped in here or there never killed anybody.  Question marks have a lot less zest than exclamation points, and you can probably get away with a second or a third in dialogue with a particularly excitable character, which could help you avoid the awkward union of exclamation point and question mark (that could be so easily done away with if only the interrobang were considered proper punctuation *heavy sigh*).  
     Which brings us to--

4.  "'"'Punctuation Combos!?,.:;"'"'

     "And then they were like, "You're skipping the example line!?'..."

     Punctuation combos can be both necessary and difficult.  What do you do when a quote ends with a period, but is posed as a question, for example?  Or if your etc. is the end of the sentence, or if it needs a comma afterward, what do you do when you really need to show that this question is a loud, excited, and astonished one, what if what if what if.
     Yes, combos are completely necessary!  But they can also be confusing.  You could always try using nonstandard punctuation, but again, it's unlikely to get past your editors, and some of it is still copyrighted.  Basically, your best course of action is to be careful and keep a watchful eye.  Do your best to minimize the need for combos, structure your sentences in such a way that they're obliterated.
     As suggested above, you could use a double question mark to denote excitement, or put a sentence IN ALL CAPS?  Which produces a different effect!?  But might be the one you're looking for!!  
     And if worst comes to worst, you can always ask a fellow writer friend if they think it looks right, or if it's too confusing.  Not confusing the reader is the entire reason we have grammar, after all.

     If the reader is irritated with our story, we want it to be because the bad guy is winning or because the hero did something stupid, not because the structural components have been overdone.  I've honestly walked away from decent storylines before because the writer didn't know when to shut off the capslock, or how many exclamation points to cap it at--a lot of these flubs go hand-in-hand, and are usually drawn in a sleigh of bad grammar in general.  
     Keep an eye on such things.  The characters and plotline are tantamount, surely, but most people won't stick around to learn about either if they feel that the structure is getting in the way.  (No one wants to look at the scaffolding, we just want to see the house.)

A Writer's Vocabulary: A Balancing Act

     When you're little, teachers stress the importance of building a big vocabulary.  They tell you to search out big words, to fall in love with language, and to make use of it.
     I was already fascinated by words and stories by the time I entered school, so I was well on my way, collecting big words and new ideas as I absorbed story after story at an alarming rate; my brain was a sponge and words were my water.
     I never thought much about the words I used--they came to me as I spoke, and if they were the right words for the situation, I used them.  But I often found myself having to stop and explain what I meant using simpler words--when the words I had used were the simplest I could make them without losing the essence of the statement, it sometimes still wasn't enough!  There were even times where my teachers couldn't understand what I was saying, or where my attempt to answer a teacher's question left the class more dumbfounded than it had been previously.
     These experiences were common all throughout my primary and secondary education, and didn't stop at the schoolhouse doors.  In some ways, the awkwardness of these encounters acted as deterrents, especially in such situations as my intellect became a weapon to be used against me in the mouths of some of my more spiteful peers.  If I had loved words less than I did people, I may have learned to avoid big words altogether, and boxed myself into the little vocabulary that society had prepackaged for me.
     My mother went through similar struggles; as an extremely intelligent and well-read woman by predilection and a Master of Psychology by degree, she, too, had a voluminous vocabulary, which grew each time ours did--she had a great love of learning, which she passed down to myself and my brothers.  But in her workplace, my mother found herself at a disadvantage; with more tools to communicate with her colleagues than her colleagues did with her, she was forced to adapt herself to them, and let go of large portions of her vocabulary for the sake of clarity.
     All this is to say that we live in a society where we are often expected to pitch to the lowest common denominator, which is not always a bad thing; if your communication isn't clear, then it's not doing its job.  Words are there to help us express meaning, not show off.  As writers, this is important to keep in mind, and I've come across many an instructional guide that encourages writers to "dumb down" their writing as well--"Throw away your Thesaurus!" they cry!  "Burn the ten dollar words!"
     There's value to these articles--just as their is value in the request that a Kindergarten teacher not read high school-level stories to their five-year-old students.  It's important not to throw a thesaurus at every sentence in your story; if a small word works, it works, and there's no need to gussy it up.  You don't put on ten pounds of makeup to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, after all.
     But sometimes ten-dollar words are the most effective means of communication:  isn't it much more effective to say "She walked along the parapet" than to try to describe the tiny wall/ridge thing that runs along a rooftop?  Isn't it quicker to say "He performed a simple titration" than to try to explain what a titration is?
     If one word works better than seven, or seventeen, or seventy, then that word may well be the optimal word to use, whether in conversation or in a story--revenant, for example, is a word that's been passed around a lot since the release of that new movie, and very few people would typically be acquainted with the meaning of the word--one who has returned, or is believed to have returned, from the dead.  You could call such a movie "Return of the Dead" or "Dead Man Walking," or "One Who Has Returned From Death," and the simplicity of the words would render the meaning clear to most, if not all, English speakers.
     But they wouldn't have the same tone as The Revenant, would they?
     Sometimes the right word is a big one, sometimes it's a small one.  As a writer, it's your job to figure out which to use, and the more words you know, and the more books you read, the better equipped you'll be to make that call.
      As for the question of whether you'll be understood--people are curious, and people are smart; if your meaning is clear enough, they may pick up on what the word means from context clues.  If not, they can always look it up.  If you write well enough, people with smaller vocabularies will be willing to do the work; Lord knows we readers are willing enough to learn the names of a billion fictional places, people, and things.  And if someone does take your command of the English language as a personal affront, then that's on them, not on you.  You shouldn't throw away hard-won knowledge just because someone else can't be bothered to do a quick Google search.    
     I myself no longer avoid big words, either in real life, or in my writing; I welcome questioning stares and cocked heads as invitations to teach, reveling in the act of facilitating another's learning, and when I write, I will write from myself, using the words that are a part of me to make a tapestry that is wholly my own, neither trying to outsmart nor patronize the audience.
     It's all about the balancing act.  It's silly to gussy up to go to the bathroom, but you shouldn't strip naked as you head out to attend a ball, either.