Thursday's Children: Dream-spiration

It's one of those days when you just need a little extra coffee...also, I like to show off my self stirring mug. It's really handy and cuts down on spoons. Which is a good thing because the number of spoon trees in the world are dwindling.

Anyway, a while back, I rambled about dream inspired story ideas. See it here.

I've had several dream inspired story ideas since that post, and I have dutifully entered them into my ever expanding word document titled, appropriately, "Story Ideas". It's now four pages long and has blurbs on 26 stories (three of them are part of a trilogy idea) and three of them I've written first drafts for. In reality, I probably won't write all of them, but they popped into my head and I wrote them down.

Anyway, Tuesday night was another one of those cool dreams that decided to turn into a plot-bunny. And yes, I had to write it down.

The dream was pretty weird, and at one point I was saving the life of someone who was supposed to be some sort of savior person. As with all dreams, it was convoluted, but here is what popped out with later pondering.

It has a title, but I still need to build the world. Not sure if it is paranormal, fantasy, scifi, dystopian, or a combination of those. It's pretty loud, but I'm still in the middle of Hate Jacket and can't do anything else until I finish that.

Knots
What if your best friend was destined to save the world?
What if you were destined to destroy it?
What if you were in love with your best friend?
Duty
Honor
Betrayal
Love

'Till Next Time

Are We There Yet?

For those of you who follow my every move on Twitter and FB, you'll know that I recently packed up the family and took a train to Chicago. After spending several days visiting several museums there, we returned home (also via train).

A couple things I learned:

1. Driving in Chicago during the week is insane. Rush hour starts at 7 in the morning and goes until 7 at night (except for weekends).
2. Despite the insane traffic, the drivers there are fairly polite.
3. Speed limits are more like speed "guidelines".
4. If you buy the Chicago City Pass, it's a LOT cheaper to see all their Museums.
5. Parking at the museums is very expensive.
6. Only see one museum a day.
7. The Shedd Aquarium is awesome but at times repetitive. By the time we were done it was "Oh look, more fish". That being said, there are some awesome exhibits.
8. The Museum of Science and Industry has the only captured German U-Boat. It also has the best exhibits with lots of interactive stuff, like a giant hamster wheel and relaxation thing where you compete against someone else to move a ball to the other person's "goal" with your mind. (which I somehow won every time...no I don't know how). We could have easily spent several days there. As it was, we got there at open and left half an hour before close and we still missed a large chunk of it.
9. The Field Museum is really cool and has some amazing things in it. For example Sue the T-Rex. They also have over 20 mummies on display. Like the MSI, we couldn't see all of it before we got too tired to continue. The only disappointment was the Creatures of Light exhibit. It sounded like we were going to be able to see lots of cool bioluminescent critters, but it was all models and flashing lights. It did not live up to the hype.
10. The Adler Planetarium has some amazing astronomy presentations, but the floor plan was confusing (even with a map!) and it was a little sparse on the exhibits. However, it did have a huge play area which we let loose the rampaging monkey boy loose in for a while. He and the angsty tween really enjoyed it.
11. Food at the museums and even on the train is REALLY expensive except for Field Museum (which has a McDonald's).

We had a chance to go up in the Willis Tower Sky-Deck, but ran out of time (it was also included in the City Pass).

Sue, the T-Rex

Now on to #writemotivation update

• I woke up early Friday morning and fired off my submission email to Brenda Drake's pitchmadness competition. I have been desperately trying to not pay attention to my twitter feed until the Round 2 results have been posted. I don't know if I made it in or not. If I did, GREAT! If not, it happens. I'm sure there were a ton of awesome stories that were submitted. I just appreciate that she's doing all of this.
• Because I was on vacation, I didn't get on twitter much except at night and sometimes on my phone, so I didn't get much cheering on for my #writemotivation tweeps. My dino pompom waving will commence now that I am back.
• I got a lot of revisions done while on the train and at night when everyone fell asleep. I don't have accurate statistics, but I'm in ch. 22 of 30.
• Oh, and here's the blog post for the week!

'Till Next Time.

Inspired by Typos

So this is my first Thursday's children post. My friend, Rhiann Wynn-Nolet, does these each week. The rules are simple. Just post something about inspiration and writing. The rest, is up to the blogger.

Sounds simple enough.

Which is why she's been bugging me about it for weeks and this is the first time I've done it. In my defense, I've been hard at work with revisions and goofing off on Guild Wars 2.

Yes, I know the second one really isn't an excuse, but it does seem to eat up time.

Anyway, my inspiration that I will be talking about comes from a typo. I used to have a document with the info about who said it, but I can' find it. *pouts*

Anyway, here's what happened. It was during a Pitch Madness event, organized by Brenda Drake. The theme was paint ball and the blog hosts were talking about the comments on their site from the various agents. The posts were along the lines of "Lots of Paint Splatters" here. My feed was full of them and I was only partly paying attention, until I saw the typo.

"Lots of Pain Splatter over here".

Then it hit me. Pain Splatter. That would make an awesome band name for my MC, Julius. It could be his favorite band! Yes! I asked if I could have it, and the tweeter agreed.

So, the band Pain Splatter was born. In my first draft, Julius only mentions them once. I decided they needed more book time so I added in a scene where you get to meet the whole band.

They are:

• Kray - Lead singer
• Clot – Drums
• Puddle – Bass Guitar
• Mucus – Lead Guitar/Backup Vocals

The band is a mixture Punk/Heavy Metal/Thrash band. Think wall of noise kind of "music" which is perfect for grumpy, outcast teen like Julius.

Also, since it's March 14th.

HAPPY PI DAY! :D

'Till Next Time.

March #writemotivation Week 2 update

Just a quick update on my progress for the month.

The major goal for this month is to get HJ ready for Pitch Madness (which happens on Friday!).

Anyway, I've got my email ready to send Friday morning. All I have to do is click send. I've got the first 250 words looking all spiffy and I just need to clean up the log line.

Revisions on the whole novel are going well. I've added two new chapters and cleaned up a lot of the prose in others. I'm about halfway done and I'm up 2500 words despite chopping the last chapter, so I should hit 65K total when all is said and done.

All in all a good month so far.

The other goals are going well too. Lots of cheering and pompoms for all my #writemotivation friends.

Since this is a short post, I'll leave you with this random picture:

George, the Uber Dust/Hair Bunny-zilla

Scary isn't it? I should probably sweep more under and behind things as I have two dogs and three cats...

'Till Next Time