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oneighty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:12 PM
Original message
Are we going to just talk about writing?
PatDem offered up a neat little story.

Who is next?

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Carl Brennan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:14 PM
Response to Original message
1. Actually you are "writing" about writing, hee.
}(
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JitterbugPerfume Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:30 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. what you mean who's next????
you tell some of the best stories on DU


how bout one or two?
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oneighty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:30 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. Indeed
I am testing the waters.

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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:28 PM
Response to Original message
2. already posted poems
in the 'political poetry' thread...

i'm not really doing fiction right now...
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oneighty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:32 PM
Response to Reply #2
5. Yes nostamj
you are always there. I saw that. Now we need more effort!

Ed
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Pepperbelly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 07:42 PM
Response to Original message
6. During one period of my life, I wrote 7 novels ...
Edited on Wed Nov-17-04 08:09 PM by Pepperbelly
the first being dreadful and improving with each outing. I made friends with a very good free lance editor during that period who was very insightful and helpful. But since then ... I have been barren.

Start and stop ... an idea that seems good until I try to commit it to form and POOF ... it's gone. But now I have a killer idea. And still have not committed it to form.

I did a hundred pages or so of it and it fizzled out. I think that it fizzled because I was making the story too difficult, too complicated, and in the wrong point of view. So now, I am at a stage of re-scheming it with a point of view change. Below, I will post a portion of the first chapter (unedited) and please ... let me know what you think.

======================================================================

Mark didn’t start out as a messiah or a superman or a wizard or even a brujo. He started out as an accountant. When he really thought about it, he could remember when he first started really thinking about the dreams. Not when he first started dreaming them because they had been part of his life’s fabric forever but when he first started wondering about them.

-snippet-

His bed was still in disarray from the morning when he had to rush out the door, hair still wet from the shower so he could make it to work on time. To Mark, it looked just fine. He undressed, then rooted into the covers, sighing as he found a comfortable position. He closed his eyes and willed his mind still, encouraging sleep to steal over him, a cat burglar rather than a smash-and-grab. He could hear a faint soporific buzz that signaled Morpheus’s arrival. Mark relaxed, allowing waves of drowsiness to wash over him, carrying him away.

With a short start, he was dream-conscious. Like always, he stood at the edge of an abyss. Around him, the dreamworld was ultra-real. The green of the trees startled him with their emerald gleam while the sky’s deep blue rivaled the most perfect sapphire. Like always, he was naked in the dreamworld. The day’s chill stirred gooseflesh on his body while the warming from a bright sun was not sufficient to de-perk his nipples. He could even feel the wind stir his hair, body and head. From a distance, he heard a crow caw. He looked straight up and saw fat, white clouds skitter above his head.

Then he gazed into the abyss. A grassy meadow lay hundreds of feet below him, postage stamp size from his perspective. He smelled a faint scent of pine with a subtle overlay of wood smoke. The wind rustled the trees and as he listened, the crow called yet again. He felt no fear at the precipice. He reached toward the sky, straining until he felt his joints pop. Excitement dumped adrenaline into his bloodstream and his testicles drew closer to his body preparing for what would inevitably follow his stretch.

He dove into the void. He felt it in his belly, the drop, the rush of wind as he plummeted toward the earth, the postage stamp-sized meadow rushing toward him, the howl of the air past his ears as he accelerated faster and faster until with a flick of his hands, he pulled out of his dive and soared up, higher, higher, higher than where he started, higher than the trees where he started, into the sapphire sky among the fat white clouds.

As he flew, the air grew colder until his body numbed from the rushing wind, numbed until his consciousness narrowed, his body irrelevant and he became nothing more than a point-of-view.

He exalted through the air, cavorting, somersaulting, twisting, accelerating, climbing to the point of stalling, then diving once again, regaining his speed. He marveled at the physics that allowed such flight, comfortable with it but still awestruck by the experience. As he considered the physics, he heard a loud POP and then found himself standing at the Pike Plaza Mall. He dream-knew that he had to go to the house he had occupied with his mother in his junior high youth, a house miles from where he stood naked but unnoticed by those who hurried about their errands, oblivious to the naked man standing in their midst.


edited because it's on word and i had to diddle with it for readability.
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oneighty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:11 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. So. Where will it take you?
Or where will you take it?

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Pepperbelly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:20 PM
Response to Reply #7
9. What I posted ...
is actually not where it is going at all. I have some plans for this that involve both a decent piece of writing that will be fun to read and will also have some inherrent marketing possibilities that dictate a change in the point of view.

And when I moved from 3rd person limited (with Mark as the POV character) to a 1st person POV, it changed the entire dynamic of how I had it laid out. It simplified the concenpt, streamlined it (I didn't want this beast to be 1,000 manuscript pages but more like 250.

But it does move me back to the place of deciding how I actually want to break it down, scene and chapter. Down south, we call it "having to lick your calf over."

And where it goes, as a novel, is in the same vein as a Celestine Prophecy although there will be, with a little digging, some meat in the nut when the reader cracks it.
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oneighty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:50 PM
Response to Reply #9
11. I follow you.
Have you in the past had success in getting published?

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Pepperbelly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:55 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. not a bit ... my patience with marketing has been my burden.
I get exasperated with the whole rather ... odd way that these good folk conduct business. Which was also part of the genesis of my current project. I had been doing mysteries, horror, procedurals, psycho shit but I ran out of steam in that area. This particular notion I have been nurturing for two or three years.

Or for 51 years, depending on how you want to look at it. :D
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JitterbugPerfume Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:15 PM
Response to Reply #6
8. Hey Pepperbelly
that is pretty cool!
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Pepperbelly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-17-04 08:24 PM
Response to Reply #8
10. Thank you.
It is about to undergo some major surgery though. A better route occurred to me ... that it has to be changed from 3rd person ltd to 1st person. That will streamline and simplifiy I think.
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patdem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-21-04 09:57 AM
Response to Reply #6
13. Great visuals! You had me moving through space along with the
character with your words! Thanks. To think you will recreate this using 1st person is ambitious! Will look forward to reading this clip when it is changed! Please!! :hippie:
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