I’m so pleased to share that one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written is now published in a volume of the Beyond the Stars anthology. My story, “Unarmed and Dangerous” is about leadership, teamwork, and science nerds going up against powerful forces. I’ve been refining it for 10 years and it’s found a home!
And it’s very cool to see me my name on the cover of a book with art by the talented Julie Dillon.
I’ve never written a novel, but I have figured out that you can’t do it all at once. So I’ve been working at how to break it down, and especially how to know enough that I can keep writing on days when I can’t stop and remember the whole book.
I’ve figured out enough of the books’s structure that I see a way to the first big crisis.
1. Set up
2. Get more characters/gather team during which our heroes have 2 problems they must resolve with varying degrees of success.
3. Get to the apparent goal.
4. Surprise
That’s basically the first act as I see it today. And I think I know enough to write it, though I have SO much to make up still. Like more characters. And names. Names are at least as hard in writing as they are in computer science.
And then words: 250 whole words!
In all the news coverage of the Cleveland kidnappings, I was most struck by Amanda Berry’s immense courage in initiating an escape. I imagined the feeling she had in choosing that action was a much scarier version of a feeling I had 41 years ago. I am always fascinated by the discrete moments when things change — for example, that split second when a decision becomes irrevocable.
Listening to the news coverage of the story on NPR I realized that after all these years I had edited the telling my own kidnapping down to a few facts, a shorthand. I no longer told the full story of what had happened to me. Suddenly, it was important to do my own story justice. Plus, I’ve had a hankering to learn more about storytelling since I heard a fabulous storyteller reenacting the Battle of Britain at the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. I decided then and there, in the ramp metering queue for I-5, to find and take a storytelling class.
The very next day I got an email from ComedySportz about a new storytelling class that was starting, and I was available for all the class dates and for the final performance. Only a little stunned by the swiftness with which God and the universe had responded to my decision, I signed up. With the help of my classmates and teacher, the wonderful Kelley Tyner McAllister, I told my story properly.
Now, you can listen to it as well: Story of my kidnapping and escape
I have a new editor. This one works directly on the keyboard.
Spent the morning finding and cleanig up cat puke. Spent the afternoon find and cleaning up sloppy sentences.
Finally have closing paragraphs for “Siege.” Happy dance! Now I just have to fix all the stuff before that.
This arrived recently. I feel all writery!
I should use “cool” in the title of every post, don’t you think?
When I write my steampunk novel it WILL have pneumatic tubes.
It’s really cool when you reread a scene you’d forgotten about and laugh out loud. It’s also encouraging. Like maybe you can write after all.