Greetings, my inklings. It’s been too long! My health has been poor but my love for writing (and for you lot hasn’t waned in the least). My short story “MadWorm”, the winner of The Writing Piazza’s first ever writing contest, needed a new home so I’ve brought it here to our Octopus’s garden to share once more. I hope to have some new material for you soon, until then enjoy Runt and Heavy’s tech savvy adventure below and let me know what you think in the comments.
MadWorm by Robert JV Christensen
Levi was on the driveway unboxing his senior project before letting it come inside.
“Kelly is going to go nuts when she sees you, Mobo,” he whispered to the heaps of plastic and carbon fiber plating scattered around him, “Where’s your head? Ah! There you go, buddy.”
“Honey, your brother is home, aren’t you going to come see him?” their mother called up to Kelly’s window from down in the yard. An unrepentantly cheerful voice sounded from an open window on the second floor in response.
“I have my routine, Mom! Heavy can wait.”
Mom set down the magazine she had been reading and rolled her eyes before shouting back, “Don’t call him that, Kelly-”
“It’s okay, Mom. It’s a term of endearment thing,” Levi said, his hands spilling over with copper wiring, “I think.” Continue reading →
Mythris couldn’t understand how the stone had become their king in the first place, that is until hearing it decree his banishment. Its voice rumbled forth from somewhere deep inside its craggy surface and there was little room to question its sincerity.
“FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE STONES WE DECLARE YE BANISHED! IF IT IS IN THEE TO RETURN, YE WILL BE CAST INTO THE CHASM! BEGONE YE TRAITOROUS STONE CUTTER!”
The guardsmen cowered under the blast of its voice but Mythris stood tall and said nothing. One of his captors gave a hard pull at the chain around his neck, pulling him down to kneel on the stone outcropping that lead to the Royal Boulder.
“Show some respect, eh? You know It coulda been a lot harder on you,” the guard snarled.
“It’s just a rock,” Mythris hissed under his breath.
Welcome back, my inklings. I hope you’re all doing well. It’s Good Friday already and the contest deadlines we discussed last week are fast approaching. There’s quite a lot of strategies you can employ to get a better chance of winning a writing contest, many of which are only applicable to certain types of competitions.
I was considering this while I narrowed down for you the five best strategies that have helped me win in the past. I wanted to provide you with tips that should work for absolutely any writing competition you come across, strategies that without which you’re almost guaranteed to lose. I can’t promise you victory, but I can certainly put you on the path that leads to it. Continue reading →
Welcome back, my inklings! Today I want to talk about competition. As much as we don’t like to look at it, competition is inherent to the craft of writing. We compete with each other in the market place and on the bookshelf. We vie for space in the imaginations of our readers.
When you put something out there, even something free, you’re engaged in the battle to take some of that limited supply of attention for yourself. At the outset of every story we write, we are asking our readers for the most valuable thing that anyone can give to us. Their time.
Think your ideas are pure gold? Get out there and prove it to the world!
To find out where you stand in the marketplace of ideas, to get your name and work out there in front of people and to build an eye catching resume for yourself as an author you’ve got to prove you can win. To yourself and to everyone else.
Contests are a great measuring stick and one of the most exciting challenges you can take on as a writer.
Knowing what competitions to enter can be difficult, most have reading fees which can become pricey if you enter a lot of them. Some restrict your copyright so badly that they reserve the right to use your submission any way they please, edit it themselves without notice and not even credit you when they publish it (I excluded exactly such a contest from this list for its outrageously anti-author terms of service).
So, as a favor to you, my dear inklings, I have decided to share three upcoming free contests with deadlines in the next several weeks.
Full contest rules and submission guidelines are available at the following links
Source: Baen Books Contest: 2016 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Entry Fee: None Word Limit: 8,000 words Call For: Short Stories in any Fantasy genre variant Deadline: Started Jan 1st, closes April 1st
Prizes: Grand Prize– Exposure! Published as featured story on Baen Books main website and paid “industry-standard rates for professional story submittals” as well as $500 worth of books.
2nd Place- $500 of free books!
3rd Place- $300 of free books!
Source: DemiCon 27 Contest: DemiCon 27 Prose and Poetry Contest Entry Fee: None Word Limit: 7,500 for Short Stories, 100 Lines for Poetry Call For: Short Stories and Poems in Sci-Fi or Fantasy genres, must contain the phrase “like a zombie” and the sentence “They always ring twice.” Deadline: March 29th, 2016
Prizes: 1st Place– Bragging rights, of course!
Also, all entries will be published on the official website after judging is completed and will be available to the attendees in print form at the convention.
Source: City of Ventura, CA Contest: Art Tales 8th Annual Writing Contest Entry Fee: None Word Limit: 500 words or less Call For: Flash Fiction or Poetry inspired by selected artworks (see website for details) Deadline: April 4th, 2016
Prizes:
“All winners receive a bound edition of the judges’ selection”
1st Place– $30
2nd Place– $15
I encourage all of you to enter and compete! I’d love to hear from you if you win, place or even just entered. Even if you don’t come in first you still have a new completed story and that’s a victory in itself.
Join me next week when I’ll give you some tips on writing winning entries to help guide you to the top. Until next time, stay creative!
Welcome back, my inklings, to Writamins! An article series designed to get you pumped, get you thinking about your craft and get you writing with my very own brand of condensed writing nutrition.
Now we all want to write stories that pop off the page and there’s a lot that goes into it but at the very center of it all is the characters. If you want people to come along for the ride and love every minute you need characters that will provoke an emotional response. If your readers love and hate the people on the page then they’re really into it. Drawing out emotional investment from your readers is necessary to giving them the best and most exciting experience possible.
So today we’re gonna talk about characters your readers will love to hate. So start thinking villainous thoughts, everybody, cause we’re gonna take some Vitamin V!
Vitamin V: Villainous Villains: Exercise: Take your favorite character (could be your own or from a book or show you like). Come up with their antithesis, whether they have an enemy already or not. Invent the person that represents everything your favorite character stands against and write a flash fiction piece just for that villain. (Your favorite character doesn’t need to be in the story for this evil exercise.)
Now for the active ingredients of Vitamin V!
8 Quick Tips For Villainous Villains
1. Know your villain’s overall goal, what are they obsessing over when they’re off page? Their actions should push their agenda whether in secret or out in the open. People, objects and places that no longer play into the villain’s plans can be discarded callously or kept close for later usefulness depending on the villain.
2. Find the lynchpin between the hero and the villain. There must be an inescapable reason for your villain and your hero to collide. Merely having opposed ideals does not necessitate conflict. Teammates can have opposed ideals, it doesn’t make them destined foes.
Conflicting goals concerning the same person, place or thing, however, do necessitate a decisive battle. Whether it be a social conflict about how the new kid in school is being treated or a full out mounted dragon war with spears of flame to decide the fate of the Castle Whitehollow, that’s up to you!
3. Great villains strike heroes close to home. For example, when a villain comes after a hero’s school, friends or family readers respond emotionally as if they are the ones threatened.
4. A truly fantastic villain is one that would have made a wonderful hero if circumstances were different. Your villain cares about something. Find out what it is. A great villain would see himself as the hero.
5. Villains must be credible threats. If a villain constantly has their plans foiled and never makes any progress toward their goal there will be no excitement in the final climax of the story. Their loss will be a foregone conclusion.
6. Villains don’t need to kill for the threat to be real. Once a character has died they can’t change, they can’t grow, they can’t move the plot. Basically death for a fictional character is the last thing they can ever do for the story. Use death sparingly or lose its potency. Life and death should be the ultimate stakes, not just the tool to show whether or not a character is dangerous or evil.
7. Villains who capture, wound, and terrify can be more powerful at rocking the emotions than villains who merely kill.
8. Great villains are never evil just for the sake of it. Their desire for their goal must be stronger than their fear of the consequences of violating laws and social norms. If a villain feels they have nothing more to lose they can act freely. Villains with real lives, jobs and families are also fascinating because they have to go about their villainy more carefully.
A villain represents humanity unchained. Like it or not, evil and selfishness are a part of what we are. Your villain was once an ordinary person that was swallowed up by the desire for their goal.
Welcome back, my inklings, to Writamins! Your regular dose of condensed writing nutrition designed to get you pumped, get you thinking about your craft and get your project in gear!
This weekend is Independence Day here in America and many of my readers will likely be spending time with friends and relatives trying not to explode while the kids survive the annual pyrotechnic ritual we affectionately call “The 4th of July”. Now how, you might ask, is an inkling supposed to get work done on their magnum opus on a holiday weekend? Take some Writamin D, of course!
Writamin D: Dialogue:
Dialogue is crucial to building believable and compelling characters Continue reading →
Good afternoon, my inklings! I have the most delightful news for you. I have another free short story to share and this time it’s another contest winner. I have been honored as the winner of the first ever “Short Story Showcase” over at Kara Piazza’s blog, “The Writing Piazza”.
I’m just grateful to God that I was given another story that somebody really liked. I hope you’ll like it too. The story is called MadWorm. It’s a web savvy futuristic adventure with laughs, intrigue and maybe even a little danger.
Please add MadWorm to your reading list and let me know what you thought about it! You can comment to me here or over at Kara’s place.
See, my inklings? Good things can happen if you keep working hard, keep putting your stuff out there and give yourself a chance. I believe in you guys. Stay creative!
You describe the relationship between creativity and cold hard craftsmanship really well. It’s like being a race car driver and the mechanic at the same time. You’ve got to feel the road, race like the wind and change your own tires.
Humans are born storytellers. Shortly after learning to string sentences together, we start sharing them: “Mommy, I did this…” or “Daddy, I did that….” We are eager to hear about others’ experiences, supposedly to learn from them and avoid their mistakes, and we like basking in the glory that our own stories give us (after being mentally edited, of course).
How to Write like an Octopus 