Writing Advice Greatest Hits Volume One

I had one of those great teacher moments today. A former student took time out of his day to seek my help on a piece he's writing just because he wants to. As the deluge of testing-induced excrement begins to fall in the next few weeks, I'm clinging to this moment with both hands.

I’m in the middle of searching for an agent this month, so there’s little to report on the career front. This entry is all about good writing advice I’ve received over the years. I thought, why not share? This is my paraphrasing of advice I’ve received, with credit given to the people who’ve influenced me. These are not quotes.

-Give the present tense a try. It gives a sense of immediate vitality to a story. –Jeff Mann

-The plot has to challenge the character. The minute they’re safe and cozy, we’re bored. – John Adamus.

-Before you send in a book for submission, ask yourself if someone bought it at an airport and read it on their flight, would they leave it behind? If the answer is yes, you still have revision to do. That kind of writing is disposable (I’m looking at you, twilight), it isn’t even worth the time to open a suitcase to tuck it in. Great writing haunts the reader. They would never hesitate to take it with them. –Rosalind Buckenberry, twilight bashing by me.

-You don’t have to go out of your way to invent poignant situations for your characters. Your own life is already full of heavy, cinematic moments. Just use what’s already happened to you and repurpose it for your character. –Richard Weems

-Don’t over-tell. Let the characters speak. Give me action and interaction. Let the character play on the page. –Roberta Clipper

-Use one verb. –John Adamus

And one of my all time favs…

-There’s nothing much to writing. You just have to stand at the typewriter and bleed.

–from Ernest Hemingway, it didn’t so end well for him, but his books were downright spiffy

I haven’t broken through as a writer just yet, but this advice has taken me this far. I’ve finished two novels and one short story collection and I have five published short stories. These are the pieces of advice that have gotten me this far. I hope they can help any writer greener than me to progress.

-James Russell

Welcome to Axis

I'm always happy when I feel like I've lived up to one of my own pieces of writing advice. I encourage my students to tell the story that they can't wait to tell, a story with characters you would want to know in real life, set in a place you would want to visit.

Today I "finished" the first draft of "Rise of the Paramancers", and I'm at that stage where I'm totally fucking in love with the little world I made. I'm even looking forward to the thousand re-reads and re-writes to come over the next few months before I try to sell this bitch. I can't wait to write all three sequels.

To celebrate, I thought I'd introduce the world of Axis and the characters in it.

The places:

Axis - The realm of Axis consists of four elemental kingdoms: Gorge (earth), Kragh (fire), Galehall (wind), and Fluvia (water), plus the city of Apex, in the very center. The people of Axis believe it is the master work of Dioro, the Artist and Blessed Brother, a God they worship by creating songs, art, poems, and sculptures. They believe he is dormant, following a war with his sister Zura, the Vandal and Devil Goddess. But before he slumbered, Dioro created...

The Veil - a shield of magical energy protecting Axis from the land of...

Beyond - a barren wasteland where the abominable creations of Zura dwell. No one in this age of Axis has wandered so far into the outskirts of Axis that they've seen the Veil, or Beyond, so many in Axis think of both as mythological. What they don't know is there is a land past Beyond called...

Zaradel - This is the home of the Paramancers. In Axis, each kingdom trains a certain type of sorcerer. In Gorge they practice Geomancy, the art of using the earth in battle. Imagine being able to crush a foe in a great fist of stone, send him flying with a wave in the ground he stands on, or pin him to the ground with an impaling earth hook. A Paramancer, on the other hand, is a sorcerer who can master all four elements. No one in Axis believes they exist, and they won't until one finds a way through the Veil.

The characters:

Karth - 16yo white-haired runt, a struggling apprentice Geomancer, his only friends are other misfits. (I just saw "Perks of Being a Wallflower" last night and people will swear I stole that trio's social dynamic, but I've been writing this for a year.) He is encouraged by his friend and crush Juna, his friend Oro, a mysterious guest student named Argio, and his teacher, Master Damon.

Master Damon - Gorge's greatest Geomancer and best teacher. He has traveled all four kingdoms, a fact that makes him suspicious in the eyes of many Gorgians. (Travel is encouraged in the kingdoms of water and wind but the fire and earth kingdoms are suspicious of wanderlust.) He can also use foreign magic, though he is only a master of Geomancy. He has faith in Karth's "latent abilities", though even Karth doubts Damon's assesment of his skills.

Juna - The only female training to be an earthknight, a form of Geomancy that involves using magic and weapons together. She is often treated with hostility for her refusal to conform to strict Gorgian gender roles. She shares this trait with another friend...

Oro - The only male healer in Gorge. Healers transfer life force from plants, animals, and even newly-dead bodies to save the living. Oro makes many Gorgian knights uncomfortable, because healing someone is known to cause amorous feelings for them. The macho earthknights are terrified of this. Oro is also a "man-lover", something his macho miner father is not likely to handle well.

Argio - Very little is known about this "guest student" except that he is from Galehall. Master Damon brought him back from one of his foreign trips. Argio favors a "thunderstick", a weapon that can fire all four types of magical energy. Argio is quiet, and knows many strains of arcane weapons magic.

Hune - Another student in Karth's Geomancy class. He is loud and arrogant, though that may be hiding something. His father, Heon, is the Standard Keeper of Gorge, a position of power second only to the king. His father is also the second-best Geomancer in Gorge, though he has lived in Master Damon's shadow most of his life. Hune struggles to live up to his father's expectations, and one time this led to a confrontation with Karth they would both like to forget for different reasons.

King Feor - The King of Gorge commands its army in times of war as its most powerful earthknight. In times of peace he struggles to maintain a good trading relationship with the other three kingdoms and the city of Apex. He is also the highest judge in the land, meaning he must temper justice with mercy. And he must balance the egos of Master Damon and his Standard Keeper, Heon.

Heon - The Standard Keeper of Gorge is trusted with enforcing the Book of Earth, which says Earth is the mightiest of elements. Heon is puritantical in his duties, bringing blasphemers and practitioners of foreign magic to the King for justice.

Zagor - Zaradel was attacked by a swarm of Zura's abominations, and Zagor broke through with a party of a hundred Paramancers, hoping to reach Axis. Though Axis knows nothing of Zaradel, the Paramancers know of Axis. They believe the people there are primitive, but their land is the secret storage place of mighty artifacts of Dioro, from his war with his sister. Zagor's party is wiped out and he is fatally wounded. And that is when he meets...

Zura - A lowly parasite taking the form of a large insect claims to be Zura, the Devil Goddess herself, in the flesh. She claims she can save Zagor's life and, in turn, grant him the power to save Zaradel from the swarm. All she asks in return is that he help her find a tear in the Veil leftover from the war with her brother. Then he must help her destroy Axis. Desperate and dying, he agrees, and they pass through the Veil, into Axis.

And that's where the story begins.

I love this world and the people in it. It isn't shelf-ready yet, but today it's 80,000 words of a complete draft. Members of my writing group have described it as an adult "Last Airbender", which I guess is good, since every traditional publisher seems to want to link a new story to something that already happened. If I had to credit something as being my source material, though, it would have to be "Final Fantasy", where the enemies were the fiends of earth, fire, water, and wind, and each element was weak against one of the others.

One day, I'm going to be at a movie premier, and the words "based on the novel by James Russell" will appear. Might not be until 2035 but it's going to happen. And the world of Axis is dying for a video game adaptation as well, I'm thinking a free-roaming world where the missions follow the plot but the gamer can also wander. Online trios where one gamer is Juna, one is Karth, and one is Oro.

One step at a time. Next up, the hunt for a new literary agent. I'm a teacher. I can't sell a book full time.

Music Video Storytelling/My Fifth Publishing Credit

Happy news this week! My story "Mountainview" is a top ten finalist in the 2013 Saints and Sinners fiction competition. It still has a chance to be top three also, which would mark my first time making money as a writer. The story is about a bullied middle school student who finds common ground with his tormentor on what turns out to be a historic day. It's all about how disaster forces us to have perspective.

I'm still waiting on a number of potential publishers for "Jesse Rules" and "Men in Strange Arrangements". Also waiting on word regarding my Best of the Net 2012 nomination for "The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall".

This month's topic is music videos that tell a story. I use some of these when I'm teaching. Most of the stories are nonverbal, having more to do with the mood of the song than the lyrics. They all have impeccable imagery and plot structure.

Imagine Dragons, "Radioactive"
Dog fighting is atrocious. Muppet fighting is genius. In this video, Lou Diamond Phillips (of all people) plays a sleazy, smoke-ring blowing proprietor of an underground muppet fighting circuit. All goes well until the protagonist girl comes in with a pink teddy bear that annihilates Phillip's horned purple people eater with a pink disco donkey punch. Then the muppets tear Phillips to shreds. Come-uppance works in every form of storytelling.

Foster the People, "Houdini"
They're better known for "Pumped up Kicks", but this is a better video. The band is killed in a light-fixture collapse about seven seconds in. Then the band's sleazy manager calls in a large Asian FX whiz who proceeds to give the band's corpses the anamatronic treatment. The show goes on. My guess is the band was feeling a wee bit exploited by the Hollywood machine. For extra laughs, find the part where the puppeteer has Matt Foster bent over a table, looking VERY exploited.

AWOLNATION, "Not Your Fault"
They're best known for "Sail", either the alien-abduction video or that one where the two hipster chicks spray each other with a hose. (30 million views, I loathemire those bitches.) This video is better because claymation. Plus...no, just 'cause claymation. It references the creepy classic Rudolph Yeti. Also, there's dancing aliens and a machine-gun wielding merman. It works perfectly with the apologetic, yet kind of controlling tone of the song.

Disturbed, "Land of Confusion"
The Genesis original is a classic (muppets again!), but this Todd McFarlane cartoon dwarfs it in scope. He summarizes the entire class struggle of the globalization years in less than five minutes. When the hooded hero Falcon-punches the monopoly man at the end, you'll want to cheer with righteous indignation. That, or you're a corporate douche no soul.

Don Henly, "The Boys of Summer"
I read somewhere that this video is in a museum. It deserves that kind of reverence. Despite being filmed in 1984, the story holds up. There has never been a song that better captured regret, and the video works as a perfect companion piece. When Henley sings "Don't look back, you can never look back," and the characters do exactly that, you know you've seen perfect cooperation between song, sentiment, and video. It's like the old Gatsby line about how we're "boats borne back against the current" distilled into a two second shot.

The first three videos are also very recent, so the art form isn't dead just yet. MTV may be Snookified but Youtube is keeping music videos alive and well. 

80s Sci-fi: It Kinda Came True

Hard to believe it's 2013. As an 80s kid, I remember thinking of this year as one of those impossible future numbers. I pictured hover boards and Schwarzenegger's uber-yellow Running Man jump suit and that dude from Omni Consumer Products in Robocop sneering, "We practically are the military."

Did any of those films have a black president? The first ones I can recall are Zeus in "Fifth Element" and Morgan Freeman (who else, bitches?) in that comet movie that summer there were two comet movies.

So for this week, let's go over some key predictions of 80's Sci-fi.

The Running Man
I mean the book, not the craptastic Schwarzenegger flick. (See the original "Total Recall" for Ahnald with a brain.) The Stephen King story features some damn disturbing predictions. In the book, the poor are without hope (almost there...) so they sign up for a reality television show where they can win a bagillion dollars if they survive a month as a fugitive. Trouble is, everyone else wins money for helping the fascist police find and kill you. Like Boss Tweed used to say, "You can always hire half the poor to kill the other half."

If that isn't disturbing enough, the Running Man is gut shot on a plane at the end. Realizing he's dying, he crashes the plane into the corporate tower of the station that runs the show. This was more than a decade before 9/11.

Back to the Future II
Lewis Black said of our time, "No flying cars, SCREWED AGAIN!" This totally applies to hover boards.

This movie did get one thing right. Remember Marty McFly getting downsized via Skype? The only thing they got wrong there = the Chinese own us, not the Japanese.

Robocop
It's scary how well the first two movies have held up. The effects look like shit now, but the Reagan-era fear of our cold corporate future has proven very well founded.

We don't have the kind of cyborg technology this film predicted, but we certainly have the problems. Urban decay. The militarization of the police. Drones. And the worst - the rise of the military-industrial complex. The line I referenced earlier deserves some context. The second in command of Omni Consumer Products (think Goldman Sachs but less evil) needs his thug henchman to kill Robocop. Henchman complains that he'll need access to military hardware. Corporate douche sneers, "We practically are the military."

Of all the shit I've seen go wrong in my lifetime, from radical de-unionization to the war on education to the Citizen's United decision (which essentially made corporations our shadow government), the scariest thing is the idea of a corporation with its own merc military. Google K.B.R. or Blackwater if you need a good scare.

There is some good news. We aren't there yet. Obama may be a centrist (he's not a black Nazi, teabaggers, that would be an oxymoron, like literate redneck) but he can be pressured to the left. There are organizations like Move to Amend dedicated to giving governing power back to our elected government. We aren't in Robocop Detroit or Running Man Los Angeles.

At least, not yet.

Writing updates:
-just passed 70,000 words on "Rise of the Paramancers"

-submitted "Men in Strange Arrangements" to a new publisher

-waiting on word for "Jesse Rules"

-"Mountainview" is in Saints and Sinners and "The Camp Seminole Weiner Wall" is still up for Best of the Net 2012

Haven't done this in a while so here are my links again:

  

http://www.amazon.com/Saints-Sinners-2012-Fiction-Festival/dp/1608640841

My story is “Divine Hand”, about an expose reporter who goes undercover at a religious conversion camp for gay teens.

And here are my freebies:

“The Camp Seminole Weiner Wall” (A friendship is tested by a sexually cruel camp ritual.)

http://www.pendulinepress.com/author-article-archives/the-camp-seminole-wiener-wall/

“Friends and Pyromaniacs” (A young man’s awakening requires a Molotov cocktail.)

http://issue3.thequotablelit.com/fiction/friends-and-pyromaniacs/

“The Gay Bomb” (An undercover agent unleashes the ultimate weapon in the war against Islam – a pheromone bomb that causes gay arousal.)

http://blipmagazine.net/archive-4/winter-2011/15-james-russel/

Announcements for “Best of the Net 2012” Award

http://www.pendulinepress.com/editorial/best-of-the-net-2012-nominees/

And here's the announcement on our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Penduline-Press/184958794884621

Pitches, Bitches

I have new and improved pitches to share with y'all. My good friend John helped me to un-fuck what I was working with.

For the short story collection, now re-re-christened with it's orignal title, "Men in Strange Arrangements":

Dear ______________,

MEN IN STRANGE ARRANGEMENTS is a collection of thirteen fiction short stories about the odd circumstances boys and men have to deal with, and the consequences if they fail.

Tom is a clean-cut honors student – and a pyromaniac. He has an awakening: fire doesn’t destroy – it only converts energy to a new form. He’s eager to share his epiphany with his best friend Bill, even if it takes a Molotov cocktail.

Nick is a bullied middle-school student, eager to fight back, but the best he can do is correct the spelling when his worst tormentor Kyle writes, “Nick M. sucks cok”. Nick is shocked to later find common ground with Kyle, amid a famous catastrophe.

Trey is a college student in the midst of court-appointed anger management counseling, following a bar fight that left a bouncer’s jaw detached. His treatment starts with a writing assignment: talk about your most functional relationship and why it works. For Trey, that means discussing his best friend, Jared, who Trey had to all but drag out of the closet. Trey is surprised when his analysis puts him at odds with the unwritten rules of hetero manhood.

These are tales of men in strange arrangements. The collection is 45,000 words and three of the stories have been previously published. “Divine Hand” was a top ten finalist in the 2012 Saints and Sinners fiction competition and was published in the anthology. “The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall” is a current nominee for Sundress Press’s “Best of the Net 2012” award. Thanks for your time and consideration.

-James Russell    

I feel much better about my publishing prospects in 2013 with a pitch like that. Here's the one for "Jesse Rules".

Dear ____________,

Fifteen-year-old Jesse Amos is going to rule the world. That way he won’t have to worry about what people think anymore – not his grade-crazed mom, not his sex-obsessed peers. Ruling will allow him to focus on what really matters: winning the Holy Cross student council election, getting a Metallica-worthy gig for his grunge cover band, Colostomy Grab Bag, and putting more time in at church, to bury all those awkward feelings he’s been having for Tony, his guitarist.

One problem: his friends and band mates aren’t as easy to control as Samus Aran in “Metroid 3” or Baraka in “Mortal Kombat”. When controlling his feelings proves equally frustrating, Jesse realizes that in order to rule the world, you have to first shock and captivate the masses, and nothing gets attention like murder.

JESSE RULES is an 83,000-word trangressive novel, my debut. Thanks for your time and consideration.

-James Russell

In other news, this blog has passed the thousand-view mark, which Celebutants can fart out in a heartbeat, but for a noob like me, it's something.

In other news, "The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall" is still up for Sundress Press's best of the net 2012 award and "Mountainview" is in the 2013 Saints and Sinners contest. Meanwhile, I just passed the 60,000-word mark on "Rise of the Paramancers", the first Fantasy novel in a four-part series, "War of the Twin Gods".

Happy New Year everyone. My quest to get books on the shelves and e-shelves resumes in 2013.

-J  

If We're Serious...

 

Nothing about the writing dream this week, it’s all about a necessary, post-Newtown conversation.

If we’re serious about preventing the next school shooting, here are some thoughts:

Let’s talk about reasonable gun control. We should be able to talk about this without hysterical N.R.A. reactions. I can’t think of a reason to make a handgun with fifteen-bullet clips except to go on a rampage like this one. If killers have to pause to reload, that can mean escape for a would-be victim. And I don’t see the need for hunters to have such a high ammo capacity. If you need fifteen bullets to kill one deer, maybe don’t hunt.

Also, can we have a rational discussion about bringing back the Brady Bill, which even conservative messiah Ronald Reagan supported? I don’t think that law violated the second amendment, which always gets paraphrased poorly. The “well-regulated militia” part is regularly and purposefully omitted. Plus, our Constitution was written in the age of muskets, when massacres like this were literally impossible. There was a reason our colonial ancestors didn’t shoot until they saw the whites in their target’s eyes. They weren’t trying to sound hardcore. Reloading involved two doses of gunpowder, an iron ball, and a packing rod. Reloading was a bitch.

Some may argue a high-capacity gun would come in handy during a home invasion, but most burglaries are committed while the homeowners are away, and most burglars don’t work in packs. It’s time to go back to more primitive weapons for hunting and home protection.

Let’s get serious about mental health care. Health care is a human right. Mental health is a part of that. (We don’t know the exact mental illness the shooter had yet, but it seems like a fair assumption.) Health care is not a product or a privilege. Medicare for all should be our long-term national goal, but that also means we can’t bitch when our taxes go up. Either these services are worth it, or they aren’t. We have to stop expecting F.E.M.A., Social Security, Medicare, AND low taxes. If we want these services, we need to pay for them. Better mental health care for every American could prevent school shootings.

Let’s fund Art, Drama, Music, and Gifted and Talented programs. I’ve seen some disturbing student art, but I look at each piece like an act of violence that didn’t happen. The lost boys who commit these crimes all had needs that weren’t met – the same needs as their peers. They need to feel like they’re a part of something. They need success in some endeavor. The Columbine shooters were un-athletic non-scholars. They needed to learn to make pottery or play bass drum or act. For young people who don’t have much success in a traditional classroom setting or in a gym, the arts are a way to see school as something other than torture. We need to fund our schools properly and, again, not bitch about the taxes. We invest in our youth, or we watch them grow desperate, and sometimes, violent.

Let’s lead by a non-violent example. Almost all of these shooters are young men. Young men have excellent radars for hypocrisy. They notice the contradiction when we as a society preach non-violence, and then treat state-sanctioned violence as a normal way of being. They notice the sixty-year trend of undeclared wars: Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. The baby boomers protested the first two of these “interventions”, demanding an end to the unnecessary violence. That generation responded like it should’ve. But then, over time, we grew numb. War became routine. War became Wednesday, just something that happens at a regular interval. These angry young men notice such trends and respond accordingly.

Let’s erase the killers from our history. I won’t even look at the name of this shooter. Why do we reward these people with so much posthumous attention? It sends a message to the next damaged soul looking to leave a mark in the easiest possible way – you will be remembered. It may be naïve in the digital age, but if there was a law stating that their names are not to be spoken or written, nor their pictures ever shown, it could be possible. It would take agreement from prominent websites to remove comments that mentioned the killers by name. If we had that, we could condemn these shooters to oblivion. This would send a clear message to the next potential killers: you will not die a media darling. You will be forgotten.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I hope this conversation is possible. There’s nothing wrong with discussing gun control. Health care is a human right, not a privilege or a product, and mental health is part of that right. War was never supposed to become the normal state of affairs. Remember the victims and erase the villains. If we’re serious about reacting to this tragedy, we can have these conversations, we can come to conclusions about what must be done, and we can pressure our representatives to act accordingly. Justice begins with dialogue. 

In that spirit, leave a comment.

-James Russell

A New Direction

Haven't blogged lately with good reason - not much to discuss. I'm still collecting rejections on JESSE RULES but I'm only up to F in the Writer's Market so there's loads of room for hope. One thing I'm thinking - this might not be an ideal debut piece. It's tough to say to a publisher, "Hi, my name is...and here's my grunge-era story of a homocidal closeted Catholic School student. Wait! Where are you going?"

It won't stop me, just saying. I'm going to try to rename the short story collection and push that as my intro to the world. Then maybe Jesse can be the "if you liked that, I have a novel" thing.

I'm also thinking, time to take the ol' blog in a new direction.

Rather than just me talking about my career, this should be a discussion forum. I always liked stories and tried to write stories that would get important discussions underway. Maybe this can be the place where fun discussions start. Maybe we can all get our nerd on, together.

Not circle-jerking over vintage action figures or anything like that, just a good olde nerd debate. You know how the Bond 50th anniversary got everyone talking about which Bond was best? (Goldfinger or Thunderball, talk amongst ya'selves...) Let's do something like that. Lot's of comments from you and less of my yammering.

So here's a first conversation starter: What do you want from the next Game of Thrones book? We know it's called THE WINDS OF WINTER and George R.R. Martin is working at his snail's pace according to his Rolling Stone interview earlier this year. I'm not asking about when you want it. I'm asking what you want out of the plot?

I'll start with what I want. (That's always the point of this type of nerd question, no?) I want all of northern Westeros gone. I want the White Walkers to go on the destructive tear that was hinted at in the FIRST SCENE OF THE FIRST BOOK. I want the ballsy execution of Stannis, both Boltons, and everyone else north of King's Landing. I'm hoping that's what all the snow around Winterfell was about - good foreshadowing.

I want to fall back in love with this series. My love started when Martin had the balls to chop Ned Stark's head off. I want that same sense of "any character could die at any time" and "there are thousands of angles and agendas here, what am I missing?" as I read.

Oh, Melisandre and Bran's crew can survive the Walkers' swath of destruction since they have pre-established magical abilities and stuff.

But Jon Snow really has to be dead, otherwise I feel manipulated about the phrasing at the end of the last book. And don't bring him back as Ghost's left nut or anything.

The death of half of Westeros and Tyrion joining forces with Daenerys (misspelled, I think). That's all. I actually don't care if I'm not reading it until the summer of 2016. Just bring back the danger, the unpredictablity.

So this is where we're headed, blog-wise. Updates on my career mixed with discussion-starters for other video game freaks, bibliophiles, and writers. Here are the discussion questions again:

-What do you want from THE WINDS OF WINTER, plot-wise?
-While we're at it, what should I re-name my short story collection? It's all stories with an element of school survival, plus the pain of puberty, plus a gay twinge. The current title is STRANGE ARRANGEMENTS but that hasn't led to any bites. I'm thinking NOTEBOOK REVELATIONS but I'm not sold.

Let me know your thoughts.
-James Russell