Good Flow, Bad Flow

So, as I begin to put this whole thing together, I have come to the realization that I need to spend more time developing my characters. It isn't so much that the readers need to know more about my characters, I do. Typically, I am one of those writers that likes to just sit down and let the story flow out of the end of his fingertips. That can be both good and bad. When things are flowing well, I often end up with some of my most compelling work. Of course if things aren't flowing well, not a lot gets done. That's not really a good recipe for writing as a career. As much as I don't like to admit it, Terry Brooks was probably right when he said that every author should outline. I hate to outline.

Looking back on my original comment, the fact that I need to spend more time developing my characters, I can see another effect of the "good flow, bad flow" style of writing. The first part of this new Friday Flash book flowed REALLY well. I have to say I liked the way it came out a lot. However, a couple surprising things happened along the way. First, the character I intended to be the lead ended up being less compelling than another character that was originally intended to be nothing more than a minor supporting character. Second, I've discovered that I'm a little stuck with how to portray another character because the ones I've created have evolved in ways I hadn't necessarily intended. Saying it that way is a little weird since I'm a grand total of about six pages into this thing. Pretty funny...

Friday Flash, part 2

And so the grand experiment begins...

As I prepare to join the Fridayflash frenzy it's been a bit of a struggle to decide how to handle it. The first question is, "what story to tell?" I'm pretty sure I've worked that one out. My intent is going to be to join the ranks of the vampire story tellers. (Don't worry, this definitely won't be Twilight.) The second question is, can I do all of this from an iPad? The second question is more of a personal experiment on my part. I've been playing with the iPad as a laptop replacement for a few months now. If you've followed the tech media at all, it's pretty clear that the iPad is a great media consumption device, but not such a great media creation device. My experience would generally agree with that. Even here on blogspot, it appears that functionality is missing. Sure, I can submit blog posts (which I unfortunately can't do on my main site since Apple hasn't produced an iPad version of iWeb.) But, it doesn't look like I can add graphics without editing the html. That appears to be a limitation of mobile browsers. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll try it with my next post.

In the meantime, I'll be writing this story in Quickoffice on the iPad. I seriously considered Pages and Documents to Go, but I finally settled on Quickoffice. Is it the best of the choices? Probably not. However, I'm hoping it'll do the job and since I already have Quickoffice on my phone, I can get a feel for the whole mobile computing experience. Graphics, if any, will be produced in Photoshop and then transferred somewhere so I can post them here on the iPad.

As to the story, I just finished reading Twilight. No disrespect intended to Stephanie Meyer, but vampires are bad guys and they are mean. They burn in the sunlight, they are repulsed by garlic, and they are killed by stabbing them through the heart. If I were a purist, I'd insist they were stabbed through the heart by a wooden stake. As it is, I'll settle for them being stabbed through the heart. One of the things that has bothered me in recent years about vampire stories is the removal of the religious element. Vampires are also repelled by crosses. I'm not sure if I'll head in that direction or not, but I wanted to make a note of it here.

So, this is VERY early in the planning stages. There will be rewrites, revisions and probably a lot of rambling. Hopefully, as the process continues, there will also be a lot of discussion.

Friday Flash

I ran across Friday Flash yesterday while on Twitter. I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining what it is, because I'm not really sure myself. It looks like Friday Flash is an experiment in social networking and writing. The impression I get is that you write a short story, post the link to it with the hash tag #fridayflash and then let your followers and the fridayflash community enjoy your work. I'm not sure if the intent is for the work posted to be complete short stories or if it can be segments from a larger story. My initial impression is the intent is the former, but I think I'm going to use it for the latter. The idea will be to see what kind of interaction and conversation you can generate around your work. I think it sounds fascinating. Being as I've been wanting to experiment with blogger, it seems like the perfect opportunity to try it. I've been an iWeb user for a long time, but I'm irritated by the fact that I can't use iWeb from anywhere except my laptop. If this blogger thing works out, that'll all change. Maybe it'll even encourage me to post and write more often.