Uh oh X 2

I had just about maxxed out my hard drive so I bit the bullet and bought an external hard drive with 160 dazzling gigs of space. Two days ago, I started transferring files to Mr. G, the external drive. Somehow in the process, I accidentally uninstalled my music application and all the music files I'd accumulated in the past three years, a not inconsiderable amount of tunes. Bad? Yep. What was worse was that I also somehow deleted my digital illustration software and project files.

I have no idea how I did it, but six hours of work and a lot of angst later, I had reinstalled both applications, found and undeleted the songs and the art work, but what a pain in the old derriere.

At the end of all that, I was toast.

Vote today

Here's another of those things I don't understand. Why don't people vote? There are more people who clog the phone lines to vote for American Idol contestants than who clog the voting booths on election day. A recent movie used that fact as its premise.

In America, you have the privilege of voting for those who represent you. Yet few seem to honor this responsibility. I grew up in a household where all the adult members voted. Maybe that was a good example for me because I've always voted too.

This is probably useless ranting so I'll be succinct. If you don't vote, then keep your mouth shut about what is happening in this country - good or bad. You haven't earned the right to say a single word about anything if you don't exercise your right to vote.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is very "quotable" so today I'll use his words to close this blog entry. "Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves — and the only way they could do this is by not voting."

Acacia delight

The other day I was talking to someone about the beauty of my acacia tree, and they had no idea what kind of tree that was. So here's a close up of the profuse blooms of the acacia at the end of my driveway. The tree starts blooming in mid-October and blooms its heart out with showers of yellow blossoms until spring.Early this morning a huge storm blew through and removed all the spent blooms so the lovely tree will keep blooming.

Some years it becomes so heavy with blooms that it begins uprooting so we have to anchor it to the ground with cables in order for it to survive the March winds. For a semi-tropical tree, it's amazingly hardy once it's established.

Okay, that's your botany lesson for today. Back to writing now.

Ted Bundy story

I turned on the television early the other morning and caught The Deliberate Stranger, a movie about serial killer Ted Bundy, starring Mark Harmon as Bundy. Though this was made twenty years ago and I'd seen it before, I still found it darkly compelling and frightening. Harmon is one heck of an actor who portrayed the charming, intelligent killer without chewing up the scenery in the process. Creepy and disturbing are two adjectives to apply to his performance and the movie. Seeing this movie again made me want to call up my kids and review all the safety procedures drummed into their heads when they were younger.

Watching The Deliberate Stranger and seeing how this supposed all-American guy is revealed layer by layer as the sick killer he was will certainly give you some insight into characterization.

If you're writing suspense or have serial killers on the brain for a crime novel, take a look at this movie and read the book by Richard W. Larsen from which the movie was adapted.

Just don't do either at night, alone.

William Styron, gone but not forgotten

How well I remember the first time I read William Styron. The book was The Confessions of Nat Turner for which he won the Pulitzer. Though in my teens, I was barely more than a child and completely shocked by the world he depicted.

Fast forward several years and Styron did it to me again with Sophie's Choice. What a brutal, heartbreaking story. I wept buckets, but that didn't keep me from seeing the movie version starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline with each so young and beautiful and doomed. I wept more buckets.

Styron's biography says he explored the darkest corners of the human mind and experience and that he was plagued by his own near-suicidal demons. It's easy to believe that the darkness he explored mirrored that inside his own heart. How else could he have written in a way that conveyed such authenticity?

I always liked knowing that he'd served in 1945 in Okinawa. Many years after he'd been there, I lived on the island. I'd think about the things I'd see and know that he'd seen them too, and they probably had looked about the same.

I also liked that he and other authors successfully kept the Disney company from putting a theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.

His writing, and he himself, was revered and reviled. Maybe that's always the way it is with people who touch our deepest emotions.

John Kerry, what were you thinking?

I rarely discuss anything political because there are so many other ways to make people mad at you. Besides, I'm a good southern girl who was taught it's bad manners to discuss politics, religion, or money.

However, sometimes your Inbox contains something so funny that it's just too good not to share. A picture is worth a thousand words. Right? My military buddy sent me this. Don't know where he got it, but I'm sure it's going around the electronic world even as we speak.

God bless our soldiers. The ones I've known have a great sense of humor, and they never pass up an opportunity to laugh. They know a joke when they see one.

Writing contests: elements judged

Halloween is over. Let's get back to business. That's contest business. I think some of you are as confused as the signs shown here. I hope I can clarify the situation and help you.

Writing contests break down the various fiction skills required to write a solid story into individual parts which will be used to judge the entry. You don't have to be a NASA astrophysicist to understand this fact. However, most people seem to be selective when it comes to reading the rules and subsequently submitting their baby.

Study the rules carefully because they tell you what areas will be judged. Better yet, if a sample copy of the score sheet is provided, study that until you know what elements are crucially important. Then ask someone else to read the sample score sheet and then read what you plan to enter and see how your manuscript compares. Be sure this reader is someone who has not read your selection before. Don't give it to your critique partner, because s/he will unconsciously be kinder than say, the retired school teacher next door.

I think every contest I've ever judged usually has these elements: characterization, conflict, plot, hook, dialogue, pace, setting, viewpoint, sexual tension or romance development, and manuscript preparation. There may be other elements, but these are the basics though they may be labeled something different in certain contests.

When you enter the contest, you probably know that these are some of the things you'll be judged on. So why do I see so many entries that totally ignore these elements? I won't even focus on the really hard things like characterization, conflict, plot, pacing, and viewpoint since those require a lot of work to develop properly.

I'm talking about the stuff that gets completely left out which means you're going to be rated very low. Most often I see hook, dialogue, setting, sexual tension, and manuscript preparation completely forgotten.

The Hook. I've already held forth about the beginnings that open with reams of description, backstory, flashback, or any of the other ways that are more or less boring. So I won't go into more detail here. Go back and read the blog on Writing Contests: alpha and omega. Suffice it to say that if you don't have a hook, you've lost this category.

Dialogue. Contest judges rate an entry on dialogue in a few ways. Two of these are (1) Is it good dialogue? (2) Is it balanced with narration and exposition? (3) Do the different characters sound different?

When you pick up an entry and there's NO dialogue, how can a judge honestly rate you with anything above, well, zero? Same with the balance. How can you expect anything but a low rating when out of perhaps 20 pages there's a grand total of 1 page of dialogue when you add it all up? Or 1 or 2 sentences? People, quit shooting yourselves in the foot with this category.

Each character should speak with his own voice based on his educational background, personality, etc. Yet most times, in contests, they all sound alike. Perhaps Aaron Sorkin wrote them? Why do I make this crack? To me, everyone on Sorkin's show West Wing sounds the same. This is why I couldn't get through one epidsode of West Wing despite that it was well written. All the people sounded the same. They talked at the same pace and in the same style. It drove me nuts.

Setting. Within the first few pages, a reader should know where and when the story is taking place. Where basically means geographical location, and when means the time of the year and whether it's day or night. Why is this important, other than being judged on producing a credible, concrete setting? Because the reader's brain is constantly producing mental pictures that illustrate the story being read.

One of the best movies I've ever seen that depicts this is The Big Picture starring Kevin Bacon and a host of stars in cameo roles. Kevin is a screenwriter. He tells the studio head what his story is about and the viewer sees the vision of it - two young, sensitive married couples in an old house. As the studio head starts to edit the story, saying, no, we really need it younger and sexier, the scene changes to screaming, laughing 20-somethings in bikinis being chased by hunky surfer dudes.

That's the way it is when a reader reads. The picture is formed in the mind. It's very jarring to have an entry that has a throwaway line about being a cop in a big city is a hard job, and I picture New York, only to discover at the end of the contest entry that the writer is talking about Topeka, Kansas. Now Topeka might also have eight million stories to tell, but am I willing to read them after being tricked like that? And the reader does feel duped.

So do yourself a favor and let the reader know where the story is taking place and what time of the year it is. Give us a picture we can replicate in our minds.

Sexual Tension. Oh, brother. This is a biggie in romance. Every contest asks you to rate this or the development of the romance or something similar. How can you rate something that isn't there? I wonder over and over why someone bothers entering a contest where their entry will be judged for this, and there's not a smidgen of romance or sexual tension. So how do you get rated for this when there is none? I'm sure I don't have to tell you that on a scale of 1-10, 1-5, 1-20, or 1 to a zillion that you get 1 if the judge is generous and gives you the benefit of the doubt that there will be a romance somewhere in the story since you labeled your entry a romance. You get a zero if the judge is honest.

Why enter something that has no tension or romance? Don't shoot yourself in the foot and say, "Well, that's how this is written." Professional writers learn to revise. Either revise it to show a meeting between the hero and the heroine where sparks fly or enter something else that does have this evident.

Another thing about sexual tension. Having immediate gratuitous sex by page three or before is NOT sexual tension or romance. A strange man slipping into a woman's bedroom and fondling her while she sleeps, then having sex with her when she awakens and finds an UNKNOWN man, naked and erect in her bed is NOT sexual tension or romance. That's every woman's nightmare, and it's usually called rape. If you think that's romance, you need to read more romance novels. Please don't submit any more of these in contests. I've seen it so many times that I'm no longer stunned by it.

Manuscript Preparation. This is a no-brainer. If you don't know when and where to use commas, then get someone else to proof your manuscript. If you can't spell, and trust me on this, hardly anyone seems able to in today's world, find someone who can. Manuscript preparation is covered in many books and articles. (There's probably one on my website. I'll check and pull it out of archives if not.) Everyone who enters a contest can score the highest on this, yet I rarely have an entry that does. It's as if most people think this doesn't matter. Yet it can easily cost you 5, 10, or 15 points depending on the scoring system.

If you slept through English in high school or your girl/boy friend did your composition work in college, it's not too late to learn now. Get a basic grammar book and go to work. If you are unwilling to master this required skill, then get someone who knows these things to proof your manuscripts.

I just want to say one other thing. Some of the contests produce entries that are all uniformly good. Year after year, I'm amazed at how good the writing is in a few of the contests so I enjoy reading these. Unfortunately, other contests seem to produce uniformly mediocre entries. I suspect the contest just hasn't "grown up" yet. I won't give names in either category. You know who you are.

So, you contest divas out there, choose your contests wisely, and be just as wise when selecting what you'll enter. And, for pity's sake, don't shoot yourself in the foot with dumb mistakes.