Kimba The White Lion Opening Theme 1966

Okay, I know, I said I was off to work on my novel, but I found another show from when I was five KIMBA. I swear that Disney stolen the idea of the LION KING from this show.

Keeping Character Journals

I first heard about character journals in Script Magic by Marisa D’Vari.  In that book she sugggested writing a journal entry for each of your main characters daily.  That seemed like a lot of work to me.

However, Lou Willett Stanek in So You Want to Write a Novel offered similiar advice.  She suggests doing writing exercises from your character’s POV.  So that’s two pings for the character journal/exercise route.

We all know three is the charm.  PBW talked about character journals and posted a journaling excerpt.  She also asked people how they get to know their characters and did her customary – comment on the post, enter a drawing thing.  I was too late for the drawing, but I did look through the comments.  Lots of good ideas.

I was probably hasty (read-LAZY) in my initial assessment.  There’s something to this Character Journal/Exercise thing, and I’m jumping into the deep end.  I’ve started a list of websites that have writing exercises and/or journaling prompts that I can use…

• Writer’s Digest has prompts for every day of the year.
• Bella-Online has a page of links to prompts.
• There’s actually a website called Creative Writing Prompts.
• And there’s a site called Journal Writing Prompts.

These are just a few of the hundreds of websites that have prompts.  While I like the idea of prompts, I’m not going to overlook the obvious ideas

• asking what if?
• pulling one, two or three words at random out of a dictionary, thesaurus, textbook, etc.
• using a line from a poem or song
• using a first line, last line or random line of text from a book
• using a quote
• using a headline from a newspaper or magazine
• using a title
• using a question from The Book of Questions

These are just off the top of my head.   I’m sure there are many other sources that I’m not thinking of right now.

Will I post my character’s journals?  No.  I tend to do a lot of free-writing in the early part of my story writing.  I know that no one else is going to see it, so I’m free to go anywhere I want to go in the writing.  I might start sensoring myself if I start posting character journals.  I will DEFINITELY post the prompts I’ve used that day.   Someone else might find them useful.

Borat Says…

I was just at the Generator Blog…

and I found THIS!  It’s a generator! How cool is that?! Geez, I’m a geek!

The Secret Lives of Books

I stopped by the Paperback Writer, who was justifying why we writers still waste our time writing books in this day and age, why we even bother because many just end up unsold and destroyed. Obviously the critics of books (not to be confused with book critics), don’t read. I can’t imagine having to defend books and writing. (Actually, I can; but that’s a whole other story!) Luckily, we have her to do it.

She spoke about the secret lives of books, how besides the story inside the cover many books have a life and journey of their own. We never know who we are going to touch with our writing.

Hey! Stop laughing at me. I know that I write speculative fiction, I write romantic fiction, I write erotic fiction, and most times ALL of those elements are in the same “work in progress”. That doesn’t mean that my work can’t touch someone. (Hey get your mind out of the gutter, I didn’t mean touch someone that way! Geez, try and be serious for a moment…)

Anyway, she asked what books we thought might have secret lives. There are sooo many possibilities answers to that question. My answer was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

It’s one of those books that made my mind start wandering and that eventually led me to writing.

AND THAT makes me wonder what books other people think have secret lives and what books have made people stop and wonder, think or ask what if?

Your Brains

re: Your Brains

Okay Thugalicious, I’ve finally seen the video. You were right, and now I’ve POSTED IT!

And So It Begins…

I’m finally back online. I’m kicking myself for not coming to WordPress sooner. I’ve got to do some looking around. There’s a lot of stuff here. This should be fun.