Setting it all up

 This being my first actual post, besides the introduction to the blog, I think I should go over some of the things that I have been doing as for my own writing and segway into what stories I have been engaging with over the various forms of media available. 

As for writing this week I must say I am a little behind in terms of pages and words, since school and my normal work schedule have somewhat encroached on my personal time to write just that, personally.  With school starting as well a number of the books that I am reading are from the curriculum of one of my classes, ‘Short Novel’ where we are reading a novel a week.  

The main story I am developing at the moment, or at least the one that has the largest amount of my attention right now, is a novel.  It is Sci-Fi/fantasy based and incorporates a large amount of steampunk elements into it.  I have been developing characters and settings for some time.  The only major problem that I am having is stepping through the doorway from Act One into Act Two.  I know this is a remedial form of story writing but the three act story has and does work, plus I like having a general outline to work with and eventually not use and go from there. 

A number of the comics I am working on are in a sort of a standstill at the moment.  I have a number of ideas that I am making notes on, but I have not put words to paper in all of the cases.  I hope to begin doing more with them as time goes by, god willing, this blog will help me to get a move on all of them and eventually have a number of comics and perhaps two to three more comics in the series that I’m writing. 

As for stories this past week and weekend I have read and watched a number of them.  For my short novel class mentioned earlier, this past week I read Justin Torres’ We the Animals.  This book was pretty good in my opinion. The one aspect of it that I really walked away from it was the ferocity of youth.  The story revolves around a boy and his two brothers.  The boy who is also the narrator has a number of issues but the one thing that really stuck with me throughout the book was the ferocity of his brothers and himself, and the gripping way that Torres tells the story makes me think of a number of the confrontations of my brother and I had growing up. 

One of the other books that I am reading and have been reading for a while now is George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons.  After the television show came out I was hooked and have been listening to the audiobooks for the entire series.  It is narrated by Roy Dotrice, who is a superb voice actor, and really brings the story alive.  I listen to the book every time I will be commuting (which is every day) and get a number of chapters in each time I listen. With Martin’s style of storytelling, with a revolving door of third person limited point of view, moving from one character to the next in every chapter is a great way to tell a story and Martin does it extremely well.  I am emulating this story style with my novel , and hope to have some good pages from this style. 

One of the other stories that I have become hooked on in the past week and I feel a little embarrassed bringing it up online is the television show Once Upon a Time.  I will not explain the synopsis of the show (but I will attach a link to the Wikipedia page if you do want to check it out, here it is) The one major part of the story is its dual storytelling method.  By showing what is going on, as well as flashing back to show major elements of the characters backstory, can be a bit clunky for my taste but overall the effect is great, as one storyline progresses, a second past storyline emerges in the episode as well.  If this is making no sense, I apologize, but this back and forth method of storytelling seems like it wouldn’t work but in this sense it does.  It makes me wonder what sort of story I could use this kind of storytelling for and come up with something a little more fresh than a story based on fairy tales (which it then filets to its own purposes)

I plan to take some of these overall ideas and work them into a concept sometime soon.  That is all that is on my mind at the moment, though there is a lot more that I am reading but I will save that for the next installment. 

“I really haven't had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I'd rather tell a story about somebody else.”

-Kurt Cobain