Vampires and whatnot...

Before Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight I was a huge fan of fantastical vampire stories, even to the point where I read most of Anne Rice’s work and eventually found Brian Lumley.  His Necroscope series has a number of focuses as the series moves forward, but amazingly ruthless vampires thousands of years old appear throughout.  That being said I believe I have a high standard for one of the more ruthless types of characters in the literary world.

In the recent years a slew of vampire based movies, TV shows and other mediums have saturated the market making vampires almost passé.  Having said this I was hesitant to check out a new TV series, SyFy’s Being Human.  This story focus’ around the lives of Josh and Aiden, a recently turned werewolf and a 300 year old vampire respectively, as well as the newly deceased resident of their apartment, Sally.  From this interesting premise, the show tries to look at what exactly does it take to try and have a normal life amidst the temptations, fear, and unknowing surrounding the characters.      

Being Human has a very basic premise but the great thing is that they do not sugarcoat everything with the drippy, long winded concepts of lust and sappy vampire drama made famous by so many others.  These characters play real people trying to deal with what they are, being a ‘vegetarian’ vampire by not eating live people and those repercussions, dealing with the transformation into the wolf that takes place every month, or trying to cope with your own tragic death. 

Being Human is a great show and another one of my total nerd indulgences.  It shows supernatural beings at their rawest, trying to cope with what they are, not lusting around trying to make a decision on whom they should marry or be with. The show is now winding down to the season 2 finale, so anyone who has some free time, I recommend taking some time to get hooked to this great show.  

Plotto

So it has been some time since I posted, and for my few followers I apologize.  Regardless it has been an intense few weeks and a number of stories and other writing based concepts that I have come across.  One such is William Wallace Cook’s story plotting tool Plotto.  I was initially really mad to get this book, reason being my girlfriend’s aunt ordered the book for me without letting me know, so my first time seeing it I was seething at Amazon.  After realizing who it was from and what it was I became curious.  Barbara, my girlfriend’s aunt, explained that she had heard about it on NPR and it sounded interesting so she ordered it for me. 

I was not sure what to make of the book since it contains phrases almost out of an algebra textbook to help come up with themes for stories, character development, as well as fractions of statements that can be mixed and matched together to come up with an (semi-)original three-act story structure. 

This book is way too interesting to describe in a blog post and I recommend any writer who is even occasionally looking for inspiration to pick up this book, or at least leaf through it at your local bookshop and see what it is all about.  It has been described as the book that every author denies using, but has a copy on their desk. 

The brief history of this book is that Cook while writing around the turn of the century was a pulp novelist, meaning that he would pump out sixty novels a year in some years, (yes that is correct sixty, 60 novels) and Cook came up with a much larger volume to keep track of the stories and plotlines he had used.  After a long career he wrote Plotto, a condensed version of his own reference and marketed it to writers. 

This is an excellent reference and I feel guilty that I have not yet had a chance to use it; it does come with exercises to learn how to use it while at the same time help you develop a storyline or theme to flesh out on your own.  But rest assured I have thumbed and learned how to use the book and its crazy algebra like structure and I must say it couldn’t be more interesting, definitely worth checking out.