Not Quite an Epiphany

Today, I realized something.

I've mentioned before that from March until the beginning of August, I sat at my computer and I wrote 2000 words before I went to bed, if it killed me and made me absolutely exhausted (minus one day where I could not even sit up because I was so dizzy, let alone think about writing). And during that time period, I better understood the thought behind actually assisting the creative process by doing this, because it actually did work. I was able to sit down, almost whenever I wanted to, up to a point, and basically put down 2000 words of a story, any story. I got so good at this, that I started writing short stories in 1-3 sittings, depending on how tired I was, or how far the story wanted to go.

The think was, while I wrote a lot during this time period (from March 1 to August 10, I put down around 370,000 [yes, I kept a record of it], which to put it in perspective, is about eight NaNoWriMos), I did not complete a lot. I was thinking about that today, when I realized that, "Hey, maybe I don't need to concentrate so much on my word count anymore. I've proven that I can sit down for months on end and write everyday. Maybe now I need to concentrate on getting things done."

Therefore, this is the direction I will now be heading in. I'm not sure what project I'm going to be working on for the next month and eight days I'm going to be working on before NaNoWriMo starts. I might just focus on getting back into the writing habit, but not with the strictness I was at it before. I might do a collection of short works, just to prove to myself that I can complete a larger body of work. But I have a lot of ideas, which I think is good, because if you don't even have an idea, nothing can grow inside your head. So, that's where I'm at right now, and I even did some writing on Sunday. So I'm getting back into it. I promise.

I just realized something... PART 2

In reflecting on this blog, along with a lot of other things recently, I came to remember something. I went back and read my mission statement and my about me to really confirm this. This blog is about my foray into writing, and what I think, not just specifically about topic I pick out and schedule that make me completely crash and burn when i realize I have no idea what I'm doing/ or I feel as if I know kind of what I'm doing, but by that token, are not well enough read and researched to do all of that.

This is about me and my writing experience. I really need to get over not knowing everything and just keep going.

Le sigh. Being a little existential can be kind of liberating, but also kind of sad in the fact that you realize you'll never really blog about something "cool." (Oh, yeah and if you search Writer's Smithy in an engine, I garuntee you, there are other people using this name.) So I really need to get over never getting famous and be okay with being me and all. Besides, I know I'm going to be fantastic, and that I always seek to accomplish something better than simply, "my best." It makes me wonder though, "Why am I so worried about playing the fame game?"

I think that scholarship I mentioned a few posts back had something to do with it. I wanted to have a really cool, well written, well organized blog to show off to the judges. And I thought I could do that (and here's hoping for next year). But there's also the Christopher Paolinis of the world, who not only finished a novel (cheers to NaNoWriMo for telling people they could do that no matter what age they are and then helping them prove it) but so thoroughly marketed and advertised it, it got picked up by a major publishing company. And I think it comes back to my own need to feel recognized for doing something good, that pat on the head I needed at the end of the day from my teachers, because none of the other kids would play with me. In a way I really need recognition for doing good.

I think another thing that brought me back to this blog was how much I loved feeling some sense of accomplishment during the months of March, April, May and June where I, without fail, if it kills me, unless I was too dizy to sit up and think let alone write, wrote 2000 words every single day. I not only felt good for getting out there and doing it, but my prose grew a lot during that time. I managed to get out stories on a first draft and go the distance for many of them, instead of just leaving them hanging.

Stuff all of my internal pretensions. I'm doing this for myself and I'm going to like it!

Speaking of that whole writing thing: it's come to a grinding halt. I'm working on it.

Much love, luck and pixie-dust.

I just realized something...

You know, I don't think I'm nearly well read enough to do what I want to do here. I don't really think I know what I'm talking about yet...More on that later. I can't say when, but yeah...

September Schedule

SO! Schedule of the next month! We're going to see how this goes, but usually if I have a schedule, that gives me a deadline, and I'm very good about my deadlines. 


September 1 — Reinventing the Wheel (or the Dragon, or the Vampire)
September 6 — World Building
September 8 —  Epic Quests
September 10 —  How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
September 13 —  Good VS Evil
September 15 —  The Hero(ione)
September 20 —  Post-Apocolyptica
September 22 —  We're All Just Misunderstood (But We're Still Going to Fight Each Other Anyway)
September 24 —  On Writing by Stephen King
September 27 —  The Choosen One
September 29 —  Metropolis 


So, see you in a few days on the first!

She's Not Dead Yet

Yes, the obligatory post in which I update you as the to the happenings in my life as an excuse as to why I have not updated in a while (a while, in this case, being nearly twenty days). My main excuse is this: on the twelfth, a week after my last post, my dad and I embarked on a journey to Roanoke, VA (my current place of residence) so that I could return to Hollins University and continue my post-secondary education. I went back early because I needed to begin training to become a residence assistant (RA). We spent two days driving, I then spent a day unpacking and then five days in training, which after the weekend break wrapped up this Monday, but I still had some stuff to complete yesterday and today, so I really feel like this is the first moment I have had to myself where I have not felt the need to completely veg out. I suppose one could argue that I did have seven days to post something, however, I was dog sitting then, also trying to finish up my self assigned summer reading list (sadly, not completed), and listing and packing the things I needed to take to school with me. So...

I do believe in the course of all this taking place I have yet to have a moment to say I'm basing one of my senior thesi off of this blog. (I'm double majoring and I actually want to undertake the effort of doing two thesi [theises? I think that one is correct, but both of them are not making it past spell check], but I'm starting and sticking with this one now, and I also have a fairly well outlined idea of what I want to do for my Communications Studies thesis as well.) Another thing to give me incentive to keep the blog running is this: I found a scholarship that will give me $10,000 to submit a blog about me or things I like (/to do). (And it should be noted that this is not the only reason I continue to write my speculative writing blog. This is really an exploration for me into speculative fiction, writing, and my own style and knowledge.)

Anyway. That schedule I mentioned a few posts back. Actually going to sit down and do that now. I'll post it here tonight or tomorrow to keep myself honest. See you then.

Bird By Bird

This past semester in my creative writing class my professor brought in a book that she would read to us (hypothetically) at the beginning or end of each class. This was, of course, Bird By Bird: some Advice on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.It is probably the first instructional book on writing that I paid really close attention to, probably because I enjoy being read to. But also partly because of the way Lamott writes. The book does not particularly feel like a text book, which is good in my opinion. The way Lamott draws on her personal experiences really drives in the points she tries to make, because she knows what she's talking about.

Particularly because as far as writing instruction goes, a lot of what is said is repetition. Almost ever writer I've ever read who has said a thing or two about writing at the very least will tell you to sit down every day at the same time and write. Lamott tells you this too, but I like the way she says why you should do it, "you're training your brain to be creative at the same time everyday." So many times I think people leave a "because," off of their infinitive. But it doesn't really feel like Anne does that, she actually gives really good reason why you should do what every other writer in the world advises you do.

Plus I think she gives some really helpful advise and encouragement. For instance, she advises if you're not really into something to take a one inch picture frame and just write one inch of something. Just do one thing for the story. And she says the first draft is going to be shitty, just get through it and write it (another universal truth, but I kind of really like the way she puts it).

I'm doing a bad job a analyzing, forgive me, but the book was due back at the library. Yeah, I know right. Anyway, I think it's an especially good book for beginning writers. 

The Speculative Divide: Supernatural

Think about the word "supernatural," for a moment. Super- is a prefix meaning greater than, and natural means existing or formed by nature. When you put these two together, the word means something greater than what already exists. This is the reason why the genre is so hard to pin down as its own genre, and even as another genre's subgenre. All speculative fiction falls under the realms of things we do not find in natural today. Humans cannot do magic like the way it is presented in books, unicorns do not exist, and science fiction by definition falls out of the category, "things created by nature." The only exception that may be made to this are the parts of the horror genre which involve people as the things which terrify, because we tend to specify people who kill out of something that feels like necessity or pleasure unnatural (not natural, rather than greater than natural).

Furthermore, supernatural fictions tends to recreate ideas rather than generate new ones. After all, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, angels and demons (the major players of supernatural fiction) have all been written about and filmed before, in horror, fantasy and science fiction. What changes within the supernatural genre is the way a creature is presented. Where they once would have been called monster they are now called human. Supernatural writing not only humanizes the classic monster it romanticizes them.  Because supernatural takes old ideas and reinvents them in this way (which is not wholly a new idea itself, fiction does this quite naturally over time in any genre), it is equal parts horror, fantasy and science fiction, those these parts may ebb and flow in their involvement in a piece of literature.

I would like to further propose that supernatural is not even a subgenre, but rather a supplementary genre. It classifies things that fall under all three of the speculative genres, and most often you see it after other genre tags like: romance, action, adventure, thriller and mystery. I think that is why it really is not its own genre, because it supplements a genres that regularly have nothing to do with any other kind of speculative fiction.  In other words, it's an easier tag to place instead of writing all three speculative genres after another tag.

It leaves room for wonderment, though, why didn't they just place a speculative tag after the primary genre?

The Speculative Divide: Science Fiction

At long last! My post on science fiction.

How to define science fiction? Well, it mostly has to do with the science, but people still get confused and still even a little angry about science fiction. Many people think that because it has "science," in its distinction everything must be one-hundred percent accurate. I do agree that the more accurate the science, many times it assists the fiction in its purpose and creates a better story. However, that really only applies to provable science, and by provable, I mean science that currently exists in the modern day. One of the most important parts about science fiction is the science that could be (and in recent years the science that could have been). Science fiction isn't always necessarily about science that currently is or was.

Now, this does contain a probability meter. Pure science fiction has to have some sense of probability to it. IE: Meeting Aliens on a foreign plant in 100 years would be science fiction, based on the fact that we have conducted space travel and our space programs around the world continue to grow. As long as the principles of the science that base the fiction are fairly sound. You have science fiction.

The divides on this become fairly blurred as with fantasy. When blending with fantasy (or horror for that matter), as long as it still has some kind of science that can be traced back to actual theory, it's technically a science fiction lovechild. There are many different names for these love children, science fantasy coming out into the forefront. One thing I did not mention about science fantasy in my fantasy post is something that happens as the science theory the fiction is based in degenerates: it becomes more of another genre. Science fantasy, for instance, can have almost none of the fantastic elements I mentioned before, but can have scientific principles not all that well based in modern theory OR just become a little far fetched but still use some kind of science (insert quotations as your mileage varies).

Horror, interestingly enough, while it began it's journey with fantastic leanings in it's monster films, now begins to turn to scifi leanings. (Don't get me wrong though--there's still a lot of fantastic horror and just messed up people with knives). I Am Legend gave a new take on vampirism, where the whole world became infected with a plague which turned them into vampires. Later media, such as the Resident Evil franchise used the same concept for zombies, only this time the plague was of man's creation. Then there are also media such as The Stepford Wives (released in print in 1972, in film in 1975 and 2004), a horror where men replace their wives with androids rather than deal with real women.  Another such film, (These Are) The Damned, based on H.L. Lawrence's novel The Children of Light, reveals a set of children who are product of radioactive fallout. Each are radioactive and quite poisonous to the world around them. They must live underground controlled by the government and problems arise when they are discovered by people from the town nearby.

These, in a sense are almost darker than fantastic horror as they imply that the circumstances are completely man's fault. In situations with magic, magic has always existed, and darkness tempts man into a fall. Man usually dives into the discovery of science as these films may show: many of the plagues and horrors which occur begin as "accidents" of discovery.

I mentioned above that some time ago (around the seventies, I believe) a series of subgenres emerged about what could have been. Over all this is called alternate universe genre, and I think that depending on the kind of alternate universe one creates (and what is used to create the shift from what is to what could have been). The reason I bring this up falls in one to two words, depending on stylization: steampunk. Steampunk works began with the idea of the steam engine evolving so that it became the greater power. Everything was powered by steam; cars, guns, boats. Eventually clockwork also became included in this movement and then it became a popular fashion movement (victorian wear and a lot of gears). But it was originally an intriguing science fiction literary movement and remains so. After all, there are many different variants of what happens with advance steam technology. Most of them stay in the Victorian era, for the clothing, though.

I'm not sure what else I can say about science fiction at the moment, so I'll have to leave you here and keep you tuned for the next (shorter) installment: Supernatural.

Back to the Smithy

Well, I've got a working keyboard again, and better still, it's actually on my laptop. My touch pad mouse is working again, too, so I was fairly "HUZZAH," when all this happen. Now I'm a little, "...Meh..." The reason for this stems from a few events, which I must explain before I can get to a point I want to make about writing.

Yesterday, I set a to do list, because yesterday several things happened, chief among them being I realized I had a lot to do. I am way behind on my book reviews, I went to my evangelism class and I wanted to read nineteen (19) books before I returned them to the library on Sunday (the 24th, not yesterday itself). Oh, and on Saturday (aka. the day before yesterday) I decided to scrap what I had for my Camp NaNoWriMo novel and start again. Backwards.

Today, I woke up, did the first thing on my to-do list and showered (yes, during the summer I do occasionally become one of those geeks who need the reminder...), I ate breakfast and I reviewed the list. The first thing I did was read the book for my evangelism class. Then I read Matthew chapter 1, as I'm also going to start doing daily devotions again. Then I brushed my teeth, and with minty fresh breath, I sat down at my computer and began to write a new scene for my CaNaNoWriMo novel, The Next Great Magician. I got about three hundred words in and then, I just lost it.

This might be a hard thing to explain to someone who's never written for pleasure, but when you have such motivation (and I do (or did), I wrote over 5000 words on Sunday), but when you loose a story which you can see so clearly in your mind, it kills you a little on the inside. But then I just decided that I was more used to writing towards the end of the day, so I decided to give it a little time. So I goofed off on the internet. Now, here I am at the end of the day.

I have not written in this blog for over a week, not counting my cop out post, I haven't written up any of my book reviews. I have barely touched a book all day (besides the Mark Cahill book for my evangelism class, and the bible), and though I did get my brother a birthday present and I had to wait a half-hour or so for my computer to be fixed. I haven't gone beyond that three hundred words.

I certainly have reasons for this; after all, I made an outline. Outlines are tricky for me, because I tend to tell too much of the story there. I visualize things as if I were writing actual prose instead of the outline. So, when I finish an outline, sometimes I feel like I've finished a story, when there's nothing good about just the outline. But the biggest reason I think I no longer feel like writing about the Next Great Magician is this: crazy goals.

To actually win NaNoWriMo in the time remaining from when I started over, I would have had to write 3334 words a day. This might have been pretty doable, but I decided to challenge myself and bump that up to 5000 words. It might have still been pretty doable, after all, I did it yesterday, with almost no problem. But now I just feel...drained I guess. I think The Next Great Magician decided it was going to take a vacation, and I decided to push it after only one day of rest. If I had set a more reasonable goal (like say, writing the 20000 words I would have needed to win NaNoWriMo), I think I might have actually done okay.

But the thing about setting such hard goals for yourself, is that when you fail, you fail hard. One of the reasons I set 2000 words as my daily goal for my yearlong writing project is that because 2000 words is difficult for me to reach, but not so difficult that I have constant trouble keeping it (okay, there was a time when I yelled at my computer via capslock, because I was exhausted and just wanted to go to bed, but could not seem to reach 2000 words, but that was just once). 5000 words did not even seem like a reasonable goal when I set it, because I wanted to power through my novel.

In fact, I think I noticed that about most my goals (save for the book reviews...maybe, I'll let you know when I get there). Trying to read nineteen books in a week isn't impossible, nor is writing 5000 words a day. But when you pile those on top of one another, along with other commitments. It gets intimidating, and more importantly, it takes the joy out of what you are trying to do. I want to read the nineteen books because my friends and I have a contest going, but it's just a friendly contest. Nothing that I actually need to get up in arms about (especially since the only prize is bragging rights).

I think that's what NaNo is for me right now. Bragging rights. Would I get The Next Great Magician published? I don't know. Maybe, if I ever felt confident enough about it. But right now, trying to write this is kind of sucking the joy out of writing for me. I think I'm going to give this novel a vacation. Maybe indefinitely, maybe not.

But I think the important thing here is that I keep writing. And, you know, set better goals for myself. I think I'll stick with the 2000 a day.

Well...this sort of counts

My key board took a water hit. So far the results have not been good. This is an update from my iPod, but it's slow going and I don't think I could write a long post like this. I will try to update soon. --Wordsmith

The Speculative Divide: Fantasy

Well, if you thought the last post was long, just wait for this one. But first an announcement: I am changing my rules just slightly. Instead of making two posts a week, I have to make a post within three days of the last one. Don't ask me how that makes it easier to keep. It really doesn't. It may change to certain days of the week that I have to update it so that way I have an easier schedule to keep (I do well at keeping schedules), but I'll try this for now. So, I am setting the iPod to tell me to write the sci-fi genre analysis on the thirteenth (if I have not done so already, and here we go.

Fantasy. This is where I think my analysis might get a little over loaded and fairly tricky. Because there's a lot to fantasy. One could almost say that it's the oldest genre there is, although way back in the day, that was known as realistic fiction. I am of course speaking of mythology. (For personal reasons, I'm not going to get into Judeo/Christian writings, sorry). But let's look at the Greeks for a second. Of course you have gods, tremendous power and impossible circumstance and beings. If I could speculate I would say that it is the non-human that tends to make fantasy. After all, in Greek mythology you have beings who are like humans (the gods, demi-gods and half human creatures like centaurs, satyrs and Minotaur) that can perform acts that no human is able to do. They are meta human, or greater than the human ability. You also have completely non-existent, non-human creatures as well, such as dragons.

These factors are true of later fantasy fictions as well. Take for example, witches, wizards, fairies and other magic makers: beings who appear human, but somehow have greater abilities than an ordinary human being. An important factor of fantasy fiction is that these abilities seem to be natural, or rather inherited some how. There is a more biological, ie, never explained in writing. Then of course you have other creatures as well, unicorns, phoenixes, giant spiders and so on. These creatures appear to be natural too, if you will, seemingly evolved with other, non-magical animals.

That is not to say that humans are not a large part of fantasy fiction. After all in The Lord of the Rings (which we will be getting back to), it a human who can do such things as have power over the dead (Aaragorn). Humans also often serve as emotional anchors for the characters with magic, whether through family ties or love interests, or even in some legends become kings, create chivalry and go down in history for being full of awesome (King Arthur); the foil to that is, that they can also be power hungry rivals, easily manipulated and try and sleep with their father/uncle's wife, take over the kingdom, cause a major battle which leaves a lot of people dead and Britain easy prey for the Saxons (Mordred). In any case, humans, like magic makers and any set of characters also play various roles.

Which leads me back to this: why do people see speculative fiction as kiddy writing? After all, someone (I do believe someone out of The Late American Novel complied by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee) said that no matter whether you write in the past or the future, you are really writing about right now. While this is more true of horror and science fiction, I believe this can on a level apply to fantasy as well. Even if the characters are interacting in a setting where maybe they are not quite human, or a dragon flies over head, it does not make it any less believable. I think the problem stems from the fact that people believe their are a lot of bad fantasy (speculative) novels out there, and so it pollutes the genre. This is absolutely true. I do not understand, however, why it should pollutes the genre so thoroughly that people could become so dismissive of it. After all, for every bad novel there is bound to be a good one. A well written story with fleshed out characters and an amazing idea. After all, there are a lot of terrible romance novels out there, but does that degenerate the value of the good ones, like Pride and Prejudice?


Anyway, back to fantasy. Now that I feel I have defined what creates a fantasy, let's talk about where it divides and crosses over into horror and science fiction. Firstly, there are two main divides in fantasy fiction: traditional fantasy and urban fantasy.

Traditional fantasy is categorized by the fact that it takes place in a completely different world. In such a world, things like magic and fantastic creatures are accepted as believable, if occasionally surprising. This fantasy also tends to use a more medieval, classical or a mixed historical influences in the setting. For this, think of Lord of the Rings, which takes place in Middle Earth, strange creatures are normal, magic exists (though it leaving the land), or for a more modern example A Song of Fire and Ice, which, while it does not use many fantastic creatures or beings, is set in an alternate world, and has some hints and leanings toward magic. The important thing to note about these stories is that, most especially in the case of The Lord of the Rings, which set a precedent for traditional fantasy, is that they resemble epic sagas or poems or classical, ancient and medieval societies. For Tolkien, who studied Norse epics and favored them, and who was trying to create a mythology for Britain, this was more intentional. For later fantasy novels, I cannot say for sure, but the better works, tend to denote their research and prior readings in style, plot and characterization.

The second major kind of fantasy is conventional/urban fantasy. These differs from traditional as it usually takes place in modern times, on Earth as we know it. These only have a few minor differences, which is why I lump them together. In urban fantasy the settings lean toward popular and large cities (why we call it urban), and this can occasionally, though not always mix with more action and adventure, usually culminating in large chase scenes. As a friend with more experience in these novels said, they also may include more negative aspects about urban life (drugs, decay, etc) and a little more adult content (sex, swearing, though on this your mileage may vary). For urban fantasy think: War of the Oaks by Emma Bull, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and Lament by Maggie Stiefvater. Contemporary is not so much focused in the setting, but more about the innovation, how it's different from previous novels.  The best and probably biggest example I can give you is none other than Harry Potter. Yeah, okay, it does have it's traditional fantasy leanings, but J. K. Rowling made a fine point of always showing the muggle world in her novels, and in the seventh book, we are not much in the wizard world at all. I should note that a few of my examples do make distinctions between worlds (Muggle and Wizarding of Harry Potter,  and London Above and London Below in Neverwhere), but it these are more societal divides than physically seperate worlds.

Now we come to the part where fantasy, horror and sci-fi tend to collide.

As I said in my post on horror, you do see a lot of early overlap with fantasy in the development of the horror genre. With fairy tales and early horror movies many of the evil/monstrous beings were fantastic, as they came from places that were not exactly explained, or explained by what was believed to be supernatural events. And speaking of the supernatural, it tends to be when contemporary fantasy crosses with traditional horror elements that you get the supernatural (sub) genre. I think I'll come back to that later, since there's much more that I want to say on it, and I'm not sure I want to get too much into in this post. I will say, though, that what we describe as the supernatural sub genre is mostly found in contemporary works, where as more traditional horror you would just say mixes genres. But these lines are fairly easy to notice and see where they cross.

With science fiction, the distinctions tend to blur much more. You have such distinctions as science fantasy, which creates an environment from possible scientific advancements with many more fantastic elements. Many times this includes deep space travel, or things that have some scientific elements, such as the use of machines, but use this to achieve an end that would not be possible for many years to come.

There are also many different degrees of combinations the two undergo. The Dragonriders of Pern comes to mind as a good example of this, as the early series within the saga indicate a more fantastic setting, what with dragons, but later on, the reader is introduced into a much more science fiction oriented setting.

Then there is alternate reality fiction, which can be any variety of integration between the two genres, as it can propose fantastic elements, such as a world with fairies, unicorns, magic and other fantastic elements, and where these things are more out in the open, but can also do certain things like suggest a change in historical events which led to different developments in technology, such as the SteamPunk genre (but since that falls more under the realm of science fiction, I'll get to that in my next post).

Another of the distinctive sub genres, comes from the superhero stoies, where a person can have inherited, magically developed, or mythic super-human abilities, but one can also use technology, scientific accidents and scientific atrocities to gain or perfect super-human abilities mostly for the sake of crime fighting. But even then the two genres mix together, and sometimes, a reader can be quick to forget the distinctions (guilty). It is the many different blurings of possibilities that make the two so hard to separate and distinguish from one another, and even label sub genres

One of the reasons I think these two mix well and seem so similar at a glance is that they both have spectacular outcomes, they are simply achieved through different means. I mean, if you genetically engineer a horse with a horn, or magically poof one up from a combination of horse/goat/rhino, you still have a unicorn. It makes it easy to see why people arrive at the conclusion that these genres are the virtually the same. But as many have said, it's not the destination, its the journey. How we got the unicorn is the important thing. The plot in a speculative novel, the means of the spectacular, really denote the differences in genre. With fantasy that means magic or the unexplained did it. With horror, something you want to kill did it. With science fiction....we'll get back to that later.


Thanks to Grace on this post who helped me clarify some things through discussion. She's the friend I mentioned above.

The Speculative Divide: Horror

Here's my first late week post as one of my friends reminded me I haven't been keeping up with the blog this week. To remedy this, I though I would expose on world building a little bit and my experience with it that led to the beginning of this blog. But that lead me to another topic entirely in prep for world building. That is, talking about speculative fiction, and expanding on that a little bit more, because well, it's kind of a broad topic now a days. Because even though it would seem to me that world building is fairly exclusive to speculative fiction--in any other type of fiction, you already have a world: reality-- speculative fiction has diverged along so many paths that this may not even be necessary in all cases of speculative fiction.

And hey, that's what this blog is about, right? Let's get started then.

The first thing you need to know about speculative fiction is that it divides up into three categories: fantasy, science fiction and horror. (In recent years, there has also been a call to add a fourth, supernatural, but I'll get to that towards the end.) Many people who don't write between these genres don't often see the difference, and truthfully there is a lot of overlap between the three, and subcategories that don't seem to fit into just one of the three main categories, and I think that's where people get confused. This may even be where some of the loss of appeal comes from a lot of speculative fiction. That and the willing suspension of disbelief does not get suspended far enough (but we'll get back to that later).

Time, though, does strange things to fiction. After all, have you ever heard the term "Action/Adventure," used to describe a novel or (more likely) a movie? Well, as it would happen, action and adventure are two different genres, but they often overlap because of similar themes between the two. For instance, people in a film mostly described by it's action may go on an adventure to catch the bad guy/stop the world from ending. But the reverse is also true: people on an adventure to find pirate's gold may encounter some scoundrels who are hoping to use the gold for diabolical purposes, and action ensues. In fact, much fiction (films being an especially guilty party) overlap genres, whether speculative or not.

My point of that rather random paragraph was to point out that at their sources, there were things that were pure science fiction, fantasy or horror. But as time goes on, ideas get mixed in together and things happen to the way people perceive fiction. I'm also digressing into problem that not a lot of people understand speculative fiction, because they aren't quite sure what to call it, and where the genres overlap. So, I'll try and give a description to the best of my knowledge of where the areas over lap, and how they stay true to themselves.

Let's start with a fairly easy category: horror. Horror is probably the easiest of the three to categorize because these are the stories that are intended to frighten you. And not just frighten you, but do terrible things to you every waking and sleeping moment for many years to come (all right, that was a hyperbole, I apologize, horror writers and lovers of all ages). But even in it's simplicity, horror has divulged into its own subcategories  and crosses over with fantasy and science fiction.

Some of this probably comes from the roots of horror. For instance, if you want to look at horror that crosses over with fantasy, all you have to do is look back far enough to many original fairy tales. While it might be hard to believe, many earlier fairy tales were stories of rape, demons, pillaging, princesses being quite willing accessories to murder and villains dying in terrible deaths, such as, but not limited to being rolled down a hill in a barrel full of nails, being made to dance in hot, iron shoes, and being burnt to death. The originals were not kids stories, and were meant to frighten the bejezzus out of people, but most had fantastic elements to them, such as actual fairies (and in later versions, the Virgin Mary). But also in later projects such as say, Dracula, or the Wolf-Man, there are a lot of unexplained fantastic elements, such as say, where vampires and werewolves come from (aside from, you know, hell). This also links back to the the supernatural genre, but again, I'll get to that later.

If you go later into one of the most famous examples of horror writings, even today, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While Frankenstein has some fantastic elements, it is more routed in a science fiction background. After all, it is speculative science, mostly medical science such as dissection, tissue donation and resuscitation (only of a being that had never technically lived at all), that creates the Monster and dries Dr. Frankenstein into madness. In fact, I might even consider the original novel more science fiction than horror, but that's another debate entirely. The point I'm trying to make here is that when horror began it was a lot of political fiction. Perhaps not Frankenstein, but many of the films and novels that followed after were trying to relay a message about the way man lives and treats it's fellow man--and how maddening things can get. But, since they would not do this with out people at first, they had to rely on monsters, such as the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein's monster and Dracula.

As time went on horror continued it's flirtation with fantasy and science fiction, and eventually began to create its own subcategories beyond the other two genres. These being mostly slasher fiction and realistic horror (heaven forbid, there actually be such a thing). Slasher fiction denotes the type of fiction where the reader/watcher is introduced to a fairly large cast at the beginning of the work, and watches as members of the cast are slowly picked off until only one or two are left at the end. The most popular of these seem to still have their roots in fantastic (and occasionally science fiction) elements, such as Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th and even Final Destination, where the slasher is Death, though not all slashers are like this, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer or Scream where the slashers are people. These last slasher films tend to overlap with realistic horror in which the killer is a person who seems to be normal, but obviously wants to kill people. These occur in relatively normal situations, such as road trips, or renting out apartment space.

Out of the three, I want to saw that horror has probably expanded the least, but I am not a huge fan of modern horror, and I would also say that it has crept into other genres. There should also be something said about the thriller genre, which overlaps occasionally with horror as they both can use excessive murder to frighten the audience, but thriller does not always use these techniques, and can rely on other means to create tension and adrenaline in the audience.

I'm hesitant to continue with either science fiction or fantasy, because I realize this post is getting quite long. So, I think I might split that up into three posts and maybe map out more thoroughly the differences between science fiction and fantasy, and also plan out how to go about talking about the newest (sub?) genre supernatural fiction. So, until tomorrow.

Camp NaNoWriMo

So, I had heard of Camp NaNoWriMo some months back when the initiators of the event posted it on www.nanowrimo.org. I was intrigued that they were finally doing something official for this time of year, as I had heard many groups of friends creating a summer event just between a small group of people or region.  But I was not sure I was going to do it.

Last year was the first year I won NaNoWriMo, and this summer was going to be hectic enough with trying to find a job (a to do still not accomplished), as well as the reading list my friends gave me. I could do it, after all, I write 2000 words a day any way, but recently my writing has not been focused. Today though, one of my friends on Facebook mentioned camp, and I asked, "What camp?" And she replied, "Camp NaNoWriMo!"

It took all of about two seconds for me to say, what the heck? Why not do this crazy adventure in July? Because I remembered a fine point of NaNoWriMo and their affiliates--no excuses. Excuses are the reasons why we don't get things done in life. The reason NaNoWriMo was created was because Chris Baty had heard every excuse in the book from himself and his friends, and decided to change what he was doing. In that, he simply started doing something. After all, one of the biggest excuse of not writing is not having the time. As my pastor once said, "If it's important, make time."

So for the next month, not only will I be making time, but I will be focusing on a singular plot. This means I should probably do more planning and finish the anon meme prompt I've been working on. It will mean a lot of focus and concentration, and not giving up (like a certain project...a certain many I should say). No word will be wasted, and goals accomplished.

My strategy will probably be something like  what I did for NaNoWriMo this past November, in that I made sure to have five thousand words in by the end of the first day (I may try to make it a straight shot from midnight on), and then write two-thousand words (well, I have to right now, but let's say I didn't).  Which really helps because it is a NaNo phenomena that something always happens in the second week going into the third to make you quit writing. I did not write almost anything for three or four days and then wrote paltry amounts everyday until I went home with my friend Emily for Thanksgiving. When she began to surpass my word count, I pretended we were racing. That night I wrote five thousand words, and in the next, seven thousand. It felt pretty amazing to have the major parts of my book done, and all I had to do was wrap it up.

I think one of the big things that helped me was the giant support group of people all around me, who were going through the same thing. Which may not help me this time (we'll have to see about Facebook, and I can drive myself to write-ins now...so it might be different).  But as a bonus, you guys get a preview for November.

I'll update the Smithy later this week or next week with my thoughts on world building. 

Shiny New Blog

I've wanted to start a new blog for a while, mostly because I wanted to switch my livejournal over to being a story text only journal. This is the first of three I think I will begin: the other two are likely to be a review journal and then a personal events journal, which I might just put on Penzu...I'm not sure yet. But I wanted to start this one on writing.

This blog will probably not make me famous. At least, I hope that I might be able to make the blog famous, instead of the other way around. But why I wanted to start this blog, because yesterday I got hit with a great idea. I was trying to expand a novelette I wrote and was hoping to enter in the writers of the future contest, but wondered how I could do that, when I killed the main antagonist(s) in the novelette. Obviously, I needed a bigger antagonist. Something clicked inside my head, and I realized that another short story I had written, as well as an idea I had been sitting on would fit perfectly within this universe.

After that, I decided to do a little world building, since the combined story would be set in a sort of traditional fantasy setting. When I began world building, I wondered, hey, maybe that's what I could talk about, because I had been trying to find a concentrated subject to blog about (aside from books and myself, which can be anything but concentrated at times). Writing, which is something I do every day and believe myself to be called by God to do, is a very large topic. Not to mention, several great authors have already written several great books about writing (Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a good one. I'm told On Writing by Stephen King also lands on top). But I figured, this can be a sort of self discovery thing too, and I can limit myself to prose, and specifically the science fiction, fantasy, and things in between kind of things.

Of course, some things are universal to writing, and will end up in any book or blog about the topic. I'll make a post about it in a little while. But primarily, I write science fiction, fantasy and the things in between. This does not make me a favorite in my work shop group, and you can believe that if I ever land myself in a creative writing class with certain professors, I will not be writing on these subjects for fear of my grade. And it's not the only thing I write. I'm sporadically working on a memoir, and I do get ideas for realistic fiction. Honestly, I do try to write things that don't involve dragons, or flying cats, or magic, or machine, but somehow they work their ways in between the cracks and the crevices before I create my tight, shiny story.

So, mostly, this blog is for me. I'll be smearing it all over facebook, but it really is for me. I want this to detail my journey and discoveries as a writer, as well as any advice any other writer has never heard before, because, hey it might help. I want it to help me, because I'm not going to be in a creative writing class next semester, but I would like to continue my own study of things. Also, in keeping this blog (along with the other ones mentioned), it means that my livejournal will have to be solely text, which means that I will have to write fiction every single day (I was journaling on some days when I felt inspiration would not come to me).

This also means that I might be giving myself a little bit of extra homework, because I pledge the following:

1. Faithfully update this blog at least twice a week (expect a lot of Sunday and Saturday posts when I'm stressed). 
2. Read the aforementioned books on writing, and see what I can apply, argue and discuss against the authors. 
3. Create reports about my own writing. 
4. Try not to get too out there, so that the realistic fiction writers can still read my blog without cringing. 

I think this is a good goal list for now, and I will see what I can do about upholding it. 

As for the title of this blog, which I am sure someone will wonder about at some point, it comes from the word, wordsmith, as it one who crafts words. As I am a wordsmith, this is my writer's smithy. And I hope you'll enjoy it here.