Woe is me! A Morality Tale

 So, if you don't like tragic stories, don't read this post. It's full of tragedy and sadness. Joy, and crushing despair. And it's all true. I'll give you the not as bad news first.
Rejected! No, this isn't a story of personal heartbreak of mine, just a rejection email from a publisher. It was actually pretty nice, not having to wonder any longer. I got personalized feedback on the short story. The tension was good, the pacing was good, but there wasn't enough backstory to become emotionally engaged in the characters. All true. All I'd have to do is expand on their characters and the backstory, then Presto! But it was not to be so.

I lost my flashdrive.

Read that again, and you'll know just about everything else I'm going to say in this post.
All my writings, gone. Vanished. Including one of the best pieces of writing I've ever done that I was almost ready to send to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. All my started novels. Gone. So that's what I've been doing most of today. Looking for it. No luck so far. But on the plus side, my room's a lot cleaner.
But, yeah. Always back up your stories somewhere where they can't be lost. Like GMail. Or a private GoogleDocs. Or something.

So, farewell on this one. I'm off to continue tearing my room apart, salvaging whatever pieces of them I have on the internet (Most of them, except the one I really need).

NaNoWriMo Conclusion & Update

 Yes, this post is extremely late. Almost a month late, to be precise. However, I've taken the past 23 days off of writing, and done nothing but brainstorming, world-building, etc. Having a bad case of writer's block helped with that.
  Right, on to NaNoWriMo YWP. I won, yes. but painfully. I had two essays to work on during that period, so it got to 9300 words (About 2/3s of the way to my goal) and gave up. My research paper was more important. So, I worked on that. Then, it was November 30, and everyone else was working frantically to finish. Me, I was watching and cheering.
  Then I changed my mind, and decided to give it one last, glorious, kamikaze style attempt to get in as many words as I could. Not to win, of course, but to be close.
 It ended up lasting 5 1/2 hours, ending at 11:45 PM, and having 140 more words than my word goal. My hands hurt for two days afterwards.
 Since then, I've been hit by a bad case of writer's block. A short story that needed backstory brought me to a screeching halt. So I've spent almost a month thinking on that. Then I decided two days ago to just start writing, SotP style. It's worked, for a bit.
Now I've switched gears to get inspiration from writing. I'm aiming to finish part 1 of Hunter Romero and the Atlantean Curse by January 1st. Why? Just to finish and not worry about editing and finishing it at the same time. Then I figure out where to go from there, and how to add a dieselpunk underwater adventure, breaking into Area 51, a conspiracy, and going to Atlantis into the mix. The characters just have to find the idol first.

So, that's what I've been doing/will be doing. What about you? How did your NaNoWriMo go?

NaNoWriMo

  There are 25 days until National Novel Writing Month, and hopefully, I will be participating. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in 30 days. For the main program, it's 50,000 words. For the Young Writer's Program, you set your own goal. My goal is 25,000 words because it's a novella which I originally intended to be a comic book script. I don't know how to write a script, so I'll start with a novella first.
  My story for this year is an urban fantasy martial artist superhero story. Epic, isn't it? It's going to be a noir feeling story in the modern day, with all the troubles it entails. There's also two warring ninja clans, supernatural evils, and hopefully some deeper meaning.

 Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year?

Importance of Characters in Space Opera

   This is an unplanned for addition to my post, 5 Essentials for Space Opera, written on request. So here I go, exploring the last frontier in space opera (for me anyways).
    Let me back up a bit to give some definitions of space opera and some for hard SF. Hard SF isn't very dramatic or melodramatic in some cases. It's serious, and focuses more on the science than the characters or story. The laws of physics are absolute and can not be broken. Hard SF is quite popular in books and often is what give SF the adjective "atheistic." Many are. I haven't read any that aren't, but there are probably some out there.
   Space opera, on the other hand, is the opposite. Space opera focuses on the grand scales of conflict, adventure, and personal conflict or drama. Rules of physics are there to be broken, often literally. Space opera has very little regard for current science.
   I italicized the personal conflict or drama (And shall continue to do so) because it's what truly what drives space opera and puts a head and shoulders above the other genres. (Military SF, Golden Age, and steam/diesel-punk come close). It's the characters.
  Stories about aliens, galactic empires, epic starships, aren't exactly relatable. Stories about inter-familial conflicts are. Aliens, rebellions, starships, and scruffy rogues just make them more interesting than your average soap opera or random neighbor down the street. We know how how personal problems feel; the nervousness, the indecision, the fear. That sickening, roiling feeling in the stomach. You know what I'm talking about.
  I'm not sure how much more I can say; so I'll provide examples.
Star Wars: The Original Trilogy: Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Luke, R2-D2, and C-3PO are the driving charters in these three movies. Luke is the main character whose change and growth along the lines of the Heroes Journey is the main subject for the story. Han and Leia create the romantic sub-plot. Their fights; reconciliations, and acceptance draws viewers along for the movies. R2 and C-3PO add comic relief and aid in repairing damaged X-Wings. They add humor to what could otherwise be a grim affair.
  Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy: The driving characters are Obi-Wan Kenobi, Chancellor Palpatine, Padme Amidala, and Anakin Skywalker. Anakin and Padme are the two main driving characters; their forbidden romance brings about Anakin's fall to the Dark Side. Palpatine facilitates it and drives the entire Clone Wars with his schemes. Obi-Wan tries to keep Anakin on the good side, as well as healthy and fine. Their interactions make what could be a standard pre-war conspiracy story in a galaxy far, far, away into a tense and emotionally rich story.
  Star Trek: The Original Series: (Are you seeing a pattern?) The driving characters are, of course, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Doc McCoy. Spock and McCoy are the most relatable; since they're great friends yet constantly argue with each other. Kirk adds some philosophy, and Scotty adds somewhat of common sense.

 Without unique characters who don't have conflicting personalities, space opera can quickly fall into unbearable melodrama.
 

Character Development & Genre: How much is to much?

 Character development is a tricky subject, and there are many ways to do it. So, how deep do your characters actually need to be? Well, it's your choice.
 Do you want an incredibly real and complex character for your explosion filled Indiana Jones style adventure? If you do, go ahead but it might be wasted.  The action genre doesn't normally have terribly complex or deep characters. Why? The characters are second to the action and plot.  Take Indiana Jones for example. What do you know about him? He's a professor and a treasure hunter. He's good with his fists and a bull whip. From the movies, that's about all we know about him. That's enough to know about him. We don't need to know anything else about him to enjoy the story.
 On the other hand, a shallow character more appropriate for an adventure novel won't work for a hefty 950 page literary novel. For a novel of this length and plot, you need fully developed characters. You would need to know everything about them, from motives to dreams. A shallow adventurer just won't have the color to move the story along. It would be like a tiny car engine trying to move a dump truck. It doesn't have the oomph to push it along.
 Back to the same comparison, a fully fleshed out, completely life-like character would have to much information. Does it matter that the main character dis-likes sports because he failed to make a team once? Only if it is directly related to the story.

 But what about the other genres? Fantasy? Science fiction? Historical fiction? Well, it depends on your story. Some fantasy stories are shorter and focus more on the plot. They don't need much character development. Others are extremely long and need rounded characters. It's the same for science fiction. Some need deep characters while others need shallow characters.
  More realistic genres, however, need fully developed characters. This is mainly because in a world remarkably similar to our own, need people that we can know well and understand.

 To wrap it up, speculative genres leave the amount of character development up to the story. Real world stories need better developed characters.

Seat of the Pants in Five (Almost) Easy Steps

   It may appear that many people frown on writers who write seat of the pants (SotP) style. It's a shame really. SotP writing is really fun, similar to reading a book for the first time. Or more like playing a role-playing game.
   Their disdain might stem from the fact that just sitting down and writing a novel with no idea what will happen is scary, even less so than outlining. In outlining, you don't actually have to write the novel for a while. You can spend quite a bit of time on the outline before starting the first sentence. You often can have detailed character profiles, plot, twists, character arcs. Everything but the story.
  With SotP, you start out with minimal planning and just dive in. I generally start with characters and a basic plot. I might write a list of scenes I want, but no order, so that the story flows and twists naturally. Granted, it sometimes seems to wander a bit. In Hunter Romero and the Atlantean Curse, I started with nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just started writing and it's the farthest and most developed one I have.
  Let me give you an example of my normal SotP outline along with the first step from Lester Dent's Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot. Here are the steps I've taken so far.
  STEP 1: I had an idea. That's how all my novels start out as, an idea, generally a scene or a nebulous feeling. It was a  modern Doc Savage/Indiana Jones/ Lance Juno character crossing a rickety wooden bridge. I sub-consciously asked three questions. Who was he? What was he doing? Why was he doing it?
  STEP 2: I answered the above questions with the answers Jack Wilder, fighting an Egyptian cult, and it was his job. That was good, but he needed fleshed out and helpers. I learned that he was an ex-Special Forces soldier who was honorably discharged due to an injury. He co-owns a company, Wilder and Gray, Soldiers of Fortune, along with Jonathan Gray, a retired CIA agent. There's a third person, but I haven't made him yet. I figured out their skills and their looks.
STEP 3: Define a basic plot idea. What is the conflict? Who are the perpetrators? Why is the hero there? Why is he involved?  This is also where I filled in the four starting points for the above mentioned formula. This is a simpler step, but it requires lots of thinking to make everything seem reasonable. I might use a plot generator for ideas, I found a good adventure plot generator, or even character generators.
STEP 4: Write. This is the final and longest step. This is where I just sit down and start pouring the story onto paper. It will be pretty bad, but some parts will be brilliant and other parts will need cut and fixed. The twists will surprise you, and they should surprise the readers.
STEP 5: Edit and revise the novel several times so that is perfect. This will take a while and will need several posts to cover fully. 

 So those are my five steps to writing a novel. Sometimes it's rough, it's normally hard, but it's a blast to write.