The Writings and Musings of B.A. Matthews

An update for February

Hello? Is anybody out there?  Really?  After this long I had sorta thought that nobody but the spammers were visiting anymore (and before I get too far off topic, let me say that the spammers have really been active.  2 days generating over 300 spam posts? Either my site has just gotten a lot more hits from regular people and the spam bots are following or somebody is sending them my way because I don’t have a bot detector set up yet).  In that case, accept my apology and my most heartfelt thanks.  Much like a dog grabbing a toy and shaking the stuffing out of it, Life has been grabbing me and shaking the stuffing out of me.  While I can’t point at just one thing, I can say that life simply conspired to make the month of February a really busy month.

As a quick update, I’m still writing and most days I have written, even if I haven’t been making my 750 words a day (and for that matter, being able to get onto their site each day).  I have found a way of guilting me into doing a bit more writing each day though… I programed my phone to remind me each day at quarter to 8 pm “Have you written your 750 Words yet today”.  Its good because it gets me writing again, even if I have to admit that I’ve been tempted to write excuses and reasons why I haven’t  as a response to the question.

I have been writing, both writing in my novel (which I finally have figured out what my “plot point not making sense” was. Knowing a scene is wrong, but not knowing why blocks me horribly) and in new projects that I started off with my friends.  We bought copies of 2YN by Lazette Gifford and have been running ourselves through that for the last 3 weeks.  2YN stands for “Two Year Novel” and her book helps take you from base idea/cool scene to a finished novel and sending out queries in two years.  I’ve been through the course before and would suggest it to anyone thinking of writing a novel.  Even if you’re not a meticulous planner (I wasn’t when I started and though I’m a planner now, I’m still not very meticulous about it), I found it very useful to learn how people plan and what sort of questions to ask.  Due in part to my experience in the class, I was able to make the world my characters were living in much more believable.

Anyways, I started doing this with a few friends of mine and have new novel ideas brewing up because of it.  One of them is Dual Melodies and I think that I’m going to start posting up my writings on this.  Between the 40k words written on it previously and another idea I had messing around in my head I suddenly realized that the story just needed some basic tweaking before I could start re-writing it again. So, I’m starting over from scratch on it… which means an all new story for you guys!  The other story is a silly idea that I’ve had brewing in my head about a year now.  I’m tentatively calling the project “Erotic Angel” since it’s about a winged woman who is a professional courtesan and bard.  It includes a lot of sex (note the Erotic in the title”) and while I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sell this little mini novella/novel thing, it is helping me to step out of my box and understand not only the act of sex more but also the feelings, emotions and behaviors surrounding it.

Something that I had to stop doing during February was reading.  Now this was painful to me, mainly because the book was not a good book.  Trying to slog through it was like trying to wade through 4 feet of snow… it can be done, just not easily or happily.  Now, I will admit that had I been handed this book 2 years ago, I probably would have just said it annoyed me, but not that it was actively bad.  However, since I’ve started studying the art of writing, my bar for books has gone way up.  Mediocre or not actively bad isn’t a good enough reason for me to read anymore.  However, this book did help me to identify two main rules of writing that I now consider to be my two major sins of writing.

1.       Never assume that I am familiar with your world or your characters.

What I mean by this is don’t start a book and forget to mention whether your main character is male or female.  Don’t assume that because you said, “He’s a monk that was trained to kill people in war” (for instance) that your reader is going to automatically understand that later on when your monk-killer starts emo’ing out and saying people “treat him differently because of what he is” that we aren’t going to immediately think that its because he fought and killed people in the war(Yes, this is has happened before… we were told the main characters profession and emo-tendencies before we found out his race).

2.       Don’t make your secondary characters stupid just to make the main character look smarter.

This should be quick because this rule is quite solid. If you want your main character to come across as smart, make him smart.  Don’t make the other characters stupid.  In the book I was reading, a 40 year old general sent his squad in unprepared to fight mercenaries/bandits who had holed up in a cave that they had prepared in case they needed someplace to fall back to.  The war mage (normally the smartest character since that sort of magic is based off how intelligent you are) admitted to not learning battle spells on a day when he should have known he was getting into combat.  But the 18 year old Monk could have told him what he needed to know.)

Anyways, I’ll stop on my rants and let you guys go.  Keep an eye open, I’ll be posting up two songs I wrote during FAWM(I wasn’t really participating, but I thought I’d give song writing in general a try) and I’ll see you all next time.

Posted in Blogs on February 27th, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off

Theme Songs

It’s only been a few days since I last blogged, but I figured another one certainly couldn’t hurt. Especially since it’s been a pretty good week for me and my writing. I haven’t moved ahead in my novel yet (I’m really good at procrastinating) but I know where I need to go in it. What I have been doing is writing a lot this week on my D&D characters. While most of this writing won’t ever see a publishing world, it is very relaxing for me to try and write about characters that I’m intimately involved in.

That’s actually what today’s topic is… not D&D and how it influences my writing though. That topic has been gone over to death.  Instead I’ll talk about the newest thing that me and my fellow geeks are doing is actually a really good idea, both for the game and for writing in general. Theme Songs! I may be getting ahead of myself though. Let me start at the beginning and explain.

Years ago (a good three years ago, maybe four, if memory serves) I started running a D&D game for my husband and friends. It wasn’t the first game I’d run but I decided that I wanted to do something different than the usual type of game. What I decided to run instead was an evil game. We’re playing D&D like we normally would but instead of just having evil alignments or being jerk’s (though they are that as well, quite often), they had a semi-firm goal. Go from being nobody’s at third level to running an evil empire before level 20. Rather early in this game one of my players was pleased enough that he was thinking about it all the time. He was listening to music and suddenly realized that the game as a whole has a “theme song”.  The whole group agreed and Nightwish’s “I Wish I Had an Angel” got the passing grade. Although the whole song applies to the game, for me it’s the line “Burning Angel Wings to Dust” that really makes the song match the game for me.

Recently the evil fighter in the group realized he was “Indestructable” (Note: It has a really 45 second beginning before the song starts) and claimed that as his individual characters theme song. It’s now at the point where all of the PC’s (player characters) and most of the important NPC’s (non-player characters) have themes for themselves. We’re doing it for most of the games we play in at this point.

As with anything that takes up my time, I eventually start wondering exactly how I can use this in my writing. To be fair, this idea was easier to implement than you would think. I have started looking at my novel and characters in my story and have been trying to figure out what their songs are. I can see a few of you out there are looking at me as if I’m an idiot now. “How hard can it be to find a song that means something to your characters?” Quite a bit harder than you’d expect actually.

First you need to know about the character, their motivations, how they view the world and why they view it the way they do. Then you need to find a style of music that matches the character. Having a folk song done to acoustic guitar for a tattooed insane woman, like ”Jack” off of Mass Effect 2, just wouldn’t feel like it matched the character. After music type, you need to pay attention to the lyrics. Simply because a character is a pyro-maniac does not mean that the song that applies to that character will be about burning something. In fact, I usually find it more true if it doesn’t. Third, you have to be willing to accept that sometimes it will be the song that you least expected it to be.

As an example, I am playing a Cat-Folk battle dancer in one of my games. She is pretty much a caffeine kitty… She only sleeps two hours a day, and she is always either on the move running around or she is completely at rest and almost cat-napping. She is a happy, pleasant woman, who speaks with a slight accent. She always looks for the best in a situation. I originally thought that her song would show off her nearly inexhaustible energy and pleasure, but in doing so, I forgot about her past. I forgot to ask why she forced herself to look for the bright side. Unsurprisingly, while I was ignoring this, I couldn’t find a song for her.

The perfect song came about when I was listening to an artist that I normally don’t listen to. Avril Lavigne’s Innocence (shown below) encompassed not only my caffeine kitty’s predilection to ignoring unhappy things, but also took into account her tortured past as a sex slave (by the way, the answer is “Yes, my characters never have happy histories.”). The song is below and suits her to a ‘T’.

So, now I’m doing this and  every song I listen to has the potential to be a song for a character in my book. “Tear you Apart” by She Wants Revenge is now the theme song for Zack, Xiam’s boyfriend in my Vampire Fiction “Falling through the Threshold”. Listen to the song and tell me that doesn’t make him that much creepier as you read through “The White Citadel”. I dare ya.

So, do you have a theme song? Do you use theme songs for characters? Do you think that you’ll be using it in your own writing?

Posted in Blogs on January 23rd, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | 1 Comment »

Musing About the Words – “Wolf Love” by Omnia

Please feel free to comment about the music, my review or even just about the band here!

Posted in Musing About the Words... on December 8th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off

Musing About the Words – “Poetry of Wonder” by Arthur Hinds

Please I’d love to listen to your thoughts on “Poetry of Wonder”.  Which songs did you enjoy?  Did you agree with my assessment on the album?  Post below and let me know!

If you came to this page first, please follow the link to read the review first!

Posted in Musing About the Words... on September 25th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 2 Comments »

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