Taking a Look at Injuries

I feel like most fantasy writers have never gotten hurt in their lives. You can't convince me that if you break a toe that you can sit there and run away from a band of rabid elves two hours later. Or if someone gets choked for a good few seconds, they're not gonna have issues breathing for a little bit. Nope, instead the warriors can go on fighting as if they were in the prime of their lives, injured or not. And I'm sure a few of you are thinking: "Luka, clearly they used magic to heal themselves."

If that was the case then it should have been mentioned! No, all of these characters are just super human/elf/orc/dust bunnies and when they get injured it never actually counts. That, dear friends, is called lazy writing, and missed opportunities, but mostly lazy writing. You should never just forget something that happens to your characters, because most times those things will show up later on. This is especially true with injuries. If your character snaps his dominant wrist, there's no way he's gonna pick up his sword and slash at the ravenous dog that's trying to eat his kitty. If he put that much weight on his wrist then it would damage it even more, maybe even making it completely useless after awhile.

These are things you have to put into consideration when you decide to injure your characters. How will it effect the story later on? Now if the guy who snapped his wrist wasn't able to save his kitty, maybe it'll give him some character development. Maybe he'll realize you shouldn't take a tiny cat with him on his adventures. Or maybe you could introduce a completely different character who fights off the dog with magic, giving our adventurer a new companion.

Another thing you've gotta think about when you beat on your characters, is how long it takes to heal. Being a person who breaks their toes about twice a year on the vacuum cleaner, I can tell you it takes about a month for me to put my full weight on the other foot. But just because I can walk on it doesn't mean anything, more than likely it takes a week or more to actually be completely healed. So if it takes a month for a toe to get in shape, how much longer do you think it'll be for a freaking rib, or an arm, or leg? Of course healing times gets skewed when magic is involved, but if you have no intention of saying "Charmy the hobbit got a healing potion from Happy the wizard cat." Then I'm just gonna shake my head and assume that your character became god at some point.

You know, a lot of the injuries in fantasy comes from epic battles. And most of the epic battles happen in muddy, nasty, and absolutely dirty places. So if you're planning to have some guy stabbed in the abdomen, his wound needs to get cleaned. I mean, that should be a higher priority than saving blonde princess #33,333,758,558. Because if that thing isn't disinfected with something, then he's likely to get an infection and die. And don't even pull that 'rips a piece of his shirt to wipe the blood away'. That shirt is probably just as disgusting as the rest of him, especially if it was splattered with other people's blood, mud, and sweat.

God, this post makes me want to check into a freaking hospital. But I assume you all get the point of this blog post. Pay some attention to your characters, pay attention to the time in your story, and for insert some deity here's sake don't go for romanticism over realism. Unless that princess happens to have healing kisses, you're gonna bleed out from that wound.

Now I'm gonna go make breakfast....

My First Story Overhaul

Oh Lord, how time has flown. My poor WIP has made it to its second draft today. And while I wanna just get on the dancefloor, I'm actually banned from it in sixty countries, it's so freaking weird. I've never managed to get to the point where I can't recognize the draft. I've aborted some of my characters, others have changed gender, all of them have had their goals tweaked, and I managed to birth a couple of new babies that'll no doubt get killed off later on. And that's just the characters, the world that I have created has also changed to suit my needs. While I once talked about several different cities, it's all boiled down to just one massive one that has several layers to it. I even went so far as to change the season this story starts in forget winter, we're going for spring now, baby!

And while it's all super exciting, it also plants a few seeds of doubt into my tiny brain. 'What if the theme is harder to understand?' 'What if my plot doesn't make sense anymore?' 'What if I just decide to eat cake instead of ice cream?'. While I do have issues with the last one, it's not nearly as important as the other issues presented. Unlike that first draft when you were full of bright smiles, happiness, and pixie-piss, the second draft feels like the dark version of all that. Now I'm full of frowns, sadness, and...What's a negative version of pixie-piss? Demon-piss?

Who knows.

And while all this is going on I know that something very important is happening, something that will no doubt change me into a better person...I'm challenging myself. It's so freaking easy to sit down and make up a magical world, a theme, and a few characters; but it's much harder to sit down and believe that every bit of it is complete and utter crap. That you have to get in there with your scalpel, drill, and old rusty axe, and get rid of what's just not working. It's sitting there and saying 'I'm not always right, sometimes I'm wrong, time to fix my mistakes'.

I-I think I'm gonna cry.

Anyway. this was a pretty sappy post. But I like to think I'm growing in my writing life, as well as my dwindling teenage life.

Now I'm gonna rot my brain by playing Mario Kart 64.

A Sad Truth

So the other day I was reading an article that demanded that every single book needs to have one LGBT person. Doesn't matter the type or gender, they just need to be a reoccurring character with some good character development. You know, I'm the type that's all for diversity. I believe you should try to represent more for the masses, it's unfair to have an all snowy white American/British/Canadian cast all the freaking time. However, I also don't believe we should absolutely freaking placate to other people just because.

This world doesn't cater to you, so I don't have to either.

Wait...

Doesn't that just defeat the whole purpose of my opening paragraph? Yes and no. While I do believe in diversity, I don't think that you should have 'token characters'. When I was a kid, my mom would watch TV with me and would sigh and say 'token character' whenever a person of color would show up on certain programs. This was the late nineties and early two thousands, so it happened a lot less than when the bulk of my audience was growing up, but that character still stood out like a sore thumb. If the writers of the show really cared about diversity then they would add more characters of ethnicity not just one. You don't have to add diversity because that's the hippest thing, you don't have to cater to other people, just yourself and maybe your moral compass.

In my own WIP I have a mass of heterosexual characters, and the only one on the other side of the court is an asexual character, Yup, not even gay or transgender, they just don't care about sex. Did I add them in because the asexuals have been screaming for proper representation? No. He, yes it's a guy, just doesn't like sex; there's no need for some deep or hidden meaning in it. I also have two Japanese characters, a white woman, a black teenager, and a white guy. Did I choose these characters to be this way just so the minorities in question can have representation?

NO.

Seriously, when you begin to write things just because you don't want to offend people, that's when you know your stuff is going down the crapper. If anything your writing should offend people! It should make them think long and hard as they write angry tweets on your Twitter. It should worm through their brains to the point that the whole meaning of your story is twisted in their eyes and they found an entirely different, albeit ridiculous, message of your book. You're a writer and you shouldn't have to cater to anyone, that's why there's genre and even age and sexuality shelves. If they want something specific then google search it like everyone else. But if they just want a good book that just so happens to have gays, an Indian protagonist, and even a sociopath, then so be it.

I'm gonna go play Uncharted now....

Tsunderes/Bitchy Love Interests

My most viewed blog entry is about female perverts....Okay, let's talk about bitches then. Bitches and tsunderes.

Actually, I highly doubt the majority of my base knows what a tsundere is...So, basically a tsundere is a Japanese term using the word tsun tsun, kinda meaning cold, and dere, kinda meaning sweet. Basically it's one of those bitchy characters that'll argue with you for three fourths of the book, then by the end they're kissing some poor bastard. Now just because I use female derogatory terms don't think a tsundere is just for females, there's plenty of males. In fact the most famous male tsundere has to be Mr. Darcy from that one book you all know of. He's not bitchy per se, but he's very much so a guy that has a cold persona that rubs people wrong more often than not.

Now I'm not sure why people like having these as main love interests, and god forbid both characters act this way, but I decided to help people write them. Mostly because I actually have experience...acting this way in real relationships. Don't look at me like that and just finish reading the blog article!

1. Have a reason your characters even act this way: For whatever reason people think having tsunderes/bitchy people as love interests creates amazing drama. And this is true, it does create drama, but it's too easy to do. A character has to have reasons for why they do things, in a way they're puppets, but they need to believable to your audience. If your character acts like a saint to everyone else, but suddenly is cruel to the poor guy that likes her, then that's out of character. She needs a reason to act that way! Maybe she's rich so she sees everyone below her, and people above her social class or inside it she acts 'stiff' since she wants to be on their good side. That would make a lot more sense than some usually sweet girl suddenly wanting to cut off some poor guy's head for liking her.

2. Don't have them switch from 'cold' to 'sweet' erratically: I hate it when a couple sits there and will have a snuggle moment, but a few scenes later the tsundere/bitch person will freak out around the love interest. It just doesn't work that way, not even with PMS. The only way to remedy this is to have proper character development. Have them go through trials that has the bitchy person rely and value the love interest, and have moments when the love interests realizes that it's hard for the bitchy person to open up about their feelings. Speaking of which...

3. Don't have an overwhelming amount of angst: Do us all a favor and tattoo this to your face, so every single time you look into a reflective surface you remember this rule. It's standard for any type of writing, romance or not. If you need to, tattoo it to your refrigerator and cellphone as well, just get this rule in your brain.

4. Don't have the tsundere/bitchy character suddenly decide to love the love interest: Love at first sight does not exist, sorry to burst your bubble. On the same note love after hours and even years of arguing doesn't exist either. If you want your couple to argue, fine more power to you, but don't have them plan a wedding at the end of the book. If I don't see any kind of affection, not lust, then I'm not going to believe it. Affection stems from something, either an action or some words, and then it branches on to connect to other things in a person's head. It's also a mass of chemicals and a false sense of security, but who am I to get in the way of romance?

5. Don't have bitchy as the main character trait: As a person who is a bit hard on their lovers, I know that it seems to be all consuming, but you have to realize that we're not really this way all the time. It's mostly around love interests or people that are generally seen as annoying, yet they hold some sort of affection for; not necessarily romantic affection. So if your character is around their best friend that they found soothing, they'd probably act completely different. Basically what I'm trying to say is look at the character interaction as well as the character traits.

So that's it. I'm gonna go watch Sgt. Frog....

Even Women Can Be Perverts

Holy mother of insert some deity here...I'm updating my blog. Well that and I'm a female writing about perverted female characters. I know, I know, this is completely unheard of and you're probably questioning my genitalia right now, but I feel like something needs to be said. Isn't it pretty 'sexist' to think that only guys think about sex or make sexual innuendos? I know in my dwindling teenage days alone I've thought about it at least fifty times a day, and I'm only nineteen. But I guess on some level that makes me a whore, slut, whatever derogatory term you want to use. I'm sure many of you are shaking your heads at the dramatics, but from a ton of books I've read I'd think differently. Almost any female in media who happens to be a pervert also spreads her legs constantly. I'm not saying sex is bad, I'm sure it's fucking amazing, but not every dirty thought needs to be played out with that mysterious yet sexy stranger.

Now, I want to make it clear I'm NOT a 'modern' feminist, meaning that I don't think men should die or whatever extreme message they're spewing, but I do believe that women can have the same desires as men. But just like men, I highly doubt a woman would just act them out whenever they think of them, or that their thoughts are always consumed by sex.

My lord, this blog post is all over the place...

Okay, what I'm trying to say is that female pervert characters are normally regulated to the office slut. Even in fantasy a lot of female characters have an attraction/lust towards another character, but they don't make sexual jokes or will blush at the eye candy. If you have that one girl who's willing to make a lovely innuendo to her love interest, she's no doubt doing guys in the tavern bathroom as well. I never really noticed this issue until I was watching a play through of the video game Bayonetta. The titular character, Bayonetta, is a complete pervert. Almost every sentence out of her mouth is some kind of innuendo, just check out the Bayonetta 2 E3 trailer on Youtube, but she's still a classy lady. She ain't interested of spreading her legs for anyone, but she'll tease you with a sway of her hips and a few naughty words. She's also a strong witch, competent gunner, and so clever that if she wanted to she could just take over the entirety of heaven and hell. For her, perversion is simply a character quirk, not this defining part of her that motivates all her actions.

So how can we write perverted female character without coming under fire from the feminazis, 'holier than thou' women, and those guys that want to join a special camp? Well...You really can't. Even in this day and age people will freak out if a female has sex on the brain, so the only thing I suggest is giving her a brain.Make her a super strategist who often helps the king's army, but will often use her position of power to drool over the men in uniform. Or have a strong and capable soldier who often makes sex jokes about how her sword will get in another guy's sheath? Take that how you will. But these girls will never just spread her legs to any idiot who wanders on her path, she does have standards.

Or they can just love sex, that's cool too. Just make her compatent, dammit!

So there you go, probably my most controversial blog post. Seriously, I should do it over something like pedophilia in books or something, this is just pathetic. Anyway, I'm gonna go oggle men in military uniforms.

Yum, military uniforms~!

An Idiot's Review of The Star Stone: Book One of the Darkwinds of Danaria Series

You know, if you've followed this blog for any length of time you know that I love to read. Reading is something that keeps me from murdering my siblings, and outright locking myself away. As such I'm pretty much able to read virtually anything you throw in my face. But you guys should also know that I'm pretty blunt when I talk about what I read. Saying this long and drawn out introduction, I wanted to like this book. I honest to ,whatever god you worship, did. With a name like The Darkwinds of Danaria series, I knew I was going to be in for something interesting. While TA Sullivan clearly has a very active imagination, and is extremely good at naming things, that's pretty much where the fun dies.

So let's start off with our two protagonists. Neerah, a fifteen year old girl, is your average Jane that lives in a tiny village. She can hear the music from the ever mysterious stones she collects, but aside from that she thinks she's normal. However that pretty thought is smashed and burned when a handsome young man kidnaps her and she learns that she's a reincarnated...well to put it simply, dark lord. Whenever Neerah was on the page I usually had two reactions, the dominate one rolling my eyes, and the other was sighing. While I do appreciate she put up a fight on occasions, I felt like it was so short lived that it may as well not even happened. I'm sure she'll get more character development in later books, hopefully, but I just didn't like her character at all. Constantly arguing, constantly whining, making stupid mistakes, it got annoying very quickly.

Our second protagonist is a guy called Joelnar. The interesting thing about him is that he's a half Nix half human creature. And...That's really where the interesting part about him ends. He was very angsty in the book, upset about things that were out of his control, and most of the time was a silent brooding type. Except when he wasn't and was usually snapping at Neerah or trying to deal with her. To be fair I'd be upset with Neerah most of the time too.

Now let's talk about the world. Since this was a high fantasy the world has to be amazingly interesting, right? Well, actually it is sometimes. While I wasn't too fond of calling normal things, like birds, off the wall names like feathered fliers. I did find the world that the Etherals inhabited very interesting, and would have loved it if the entire plot was set in the world. The description for it was wonderful, and the inhabitants a bit unique, almost reminding me of the Farplane in Final Fantasy 10. But once you hit the actual setting, it was just a typical fantasy landscape that reminded me of Western Europe if not Northern America.

The plot is as expected. Normal girl finds out that she's not normal, gets saved by a handsome stranger, they go destroy the plot device of doom. Aside from the fact that everyone wants to kill Neerah for some reason or another, there's no real surprises.

So to sum it all up, I have to say that the story had potential. Some aspects of it was really thrilling and unique like the Etheral world, and the Nixians, but other than that it followed way too many high fantasy tropes making it a pretty boring affair.

If you still want to get the story it can be found here.

Alright, I'm gonna go eat some grits....

You're Not Describing, You're Purple Prosing

I know prosing isn't a word, but just deal with it for a few seconds while you read this article. Now, with that out of the way, let me do my obligatory introduction. 

All writers have a duty to show, not only a good story, but an amazing world to the readers. The world needs to jump off the pages and caress the readers minds with lovely images that they will keep in their souls until Death calls them back to the never ending oblivion that is the end of their lives...

That is not describing what you need to do, that was a bunch of pointless description that had terrible grammar. For whatever reason writers, especially of the SF/F and romance genres, thinks that accurate descriptions need to be long and poetic. Now this is fine if you're like Shannon Hale, and your prose is naturally poetic, but even Shannon Hale has enough reign over her writing in order to keep it to the point. Me and at least an eighth of the human population just doesn't understand poetry or straight up doesn't like it. So instead of reading poetry, we read other mediums of fantasy telling. When people like you shove in all your glittery, fancy, and down right obnoxious descriptions down our throats it makes us upset. We shove poetry to the side for a reason, don't make us read any more of it.

Dislike of poetry aside, there's another valid reason; because my opinion does matter that's what popular culture has taught me. When you have all the flowery descriptions of certain characters, you immediately have seasoned readers hating that character. That poor character probably just popped up on the page, but when you're describing her like this: "Skin as dark as chocolate and eyes as brown as a fawn. Her black curls bounced against her shoulders like playful snakes, just begging to be pet and played with. Her smile was wide and the adorably small teeth were as white as the moon, and had their own particular shine that made Prince Leopold's heart soar..."

Now, having read that, don't you get a distinct impression of her? I don't know about you, but I think that this...thing I created is a Mary-Sue. Heck, I don't know her backstory, her goals, or even her name and I hate her. And if I'm hating a character I literally made up on the fly, then I'm probably gonna hate the character that I've read about for at least three chapters and have had nothing but whimsy descriptions shoved in my eyes.

Of course not all descriptions are whimsy and happy. Some can be outright sad and melancholy, tales of tragic heroes dying in puddles of their own blood, or the death of a great and valiant creature that once ruled the skies. This is more common in death scenes, probably to make me care more about the character, ignoring the fact I've been reading about him since book one, page 45, eight books ago...

Now I could tell you a hundred more reasons why purple prose just doesn't work, but I'll finish with one of the best reasons why you shouldn't...

You ready?

People skip it. The six hours you spent flipping through the thesaurus for the longest word that still meant tiny, all to describe a magic girl, is gonna be skipped. And not because the person hates poetry, thinks the character is a Mary-Sue, or hates kids. It's probably a better bid to say that they just want to get onto the next bit of dialogue or action. Description in long never ending paragraphs is boring! If you've read Journey to the Center of the Earth, then you probably skipped the majority of the first chapter since it described the house. A house that, if memory serves me right, you don't ever see again. 

Basically, at the end of the day, just describe things the way they are. Don't try to overdue it, you're just gonna make people upset, or waste your own time because people will skip it.

Now I need to go finish reading the book I'll be reviewing....