Melange and Morsels are Available!

Check out www.overlordmpress.com for details! These two anthologies were absolute fun to write, and both include stories from my most beloved genre. Check out "Treasure" in Morsels, and the ten Microfiction stories under "Ain't No More Coffee" in Melange for my various takes of a crapsack world. 

The End is... On TV?

Short post: there seems to be a glut of reality shows dealing with the apocalypse (zombie or otherwise) and doomsday scenarios.

I will say this: "Preparedness should be like Fight Club."

I will say it again: "Preparedness should be like Fight Club."

There's an episode of The Twilight Zone, "The Shelter," which deals with exactly this kind of situation. I'd advise anyone interested in emergency situation preparedness to watch it. 

MAD MAX!!!! Ahem... sorry for shouting

But I can't help it, not really.

This looks amazing, and I hope it lives up to the hype. I will be on the beta bandwagon if I can help it. Or not. I've had mixed feelings about playtesting something not so polished and ended up feeling like my post-armageddon joy got tempered with a sandpaper scrub. Take Fallen Earth, for example, a post-apoc online RPG centered around Hoover Dam. I got to beta that one and I was unimpressed. I knew the gameplay would be a little wooden, but shooting was a nice touch. A nice change from the glut of fantasy RPGs out there, but when the premise seemed to be about cloning to play a character who could be killed over and over, as is wont to happen in such RPGs, I uttered a 'meh' and moved on.*

But this still looks amazing.

And it's Mad Max.

The only thing which would be WAAAAAAY cooler is just getting to play around in the world as a character I've created. Not just Max. Although it will be awesome to BE Max for a little bit. Am I rambling? Sorry. Just dreaming. Really looking forward to this one.

Mad Max.

Need I say more?


*Not that there hasn't been cloning in my fave post-apocs. Wasteland featured the ability, closer to the endgame, where you could fix a pod, pour in the right chemicals and scrape off a little DNA. I never did try it. And its not that I don't like clones (I've got a few stories I've written about the very subject) but I didn't like it in that particular setting. Kinda like eating a huge juicy steak with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Two great tastes, does NOT taste great together.

Flash Fiction...

... I will keep this one short and just link to the post on my writing blog. I posted here because the short story I submitted for the contest has --drumroll-- a post-nuclear theme, called "Mourning Chorus."

Edit: The story was added to the site, but  too late to qualify for the May entry. I still got a few comments on it, however.

Changes

As of late, I haven't come across anything really exciting in the post-apoc genre to get me hot and bothered enough to post --

I have to stop there for a moment. How many of us get so excited by anything that the first reaction we have is to log into an account and type away. What? Oh, wait... yeah. Facebook. Twitter. Nevermind, hah! --

But a few things out there look promising. When I actually have some money again (separation and divorce are emotionally AND financially painful. I don't recommend it, but at the same time, its not worth fighting someone to get them to change their mind. Only makes them hurt you worse), I plan to plunk down a few bucks to see if they live up to the hype.

One of those things is: The Last of Us

When I saw the trailers for this one a while ago, I admit I was excited AND deflated. Years ago, I read about the zombie ants, due to the cordyceps fungus. Interesting, and best of all, REAL. I wondered then how I could work that into a story, but never found anywhere appropriate.

Fast forward. A few months ago, I am listening to a podcast with my husband and the guy mentions his regimen of vitamins and supplements. Among the items he lists were the cordyceps. Bells and whistles went off, as I recalled the cordyceps word ("Why does that sound familiar?") and, with the handy-dandy iPhone, pulled it up.

Here was a guy mentioning cordyceps as a supplement, and suddenly I had a vision of "THAT's where zombies are coming from! People taking these as supplements and the fungus mutating, taking over their brain and turning them into zombies that climb to the tops of buildings and --" Well, okay, not about the part where they climb to the tops of buildings. But being the instigator of zombification.

Fast forward again (gotta love that virtual remote) and I see the trailer crop up, and said "YES!" and then said "Oh no." Someone else came up with the end of the world scenario involving cordyceps before I could write and publish it. I do not know if it had anything to do with body-building supplements, but all the same, I am looking forward to playing The Last of Us, to see how the conceit plays out. Along with having an entertaining time, of course.

On a side note, this is a fantastic representation of the cordyceps at work, among his other magnificent pieces. Beautiful work, Mr. Fleming.

NaNoWriMo has begun!

Or will, by midnight. Head over to my writing blog, Torrie Burke, to view updates on my writing project for the month of November. Hope to see you there!

Writing is a Chore... but I Can Whistle While I Work

While working full-time doing something that is just a little tiny bit like writing, I realized that I once again needed to bounce back into the blogosphere in order to give my creativity a renaissance.  I don't want my job to kill it, even though I stare at a computer screen for most of the day making sure the grammar is correct (with the irony being I am not going to get it right most of the time here, and frankly, I don't care so much here).

In order to resurrect the space without deviating too much from the original content, I have attempted to find something new and exciting in the world.  Zip. Nada. I have found nothing apocalyptic by which I might find intrigue, and pique a new interest in this jaded, old heart.

So I go back to commenting on my writing progress. Yes, yes, anyone who has read me for any amount of time realized that I am working on my own novel.  I got caught up in other things, because Life, after all, Does Happen.  After two revisions, I am STILL not happy with it, but I did find a writing course which has, so far, been taking it to a new level of satisfaction for me.  I recommend her courses because now I can actually afford them and the methods really work to build a crane over the work and pull it out of the mire in which it sank.

I thought what swam around in my head could be a great novel, but I realized I lacked enough scenes with great conflict.  Even though what I saw in front of me was prose, I resorted to reading Blake Snyder's book on screenwriting called Save the Cat!  It still proves to be a good resource so far, by giving you a basic skeleton for the three-act structure (screenplays or novels) and it allows the writer to see where they are missing material.  I suspect I have the same problem as a lot of people, in that I can come up with a great setup and slam my characters with a zinger of a main conflict to get them out of their comfort zone and into the thrill of the story, and I know how the story will end, and I can even see a few great scenes play out in front of my very eyes, but it is too thin. 

What it doesn't do, however is offer much in the way of how to actually fix that problem.  It just tells you what you needed when you were done. Seemed a lot like baking a cake without a recipe. Someone says "You mix ingredients, stick it in the oven and out comes a cake." That's true, sure, but not precise. What ingredients go in it? How much? What order do you mix? How long do you bake?

Enter the course "How to Think Sideways" by author Holly Lisle.  I stared at it for many, many months.  Lack of a job and accompanying pay made me balk at the price tag, but I kept staring.  I finally got a full-time job, had money to drop on the course and... wham.  She doesn't run it quite the same way.  BUT... she did release the courses individually online for a much more affordable price.  And, the courses were always on the writer's timeline, with no datelines or homework, as such.

I am loving the results, but I am not quite ready to post anything just yet.  Let me say that Holly is 100% correct in that little ends up being the same when you let your muse play.  I've come up with so many new things that really add the punch I looked for that I wish I had scraped up enough and taken the course way back when I wrote the first draft.

The bottom line is that I need to get back to writing, both working on my novel and writing here.  If I have any readers... drop me a line and let me know if I am taking too long between posts.  I need something standing behind me with a cattle prod.