ScriptSuperhero.com

Sometimes it’s hard to know what the best concept is going to be for a solid novel. Along with my wife, I’ve recently discovered Charlaine Harris as an author and her story in an intriguing one.

Harris got into print and had early success with two mystery series, Aurora Teagarden and Lilly Bard. Aurora Teagarden is about a librarian who inadvertently solves crimes, while Lilly Bard is a cleaning woman who does likewise.

Both were keeping her in print and both were selling enough to keep the contract renewals coming, but Harris was unsatisfied. So she took a risk and started two new series; both mixed mysteries with the supernatural, which her earlier books didn’t do. The results were the Harper Connelly series, which features a woman who can sense the dead; and the Southern Vampire/Sookie Stackhouse series, which focuses on a clairvoyant waitress and her vampire companion.

Yup, in both series, the main characters still solve crimes. Both series sell better for her than her previous series, and the Sookie Stackhouse series will, this fall, become the basis for an HBO Original Series, True Blood.

You never know which idea is going to be your million-dollar concept; if Harris had let her early success lull her into a false sense of complacency, she might never have produced her most successful novel series to date, and that would be a shame, kind of like owning unlocked cell phones that never get used.

One of the nice things about writing is that it’s largely unaffected by trendiness. I’m not talking about story styles or the popularity of genres. I’m talking about accessories and tools.

I mean, I use a fairly standard Acer Aspire and MS Office 2007, and while other folks may prefer an earlier version of Word, or a different brand of computer, it’s not like, say, shoes; there’s not UGG Australia word processor out there that all the hot, fashionable writings are composing their scripts with.

I hope the day where that changes never comes.

Writing is hard enough with you have everything you need handy; it’s a lot harder when you’re missing something. Today, I was hoping to finish off a lesson I was writing for a class at my church, but I didn’t have any of my reference materials handy. Even though I only have a couple paragraphs or so to go, I just couldn’t get it done.

Writing without references handy won’t win anyone a CPM or anything, and it also doesn’t exactly result in accurate prose. So I had to put the project off.

That’s where creative writing is a bit more flexible; your handiest reference material is your brain, and it’s hard to lose that.

Sometimes your mind just goes blank.

I’m not talking about the oh-so-typical writer’s block. That’s common and there are many strategies to overcome it.

I’m not talking about not having a story in mind, or lacking a wellspring of ideas. Neither am I talking about not knowing what your next thing to write might be.

Sometimes, in my experience, you can have all that going for you and - BOOM - you sit down at a screen to start writing up that scene, column, blog entry or whatever, and you may know everything you need to write and how you want to write it, but you just… don’t want to start.

There’s a name for this; it’s called “realizing that sometimes, writing is real work.” All workers, no matter their jobs, would simply be somewhere else, doing anything else than what they’re doing at the moment. The more often people run into that feeling, they begin to get restless and think about “writing the Great American novel” instead of doing whatever it is they are doing.

But what do real, hard-working writers do when they have that moment where they realize writing is real, hard work?

Well, for me, fishing is a frequent candidate.

Fortunately, those moments are usually brief and pass as soon as you put your first sentence together, whether it’s a narrator’s controversial statement to open a chapter, or an essay on used Harleys, or a blog post about how, sometimes, writing is work instead of the most fun thing you could possibly be doing right now.

The ideas and concepts for stories that writers come up with are as mysterious to non-writers as the pyramids are to non-Egyptians. The most common question writers are posed with is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Writer Lawrence Block’s knee-jerk response is usually a favorite: “At a warehouse in New Jersey.” Right next to, I imagine, the cat supplies.

But I think there’s a better and more honest response. “By being alive.”

Now, that might sound just as flippant as Block’s response, but think about it; as writers, we get most of our ideas by observing the world around us. We see a mom struggling to keep her three-year-old from pitching a fit in the Wal-Mart, or a couple arguing in a city park, obviously teetering on the edge of a break-up, and we start asking ourselves questions, filling in the blanks, and pretty soon we have a concept for at least a scene, or a good portion of a short story; string a few of those together and wrap them in an overall plot and there’s your novel.

So while it sounds just as dismissive, it’s really not; where do I get my ideas? By being alive.

The main fear I’m holding in terms of my mother’s pending death is not so much the death itself, painful as that will be. No, the main fear is the ongoing absence of her from my life.

It may sound terrible, but I’ve always had an easier time talking to my mom than my dad. I love them both, but I’m closer to my mom because I can talk to her more openly.

While Dad is still with us, once Mom is gone, one of my main security blankets in life goes with her. The fact is that she’s always been one of the people I can call and talk to when life isn’t making sense.

That’s the biggest fear. That in the weeks, months and years that follow her passing, there will be days, or nights, when I wake up wanting to call Mom… and realize, I can’t anymore.

(And here when I was a kid, I thought acne treatment was my biggest fear.)

Pride comes before the fall. And that doesn’t mean before autumn.

I’ve been thinking some today about how important it is not to let the little things bother you. It’s a hard skill to employ. After all, it’s usually the little things that trip us up.

It’s rarely the major things that cause fights or disputes; it’s rarely the big stuff that causes wars to break out. It’s the details.

The great thinkers say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and “It’s mostly small stuff.” But if that’s true, why is it so hard to actually DO that?

Take for example weight loss pills. I need to drop at least 40 pounds. Pills like that might make it happen more quickly. But what’s the long-term damage, and is it worth it?

For me, how quickly I lose the 40 pounds is the small stuff. The important stuff is that I’m moving in the right direction, toward losing it.

Time disappears so quickly.

One moment you are spreading pimple cream on your face, the next you’re in your early 40s and worried about when the final call will come that your mom has finally passed away.

May sound morbid, that Mom has stage 4 cancer and it’ll be sometime within a few weeks to maybe a few months… maybe even a few days. No one knows.

And in the urgency of all the immediate concerns of daily life, time gets eaten up and before you know it, it’s gone. I’ve been hoping to find more time to write about how I’m handling this pending loss, but even that time slips away all too easily lately.

Last week, my wife and I went to a local Barnes and Noble to pick out some new reading material. Having burned through all her current favorite authors, we were looking for some new faves.

The thing is, my wife and I don’t like to read excessive profanity, especially the “G-d d–n” instance; we allow only three stikes on that count before pulling out a DVD or setting aside a book. It’s a personal preference, that’s all.

So my wife tried to explain this to the guy, and while he tried to be helpful, I felt (my wife sees it differently) that he spent most of his time disputing our personal reading standard, until a different sales associate took over and helped us find some potential candidates.

What all this points out is that language and audience are always concerns for writers to take into account. You’re not going to reach an African American audience well with characters that talk like they stepped out of Huck Finn, for example; and you’re not going to reach a lot of church-goers or the baby strollers brigade if you’re a cuss bucket.

And heck, my wife and I are hardly prudes; I can understand from an artistic perspective needing to use the word “damn” now and again. Is it too much to hope for that more writers could consider refraining from adding God onto that particular turn of phrase?

One of the things most successful writers require of themselves … at least, the ones who get published regularly, is a daily production quota. It works for me better than diet pills when it comes to blogging; if I need to get 20 blog entries done in a two-week period, it’s a lot easier to write 2-3 per night than sit down like I sometimes do and write 18 of them in one sitting.

The same principle holds true for any other type of writing; if you make sure you write, say, three pages a night, you get to 300 pages a lot faster than if you write in 10-15 page bursts, but then go days and even weeks on end without producing a single paragraph.

That’s the key to success as a writer; setting a production goal, and making sure you hit that minimum, all the time.

It doesn’t take a Slingbox to keep up with your manuscripts while traveling for the summer. All you really need is a laptop. Unfortuantely, I don’t have one.

Of course, I’d love to have one; for one thing, it’d make me able to sit in the living room with my wife while she works on homework and blogging, while I work on my writing projects and blogging. That would be a great benefit.

But ultimately, it comes down to spending priorities, and with my car currently in the shop needing to be repaired, transportation is taking the lead and mobile writing ability is taking a back seat. So it looks like a flash drive may be the best way to go, for the moment.

One can negotiate a PS3 shooter easier than the negotiations between SAG and the AMPTP, following the expiration of SAG’s contract on July 1 and the successful ratification of rival actor’s union AFTRA’s contract a week later.

The current hubbub is that the AMPTP is saying that SAG rejected its “last best final” offer, while SAG is saying “oh no we didn’t… we just haven’t accepted it yet.”

Whatever. The bottom line is this: if SAG thinks they can break through where WGA, DGA and AFTRA failed, we are headed toward a strike, or at least a producers lockout. SAG needs to get realistic and take the best deal they can get for now… and live to fight another day for progress on some of their other pet issues.

And let’s be honest; there’s no way actors are getting bagged by producers the same way writers were.