I am not a big proponent of Valentine’s Day. I am not a big fan of holidays in general for that matter. It just seems that we, as a culture, take great ideas and over think them to the point that we destroy all the fun in them. Look at Sundays for instance – a [...]
While attending CES this year for work, I tweeted my adventures, but since I am fundamentally a very boring person in real life, I figured it made sense to tweet my fake adventures too, just to make it interesting to others. Here are my #FakeCES tweets.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” Pete said as he stared back at Mike for a beat longer than was probably absolutely necessary. “Seriously.”
Mike laughed and said, “Man, that is so completely lame.”
I no longer consider myself a full-fledged nerd or a full on geek. At a certain point life just kind of takes over and those things that dominated our perception of ourselves lose some of their traction, as Craig so aptly explained previously. Right now, I tend to refer to myself as a Reformed Geek. Life has staged an intervention for me and forced me into its own 12 step program that has curtailed my dogged determination to be fully immersed in nerdology.
Good music, the kind that thumps along so hard that you can’t help but start dancing, whirls out from a core of rhythm and repetition. Once a good song gets under your skin, it doesn’t leave you. You sing along; you move your feet; you smile and settle in for the ride. Developing any skill, writing being no exception, is like letting a good groove get into your soul and dancing along.
Just a quick thought if you’re looking to up your geek Cred: Should you find yourself delving into the deepest and darkest corners of the internet (don’t wake the Balrog) and find yourself on YouTube, do yourself a favor and enjoy a game of snake.
That’s right, you can play snake on any YouTube video.
In honor of this most esteemed holiday and all that it represents, we would like to share with you this season appropriate music video that we produced one Saturday afternoon in a corner of our office.
We have come to a place in pop culture where being a geek is all the rage. With Comicon, Dragoncon, super hero movies, 2 new Star Trek joints (one up and coming), and other countless outlets for nerds, all created with precision, talent, and marketing prowess, the powers that be have perfected the art of packaging geekdom in blazing color. They’ve shrink-wrapped it. They’ve put it out into the main stream.
Explore the voice and narrative point of view in your story by writing a short story using your protagonist. Craig offers a short fiction example using the running novel example in this article series, The Integrity of Gus the Plumber.
A recording of this short story can be downloaded from Craig’s Podcast. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Just visit the iTunes store and search using the words Craig Nybo. By subscribing, you can listen to many of his stories.
Some authors pound their staves, declaring like town criers, that the best place to start when writing any story is by exploring the main characters. These authors are correct in this sentiment. There are other authors who, with perhaps an even larger staff, pound even harder, shouting that plot is the place to start and that without conflict found only in plot structure, character can not be fully fleshed out. These authors are also correct.
