A Glimpse Inside My Mind

My mental white board is a source of constant amusement for my writing partner, Lindsay.   When I am playing connect the character dots or trying to add a new thread, she will often chuckle and tell me to flip the board back a week or two to see what I've missed. As irritating as her suggestion is, it is surprisingly accurate!  I simply shuffle whiteboards  . . . toss one to the back while bringing another forward.  I have one for each of my characters, each of my manuscripts, as well as for those works I am critiquing.  I don't know how I keep them all straight --probably heavy doses of caffeine and an insane need to compartmentalize!

She asked me a few days back what my character map for our MC, Jake, actually looked like.  It took some time, but I think I've created a rather accurate rendering for her to view.  Here it is!  It may not make any sense to you; but to me, it contains all the information I need to create a fully fleshed-out character.

Show Me The Voice - Semifinalists!

This morning, we discovered that FATUM has been chosen as one of the semifinalists in Brenda Drake's Show Me the Voice Competition.  Wow!  Thank you everyone who commented on our 250 words and thank you Brenda for hosting.  Now, we're off to visit the others and do some congratulating!

Walking the Fine Line

DYSTOPIA : an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.

Participating in Brenda Drake’s Show Me the Voice blogfest was fantastic and thank you to everyone who commented on our first 250 words of FATUM.  One comment we received repeatedly was that the opening “didn’t feel like a dystopian”.  Actually, we are very glad you pointed this out because it’s a very important aspect of FATUM, one that really deserves its own post.

Dystopians are often characterized by a futuristic setting, the events sometimes taking place hundreds of years or more into the future.  The decay of civility and social order is often brought about by a man-made crisis and humanity is subjected to a new regime. . . often a corrupt one. 

FATUM does not adhere to these guidelines.  In fact, it walks a fine line between Contemporary and Dystopian. . . taking place in current day and after a massive solar storm wipes out the earth’s communication systems.  In other words, it takes a natural phenomenon and speculates on what would happen to our earth, to humanity, to life as we know it, if it took place on an unimaginable scale.  What would happen if Earth really was plunged into darkness and we were unable to rely on technology to communicate with the outside world.  How long would it take humanity to turn on itself, and what kind of character, what kind of moral fiber does it take to rise above that?  Those are the questions Fatum poses, the answers . . . not as rosey as you might think.

Show Me the Voice

We are pleased to be participating in Brenda Drake's Show Me the Voice critique blogfest.  It's all about the voice in this blogfest, and we have been challenged to show ours in the first 250 words of our finished manuscript.   So here it is, the first real glimpse of Fatum.  
   

Name:  Lindsay N. Currie and Patricia Burgess Leaver

Title:  FATUM 

Genre: YA Dystopian  

    
     
     We’d been having this argument every day for the last week, but here I was again, defending a score I knew for a fact was correct.  Guess that’s what happens when you’ve been cooped up in a missile silo for the better part of a year with nobody to talk to but each other.  Somehow, something as trivial as the score of our last baseball game becomes a matter of life and death. 

     “I had nothing to do with us losing that game, Keith.  We were ahead five-two until you stepped onto the mound.

      “Whatever, Jake. We would’ve been ahead five nothing if they’d let me start.”

      I stood up, sending the old cable spool we used as a table crashing down, our only deck of cards scattering into the thin layer of dirt that covered the floor. “Are you kidding me, Keith?  The only reason you made the varsity team is because your dad is the assistant coach.”

     “Was!” Keith roared.  His father had died along with the rest of our team that day on the bus, leaving the three of us to fend for ourselves.  “And if you’d done your job and won the game before that, we wouldn’t have been on that damn bus, Jake.  We would have been home.”

      “Now you’re saying it’s my fault your father is dead?”

      Keith nodded, took one aggressive step to invade my personal space. “I’m saying you losing that game sure as hell didn’t help matters.”

     “You little prick!” I grabbed him by the shirt collar, the thin fabric fraying in my hands.  He’d been blaming me for everything lately, and I’d had enough.

Meet Fatum's Jake Holloway

Fatum: N  utterance| oracle; fate| destiny; natural term of life; doom| death| calamity

The setting of Fatum is as important  . . . as integral to the plot as the character's interactions.  So what better way to introduce Fatum, then to give you an inside look into our MC's room.

Jake's room is about ten by ten, the walls made of thee-inch concrete.  A steel reinforced door, that is too heavy to maneuver, blocks his room off from the hallway beyond.  A double, well-worn mattress rests on the floor, no sheets just a few stained quilts protecting him from the protruding springs.  Three empty milk crates double as his dresser and a storage closet for his ammunition. An old, wooden cable spool serves as a table where two mason jars of water and a half-empty can of rotten peaches sit.   There is a pile of holed jeans and gray t-shirts crumpled in the corner, his rain-washed socks hanging on the wall to dry.

On his sheet-less bed lays a baseball, smudged and well worn, a matching glove, and a journal. The floor is covered with pencil shavings and old newspapers.   Dead center of the room is a rusted-out half barrel, a smoldering fire just beginning to die out.  Next to that fire pit are three knives, two dull, one sharp and still resting on the stone he drew it across.  

So that about sums it up – the entire contents of our MC's room. Any idea who this kid is or why he is there?