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4K A Day
I had a bit of a dry spell recently but I’m back on the keyboard.
Not So Hot
We’re rolling happily along toward July and it looks like we’re staying in the 80s for the foreseeable future.
Granted, anything over 55° is Hell on Earth for me.
As summertime goes, while the 70s of the past week were nearly tolerable the upcoming 80s should still be survivable with sufficient fan coverage.
Adjustment to the hearing aids is still in progress. I find that they are more efficient at sharpening environmental noises than at clarifying voices. Hopefully, my visit on Monday will help to tip the balance. The control console seemed rather sophisticated. With any luck, the sound profile will allow some of the inorganic sounds to be de-emphasized.
Apparently, the novel coronavirus has not gone into remission due to increased heat, humidity, sunshine or whatever. The only cure for this disease with a 98.888% recovery rate is apparently participating in a race riot. The governor is still a tyrannical little hemorrhoid and we’re waiting to see if the Pennsylvania legislature is capable of pulling themselves together to impeach him.
I didn’t much enjoy my recent dry spell but it did give me some time away to approach the story from a fresh perspective and apply a more coherent plot structure. I’ve had two days with over 4,000 words since I was able to restart. If it holds, I’ll be done a viable first draft in about a month.
A Good Start Is Half The Battle
The 3 Kinds of Superhero ORIGIN STORIES! || Comic Misconceptions || NerdSync
As the video says, people love a good origin story. Half the fun of superheroes is finding out how they became superheroes.
In the Sentinelsverse, there are basically three sources for supers (heroes or villains).
Like Superman and other alien heroes, Mary Christmas gets her powers by virtue of her alien origin. Where she comes from, everybody shares a telepathic link. Teleporting is a skill that is taught over the course of centuries and shaping matter with their minds is as natural as working clay with our hands is to us.
Like Iron Man and other tech-based heroes, Hellion and Claw have no actual superpowers. Their phenomenal capabilities come from their ability to design and create technology that enables them to bring vengeance against evildoers.
Like so many comic book heroes with accidental origins, most of the supers in the Sentinelsverse get their powers from unexpected intervention by the Chaosians. Most of them have no idea they’ve been in contact with a Chaosian but the unearthly energies have effects as random as gamma-ray bursts, lycanthrope curses, irradiated spiders or magic totems.
As the video also says, it’s not so much the powers as the choices of what to do with those powers that defines whether one is a hero or a villain.
Pedigree
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. ~James Rollins
Kelly has been on a James Rollins kick lately. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I’ll probably start after she’s ripped through her growing collection.
I never felt that any sort of pedigree was required. Writing is a skill and storytelling comes naturally to human beings. Some people decide to combine the two for fun and profit.
I was never one of these people who know all the right names to drop. I can admire the skill and notoriety of those who have gone before without necessarily wanting to be them.
I’d sure like to have some of their royalties, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to live their lives.
The lives and experiences of each author provide them with a unique ability to produce the stories that only they can tell in the way that they tell them.
Everybody has a story to tell. Only a few of us take the time to put them down and share them with the world.
That’s a quick couple of words for the weekend. I’ve got to get back to The Sentinels and all of their drama.