The Pencil Place

When I get stuck while writing, I sometimes find it useful to work on something completely different for a bit in order to let the brain reboot itself a little. I’m not sure how it connects in my mind, but my grandfather would sometimes say he had to go outside to have enough room to change his mind.

I was taking a tour around the ‘net, and I stumbled onto this video.  It is a 1927 colour film of London.

It’s absolutely stunning. If I were trying to describe 1927 London, I’m quite sure I would have gotten it so completely wrong as to be laughable. But then the odds are we are all in that boat.  Now at least there is a sense of the city.

And of a little girl selling peanuts.  That just started writing a story for me right there.  And the old boat on the Thames.

Evocative.  I’m really glad I found this video.  I think I’m nearly rebooted now!

Just when I’m wrestling with a question, the answer presents itself in the Internet before I really begin searching.

I have books about query letters. I have clippings and other odd bits of bookmarks tagged for research, study, and deliberation.  That doesn’t mean that I know what I’m doing, however.

I love days like this.

What is a query letter in 25 words or less?  Keep it simple – as in this blog post for query letters, for instance.  Thanks, Janet!

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Some batteries just need a quick charge and they’re good for a few hours. Some batteries you need to charge overnight and they still drain quickly.

With writers, the batteries need a variable charge at a constant rate, otherwise output suffers and performance is unpredictable.  This is science, I think.

For me, I’ve been reacting to a lot of different stimuli that has kept me distracted from some of my original goals, and that’s partly my fault.  A lot of these things are not really controllable though, are they?  Sick pets, financial stresses, the economy, politics – and all the rest.  I tend to bog down a little too easily at times.  I end up with too many to-do lists.

So now to recharge, I’m reading.  I have a stack of books that I’ve collected over the past two years or so, and an absolutely sick collection of eBooks I’ve downloaded – mostly novels and other works in the public domain.  They don’t do me much good if I don’t read them though, do they?

So I’m reading through the Nag Hamadi manuscripts, the Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition rules, and a biography.  Yeah, well not all at the same time. It’s hard enough to get my bifocals adjusted to a single page, much less that many pages.

And, with a little luck, my world will freeze over soon so that I can breathe easily for a few months – meaning that I will be back in audio book mode.  Otherwise I stop to make too many edits trying to keep the tar off the back of my throat.  I’m looking forward to it.

You know, I never had allergies until I moved to Indiana.  Hmmmmm…..

Anachronism: -noun; something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, esp. a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time (or a later time)

I started thinking about anachronisms this week. I was walking near a military facility, and I overheard a guy behind me complaining, “It doesn’t rain IN the Army, it rains ON the Army, so you better just learn to deal with it!”  From his strident tone (and yes, it was raining) I was expecting some young person, probably in uniform and walking with a colleague.  I slowed down and adjusted my umbrella because I wanted to see if my hunch was correct.

Yes, I do odd things like that sometimes… But I was very incorrect. Both men were in their 50s, a bit rotund, and obviously reminiscing about having to endure rain while in the service years ago. Neither one had a jacket and it was quite chilly.

While this wasn’t exactly an anachronism, it got me thinking about timelines.  If you’re stuck on a story line, maybe it would be more interesting in a different time.  Let’s look at some modern trends and see if we can jazz things up.

Vampires.  Teens eat these stories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Goth is still quite popular, and the entertainment industry is sucking it for all it’s worth.  But let’s face it, the urban fiction angles have been about played out haven’t they?  Why not think about your vampire story as set on a space station or planetary outpost.  Or better yet, how would Neanderthal tribes have dealt with vampires?  Would they have figured it out or would they just be free food?  Is that what wiped out the Neanderthals?

If your book deals with politics, why stay with today’s headlines?  Why not move everything back 200 years?  Or better yet, find a nice timeline of maybe the Hundred Years War and set it ahead to maybe 2015.

I started a novel once that set a couple of modern guys back to an age that was somewhere between high fantasy and steampunk.  I never finished it because it got too wierd (yeah, even for me).  It was a hidden area where some magic still lingered, but steam power was used as well.  I think about that setting often, and wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t dust it off.

What I’m trying to say is – no matter what you’re writing, if you are stuck just throw it into a different time and see what you end up with.

As adults, I think most people discount dreams. We don’t pay attention to them, don’t put any significance in them, and don’t bother remembering them.

I’ve always been glad that I have never had that tendency. I dream often, vividly, in color, and I remember my dreams.

Today it paid off. I dreamed up a whopper, that is still vivid enough for me to think about writing it up as a test thought or two. It starts off with some boxes found in the sand on the shore of a lake that contain odd things, and as an investigator I am tasked with figuring out if there was a crime or not. Yeah! I love puzzles, and I love them when they come in my dreams. The problem is, this was not a puzzle. This was a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago, and the evidence in these boxes is a very sad tale that implicates the father of a friend of mine. We had heard that he was dead, so it should be all over, right? Right?!?

Maybe. Will I write it? I don’t know. I’m a bit busy with other stuff at the moment, but I may very well come back to this one. I’ve never tried a murder mystery.

So take it as a cautionary tale, my scribbling friends. Don’t discount your dreams. Write them down. Mine them for ideas. Follow where they lead.

Well, pardon the dust.  This is the new home for tjpontz.com, now under WordPress.  I’ve imported all of the old stuff that was on the typepad page, but the formatting has suffered on several items, and the other nitty grits are misbehaving.

A fresh coat of paint, a few throw pillows….

Really!  I may find myself accidently posting more often now. You never know, do you?

This blog is something I started as a place to talk about fiction writing.  The problem today is that I’ve been doing far more nonfiction writing, which is kind of a new genre for me.  So to get everybody caught up on what I’ve been doing, I’m going to bridge that chasm in my brain here and leave a breadcrumb for folks to follow.

First off, I did a modernized version of the Jefferson Bible. It’s a pretty modestly sized little book, so why not?  Derivative works don’t usually get updated as often as scripture, and I thought that it would be pretty interesting to see how well it works in today’s English.  You can read more about that project at http://jeffbible21.com. It dovetails nicely with my loves of history and language, and many years pondering theology.

The other project I have just completed is the Haunted Homeowner’s Survival Guide.  There is a ton of misinformation out there, and ‘reality’ TV shows of folks chasing spooks doesn’t help the situation.  I’m condensing the web site content into a downloadable PDF just to help people out. There will be a version on Smashwords for other eBook readers, and I will ask a modest price for the download to help cover the costs of my domain setup. There will be a coupon program too, so no fears there.

I think my favorite part of the web site (http://hauntedhomeowners.com)is when I short circuit a lot of the preconceived notions about paranormal events by letting you think about something parallel but completely different.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a minute.

Suppose I say that I have an invisible unicorn in my closet.  I want you to find him and get rid of him for me, okay? He throws clothes off the hangars and into piles in the corner. He turns the lights on and off, and I hear his hooves on the floor sometimes.

How do you catch a unicorn?  I’m glad you asked, because there are two basic schools of unicorn catching.

1)  Believe there may be a unicorn.  You give me the benefit of the doubt, and try to find the unicorn. Set up your cameras, thermal detectors, magic field finders, and hoof sensors.  If you find any evidence that way, you’ll be inclined to believe you really did find a unicorn.  That’s what you were looking for, isn’t it?

2)  Believe there might not be any unicorn.  Using this method you would investigate the hangars to make sure the clothes should have stayed on them. Is there anything in the closet that could have knocked the clothes off? Check the piles of clothes to see if it is just normally discarded laundry (ew!) or if it has anything else going on.  Does the light switch have a second circuit, a faulty switch or a loose lightbulb?  Check out the floor carefully for construction faults, noises caused by seasonal expansion and contraction from heating systems or air conditioning.  Lastly, you’d think about getting an evaluation of me at the hospital, because most sane people don’t believe they have unicorns in their closet.

In this case, if you use the term ‘unicorn’ with me, it is an agreement that something odd is going on, even if there is no invisible beast in there with a horn growing out of its forehead.

With either method you may find a simply unexplainable phenomena. Or you may decide it was all just my cat.

What is a ghost? Many people would commonly answer that it is the remaining spiritual energy of a human who is no longer alive.  What is a demon? Many people would commonly answer that it is an energy force or a spiritual entity of a being who is not human, probably with hostile (or at best not friendly) intentions.

Great! But what does that mean in measurable, scientific terms? How can anybody know for certain the difference between a ghost and a demon?  What kind of spiritual energy is this, exactly?  Does it have a voltage?  How many milliwatts does it take to create an apparition or a moving shadow?  Energy fields are measurable, so this should be a piece of cake, right?

So if you happen to find a piece of ectoplasm, please save it for me. I want to see if I can charge my cell phone with it….   I’ve decided that creativity can be used in nonfiction writing.  Maybe that is a lesson appropriate for this page after all.

The wheels of thought, though elastic, are hard as iron. They spin together like a great conflagration of metal and steam, pushing out new ideas faster than sausages. Each thought gives rise to new thoughts, each with its own children and cousins. These new thoughts percolate back through the system, achieving even grander results (at least sometimes).

Or, why lulu.com is not really playing a good game.

The eBook version of The Jefferson Bible for the 21st Century is now available on Smashwords in 10 different download formats!
There are minor formatting differences between this version and the eBook version on lulu.com – mostly related to the verse numbering system. It is also available on Scribd for a free preview read. Just click the Scribd icon in the left side.
So now, when my allergies clear, I'll be starting the audio book side of this venture back up again.