Inventing Mirror Breeze

Welcome to Mirror Breeze, a fictional city that's a mix of my hometown and my imagination. It's a name I try to give the central places of all my stories where I actually name the place (which, I admit, has been very few stories so far...). In the end, I want it to become a place my readers can recognize, and maybe even characters can appear in several stories. So far, I've had the town be the central place of both stories with a very 'realistic' plot (Angels in a Small Town) and a supernatural plot that takes place in the past (Kain, Nighthunter). However, I doubt that anyone has noticed this name as a reccuring theme, as most of the stories about/featuring the town are half-done, long since scrapped, or merely ideas. I've got one story where the town is a major player coming up, it's about half-way written, and I've got the town as a main feature in two upcoming stories that are both just ideas (I've had them for a while, but they are hard to write :p)

So, hopefully I'll see you all down the line, in a place I hope you'll all come to like, Mirror Breeze =)

Captain Morgan Stone

If someone was to search all my stories posted at storywrite, I think they'd find no stories about pirates. If someone was to search all my saved .txt files however, I know they'd find plenty. See, I've tried over and over again to write a story about pirates, a subject I always think is fun and challenging. However, the challenge always proves to be a notch above my level, as I have never finished a pirate-story that I really liked in the end. I once posted one at storywrite, about three pirates who served at a ship, but in the end discovered that they were in fact ghosts. Upon rereading this story I found that it wasn't really very good, and the end was far too unclear to make sense for anyone but me. The next day after posting it, I deleted it again.

Then enter captain Morgan Stone. The story about captain Morgan Stone is (similar to the story about the astronaut watching the world end) a story that I've been trying to write for a long time, and one I have started writing several times, all with different approaches. The one I think is my first try at the story, is a tale about a man who used to be part of captain Morgan Stone's crew, who many years later decides to set out after the treasure he was once part of hiding. The story didn't get very far until I scrapped the idea for a total lack of originality and likable characters. Cue attempt number two.

The second try became the story of a sailor who turns himself in for piracy. The pirate then tells the story of how the famous captain Morgan Stone disappeared, and what really happened. But of course, the narrator isn't extremely reliable, and in the end there are supposed to be several twists and turns. Unfortunately, I'm not extremely good at long pieces of dialogue, and even when trying to break up dialoge with retrospectives, it didn't quite work, and so the story never got very far. This is a story I'll try to finish sometime though, so bear with me here ;)

Anyway, here is a preview of the last version of the story, the introduction:

1663:
Captain Morgan Stone attacks a Portugese sloop, the Dragonfly, and kills the crew. Unsatisfied with what little silver and food he finds abord, he is about to set the ship on fire when a crewmember opens a barrel in which he hopes to find fruit, but finds something far greater. The Dragonfly turnes out to have been a gold transporter, headed for Portugal to deliver the foundation for a new currency. The barrels with gold are plentiful, but heavy. Being the largest treasure any single pirate had ever looted from only one ship, it is far too large and heavy to take with them. Their ship would sail slowly, as the Dragonfly did, and they'd be in grave danger of being attacked by anyone with a mind like their own. Captain stone and two of his most trusted men takes part of the treasure in each their rowing boat, going to hide it in a cave on an abandoned island. As the three of them return to their boats, they find that their ship, the Dark Princess, has sailed without them. The Dragonfly, probably still with a large portion of the treasure abord, has been sent to the bottom of the sea. With six barrels of pure gold hidden inside the cave, captain Stone and his two trusted friends makes a map in three parts and takes one part each, swearing to one day take revenge upon the treacherous crew before returning to the island and retrieving the treasure.

So yeah, that's the start of it, I hope to get it finished one day ;)
Thanks for reading =D

Editing Cassandra

Sometimes, I like to go back to my old stories and read them through, either to find out if I'm making progress as a storyteller, or to find inspiration for new stories. One thing I've often thought about is to go back and edit older works, especially one I like very much myself, called Cassandra.

I wrote the story back in February 2007, just a few weeks after joining storywrite. The story is about an author who writes about a young girl, and as he writes about her, his story comes alive (because of some sort of enchanted book). He comes to love the girl like a daughter, but has to write small texts about her in order for her to stay alive. However, what will he do when the pages of his 'magic' book runs out?

So yeah, I decided to read this story again about a month or so ago, and to my horror I found a lot of flaws =P Firstly, the structuring of the story is awful, and could easily be made better. Secondly, there are a lot of minor flaws and errors, grammatically and otherwise. And thirdly, it's just not really as good as I used to think it was =p

I'm not really blowing my own story down here, I still think the story itself and the premise is good, but I would like to edit this into something better. The lack of detail shines through the story, and it almost reads like a summary or a synopsis rather than a complete story.

So, what I did was to sit down and start editing Cassandra. At first it was easy, correcting the flawed structure and the grammatical shortcomings, followed by taking use of several tips and corrections that readers had left in the comments of the story. Suddenly, it didn't only look better, but it read easier as well. Then came the hard part...

When it was time to add things or take things away, I found that it was hard for me to do so. It's a story I've always loved myself, and one of my most read stories posted at storywrite. It's quite high in the most popular stories list at SW, coming in at nr.112 out of a whopping 141,583 stories. People have always liked the premise of the story, though I think many agrees that it could have been done better with more detail and some extra things added or taken away from it. In the end, I just couldn't really do much about it... At least not for the time being...

So, I'll probably get around to replacing the existing version with the slightly edited one soon, and I hope that one time I'll manage to further expand upon the story, and write it the way it deserves to be written =)

Thanks for reading ;D

Venus is Lovely This Time of Year

For ages now I've been trying to write a story about an astronaut in space that witnesses the end of the world by nuculear war. It's supposed to be a story that shows just how hopeless it is to see everything you've ever loved be destroyed, and be able to do nothing about it, not even be there. It's supposed to be a story about loneliness and despair, but I'm having a hard time writing it...

I've actually started to write the story several times, each time with a different approach. One of the versions is written as if it is the last journal-entry made by the astronaut, written some time after the destruction of earth, just as his shuttle is about to land back at the barren wasteland that is the new earth. This version however contained very little emotion, and ended up as a plain description of what happened, with cheap references to a lost family as the only way of provoking any sort of feeling from the reader. All in all, it was just another failed project.

If anyone has any tips or suggestions about how to get this story written, or how to go about it, please do tell me =)

Maybe, sometime in the future, I'll be able to write my space-story, with the right amount of emotion and a feeling of great loss provoked in the reader... Or maybe not, we'll see ;)

Journey to the Darkside

Alrighty, so here I'll introduce to you some of the sources of inspiration that make me able to sit down and write my stories... Welcome to the darkside ;)

In this post, I'd really just like to introduce you to two great artists who've both been of great inspiration to me when writing stories.

I wrote a two-part story once (where a third part was started, but never finished) called Departed and Departed - part two. Now, Victoria Frances is the name of the excellent artist that inspired both characters and locations for this story, but even beyond just looking at her pictures, I'd reccomend everyone to go to her website and let the music there play for a while while you're browsing pictures. I'm telling you, that atmosphere was what prompted me to write Departed, and has helped inspire me through several other pieces of work. So, Victoria Frances, thanks a lot for being such an awesome artist (and yes, I do have a poster of one of her paintings at my room).

Another artist that has been giving me inspiration lately is Henning Ludvigsen, a digital artist that is awesome at what he does. Browsing his artwork at his website inspired me a great deal when writing Kain, Nighthunter. I even recognized some of the pictures from google-searches, and have no doubt that this brilliant artist has inspired me at other times aswell.

So, I would recommend everyone to take a look at the websites of both these artists (just click their names to go there), and yeah, this has been a peek into the sources of my inspiration, I hope you can find inspiration there as well =)

Most Recently Failed Project: Spurt

For two days now I've been trying to finish a project I called Spurt.

The whole idea behind the project was to make a very gory comedy-horror story, somewhat like I once did with Red Red and Red all over. The idea was to start the story with a definition of the word Spurt, like this:

Spurt

1. A sudden forcible gush or jet.
2. A sudden short burst

Which would tell readers that this is a story with lots of blood in it, but also give the impression of comedic value. So I sat down and started to think how I could start the story. In 'Red Red and Red all over' I started straight into the action and explained things as they progressed. With this one I felt like making a proper introduction of things, introducing a few characters that I could then kill off.

My ideas of how to get characters into trouble were numerous, but I ended up with a few that I liked more than others. One of the ideas was to write about someone escaping prison, only to take refuge in an abandoned house, that also turned out to be (obviously) the refuge of a serial-killer. However, after thinking about it for a while, I decided that it would be too long of an introduction, writing about a prison-break and such, and so I instead decided to speed things up a bit.

So, in my new introduction I went straight into a teachers speech of death, dying and life after death. We're quickly introduced to two of his students who are fascinated by finding out what happens when someone dies, in their dying moments. Then we cut quickly to a scene where these two have tied up ten people on hospital-like beds located in a sterile room, where there are lots of different tools lying on a table in the middle of the room. To make an already long retelling shorter, they try to slowly kill the ten people one by one, filming every kill, to see if anything particular happens when someone dies. One of them suddenly finds himself wondering if he is doing the right thing, and starts to let some of the people out of their restraints. The other one then must try to kill the remainder of the people, but it rapidly gets harder when they acquire tools.

So, where did this all go wrong?
Well, actually I thought the beginning was well written, and the first few murders were okey described with the right (excessive) amounts of gore. But when I came to the part where one of the students started to let people go, I realized that not only was the story lacking horror and comedy, it wasn't actually making any sense at all. All it was at that point was terrible descriptions of gore. That is terrible as in badly written, and not as in horrific gore. I suppose where I went wrong with my inspiration was that before writing I read an article about medieval torture devices, and I had sort of forgot the entire comedy part of it :p

So, I shall try my luck again at another horror-comedy soon, hopefully with the title Gush ;)

If anyone has a suggestion of how to make the plot of Spurt any better, or how to make it funny or scary, all suggestions are warmly welcome =D

Tavern of the Storyteller - Trying to write

I would guess that everyone that comes to this blog will know me from storywrite, where I go by the name Drac. If you're not from storywrite however, here is a link.

So, let me try to explain this blog to you, I bet you're confused ;D

Often (read: all the time) I sit around and try to write something. Sometimes I sit for hours browsing pictures, songs and writing-contests trying to find some inspiration that suddenly prompts me to write, and sometimes I just sit down and try to write regardless of inspiration. Many of those times (read: most), I end up writing nothing at all, or merely a paragraph or two that are eventually discarded. Sometimes I end up with an idea or the outline of a story, without having any idea how to finish it.

So, this blog is really just here to let me share some of my ideas and tell everyone about my works in progress. I just need something to do with all that material that never goes anywhere. Maybe someone will read about my unfinished ideas and comment on them, giving me tips and suggestions as to how I should continue. Maybe just having written down that I'm working on something makes me try extra hard to finish it. Maybe I can post my sources of inspiration, and share them with the anyone that wants to see.

All in all, this is just a blog where I'm going to whine about not getting anything written, and so it is a great way for me to actually get to write something, even though it's all just for the heck of it :p

Anyway, let me rather show you what this is by posting something else, and let me welcome you to my tavern ;)