My heart breaks tonight. I have four daughters. Dear Lord, I have four daughters. What do you do? I’m going to take this to my family council this week. I have insulated myself in a world of Twinkies and DVDs. This from The Economist.
More: Starving Afghans sell girls of eight as brides, The Bride Price.
One of the most basic way of coming up with story ideas is to take a familiar story or thing, list out what’s commonly associated with it, then start changing some of those elements.
For example, you list out all the normal things for vampires–the coffins, black, bats, sucking blood, etc.–then you begin to twist. What if the vampire wears, instead of black, some styling plaid? What if it isn’t a person but a rabbit (whoops, that one’s been done)? What if instead of gothic places like catherals you find him in a trailer park? What if instead of being dangerously suave, he’s a drunk?
Do you see? You can do this with anything.
In this interview, Matthew Sturges talks about how he did just that with the movie The Dirty Dozen and ended up with with Midwinter, a novel about prisoners given another chance. According to Sturges, “In the case of Midwinter, the beginning of the story was, ‘What is prison like in Faery?'”
Read the whole interview. I think you’ll find it enlightening.
Titanoboa. 43′ long. Weighs more than a ton. Could eat Bessie. Literally.
The picture below is of a python slithering over the vertebra of a titanoboa.
More here in Times Online article, USA Today, and LA Times.
We just visted the Abbey of our Lady of the Holy Trinity this week with my family. It’s nestled on over 1,800 acres of some the most beautiful country in Utah.
I think almost every religion demonstrates virtues we can all learn from. The dedication of these good men to their beliefs and vows to God is one such example. As is their decision to live simply. And their creamed honey blends, which you can order from their website, are delicious! So far the maple honey is my favorite. Here’s a 2 minute National Geographic video about this abbey.
This from a gal I know who’s been touring Spain…
I ate a quarter of a suckling pig today. I feel like a monster for eating such a young animal; a rotund, content, sleepily sluggish, well fed monster.
If you’re going to kill an animal, kill it when it’s young. It so much more barbaric that way…
And she sends along these pictures.
Is that not the voice of a character speaking to you?
Zing, Baby!
BSCreviews just published my guest blog “How to Get Ideas: Talk to Cows.” For those of you unfamiliar with the genesis of Servant of a Dark God, you’ll want to check it out.
This is Warren Ellis.
I heat my house with radiant heating. When we built this place, Nellie, I, and the girls laid down yards and yards of tubing. Then the mudmen came in and covered it all up with concrete. We run hot water through that tubing. That water it heated by a boiler, which also heats the water for sinks and showers.
About two and a half weeks ago our boiler quit working. We called the guy who sold it to us. It worked again for one week and went out again. Then again. And again. Now if we lived in the valley and it was summer it wouldn’t be an issue. But we live at 6,000 feet, in the mountains, and it’s winter. We just got four inches of snow two days ago. Needless to say, heat is important.
Well, four technician visits, $600, and many hours later, we still have problems. The blasted boiler conked out again tonight just as Nellie and I were about to take showers to go to a dance for adults our church was putting on.
So we brought in the big guns. We called Warren. Now Warren fixes cars. He fixed our fridge. He’s worked on everything from computers to furnaces. So Warren arrives. In less than 10 minutes the @#!$ boiler was working again. And we now know exactly what the problem is so the Lochinvar boiler rep can’t tell us to look for something else and that it’s an installation error (yes it’s a Lochinvar Knight boiler–remember that boiler buyers). Genius. Absolute genius.
I offered to give Warren a big old kiss–hey, hot water’s important, almost as important as a wife who doesn’t have to take a cold shower in the morning. Warren refused.
So here’s a wet one for ya, Warren. You’ve done your work to further world peace.
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That’s pretty amazing stuff. People live in such a different worlds than us. Really, we’re amazingly blessed. What are you going to do with it in family council?
I don’t know yet. I’ll present it and see what ideas we come up with to help.