…and I am VERY glad!  Where to begin? For the curious among you, my first holiday destination was Cancun, Mexico.  It was just in time for hurricane season, I’m told, but we only saw rain twice and both times it was at night after we had shutdown for the evening.  Sweltering hot too, but in the end, very enjoyable. The trip to Mexico has proven to me that people can share the same system of measurement and still not really resemble each other in many ways.  Little things like speed limits, for example.  Suffice it to say that the Mexican way of life is substantially different than the Canadian one and we can leave it at that. The second portion of […]

Well, we made it… 4 episodes in 4 weeks.  This week, as you already know, we are talking about supporting characters and how your story resolution might go. So, without further ado, let’s soldier on. Part IIIe – Supporting Characters Supporting characters.  Whether you love them or hate them, they are (usually) a necessary facet of any story.  But what sorts of things do you need to consider when you’re creating them? For me, I try to keep them to a minimum.  What I mean by that is, I only bring in a supporting character if they move the story forward.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t have people in my stories.  Far from it.  I just don’t spend any time […]

Hello and welcome to week 3 of  my discussion around “The Creative Process” for story writing.  Good to have you back.  How is your story coming along? This week, we will be discussing conflict and creating the plot points for the story.  Let’s get started, shall we? Part IIIc – Conflict For a story to move and be interesting, it has got to have conflict.  That shouldn’t be too hard since our lives are full of it.  What types of conflict might we consider for this story?  There are so many to chose from, but just as a start we could use: the family against the planet; the family against each other (remember, there IS a teenager here, not to […]

By the time you read this, I will already be out of the country.  I won’t tell you where only because I don’t what to sound like I’m bragging or trying to make you feel bad if the weather is poor where you are.  If you missed last weeks posting, please stop here and go back and read it first.  That’ll put you on the same footing as everyone else.  For everyone else, let’s move on. We left off last week having just decided that we would be writing a Science Fiction novel of a length somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words.  Our basic story idea was that a group of amateur paleontologists/archeologists discovering a strange artifact/building/ship. I had also […]