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 […]

If you read my post last week you already know that I’m going to be away for 3-weeks after this week.  The trouble I’m facing is I don’t know if I will have easy access to Internet or not.What to do?  Definitely a conundrum.  Do I take my chances and hope that I have both connectivity and time to write something each week or do I pre-write articles for each week?  There are problems with both, obviously.Waiting and writing something new each week is the biggest risk, in my mind.  Having time and connectivity that coincide is unlikely at best.  It does have the advantage that I will have something timely to write about. On the other hand, prewriting means that […]

June is promising to be one of the busiest months on record for me.  I mean, I’ve already been to Vancouver for 2-days, I’m currently in Toronto for 5-days and I’ve got a 2-week vacation coming up on the 23rd.  That doesn’t even begin to account for all the driving-type stuff I’ve been doing (and will be doing) on weekends. Yup, busy pretty much describes it. And, I’ve got to admit that I’ve been stressing a bit about getting my writing commitments properly taken care of.  Naturally, there’s the weekly posts here (for those of you who still read them) and there was the little “First Chapter Contest” for The Writing Show.  Oh yeah, and all the other projects I’m […]