November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322
My Son Was Murdered, The Killer Walks Free, Your Child Could Be Next!
FAQ: What are the most visited pages on this website and how many visits do they get?
Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to write different types of magic uses, or rather how I personally write various types of magic users within the context of my Quaraun books. Today that page is one of my top ten most visited articles. It gets 50 to 500 views/reads/hits/visits per day depending on the time of the years and has had over 200k visits total since it was published.
Amphibious Aliens: Debunking The Atwater Family's Alien Abduction Hoax with more then 30MILLION reads since 2007 and The GoldenEagle: Debunking Stephen King's World's Most Haunted Car Hoax with over tenMILLION reads since 2007 still rank as the two most visited articles on my website, but, neither of those are writing related.
Writing Medieval Servants is my most visited writing related article with over 7MILLION reads.
This website was started in 1996 and has 1 to 3 new articles (all written by me, I am the only writer on this site) published almost daily. In 2017 we crossed ten thousand articles published. As of 2023, EACH article gets MINIMUM 10 to 70 reads PER DAY, with the high traffic articles getting 500+ reads per day.
And since December 2019, my website now gets three hundred thousand to 7 million reads per month - well over ONE HUNDRED MILLION PAGE READS PER YEAR, making it not only the single most trafficked site in the State of Maine, but also one of the most visited websites in ALL OF NEW ENGLAND!
{{{HUGS}}} Thank you to all my readers for making this possible!
I can write scenes, but not stories from writing
>>One approach is to use the 'road story ' method, based on one or two characters traveling cross-country and having various adventures along the way, that may or may not be linked in some way.
In Fantasy this method is know as "questing adventures". This is the way I write. I write a series of novels about 1 character as he travels across the country. He always has others traveling with him, but it changes in each story depending on who he's met along the way.
I do not plot or plan, instead I use random generators from sites like Seventh Sanctum or Chaotic Shiny, and drop something in at random.
For example, if I need him to meet someone along the road, I'll use the character generator
right now it just gave me:
I'll use the attitude generator to determine the new characters stance towards my main character
right now it just gave me:
If I need to give him something to do there are plot generators
the adventure plot generator right now it just gave me:
the writing plot generator right now it just gave me:
the plot twist generator right now it just gave me:
the Writing Challenge generator right now it just gave me:
the situation generator right now it just gave me:
then if I want to add an item for him to see/discover, I'll use the item generator
right now it just gave me:
If I want them to meet in a tavern, there's the tavern generator
right now it just gave me:
When my character needs to order food, there is the Seventh Sanctum meal generator
right now it just gave me this menu:
or the Chaotic Shiny meal generator
right now it just gave me this menu:
If I need to mess up his life, you know, because I can't think of anything else to write for the story, there is the disease generator to toss random illness at him,
right now it just gave me:
As my main character is a Necromancer I can further mess up his life with the zombie generator
right now it just gave me:
Often overlooked in many stories is the influence of the weather. I love using the weather generator to add things to his life yet again.
right now it just gave me:
There are literally thousands of random generators all over the internet, so you can toss anything at your character.
Writing this way, I never know where the story will go either. So it always becomes an adventure for me as a writer to discover how to get my character from the beginning to the end, when he has these random places, people, things, and events tossed in his way.
For me, I'm someone who writes lots of random scenes first and then gets stuck trying to figure out how to piece them together as a story, and that's when I use the random generators. I find that grabbing a person, place, thing, or event at random, I'm suddenly forced to ask myself: "How in the heck is he going to deal with this?" followed by, "What in the heck does this have to do with the plot?" and "How does this connect scene A to scene B?
I don't know, this method may not work for every author or every story. It works for me and my series because I'm dealing with High Fantasy about a wizard, so I've got a magical universe where weird things can happen, like a portal can open up in the sky and suddenly spit out hellhounds or something at him. And he's a wandering vagabond, living on the road, camping in a tent between villages, going from tavern to tavern looking for odd jobs to do for people, so the setting allows for him to meet lots of people and be in lots of new places, etc. Thus, for me and my story, using random generators works as a method of keeping the story moving, thus connecting the scenes together to make a larger story as a whole.
Also using random generators allows me to get to the end of a 300,000 word novel without getting bored with what I'm writing, because I never know from one day to the next what I'm going to write. It's a road of discovery for me as an author, to click a generator, see what it gives me and then get my brain working overtime to try to figure out how to make the generator's result fit the story. It's like playing a game or solving a puzzle and it really helps to keep me excited to get up and write a new chapter each day.
I think one of the things I like about this method is the fact that, my character has goals, and I know where I want him to go, but I'm never sure how to get him there... then I toss in something from a random generator, and suddenly now I have this completely unplanned obstacles, that I had not planned to be in his life, so now I have to figure out, more about his character, his personality, and really stop and think about what type of person is he and how will he deal with this new situation that has disrupted his ability to get from point A to point B. I end up learning more about my character which I love, because I love exploring who he is.
But, not sure if this method would work for every story or every author. Maybe this method will help you? Not sure.
Michael Chabon's advice to me: 1,000 words a day from writing
I started with 700 words a day (I figured it was easier for my mind to reach/be motivated by a little more than 500 but not quite 1,000). By the end of the year, I was doing 2,000 words per session, 3 times a day (6,000 words a day). Now, nearly 20 years later, I'm averaging 17,000 words a day. The younger me who struggled to reach 700 words a day would have fallen over dead had anyone told me that one day I'd find 17k a day easy. :P
Funny thing is, I never consciously changed my goal to a higher number. It was just that once I got into the habit of writing daily, I discovered I had a ton of stuff to write, and once I got started, I just couldn't stop until I reached the end of the scene/chapter/story/whatever, and before I knew it it was no longer me writing a certain amount of words anymore, but soon it was me writing a certain amount of scenes or chapters a day.
Practice and sticking to it every day, really is the only way around it.
Day in the Life Slice of Life Vignette in the Fantasy genre is EXTREMELY unusual, and fewer then 10 Fantasy authors write it, so it stands out quite a lot when you see it. (I'm actually considered the inventor of that format... I've been writing it since 1978, the day in the life of an Elf wizard... 40 years and 130 novels later, I'm still writing all the mundane details of Quaraun's life and have yet to toss him into anything even remotely an action scene). You see it in other genres all the time, but almost never in Fantasy, because usually in Fantasy, people want none stop action.
But one of the reasons I like writing it, is because, I'm never at a loss for what to write. I don't have to come up with over the top plots and battles. No, instead I write about him getting up in the morning and puttering around with his daily punting session, his obsessing over what to wear, his getting drunk way too early in the day then getting into arguments with his unicorn, people coming to him begging for help with some dragon and him flipping them off with a fYk-you, and then him ranting about how much he hates humans.
It's also why it was so easy for me to go from 700 words a day to 17k words a day. Every day life is pretty easy to write. It's almost like writing a diary, because you are NOT sticking with more standard formats and have more freedom to write exactly what the character is thinking/feeling/doing, because you don't have to worry if it's important to the plot or not. That's the big advantage of writing Slice of Life Literary in any genre, is, plots are optional, and usually plots get in the way and are not included at all.
Slice of life relies on everyday activities and not plots to move them forward. It's a character driven genre, moved forward by feelings and emotions, instead of goals and actions. That's also why a lot of readers find it awkward reading, because they are used to reading plot driven stories instead of character driven stories. Character driven stories are rather uncommon.
I started writing character driven Fantasy, because I was bored out of my mind with one sword fight battle front after another. I liked reading literary fiction, but hated the modern settings, and wanted literary fiction featuring Elves and wizards, which in the 1970s, did not exist, thus the only way to read it was to write it. I didn't really have a goal for it at all, so I just took a wizard and started writing random short stories about his life. Him being a homeless wandering vagabond wizard for hire, you never see him in the same town twice as he travels across the country. The series being set in America & Canada, and me being a full time RVer, I actually drive to every place he visits and every day I'm sitting on location writing the settings. Story set on the shores of Witch Hole Pond, Maine, were written, while I sat at the real Witch Hole Pond, Maine and wrote exactly the story that the area inspired me to write.
Sadly while 1 or 2 books in the genre get popular once in a while, the genre as a whole is very much not popular, because people much rather read battles and sword fights, then "oh my, look at that landscape!" and read long tavern dialogue. Most people want to adventures of the quest itself, not the downtime and behind the scenes of the daily lives of questers when not questing. shrug
I would like to see the genre become more popular, but, mainstream people just want to read hack and slash action, and folks looking to read slice of life are a very small minority in the reading world.
The Space Dock 13 WebRing
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What do you want to become?
What did you do today to step closer to that goal?
Whatever you do, be your best at it!
And remember to have yourself a great and wonderfully glorious day!
~EK
EelKat.com
pinterest.com/eelkat/
Evil men go out of their way to try to drive a person to suicide.
Are you an evil man?
Are you sure you're not?
How many people have YOUR hate filled words killed?
Next time you go to do a mean thing to a fellow human, stop and really think about the consequences of your actions.
Did you ever notice how every one has a story to tell about me, yet not one of them ever speaks the truth?
What lies has YOUR gossiping tongue spread about me?
Did you know...
October 16, 2006, bomb blew up my house because of YOUR lies.
August 8, 2013, the house which replaced the one the bomb blew up, was driven over by a backhoe.
November 14, 2013, my 8 month old infant son was murdered because of your lies.
November 14, 2013, I was beaten up, paralized for 5 months, spent 18 weeks relearning to walk, I'm now crippled for the rest of my life, because of YOUR lies.
Are you proud of what you have done?
Enjoy your eternity in Hell. You earned it. You've certainly worked hard for it.
~EelKat
If you have any information about any of these events, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322
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