The Writing Workshop

DC Comics Rebooting Entire Universe Today with new Justice League #1

That's all folks.

The DC Universe has officially been rebooted. There was an event here in Manhattan last night with comic book creatures and DC editors-in-chief Jim Lee and Geoff Johns sigining copies of the new Justice League #1. Here's a rather hilarious video that I found on Topless Robot  (a site for all things nerdy whose main draw is some great daily lists) today.

Am I excited? Actually, not at all, especially not about Justice League #1, which apparently features Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman all meeting for the first time and having your (standard) superhero fight each other because they think the others are supervillains moment. Ugh. I'm so interested in that.

Will I pick up Gail Simone's Batgirl? Yes, because I as much as I don't like the idea of Barbara Gordon walking and no Stephanie Brown, I like Batgirl and I like Simone. Will I pick up Batwoman? Yes, because it has JH Williams III's unbelievable art and the highest profile LGBT character in comics.

Am I picking up anything else? Uh. Check over at PFS Book Club's next Comic Pull List to see if I flipped through anything that was worth bringing home. Maybe I'll get lucky and Teen Titans won't be as awful it looks.

Writing Prompt: Turn a Video Game into a Novel

Renowned movie critic Roger Ebert once famously said that video games can never be art. Gamers then ripped him a new one until he rescinded his comment and admitted to have no expertise in the area.

People claim that video games have changed the world's lifestyle, but I don't really think it's as complicated as that. People have always played games - drawing rooms used to be filled with cards and other games - and video games are simply the newest form of that human experience. But this doesn't mean that games can't be art.

Art, especially storytelling, is about connecting human beings together through mediums, establishing some sort of emotional or visceral response. And video games, since the late 1980's, have developed a bigger and bigger sense of emotional response from their players. (Try not to cry when Aeris is brutally murdered in Final Fantasy VII, pictured above.)

Write the story of a video game.

You can interrept this prompt in many ways: you could retell a video game's story in prose form, you can describe the internal life of a video game character who knows its in a game, or perhaps even tell the life story of a video game cartridge from your local Blockbuster (those still exist, yes?). The whole point is to be creative. Good luck!

Writing Craft: Writing Deaths & Other Highly Emotional Moments Without the Melodrama

Storytelling is about getting the reader to understand a point or about getting the reader to feel an emotion (sometimes both). This is why writers tend to be drawn towards the extremes of human experience when writing narratives. It's much easier to get a visceral response in the midst of a shoot-out then it is in a polite discussion between parents about their children (not that it can't and hasn't been done).

The problem with writers' proclivity to go towards the narrative extremes is that their ability to write extreme emotions must come through. In other words, without identifiable human reactions to go along with extreme (plot) situations, the narrative will become melodrama, or worse, feel false to the reader.

Comic books are probably the best example for this. Since comic books are known for both their death scenes and coming back to life, a character's death (like Jean Grey's rather famous demise in Uncanny X-Men #136 over there) must mean something. In Jean's case, she sacrificed her own life to save the universe from her own growing powers. Her death then affected the rest of the cast and the stories told for the next ten years.

But recently, death has become something a breezy issue in comic books. Bucky's (Captain America's WWII partner) death in an event comic wasn't even dealt with, and the character didn't even die that heroically or surprisingly. Fans were upset. In other words, the plotting and the story didn't serve for Bucky's death to make sense to the reader.

Does death make sense to anyone in real life? No.

Does death need to make sense to your story and therefore your reader? Absolutely.

Part of being a writer is taking the things that don't make sense in this world and distilling them into something recogniziable and understandable for the reader. If a hero falls saving his friends, then that's a death the reader can understand. If a woman get hits by a car while chasing down her child, that's a death the reader can understand.

But if a man gets hit by lightning on page 3 and nobody seems to care because you didn't really focus on the death in your plot and theme, the theme of your book is now how cullous the world is. In other words, highly emotional moments, like a death, impact the story much more than other moments, and create shifts in tone, plot, and most importantly, theme.

In other words, anytime you write a death or other highly emotional moment into your story, make sure it's not there for shock value alone. Make it worth something.

Creating Books Through Online Donations: Unbound Invents a New Way to Publish

New UK publisher Unboundhas created a brand new publishing business plan, seemingly inspired by the techno-developer and artist supporter site Kickstarter.

Like Kickstarter, users donate small amounts of money to get a project off the ground. For Unbound, this means that Unbound users pick books to donate to and the more money that is donated overall, the more likely that Unbound will publish the book.

To make the donation deal even sweeter, Unbound then offer rewards for donators whose chosen books are published, including future book readings, access to membership sites to interact with the author, and more.

Here's a video describing from Unbound describing their philosophy:

I truly believe that traditional publishing is going get more and more competitive in terms of new and different business projects sprouting up like this. Unbound has been generating a lot of press - I discovered it in this article by FastCompany - and I wouldn't be surprised to see an American version popping up any day now.

My only concern is that it seems like the book isn't even started until after a certain amount of money has been donated to the project. If that's the case, you're talking severely delayed gratification for the readers who donate, since most books take up to a year to write (at the least) and then another year to publish. I think they need to try to speed up that process.

Other than that, I'm interested to see if Unbound can produce any bestsellers (since the donators will be likely to buy the books they help publish) or any award-winners. I hope it's only a matter of time that we see non-traditional and non-Big Six books breaking through to the mainstream.

Writing Prompt: 5 Characters, 1 Locked Room

There's a TV trope called Locked in a Room, in which two or more characters who don't like each are trapped together for what appears (at least to them) to be an indefinite but lengthy amount of time. As such, conflict arises and the characters are forced to come to grips with their animosity. The more general use of this is the Bottle Episode.

Write a story in which five characters who already know each other (and possibly hate each other) are trapped in the same room.

Why is this story so much more difficult to write than it is to tape? Mostly because you're going to have to do a lot of dialogue choreography to make this story about more than just the description of wherever you've trapped them. Also, you've got 5 characters - making sure the reader understands whose talking when and keeping the plot moving along is going to be a pain. Since there's no movement, the plot will be basically completely emotionally driven. For writers who focus more on action, this prompt will be a challenge.

Get Published!: But At What Cost?, or PublishAmerica is Evil

While self-publishing may be a more worthwhile endeavor these days, more and more shady publishers seem to be popping up.

Vanity publisher PublishAmerica has recently started a program wherein they "send" one of their workers to JK Rowling's home and drop off a box of promotional material for some of their books. And then they charge their authors $49 for this service by claiming that they put the books right into Rowling's hands.

Rowling's lawyers have issued a cease and desist letter, to which PublishAmerica responded with this rather hilarious letter - one in which the "lawyer" involved uses triple exclamation points (he apparently never took my composition class).

The whole point is that  you need to know who you're working with. You wouldn't take a job from a company that's not going to pay you what it said it was going to pay you, so why would you take a contract from a book publisher who's likely to cheat you? In other words, before you send your manuscript anywhere, you MUST research them (and I don't use all caps lightly).

For instance, if you go and google PublishAmerica, you will quickly find things like "PublishAmerica Scam" and "True Stories about PublishAmerica" on the front page of Google. If there's just one bad account, ok, fine, the author has a gripe. If there's several, all of the same type, then you've got a bad publisher.

Legally speaking, PublishAmerica might not have broken any laws yet. So, they're still in business. They can even advertise right here on my page (I've seen them but I haven't figured out how to stop them and now that I wrote a story about them, they'll probably show up more. I'm sorry.) Please don't use them.

If you truly can't get a deal with a good publisher, then self-publish. Don't use a vanity press. There's simply no reason to in this day and age. Lulu, iUniverse, and Createspace are all great programs for people who simply want to be in print. Amazon's Kindle Direct program is awesome for e-books. There are ways - just please don't waste your time and money with a program like PublishAmerica. It ain't worth it.

Fantasy Author Bits: Preview from Vampire Academy's Richelle Mead, Amanda Hocking's New Book Covers, & Sneak Peak at Pottermore

It's a female fantasy author free-for-all! (Go alliteration, go!)

First up, we have USA Today's brand new look at fantasy self-publishing queen Amanda Hocking's mass market book covers. For reference, that's one of Hocking's self-published books to the right. Apparently, the designer decided to keep the strangely bright colored branding that all her books had in the translation to paperback. (If you don't remember Hocking's deal, here's my recap.)

The only big question I have is: since Hocking's e-books were so cheap, are people really going to buy paperback versions of books they probably already read or is St. Martin's Press hoping to ease the time between actual new, original stories from Hocking with these reprints for new readers who don't yet have e-readers? I'm not sure it's the best marketing plan ever, and might diminish Hocking's street cred with the self-publishing world. (Word.)

Over in more happy news, we've got the first screenshots from Entertainment Weekly for Pottermore, JK Rowling's new Harry Potter website extravaganza. I've also got more information over here about Pottermore, and I've heard many people say that they got their beta-testing passes (they were available by contest), so I'm sure that when the beta site opens up, we'll be hearing a lot more about whether people like it or not. (I'm personally still excited.)

In also fun news, Entertainment Weekly has the first several chapters and book trailer for Bloodlines, the newest book from Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy spin-off. I've got to say, Twilight stuff has totally overrun the Young Adult world. But I've read some of Mead's stuff, and I kinda actually like it, so at least there's better vampire young adult options out there. And who doesn't love vampires crossed with boarding schools?

Writing Prompt: Change One Plot Point

In any classic story, there's certain plot points to hit for it to be said classic. If you're talking Romeo & Juliet, you need Romeo to be told that Juliet's dead. In Jane Eyre, it's Mr. Rochester's first wife getting out and burning the house to the ground. Or, in Harry Potter, it's that whole Voldemort choose to attack baby Harry over baby Neville. What would happen if these details changed?

Write a story in which a certain plot point from your favorite book was altered.

The goal here is to inspired by the original piece, but also to show your creativity. Whether you change something large or small, it should show the theory of unintended consequences. Let each change, starting with the first, be a series of dominos that finishes by dramatically changing the story's end.

If you can alter the story's themes while you do so, even better.