The Writing Workshop

Writing Prompt: Reverse Your Own Gender

What would your life be like if you were born the opposite sex?

It's an interesting question, especially in the light of recent anti-women comments like Rush Limbaugh calling an advocate for free and available birth control a slut on his radio program. It's a clear sign that we do not yet live in a post-gender world.

Rewrite your own life story by changing your gender.

The goal here is to avoid obvious traps of gender bias or stereotypes. If you're a guy who loves football, still love football. If you're a girl who trades stocks for a living, still trade stocks for a living. The only thing you want to change is your gender.

Imagine the differences in the ways your parents raised you. Would you have still gone to the same college? Which activities would you have done in high school? What kind of person are you going to date now?

The best part of this story is that the origin of it doesn't have to be explicit. In fact, it's best if it's not. Don't make this about gender. Make this about revealing another part of you. Same personality. Just a different body to hold it in.

Comic Book News Snapshots: The End of Young Avengers, the new Captain Marvel, and Felicia Day Webcomics

The comic convention WonderCon happened this last week at the Anaheim Convention Center, and news from Marvel was all over the place.

First up, there was the big announcement from Marvel about the X-Men titles, including a new X-Treme X-Men (pictured) series staring Dazzler and an alternate team of X-Men that sounds a lot like the plot of fan-favorite Exiles. The book will be written by Greg Pak. News also came that Brian Wood, formerly of 90's X-Men title, Generation X, will be taking over both Ultimate X-Men and X-Men.

There were also rumors of an X-Men wedding coming up, believed to be that of Northstar and his boyfriend, Kyle, in the pages of Astoninshing X-Men. If so, this would be mark the first gay wedding for Marvel.

In Avengers news, Jeff Parker, Declan Shalvey, and Kev Walker's Thunderbolts will become Dark Avengers, a twist I find awful, since the Thunderbolts (a group of villains who can't decide if they're reforming or not) are awesome and the Dark Avengers (a recent fake hero team led by the Norman Osborn) are not.

The best comics news was actually about Carol Danvers, otherwise known as Ms. Marvel (and sometimes Warbird or Binary), as she will take on the name Captain Marvel and star in a new series by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy. She's not the first female Captain Marvel (that privelge goes to the original Captain Marvel's daughter, Phyla), but Carol is one of the most recognizable Avengers and this will be her third solo series. If you think it's not important for more female characters to be strong and powerful, I suggest you take a lot at these humorous gender-bending costumes. I personally love Carol's new costume and direction.

Dark House Comics has also announced a team-up between them and nerd goddess Felicia Day, who once appeared on Buffy and Dollhouse (and a bunch of other TV shows) but really made her mark with the internet series, The Guild. Day will produce new (and free!) weekly motion comics for Dark Horse.

And finally, we have the momentous occasion of Wiccan and Hulking's first on-panel kiss. The two gay teenagers have been a couple since their first appearance in Young Avengers #1 in 2005 but did not share a kiss until this month. They are also Marvel's most well-known gay couple and one of the few teenage gay couples in comics.

Get Published!: Why would you want a Pseudonym?

The pseudonym, also known as a pen name, is one of literature's oldest traditions. The pseudonym is a fake name that an author takes on to publish under.

It is commonly suggested that the most typical form of literary pseudonym is that of female oppression: female writers write under male (or gender neutral) names to get their books published.

All 3 Bronte sisters used pseudonyms with a stroke of amazing solidarity: they all took male names but used the same last name of Bell. The novelist George Eliot (of Middlemarch fame) was born Mary Anne Evans. But women aren't the only ones to choose a pen name for themselves when being published. Mark Twain (the great American author who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

I personally think he should have been S. Langhorne just because it sounds cool.

And authors aren't the only ones to take pseudonyms. The majority of our celebrities do not use their real names or alter them slightly, for purposes of name recognition and branding. Actors, especially, must choose unique names, because their union, SAG, only allows 1 person of any name to be a member. In other words, if your name is Diane Keaton, you're out of luck.

In publishing today, pseudonyms are still a major factor. I know back in my MPW days, we discussed (usually in full-on daydreaming mode) what name we would write under. And did you know that JK Rowling is actually Jo Rowling, and the K is not part of her actual name at all? Rowling used the initials after her editor (or publisher, don't remember which) believed little boys wouldn't want to read something written by a woman. (Because Jo is so feminine, anyways.)

And the New York Times recently published a piece on the story of Patricia O'Brien, whose most recent novel, Harriet and Isabella, didn't do so well. After several rejections, including from her own publisher, O'Brien submitted the work under a pseudonym and the book was sold pretty much immediately. Whoops.

In this day and age, a name is branding. If you search just my first and last names, you'll find a whole bunch of people who aren't me - I have the most common last name in America after all. But if you search my full name, Drew Patrick Smith, then this website and my twitter account are on top. I have branded myself by making myself unique, so that my name holds some recogition value - at least to Google, anyways.

Pseudonyms can do the same thing - or they can help you to create a new branding if the old one isn't working out. The goal, though, is pick a name somebody else isn't using, no matter the field. You want your name to be the first thing that pops in Google.

Cause despite Beyonce's protests about girls, it's Google that runs the world.

Writing Prompt: Power to the Shippers

There's this thing called fanfiction, wherein an amateur author writes a story using the characters from their favorite books, TV shows, etc. and then publishes them online. It's generally considered a form of flattery, doesn't make much money, and thus, isn't penalized under copyright law, even though it technically should be. Sometimes, that fanfiction develops into something else - the Random House bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey (as of this posting, the book is over on the Amazon's Most Wished For list in the sidebar) started life as a Twilight fanfiction.

There's also this great internet meme called "shipping" (a derivative of relationship), wherein fans of a particular show or book or comic wish for a particular relationship that doesn't quite exist in that world's reality. For example, people might ship Wolverine and Storm, Heathcliff and Nelly Dean, or there's even something called Wincest, the pairing of Supernatural's Winchester brothers, Sam and Dean.

Write a fanfiction story in which you ship a pair of characters that are normally not paired up. Then change the names and setting to create an original work.

Imitation is the finest form of flattery, people.

Publishing News Snapshots: E-Publishing Galore: New Bronte Story Online, Franzen vs. Twitter, and Marvel Comics Creates new Infinitive Digital Comics

As shown repeatedly in the past ten years, digital publishing and new, nontraditional publishing ventures are becoming more and more the norm.

Even old school, literary publishers are getting into the mix, like this brand new Charlotte Bronte story, which has been published by the London Review of Books. Called L'Ingratitude, the story was just recently discovered and is believed to be Bronte's French homework.

Kindle Singles, Amazon's e-publishing platform that produces shorter works by popular writers that wouldn't be able to be published in traditional book form, has now sold over 2 million books since it launched just over a year ago. The reviews are mostly that it's great for the authors, since they can write novella and short story length works and actually have them be published. Customers like it because the prices are usually cheaper than other e-books by big name authors.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections, has stuck his foot in his mouth again, this time by revealing just how much he hates Twitter. Roxane Gay delivered a wonderful smackdown of his arguments over at HTMLGiant (which was then re-published by Salon), wherein she basically tells the rather austere author that you don't have to like it, but don't hate on something that other people do, since you haven't even tried it.

The Brooklyn Public Library has purchased an Espresso Book Machine, which allows users to create print on demand books at the library itself (from PDF files and the like). I think this is great, but there's a little part of me that wonders about copyright infringement issues, but in general, how great is it to create a book in little over seven minutes?

And lastly, we have Marvel Comics, publisher of superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the upcoming Avengers, who has announced Infinite Comics, a digital-only publishing initiative. In the past, digital-only books have been events or preludes to big event comics, but the Infinite series will lead with Nova (pictured above), a formerly in-print book, and will be written by comic book veteran Mark Waid and drawn by stellar artist Stuart Immonen. I think this is great, mostly because the cost of paper has drive the price of comic books way up in the past five years. And using wonderful and experienced talent? An excellent move, Marvel.

Good Grammar: Comma Splice Definition and How to Fix Them

One of the most common forms of sentence structure errors, comma splices are also one of the hardest grammar errors to catch.

A comma splice occurs when two independent clauses, also known as complete sentences, are combined by only a comma. This creates a run-on sentence.

Independent clauses can only be combined with a semi-colon (;), separated into two sentences by a period and capital letter, or by using a comma with a conjunction. Basically, a comma splice occurs when you're missing a conjunction.

Examples of comma splices:

• The cat meowed, the dog barked.
• Sally was mad, when she went to the store, she missed her bus.
• Jamie never wanted to be there in the first place, he was too nice for that type of people.

If both parts of a sentence, on either side of a comma, can stand alone, then you've got a comma splice. Here's some of examples of how to fix them:

• The cat meowed. The dog barked.
• Sally was mad, because when she went to the store, she missed her bus.
• Jamie never wanted to be there in the first place; he was too nice for that type of people.

Try to locate comma splices in your own writing by actually looking for your sentence structures, especially if you're someone who uses a lot of commas.

Writing Prompt: Making the Most out of Gibberish

Writers write for different reasons: some of us love a good story, others like the wordplay. For some, it's the rhythm of a sentence that drives us, while others need that emotional tug of the heartstrings. But for most of us, it's still about making sense out of black and white blobs on the page.

In today's prompt, we're going to take that literally.

Take a piece of paper and cut it up into small pieces, at least 24 of them. Write down the names of your favorite 4 movies, 4 characters, 4 places to visit, 4 items you'd take with you in case of a fire, 4 great quotes, and 4 flavors of ice cream. Put all the words in a hat. Pull out 4 pieces of paper. These words should combine to be the basis for your story.

For the movie titles, you must use the plot of that movie. For characters, an analogue of that character must appear in your story. For places to visit, that must be your setting. The items must be used (although you don't need the fire), the quotes must be said, and the flavors of ice cream must be tasted (although not necessarily in ice cream form). If you get more than one type (two plots for instance), then you must merge the two together.

Repeat the process to create a new story.

The more crazy your words are, the more exasperating this prompt will be. Fun times!

Words I Thought I Knew (But Didn't): Psylocke, the River Thames, & other British things

One of the joys of the English language is that its phonetics make absolutely no sense.

Phonetics are how words sound. A written "g", for example, has a "guh" sound, like in "good". But, since this is English, it can also be silent (like in "tight") or soft (like "genre"). And that's just one letter of 26. Fun, right?

Part of the reason for this is that although the English language developed from a Germanic base (the ancient German language, not the modern one) on an island nation, those people frequently got conquered or resettled, bringing new languages with them, whether the Indo-European languages (like Celtic), the French, or the Romans' Latin. Linguists often fight about how it happened, but that's the gist of it.

Basically, phonetics is useful only to a point in English, unlike in our sister language, German, wherein phonetics is fairly straight-forward. Words sound the way they should in German.

A good example of this is the River Thames, the river that runs through London and whose name I horrifically butchered while teaching last week. If we used basic English phonetics, the pronunciation would sound like it looks, a "th" sound followed by a long "a" (like the "a" in "gain"), then a "mmmm" and "ssss". But, this being English and the word coming from a possibly Celtic origin, the word actually sounds like "Temz". I mean, seriously, really? What a pain in the butt.

To the left, you see Psylocke. She's a comic book heroine, an X-Man, but has a history that nicely fits with this issue. You see, she was born British. But as you can see above, she's a Japanese ninja. This is due to a body shop wherein her soul was switched with another character. Much like the English langauge, Psylocke retains her British accent when speaking (her twin brother is the character Captain Britain, actually, which just reinforces the irony) but still has a very different appearance, much like many English words who look one way and sound completely another.

And what's with her name in the first place? She's a psychic, so that's the "psy" part. And being British, the "locke" is most likely for the British philosopher John Locke. But when I was a kid and started reading comics, I tried using my superior phonetics to figure out her name, and somehow came out with something like "Pi-low-ki". Amazing kid, I was. It wasn't until a few years later when Psylocke showed up on the 90's X-Men cartoon that I realized how wrong I was.

So what's the lesson here? Basically, be careful of English pronunciation. In general, you can actually never know how something's pronounced until you hear somebody else say it.