I Spy Sci-Fi

These items from recent news highlights:

Residents become ill after meteor crashes - http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070918/sc_afp/peruhealthoffbeat

Britain approves creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for research - http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070905/sc_nm/britain_embryo_dc

Don't you see the makings of sci-fi/horror there?

Anyhoodles, just finished a really good book last night. A MANKIND WITCH was fun, but was not on the level of this one. Once more, I accidentally brought home the last book of a series, but since I was desperate, I went ahead and read it. I didn't really need to read first two to understand the third, but I'm going to go pick them today just because I loved this guy's writing style. Here's an example where he describes a hunter's dog from a demon's point of view:

That dog, potential insanity on four legs, can be as calm as a dreamless sleeper until danger drops from the trees and then his placid, near-human smile wrinkles back into a snapping wound machine. The crafty beast learns to lunge for my brethren's unprotected areas--wing membrane, soft belly, groin, or tail. I, myself, witnessed that hound tear of an attacking demon's member, slip through its legs, and then shread a wing to tatters in his escape. He has an uncanny sense of certainty about him in all situations, as if in each he is like a dancer who has practiced that one dance all his days. Wood reads Cley like a book, understands his hand signals and the subtle shifting of his eyes. There is no question he will die for the hunter, and I am convinced he will go beyond death for him--a guardian angel the color of night, muscled and scarred and harder to subdue than a guilty conscience.

Doesn't that just perfectly capture the essence of dogs?

The book? THE BEYOND
The author: Jeffrey Ford

Get Real

I've probably whined--I mean, blogged--about this before, but one of Steve's recent blogs and something I did the other day brought it up again.

See, I've been looking through my many works-in-progress, trying to figure out which one to focus on (get out of my lazy funk and finish something already) and I came across something interesting. I hadn't touched a number of my files for some time, and some of the ones I'd remembered as being good, were fairly blah--a few even downright bad. But there was one that I remembered as being boring crap, which actually held my attention and made me care about the characters in just a few pages. I was surprised, because I had abandoned that work some time ago on the basis that it was too boring.

After some contemplating, I realized why I thought it was much better than the others upon re-reading. It was written from real emotion, based on deep feelings that I had experienced, and that made it ring true. The situation was complete fiction (a selkie and a summer cottage) but the emotion was real, and that made all the difference.

Everywhere, I find the advice to "dig deeper" - go for the gut emotional appeal. It takes courage to do that. I find it very hard (being such a coward and all.) I've abandoned other works because the emotional toll was so great, and I'm a little suspicious that may have been what was truly behind my abandoning the selkie story. It wasn't boring - it was painful.

So I applaud those of you who dig deep, look closer, pull out the hard truths and put them out there for everyone to see. Good on ya.

How Do You "See" Your Characters?

I read Michelle Diener's blog this morning, and her post about having a soundtrack for her books was interesting - what struck me most, though, was the comment by Edie who said she didn't "see" her characters when she wrote, she "heard" them.

It made me wonder how other people experience the scenes and characters in their books. I've been guilty of expecting everyone to be like me: I see (and consciously try to feel) everything in my head, then have to try to translate that into words. It didn't occur to me that other people might experience it differently. (Duh)

I wondered if the differences could be traced along learner styles: aural, kinesthetic and visual. I'm a strong visual learner with feeling/doing coming in second place - almost no auditory involvement at all. In fact, my daughter was aggravated with me last night because I couldn't understand what she was reading to me unless I looked at it myself.

So now I'm really curious -- how do you experience the characters and scenes you write about? Do you see them? Hear them? Feel them? Something else?

Inquiring minds want to know. Can you see a correlation to your learning style?