Good Writers Need To Read

Regular blog contributor Patrick Dilloway runs a blog called Every Other Writer Has A Blog...Why Can't I?  The other day he did a post that is located here.  In the post, Patrick said he had reached a road block of sorts and that he would take a hiatus from his work-in-progress to read some books in the genre in which he is writing.

Now, in the comments, Rusty Webb questioned Patrick's "motivation".  He wanted to know specifically

"I wonder what you think you’ll get from reading a bunch of genre stuff?"

This got me to thinking.  I know that Stephen King says that writers should read a lot.  I'm not going to quote him any further or go back to any of his source material.  The fact is that I think this too even if I had never read Mr. King's words.  Here is why.

Good writers need to read. Great writers need to read a lot and jot down ideas in response to what they read. I do it...I keep a list of words that I see on a notepad.  I think of how certain writers organize chapters from Faulkner's point-of-views to Vonnegut's one-page chapters to George R.R. Martin's cliffhangers.

And just as Mutt indicated in his post that I linked above, as a writer, you’ll find yourself hitting plateaus and roadblocks when you aren’t regularly reading. You’ll find that you actually run out of words, if you’re not regularly being challenged through reading new things. This is an important step to becoming a good writer.  I don't think I'm just spewing B.S. here either.  A car runs on fuel and words are the fuel that writers consume.

I admit...sometimes I may be guilty of over-analyzing things.  But I don't care.  It's just how my brain functions.  And this post is not about "meaning".  Many people read books to finish them. This is not always necessary. Read books or articles just to read them — to glean new ideas, to learn new words, to fall back in love with language.

So yeah, if you find yourself at an impasse with your writing, I think you should take a break.  Read a novel or two and see how that helps you.  As Tyrion Lannister has stated, "A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, John Snow."  And George is absolutely right on the money.

Please keep in mind that writing is separate from publishing.  I'm not talking about publishing.  I'm sure there are plenty of examples of people who publish and who write and who make money.  But they are most likely terrible writers with a lot of money.  It's true folks :( Not everything that makes money is genius.  You can egg me later please.  So if you want to write well...please read.  It will make your prose better.

Review of A Dead God's Wrath :)

A Dead God's Wrath was a delightful little gem I purchased from the Amazon Kindle store and read on my iPad in one hour.  It is by author Rusty Webb and you can find him at his blog The Blutonian Death Egg.

Here's the blurb from the jacket:

In 1895, deep in the Southeastern U.S., a sleepy little town is home to one of the most violent criminal families in the country. When Thomas O’Brien witnesses the brutal murder of his best friend and the kidnapping of his beloved Mary at the hands of the O’Malley brothers he thinks things can’t possibly get any worse.

But when a mysterious stranger shows up to help, Thomas begins to suspect this man is more than he seems. This stranger pledges to help bring Mary safely back from the O’Malley brothers, no matter the cost.

Tom’s real nightmare is about to begin.

Okay, so you might ask, what made this read so special?

1) It's incredibly well written.  Here's a sample of the prose:  A glint of steel flashed as Charles pulled a large machete from a scabbard hidden inside his coat.  He struck hard and sliced through burned flesh all the way down to Peter's bone--nearly removing the man's arm.  I don't know about you...but that's damned good writing. It's riveting. It's not choked with unnecessary adverbs.  It flows well.  I loved it.

2) Rusty gets big kudos for originality. As a sci-fi novelette, the setting is a western with glimpses of some other world in gadgets, hints, mythology.  Rusty knows how to keep you from knowing everything and you are continually guessing at what is going on.

3) Pacing. It's dead on perfect.  The novella starts with "Thomas O'Brien rode his horse as hard as he dared, and narrowly avoided disaster when his pull cart bounced and nearly tipped during his race into town."  That sense of chaos...that sense of angst you get from this opening line--it stays with you during the entire read.

4) Voice.  Rusty captures the feel of the old west in his narrator. He uses first and last names.  This is how he describes Mary:  "And his precious mary--dainty, feminine, Mary--still a few good meals away from a hundred pounds, she lashed out like a wild bear."  Wow...I mean this puts you into that period.  Who describes someone as being a few good meals away from a hundred pounds?  I'd be tempted to say, "She weighed 95-pounds." which would be kind of boring, right?  But I don't have the voice of a western in me--Rusty does.  I can tell that he's read quite a few.

I give this five stars.  If I were to ask Rusty what is more difficult to write, a novella or a full-blown novel, I wonder what he would say.  I would struggle to tell an interesting story in so few words. But Rusty knows how to do it and knows how to pull it off.

This book is .99 cents on Amazon Kindle and is worth every penny.

Here's the link.

Thank you Rusty for the wonderful story :).

A Story of Best Friends...

ONLY BEST FRIENDS...

Greet you like...

Wave to you across the room like...

Do "creeper" things with you like...

Dance with you like...

Chill out with you like...

Eat with you like...

Sing with you like...

Be emotional with you like...

And be somewhat loving like...

Random Friday squee: I totally got tweeted by Neil Gaiman on Thursday. I was kinda in shock about it and had this surreal moment where I was Frodo Baggins who attracted the Eye of Sauron for just an instance...only this was a good thing.  I could see Mr. Gaiman doing whatever it is that he does, selecting to mention @MichaelOffutt back and then respond to me asking whether or not him following 666 followers was coincidental or intentional. 1.9 million followers and I was the voice he heard. /takes a bow.

More Random Friday squee...the blond boy in this picture is TOTALLY my protagonist in my sci-fi book.  He's cute, don't you think?  He's not really of course...but I live in a warped sense of reality where I make shit up all the time.  How about I say...I'd like him to be...yeah...that would do :)

More More Random Friday squee...my birthday is tomorrow. I'm so excited. And tonight I get to go to Cafe Madrid with my brother...mmm yumm. 

Anonymous To Attack Facebook

PK63WBBDRZWU <== Technorati claim code (trying to get Technorati to find my website) :)


I saw that the hacker group Anonymous has scheduled to attack Facebook on November 5, 2011 of this year.  They use melodramatic words like "It will be destroyed through digital warfare."  I think that these guys are kind of scary--like a Tech version of Al-Qaeda.  I really wish they could be tracked down and arrested. I have no idea what they plan on doing but I bet it has something to do with bringing down the website and making public everyone's information for the whole world to see which seems to be their modus operandi.  So basically, a lot of innocent people are going to get victimized.


Here's there YouTube video announcing their attack.

The claim code above is to get my blog registered with Technorati.  They ask that you embed it at the beginning of the post so that their "bot" can find it...kind of a pain since it's already failed once.  This time I'm making it more obvious. 


Have a great Thursday :)

Awards, A Meme, and a Thank You

I won the Blog on Fire Award (this shall be my second time) from fellow blogger Lyn Midnight.  I've been following her blog for a little while and she loves movies, loves books, and is in general a fascinating person.  Please go visit her if you haven't seen her blog :).

Since I've accepted this award before, I'm just moving on to the next order of business...that of an internet meme...which was passed to me from fellow blogger Brooke R. Busse over at Paper Mountain.

Here are the questions for the meme:

1) Are you a rutabaga? Honestly...I'm not sure why this is even a question. However, I'm not a vegetable.

2) Who is your current crush? I really don't have one. I exist in a "crush-free" zone.

3) Upload a heartwarming picture that makes you smile.

4) When was the last time you ate a vine-ripened tomato?  Probably two weeks ago.  My friend Meg is growing some so I hope to get some more from her garden when they are ready. I love vine-ripened tomatoes.

5) Name one habit that causes other people to plot your demise?  Hmm. I don't think I have one of these.  "Demise" seems kind of permanent unless taken out of context like you would the rutabaga question.

6) What is the wierdest, most-disgusting job you've ever had to do?  Clean out the nacho cheese machine at a 7-Eleven when I worked there during summer break from college.  It was pretty disgusting.  I have sympathy for anyone that works midnights at a 7-Eleven.

7) Where da muffin top at?  Hmmm. I have a spare tire so way beyond muffin top.

8) What author introduced you to your genre? Holy cow...going way back... my first fantasy series might be Lloyd Alexander's Prydain chronicles. I own mint-condition hardcovers of all five in my book case. Those are difficult to find.  My first sci-fi is Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", then onto Herbert's Dune (I finished God Emperor of Dune and went no further in the series but Leto was awesome and the cloning of Duncan Idaho became really interesting), and Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.  I love the way Herbert opens chapters with quotes from his universe.  Arrakis was an epic setting...probably one of the best I have ever read.

9) Describe yourself using obscure Latin words.  Castigo Corpus Meum.  "I chastise my body" used in the DaVinci Code. I often say it in jest when I do something wrong.  The other one might be non-sequitur...but I'm not taking that away from Steph Schmidt who uses it for her blog title. Basically, it means "it does not follow"...kinda like talking to my mother.  I say, "Mom, have you taken your meds today?" She answers, "Oh I love DisneyLand."

The following people are being tagged for the above award and subsequent internet meme:

1) Rogue Mutt.
2) Briane Pagel.
3) Mr. Munk.
4) Cindy Borgne.
5) Nishiboy
6) David Powers King.
7) Hart the Watery Tart.
8) The Ever-Revising Misha.
9) Stephanie Schmidt who is on blogger hiatus but I don't care.
10) And Liz over at Laws of Gravity so she'll do a blog post other than one regurgitated from her myspace page. :P

Last but not least I want to thank Jennifer Jackson at her blog Everything It & Tales.  She doesn't have much of a following but is a sweet lady and I won a $20.00 Amazon Gift card just from commenting on her blog. I've used it to buy books of course :))) as I love winning things.  Say hi to her if you have the time.

hee hee. Have fun everyone.

The Art Of Good Storytelling

Alert: There are some spoilers ahead for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

This weekend I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and I loved it. When there have been so many of these movies done in the last fifty years including a terrible reboot starring Marky Mark...why did I love this movie so much?  What set it apart?  Well the storytelling is awesome.

Hard science-fiction can be challenging to pull off well.  This is where all the science is accounted for, where everything is possible, only you just take it a step further which is what breaks the boundaries of fact and throws in the fiction.  I knew this going into the movie because sci-fi reviewers had given this movie great props for pulling off the hard science-fiction aspects of the story. That and they set up the sequels perfectly.

This is what the writers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes did. They gave us an exposition of ground-breaking work in the world of Alzheimer's disease and took it one step further.  They showed us how the human drive to find a solution to a terrible malady could in fact produce evolution, result in a new life form, and that we...not them...would be the ones responsible for our own destruction.  And it all came about with the best of intentions.  The end result was never supposed to happen.

Andy Serkis

There were several parts of this film that I just absolutely loved. From being mesmerized that Andy Serkis could stand in for the motion capture of Caesar (who does some astounding things) to the lessons about humanity that I learn in just watching this splendid film take shape.  Tom Felton a.k.a. Draco Malfoy seems stereotyped as an asshole on screen.  I hope he can break out of this role and soon because he shows great promise as an actor that can play other types of roles.  James Franco as the scientist who created the drug stood in very well as the tragic genius who turned to all that he knew in order to make life better for his father (played by John Lithgow) who was robbed of his life with each passing day to the onset of Alzheimer's disease.  The film is filled with powerful foreshadowing.

Go see this movie.  As a writer, even if you only write YA or some other genre, you can benefit to see how sci-fi done well can have a lasting impression on you for hours after you have exited the movie.  By the way, if you are worried that you will see apes killing humans, that doesn't happen except by absolute accident or to defend themselves. In the end, it is the humans that destroy each other because our lack of humility with regard to the power of genetic engineering is the source of our own cataclysm.

Word Count Fail

I think I have George R.R. Martin's disease which is bad for a beginning writer.  I call this Iwritetoomuchaboutthingsthathavenothingtodowithplot.  It's horrible, and I think it's contagious.  I hope you don't suffer from it because the cure is painful.  Not the kind of "stick you with a syringe four times because you have rolling veins" kind of pain but an emotional kind of pain because this disease robs you of objectivity and makes it difficult for you to have perspective on your work.

After I got notification from DDP that I had been picked up for their 2013 release schedule, one of the things that really made me smile was that I would get to revisit my favorite world in these things called "sequels".  It really is fun to write, and unfortunately, the words just pile up.  I mean seriously...when I say the novel writes itself...IT REALLY DOES seem to write itself.  I had days where I would do 6000 words in like three hours because I couldn't stop.

I had no problem coming up with content...like 120,000 words of content.  And here's the problem. I'm only 3/4 through my story arc of the second book and I'm already at that word count.  To quote my friend Steph Schmidt..."EEEEP!"

Luckily, I started this project last year about this time because I was bored.  This was before I had ventured into the world of blogging which happened in late January 2011.  Well, back in September 2010, I stopped working on that project because I realized that it may never see the light of day unless I published it myself or put it on a website somewhere.  So I threw it in the closet, mothballed it, and wrote another book.  This was a simple fantasy that topped out at 80k words that I started to query only recently.

Well, with the news from DDP...I threw that fantasy back in the closet and dusted off the ole sequel to re-read, edit, and finish so that I could send it to the editor that helps me get manuscripts ready for professional editors to look at :).  As I'm re-reading and editing it myself, I see all over the place where I have taken liberal tangents.  I still love these tangents, but if I have no intention on following up on them, they really don't belong in this novel.  And my story is so huge that it will take multiple volumes to tell it right.  I know I really shouldn't wander like this.  So I'm having to slash paragraphs, pages, and even maybe a chapter and it's hard...it's really hard.  However, I think I can slim this beast to 115,000 words and then finish it in another 25,000 words.  140,000 words is huge, I know.  But it is a sequel, and the first book is 120,000 words so this is only stretching that quota out by 20%.  That's acceptable, right?

When I finally get the courage to talk to my publisher about it, probably closer to this time next year, I hope that they don't mind that I write fat novels.  Really, as an author, I despise word count. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Why oh why must brevity be my Task Master?

Is anyone else out there like me? Do any of you writers struggle to fit within certain word counts?