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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: synobal on August 17, 2012, 11:25:33 PM
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We all have it that moment when writing where something just fits, or you find the perfect name for something that singular moment when everything comes together.
For me my latest one was when I was doing outlining for a book idea and I was looking for the name for my fictional city that I described as 'Las Vegas by the coast' after about two hours and a couple hundred rejected names and a few possibles the perfect one hit me, after that everything else about the city just fell into place.
So tell me what was your latest Eureka moment?
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Wondering about one of the coolest ways to hide a traditional "cross-roads" or "faustian" demon in plain sight in the City. Settled on golden-statue street performer. It reads a lot better than it sounds :D.
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Wondering about one of the coolest ways to hide a traditional "cross-roads" or "faustian" demon in plain sight in the City. Settled on golden-statue street performer. It reads a lot better than it sounds :D.
I love Faustian and Crossroads demons, I was (embarrassingly) introduced to the crossroads demon via supernatural and have since done a lot of reading surrounding the lore of them.
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Most of mine tend to be structural; realising that the operation my protagonist co-runs with the marines in chapter 9 can be used to introduce a couple of characters I thought she would not get to meet until the formal launch of the expedition in chapter 11, so I can restructure the plan for chapter 10 and 11 and I think they will flow more smoothly now is the most recent one of any substance. Also, I think I have seen how to do a frame story for this one if I decide I want to, which I am not yet sure about and probably won't be until I have written the whole thing linearly.
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Mine was a week or so ago, when I finally got all my antagonists' motivations in The Sequel worked out to my satisfaction.
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in a modern fantasy setting, had a minor world detail about how the Spaniards kept the peace between mankind and the Spirits of Cattle through a mutual Sacrifice (they sacrificed their own in Bullfighting, we sacrificed ours in the Running of the Bulls). Didnt even think it would ever appear in page. Then I found out that in the Zoroastrian mythos the world is built on, the mutual deaths of the First Man and the First Bull were what planted the seeds for all animal life in the land, making it a much deeper and thematically resonant element. Love it when thing fall into place. :)
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I discovered that Social Workers make great Urban fantasy protagonists. Their job implies a level of self-sacrifice. They're expected to be a little embittered and to know the cities criminal portions. At the same time they aren't cops. they can play looser with the rules(a little, not much, and they can be scared so much easier.
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a mind freezing panic attack for the MC. Followed by brilliance!
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I'm having a kind of rotten day at the moment, so I worked some of the frustration out by thrashing out the plot of volume 4 in somewhat more detail. (This is the thing of which i am currently working on volume 3.) Along the way I figured out a few useful things about where the thread about the singer fits in and at which point moderate-separatist-political-opponent parts ways with extreme-separatist-political-opponent-who-condones-violence and instead joins forces with strange-charismatic-religious-leader.
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I had one. I was sitting at a Weird Al concert grooving on the music and mulling over my Gunner character and wondering what he was going to do in this certain situation. I realized my original idea wasn't going to work. So I was grinding and grinding on it in my head. When I remembered I'd added a new character a giant native to his gunnery crew and said native wasn't going to take this situation lying down.
Next thing I knew, instead of trying to figure out how the gunner was logically not going to wind up dead, I was envisioning the Last Charge of the Grease Monkeys and trying to figure out how the Chief Gunner and his Native sidekick were going to run out of steam before they hijacked my plot!
Eureka! Oh crud!!!!
The Deposed King
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A couple of weeks ago I was discussing my next book with my publisher, and how to make it stronger. Then it hit me, that I was so set on writing a 6-book series that I was thinning out the second book to keep important events for later.
I realised that by delaying the really good stuff I was shooting myself in the foot. So I agreed to re-write books 2 and 3 as a single novel and eventually do the same with books 5 and 6, spreading anything important from book 4 into each of them.
And bingo. I was now writing a trilogy.
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Not a real biggie. I had a minor character do something annoying and discovered, to my surprise and delight, that I can use that incident and it's fallout later to help my heroine get out of a tight situation.
It involves frogs and Tibetan Prayer flags and don't ask.
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Not a real biggie. I had a minor character do something annoying and discovered, to my surprise and delight, that I can use that incident and it's fallout later to help my heroine get out of a tight situation.
It involves frogs and Tibetan Prayer flags and don't ask.
And now all I want to do is ask! :P