Well, looks like it might be back to the old drawing board as the saying goes. In the last couple of days I’ve had a lot of fun creating vampires and fictional locations for my self-published stories. What does it mean to fill out a character worksheet? It means you get a visual idea of what your character is all about: what they like, dislike, love, their favorite things to do and so on.
But the hardest part was finding a few pictures to ‘visualize’ what my vampire characters might look like. Then I had the fun (and daunting) task of morphing each photo into what I would think my vampires would appear (physically). I don’t have photoshop, so I had to do the next best thing and run all the pictures through an inexpensive photo shop-like program, play with the effects, colors and opacity levels and the end result? I believe I created some awesome vampires with what I had at my disposal. I’m doing this so when I go back into revise my stories I can glance at the worksheets and know exactly who goes where and get an idea of their emotions, what they’re doing, etc.
Right now I am repeat offender of writing in the “God point of view”. Instead of having a character say something I write it in the ‘third person’ which there’s nothing wrong with that, per se, it just shows that I don’t read much.
It would help if I would read—like really sit down and crack open a book. I do plan to find another set of the Vampire Files (by P.N. Elrod, one of my favorite authors), and actually take a step away from writing and begin by reading. How do the scenes flow? How do the characters interact with each other, what’s the basis of the story, what’s the plot about and most importantly, make it flow in chronological order.
When I write… I get inspired or get an idea stuck in my head and feel the overwhelming need to write it down not on scrap paper or even in my notebook, I write it into the story and that’s good if I’m planning to write back material, but I’m not. I’m trying to write a story.
But the character worksheets are a lot of fun! I believe I created no less than ten pages. I still plan to pack my camera with me and take some pictures of a few places, then weave these into my stories. One great thing when you write about fictional towns, residences, and cities, you pretty much write the laws. Yep, if you want your character to ride their bike on the sidewalk and not have to worry about receiving a ticket or a warning, you can write pretty much anything. In real life, (as I’m sure its law everywhere), you can’t ride a bike on a sidewalk, especially not in a downtown district. Recently where I live they put in bike paths and you won’t guess where. The new bike paths are right in front of on-coming traffic, and the city planners brought these paths out so far into the narrow streets that it also hampers motorists who may need to park by the curb.
Thankfully I don’t ride a bicycle anymore. However, I do drive so I’m always extremely cautious when driving around town. I feel the bike paths are a danger not just to the bicyclist, but also to the motorist as well. Oh, yeah, and the city planners also decided to run the bike paths right into the turn lanes, so when you need to make a turn, you may not see the bicyclist until they are right up beside you and since riding on the sidewalks is against the law, I’m waiting to see if these new bike paths will be removed, or what they plan to do about it. So far its received a lot of complaints. I assume this is ‘liberals’ at work.
The good thing about writing is you can make up any law and run with it in a story. And I do apologize if I went off topic there. Main thing is my writing and revising is far from over with. I do plan to leave all my stories up on Smashwords and Kindle Direct in the meantime until I am completely done going through my stories. Then I will upload brand new copies. I’ve also been kicking around some more ideas and really want to change a few scenes in my stories that I would like to expand on. As always thank you so much for liking, re-blogging, sharing, commenting, tweeting, I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂
zippymouse1923 