Five Ways To Beat WB--By J.S. Wayne

Odds are, with a few seconds' thought, you can work out what WB is. No, it's NOT Warner Brothers! (Please don't sue me, mmm-kay? Thanks , , ,) It's the bane of every author out there, and statements I've made in the past to the contrary, in recent months I've actually had a couple of fairly nasty but mercifully brief interludes with it. But this whole Lesbians Vs. Zombies project got me to thinking about ways to take WB and make it work for you. After all, without the thoroughly outrageous premise and conditions our own Ruby Green attached to this project, "Dead Means Dead" wouldn't even exist . . . and it certainly wouldn't have been the sexy, scary romp it turned into! So, with that in mind, here are five ways to kick WB to the curb!

5) The jumble

When you're really stuck for something to write about, take a bunch of concepts and throw them into a hat or a bowl. Write down a list of possible twosomes, threesomes, or moresomes. Then do another list of occupations or mythical creatures. (Or do one list for each. Hey, go for broke!) Then do a list of times or places you'd like to visit. (Again, you can do this for each if you like.) If you want to get really deep into this (and completely surrender to the hand of Fate to create your plotline) you can also add lists of body characteristics, hair and length, eye color and shape, favorite kinds of clothing, and so on.

An example: I just did this for myself. I came up with an FFM pairing concerning a firefighter in Dublin, Ireland, who's fallen in love with a Siren marine biologist from Ancient Greece and now based out of Columbia University. The complication is her girlfriend, who's a mermaid stripper from Brooklyn. They all wind up going back in time to the Civil War and having to survive traveling the Underground Railroad to Canada. If they make it to Canada, there's a shaman waiting for them to send them back, with (moral lesson here) learned.

Would I actually attempt to write this story? Well . . . at some point, maybe. Right now, the idea of the sheer volume of research involved in learning everything I would need to about Dublin, the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, and marine biology is far too daunting for me to even consider. But, hey, one night I might get bored and find myself with a couple hours to kill, right?

4) Ask a friend

There's nothing saying you can't ask somebody to give you something to write about. In the writing world, we call that a "prompt." You may use any, all, or none of the ideas given, or their ideas may spark some of your own. "What if" followed by "what then?" at its finest. But if you do this, make sure they're not planning to use it in the future, and DO be sure to give them a nod in the acknowledgements! ;)

3) Go to the mall.

Yeah. A card-carrying member of the straight male persuasion just told you to go to the mall. Or the park. Or a busy downtown street. Anywhere you can sit with a pad of paper and a cold beer or a hot cup of coffee and watch the people go by. See that geeky, slightly balding businessman in the two-thousand-dollar suit and the wingtips that cost more than your last car payment? Watch his eyes and his face. What kind of woman does he react to? Or what kind of guy? How does he react? Or how about the woman who walks by him with an upturned nose and a look of disgust. Maybe she knows him. Maybe they had an affair at one point and she still loves him, but doesn't know how to try to get him back.
People-watching is a great way to get ideas, folks! If you're really, truly stuck, getting out of your comfort zone and finding an environment that serves your story while not putting you at personal risk is a good way to shake some of those words loose.

2) Just do it.

A lot of people use programs like "Write Or Die." The entire point of these programs is, you've got to be thinking ten to fifteen words ahead of the cursor. Especially if you use the sprint mode, which prevents you from going back and editing unless you want to watch a half page or more of fresh writing vanish into the Blue Nowhere because you realized you used "lippenschnitzen" fifteen times in three paragraphs and tried to fix it. Your first draft with Write or Die and its clones is likely to look like utter crap, no matter how polished you think you are. But if you can mine out the good stuff and fix the bad, you're going to find you've got a lot more usable material than you think!

1) The Internet

Of course, the Internet! Where else would you look for the entire sum of human knowledge? Find something that's trending on Twitter or blowing up Facebook and write about that!
When doing this, choose your topic carefully. I would suggest, if you're going to attempt something like this, you take your overarching inspiration story and mash up the elements as in #5. This will help you create a story that's uniquely your own, and offers an almost unlimited source of fresh material.

Because we all know truth is always stranger than fiction, right?

Until next time,

Best,

J.S. Wayne

Something About A Woman... By J.S. Wayne

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a BIG fan of the female species. Yes, you ladies have your things that drive me just a little bit (more) insane: your ability to cry over anything, everything, or absolutely nothing; the silent treatment, otherwise known as "if you don't know why I'm mad, I'm not telling you"; and Glee and just about every show on Bravo.

Confounding as I sometimes find women, and the broad-stroke portrait I just painted notwithstanding, I do have a great deal of admiration for them. The fact is, most women of my acquaintance are strong-willed, dauntingly intelligent, and perfectly capable of taking what they want from life. I don't know many fifties housewives or demure, retiring women. The women I hang out with can match their men drink for drink, argue philosophy and football play calls with equal facility, and have no qualms whatsoever about dropping the occasional F-bomb to emphasize a point.

Now, this doesn't mean I don't admire a woman who behaves like a "lady," whatever that means in modern society. What it does mean is I don't think the less of a woman who doesn't keep her legs demurely crossed and never speaks unless spoken to. The fact is, I've always preferred women who said what they had to say, even if I don't always appreciate what they're saying.
We've all heard the old Victorian saw about what a man wants: A lady in the parlor and a whore in the bedchamber. Personally, I disagree. This, I believe, is the crux of my love affair with erotic romance. Nearly without exception, the women I create in my writing are women I would like to meet (and bed) in real life. They bring the elements I most admire in womankind to life in all their chaotic, confusing, contradictory glory. They're women who know which fork goes with what course and the proper way to place a napkin in their lap at an elegant restaurant, but will, with vindictive fervor, scream "Shit!" if they happen to drop cocktail sauce on their white linen sheath. They don't really care what society thinks of them or their choices. They see what they want, and they go for it.

This also extends to my female characters' choices in lovers. To hell with Emily Post and Dear Abby: These are real women with real desires and real emotions. If they decide they want the man or woman I've paired them with on the first date (and they almost always do, heh heh heh), then the rules be damned, they'll spend the night.
Frankly, I love writing about women. I enjoy digging deep into my memory and conjuring the peculiar scent of an old lover's perfume, the curve of her hip as she rolls over in the morning, or her drooping eyelids after a particularly energetic interlude. Writing about women is a very sensual experience for me, in the fuller sense of the word, not merely the erotic one. When I do so, I find myself smelling the perfume I wish to evoke, feeling the warm silken firmness of her skin yielding beneath my fingertips, tasting the slight salt tang at the curve of her neck, and hearing the tiny sounds of pleasure she makes.
I've said before on this blog that for me to find the stories I create arousing to the reader, they first have to arouse me. And nothing stirs my creativity or my libido like that mysterious and elusive creature I try to fix on paper with words, like a butterfly pinned to a entomologist's collection card.
It all comes back to that mysterious something about a woman.

Until next time,

Best,

J.S. Wayne