Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Friday, June 19, 2015

Professional Bloodbath

I just wrote 'bloodbath' in an email to a client. It's part of a serious discussion.

I love this job.

I first met this client while working in my car. I was just a blob in the dark with eyes sparkling every now and then and he was in his room on the other side of the planet. He'd done this before, an online chat across the world. I was, in his words, a virgin to this.

This is where the dogging analogy ends.

We chatted online for two or three hours, until my battery died, about zombies and vampires and how to make better monsters and why ours was going to kill, again, and again.

Then I had to charge him for my time. It was amazing to to me then that I get to charge for this, but he needed my expertise and I can't help that I'm in love with what I do.

Hating work doesn't make it work.

Hating what you're doing doesn't make it more viable or valuable than something you enjoy.

work
wəːk/
noun
noun: work; plural noun: works; plural noun: the works
1.
activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
"he was tired after a day's work in the fields"
synonyms:labour, toil, exertion, effort, slog, drudgery, the sweat of one's brow;  

verb
verb: work; 3rd person present: works; past tense: worked; past participle: worked; past tense: wrought; past participle: wrought; gerund or present participle: working
1.
be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.
"an engineer who was working on a design for a more efficient wing"
synonyms:toil, labour, exert oneself, slave (away), plod away;

Monday, March 30, 2015

#VeryRealisticYA



Alice Nuttall @Ally_Nuttall  ·  23h 23 hours ago
Teen protagonist tries to investigate shifty government facility, can't get past the security guards, goes home.

Teenage girl detective walks into the killer's lair armed with nothing but her wits. She is killed.


Four friends try on the same pair of pants. It fits one of them. The last one to try them on rips them.

This hashtag makes me think again about what makes a story worth telling. If the character isn't doing anything exceptional, then is his/hers a story worth telling? 

The exceptional is conversely commonplace in fiction.

I like realism in fiction/movies, but go far in either direction and you end up with a joke. Realism can be tricky, but it's one of my favourite lines to cross. 



Kid is beaten up by bullies. Learns martial arts. Bullies have all moved on. It's been 6 years.