SciFi Tropes

As I am finishing up my book I am reading others. I have run straight into a ton of classic Scifi tropes. I will never include and of these in my fiction:

• Brilliant 16 year old kid that is as smart as the chief engineer.
• Beautiful, young cold woman PHD scientist, that burns with hidden passion.
• Cadets, fresh out of the academy on a shake down cruise become command crew.
• Aliens that speak English but don't know of Earth. 
• A human female pregnant with an alien life form.
• Ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
• Goat-tee beards mean that you are evil. 
• Sounds in the vacuum of space.
• Visible LASER beams in outer space. 

--This list will grow.

Quotes

 I saw a pile of good quotes on writing.

1. “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley

2. “The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon.” ―Harriet Beecher Stowe

3. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” —Oscar Wilde

4. “The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

5. "My ambition is to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books—what other men do not say in whole books." —Friedrich Nietzsche

6. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” ―Jane Austen

7. “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” ―Emily Dickinson

8. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” ―Victor Hugo

9. “But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.” ―Charlotte Brontë

10. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ―William Wordsworth

11. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter ― it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” ―Mark Twain

12. "I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.” ―George Eliot

13. “Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” ―Nathaniel Hawthorne

14. “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” ―Charles Dickens

15. “As a child I scribbled; and my favorite pastime during the hours given me for recreation was to ‘write stories.’ Still, I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents.” ―Mary Shelley

Routines

Got a lot of editing done this weekend. I probably reached the halfway mark. I am getting back into the routine of working it. Vacation is over. I started dieting. I'm back to work. Running in greased grooves.

--I set a new deadline for this draft: October 31

It Figures

I got up this morning, made coffee, had a blueberry muffin, and sat down to work on my book.

When I opened Scrivener, the excellent tool I am using to write this thing, and received a message that an update was available for download and installation.  I have updated like this dozens of times so I clicked ok.

Somehow the update failed.

When the program comes up, it gives me a scarey error message, it tells me to uninstall the program and reinstall.

No guts, no glory. Why not, I have backups.

I uninstall, download the current version, install it, open it up, got to the menu and I see a "Backup Link".

There is no "Restore" menu option.

I drink way more coffee before continuing. I tried several things that didn't work. More coffee was the only thing that worked.

I finally figured out that I needed to unzip the backup manually.

--It only took me an hour. Back to work!

Back from Vacation

Now that vacation is over it's time to knuckle down and get serious about finishing this edit.

I have decided to cut it back even farther and move the climax to a different point.

I had to cut A LOT more.

I am saving it all. Some retooling remains to be done before I can have some people give it a read.

Back on the stick. No more excuses. I will have to write a big post about procrastination. But later... ;)

--Slacker!

Procrastination!

I have been a horrible slacker for the last month. Trying to get back on track again!!

I saw this great list on OpenCulture.com

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physical healthy, and I stayed married.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There’s should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

Just Read Silken Prey by John Sandford

"Murder, scandal, political espionage and an extremely dangerous woman. Lucas Davenport's going to be lucky to get out of this one alive."

"A Minnesota political fixer has hit the jackpot - or so he thinks. Hired to take down the incumbent U.S. senator with a vicious smear, to open the way for an ambitious, take-no-prisoners heiress who sees the Senate as merely a stepping-stone, he decides his payoff should be larger. The blackmail demand should yield some pretty large numbers, he thinks."

"Instead, he gets only a small one - 9 millimeters, to be exact. In the heart."

"Davenport is investigating the smear when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work, and the money, ruthlessness and sheer will to make it happen."

"No matter who gets in the way. "

--It was OK. I would rate it 6 of 10.

Murder, scandal, political espionage and an extremely dangerous woman. Lucas Davenport's going to be lucky to get out of this one alive.

A Minnesota political fixer has hit the jackpot - or so he thinks. Hired to take down the incumbent U.S. senator with a vicious smear, to open the way for an ambitious, take-no-prisoners heiress who sees the Senate as merely a stepping-stone, he decides his payoff should be larger. The blackmail demand should yield some pretty large numbers, he thinks.
Instead, he gets only a small one - 9 millimeters, to be exact. In the heart.
Davenport is investigating the smear when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work, and the money, ruthlessness and sheer will to make it happen.
No matter who gets in the way. - See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.co.uk/Silken-Prey/John-Sandford/9781471129629#sthash.Psg2e8qJ.dpuf

Murder, scandal, political espionage and an extremely dangerous woman. Lucas Davenport's going to be lucky to get out of this one alive.

A Minnesota political fixer has hit the jackpot - or so he thinks. Hired to take down the incumbent U.S. senator with a vicious smear, to open the way for an ambitious, take-no-prisoners heiress who sees the Senate as merely a stepping-stone, he decides his payoff should be larger. The blackmail demand should yield some pretty large numbers, he thinks.
Instead, he gets only a small one - 9 millimeters, to be exact. In the heart.
Davenport is investigating the smear when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work, and the money, ruthlessness and sheer will to make it happen.
No matter who gets in the way. - See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.co.uk/Silken-Prey/John-Sandford/9781471129629#sthash.Psg2e8qJ.dpuf