Deborah Woehr

My curiosity was piqued by Jennifer Minar’s Four Ways Reality TV Can Improve Your Fiction. While I thought she wrote a good article, I didn’t agree with everything she said.

Character Development

These shows have archetypical contestants: 20-somethings, 30-somethings, gays, nerds, aging, etc. If you watch these shows for any length of time, you can predict how these people will react to each other and the challenges they’ll face.

I must also point out that people behave differently when in front of a television camera. There is always one contestant that goes “over the top” and is touted as the “villian.” More often than not, these people misbehave to gain fame.

To sum it up, they’re cookie-cutter people and not worthy of writing about.

Dialogue

Okay, you might be able to pick up some good lines and some strange body language.

Suspense

“When Beau carries things too far, Keith does something that will shock the other guests of paradise!”

Yeah, I’ve seen the clips of the big blow-ups, which were nothing special. I’ve seen too many real-life blow-ups that were ten times more impressive than the ones they show on reality TV. In order to write effective suspense, you need to imagine how the character is feeling inside as events are unfolding around her.

Setting

Jennifer give some good tips there. You can gain some good knowledge about the culture of exotic and foreign locales.

My Verdict

While you can get some good setting description, dialogue, and body language, using reality TV as fodder for your fiction is a bad idea. Use your own experiences and those of the people you know. Your novel will be richer for it.

The picture says it all.

Is it just me, or does it seem like the week just melted away? I feel like I’ve done nothing, but I know that’s not the case. Most of this week was spent researching and problem solving.

In regard to the design issues I had yesterday, I still haven’t solved the full justification problem. Thanks to a text cleaning software, I was able to get rid of those extra spaces and use another version of the justification. The type looks better.

Moving right along, I found six more leads for publishers for the anthology. Most of them are iffy (meaning that the anthology may squeeze through), but it’s better than nothing.

That’s all for now.

I’ve been reading this book on book design to learn the required formatting for book printing. The required alignment is full justification. I did not know this when I formatted the ebook for the anthology.

To make a long story short, my word processor (They all suck.) and InDesign are waging war over code formatting. See what I mean by clicking here. When I import the file from Word (or in my case, Nisus Writer) into InDesign and use full justification, the paragraphs get littered with spaces. Now, it is my job to figure out how to “clean up” the code inside the word processor.

I’m tempted to leave the justification just the way it is inside the anthology ebook, but the results will be less than professional. Anyone have any suggestions or opinions?

I don’t know why but spammers have singled out my “WordPress 2.0: My Experience” post. I’ve been getting spam from all kinds of sites, most of them the typical. But just now, I received a comment from the Canadian Immigration Service. I wish I’d thought to check out their link before I deleted it from the que.

I just got back from taking my youngest for a follow-up with the surgeon. The incision has healed nicely, and the angioma is nothing to worry about.

Governor George Pataki considers the construction of the underground memorial a milestone in the aftermath of 9/11. The Coalition of 9/11 Families has filed a lawsuit, in the hopes of preserving history.

Families find it an insult that the memorial placard will be placed underground, where visitors can’t see it from the streets above. Another issue they have is the safety of the design. You can read more at Construction Begins on WTC Memorial.

I can understand both sides of the argument. It’s important to grieve, and it’s important to move on. A couple of weeks ago, I sat in the barber’s lounge area while my boys were getting their haircuts, and read the TimeLife book on 9/11.

Those pictures brought back some sharp memories. A penpal that lived a mile and a half away from WTC. My father-in-law who was in Philadelphia, attending his brother-in-law’s funeral and celebrating his mother’s birthday (which was on 9/11). My sons, who asked me when PopPop was coming home and if Osama Bin Laden was going to blow up their house and school.

I can understand the WTC families’ pain, indirectly. As far as I’m concerned, there will never be any real closure until Bin Laden is captured and executed for his crimes. Until he is, the only thing we can do is move forward despite the pain.

I’ve got nothing today, but I found some articles that may interest you.

Plog-plog-plog-plog Find out how readers and authors feel about Amazon’s plog feature. Unless something jumps out at me, I’ll bypass this for the book section. Do you enjoy this new feature?

Books from blogs vie for new literary prize This article not only talks about the finalists for the Blooker prize, but speculates on a new publishing trend.

Quoted from South Dakota Bans Most Types of Abortion

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Oh, give me a break! What woman wouldn’t be physically or psychologically messed up from rape? Here’s another point: 99.99% of the women I’ve met in my life had lost their virginity by the time they were 15.

The girl has to be religious? Excuse me, but rapists don’t care what religion their victims are.

Married women will be forced to carry a rapist’s child? Oh, that will go over real well with their husbands. Here’s his second idiotic statement.

BILL NAPOLI: When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

Yeah, they had a shotgun wedding, most likely. Then the asshole probably beat her half to death before he left her. If she and the kid were lucky. Either way, the kid(s) paid the price. This guy is living in a fantasy world.

The only thing he said that I agreed with is that most abortions are performed out of convenience. Although I don’t like this fact, it’s none of my business. It’s none of the government’s business, either. This is a private matter between a woman and her lover, or the families if minors are involved.

What Napoli and his followers are trying to do is unconstitutional. Roe vs. Wade has little chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court. But these crazy zealots will certainly try their best.

I’ve just finished another pass of edits on the anthology project and compiled it into an ebook format. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

2006 Writer’s Blog Anthology